The “Arab spring”, to most, a compelling symptom of real political change, towards ‘democracy’, spearheaded by the dissented proletariat across, suspiciously, designated parts of the Arab speaking world. The virtuously named events later proved to be nothing short of a ‘Ling chi” (death by a thousand cuts) death sentence, and the Arabs would come to discover that, rather late. The spring had already left its imprint by the time the hypnotic effects of the media wore off, and the spring leafs of “freedom” were lost somewhere among the tens of thousands of lifeless bodies in Libya, over half a million in Syria and Yemen, and a millions of displaced families, a needless peace drought brought to the unsuspecting on a silver platter.
Egypt is of central relevance when dealing with the larger middle eastern civil unrest and sectarian infighting. The unspoken presence of an armed insurrectionist network emboldened by the regressive theocratic beneficiaries of Qatar and Saudi Arabia and their more powerful co-conspirators that provide the diplomatic cover and the political flexibility to execute the region’s hope for long term stability is only real. It may have escaped the minds of some of us that hundreds of millions, to many billions of dollars were already spent arming and training radical groups to quicken the spillover. The scarcely mentioned and most collusive of all radical armed syndicates operating trans-nationally in the region, the very antithesis of democracy (despite winning the Egyptian 2012 elections), the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’. According to many, it’s this extremist collusion that reared the tragically short-lived “spring of democracy”.
The entity would make its biggest success formula after taking advantage of the Syrian and Libyan authorities’ amnesty programs that enabled the release of key affiliates and members of the organization as a part of a broader reformist endeavour that sadly backfired. Both nations contemplated and deployed liberalization efforts that included, amending the diplomatic fissure with the US, and both tailored their state security apparatus around containing the ever-growing threat of terrorism, going as far as coordinating with the Pentagon. Fast forward eight years later, Libya, a blood fest inaugurated by none other than Hillary Clinton and her cohorts, who in her 600+ page long, semi-conscience-stricken memoir recalled
“It’s crucial that we’re all on the same page on NATO’s responsibility to enforce the no-fly zone and protect civilians in Libya”
That took place in a call with her French counterpart, thus practically issuing Libya’s 8 month long bombardment, merely a segment of an interventionist policy aimed to enforce political change by military means, the likes that her jingoistic colleagues in the pentagon aspired to mimic in Syria, but was undermined by a serial combo of Chinese and Russian vetos in the security council. This voracious appetite for intervention is often preceded by rhetorically subtle innuendos directed towards “regimes” whose replacement is then deemed a “humanitarian necessity”, not to mention the profound eagerness for intervention on the part of particular circles of power in the west seem to entail geostrategic ambitions that appear to stretch beyond the framework of the U.N’s R2P, a doctrine that’s been victim of cunning ‘misapplication’, or reinterpretation as the Russians described. Libya’s share of the 1973 mandate transpired by way of converting Africa’s most prosperous state (UN Human rights council, 2011) into a failed state and exporter of terrorism, as well as prolonged the Syrian, Yemeni and Sudanese by sabotaging numerous peace resolutions.
The region’s plunge into anarchy cannot be entirely blamed on pre-existing grievances caused by one regime or another’s discomfort with the idea of sharing power with other sects in the country, in fact, the region’s extensive record of politically-motivated violence is one subsequent expression among many, all of which we can only identify retrospectively. There’s a strong incentive however, to believe that there is a central ground of operations from which these cells operate, a patient zero if you well, with a strong social and political incubation, and I believe that to be Egypt due to its large population and history with the brotherhood, after all, it was the Libyan Insurgent’s main supply line during the conflict. This entity learned to take conscientious advantage of the sectarian cripples in countries it wished to expand into, for instance, the Syrian authorities’ suppression of political opposition, referring to its political dissenters as law violaters who are ought to be dealt with in accordance with the country’s legal system, this engendered over ten thousand citizens (mostly of the Sunni sect) jailed or executed.
“The Hobbesian problem of order” is one that sticks out in the more specific realm of social structures, providing a much needed theoretical perspective with regards to institutions and customs, values and practices, and depending on the context, it may suffice as a diagnosis for the degenerative state of the region. In his book, ‘The Leviathan’, Hobbes places an emphasis on the behavioural capacities humans possess in situations characterized by the virtual absence of the “artificial man”, or the aforementioned ‘Leviathan’, or in a more contemporary sense, the state. Weak states, or the absence of one, so the argument goes, induces the primal facets of human nature, the law of nature as he portrays it, paralleled by a characterization by another thinker, Niccolo Machiavelli, who theorized that conflict is fuelled by an innate desire for self-preservation and power, a universal set of traits amongst all animals. How does this relate to the Arab spring? you may be wondering, it has everything to do with it, in fact, it answers almost all political crises. A state become symptomatic the moment a singular model of governance is implemented, and due to the certainty that is, values and ideas are subjective, it is only natural that opposition in all forms persist. JK Mackie’s paper title ‘The subjectivity of values’ illustrates this problem far more eloquently
Due to the armed insurgency having been pushed to the margins of country thanks to a combined Russo-Iranian military pressure, we may inching towards the end of the Syrian conflict on which the world’s fate clings, only it’s not. Patient zero, being Egypt despite appearing relatively stable will soon transition into another hopeless, bloody quagmire.
