Wrong Priorities. Why the Middle East is Doomed

The Arab Spring has also been called the Arab Awakening, which begs the question of why the oppressed people living in the Arab states and Iran don't wake the hell up already.

There are hints that the international mainstream media (despite the wilful blindness of the BBC, CNN and other big outlets) has begun to catch on to the fact that all of the revolutionary activity across the Middle East has actually set back the region by decades and may end up putting them back centuries. Some of the people who live in those countries, such as the few genuine liberal democrats hoping for a break with the greater and petty tyrrannies of the past may be catching on a bit quicker. But the vast majority of Arabs appear to be quite willingly signing up for another epoch of theocratic serfdom.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is triumphant (much to the chagrin of the country's Christian minority, which is already on the verge of being totally ethnically cleansed). The head of Tunisia's victorious Islamist political party gloats over the pending arrival of a Sixth Caliphate. In Libya, the dictator has been replaced by gaggles of Al Qaeda-sympathizing hillbillies. These are the areas where the revolutionary activity has seen its greatest potential success and ultimately, its most awful failure.

The Islamic world generally suffers from poor development prospects to the point that the nations of the Middle East (with one glaring exception in the tiny but free democracy of Israel) have fallen behind everywhere else from Asia to Latin America. The causes are not difficult to discern: women are not emancipated or even fully treated as human beings. Right off the bat, 50 percent of the Middle East's productivity swirls down the toilet. Meanwhile, vast numbers of uemployed, under-educated young men with no prospects, no capital and no idea of how to change their lot in life sit and steam. That's a recipe for disaster in any country. Throw Islamic fundamentalism into the mix and now you're really playing with fire.

The revolutions were supposed to bring change, but how can they do that when most people don't understand their own interests (Which is not a phenomenon confined to the Middle East -- try asking an unemployed American Tea Party volunteer why he supports tax breaks for billionaires and a reduction in the social safety net. Prepare to get spit on)?

What Arabs (and Iranians as well) need is jobs, better education, better infrastructure and better government by the people. But how many of the Islamist parties that keep getting voted in campaigned on promises of developing their own infrastructure jobs program, or Green jobs plan, or biotech jobs plan -- any kind of jobs plan that didn't involve handing over cash to madrasas or bored men with AK-47s?How many offered a transparent and well-though-out plan about tax reform? How many suggested making it easier for small businesses to open up in 10 days instead of six months? How many of the Islamist parties had thoughts about the ideal mix of private versus public health care? How many Islamist parties offered distinct and innovative policies on cleaning up environmental contamination? How many of them offered big ideas about how to increase tourism to their beaches and ancient heritage sites? How many offered clear plans about how to eradicate illiteracy and develop an Arab equivalent of Harvard or M.I.T.? 

The Islamist parties didn't seriously offer any of these (and to their great shame, none of the disorganized secular parties seemed to offer clear and well-publicized platforms on these matters, either). Instead, the newly democratized people of the Middle East are voting for parties that harm their immediate prospects. Tourism is a huge part of the Egyptian economy, but even before the Muslim Brotherhood won its vote, its leaders were speculating on applying Mecca-style standards of dress and decorum on their beaches -- and the market has already reacted by cratering. The Islamist parties' biggest foreign policy plank appears to be ending its historic peace treaty with Israel. Just imagine a German politician campaigning on a platform of "ending the peace treaty" with France, or the USA canceling its state of peace with Canada or Mexico -- not as a result of some unprecedented crisis, but simply out of longstanding spite and prejudice. They'd be pilloried in the streets. In Egypt, that's how you win elections. Meanwhile, in Tunisia, the Islamists' biggest priority in terms of education appears to be separating women from men -- which will improve education outcomes and lead to jobs how?

By their votes, the citizens of the newly "democratic" states of the Middle East have shown what their true priorities are: more poverty. More oppression of their own women and minorities. More war and genocide.

The predictable result will be a steady slide into Taliban country, followed soon after by apocalyptic conditions of living in the ruins of something that never quite reached the stage of "civilization" in the first place.

The voters in these countries are choosing this future, but in a sense, they are also choosing our own. There is already a river of immigration from these failing states into the West, where many people who could not function in their own countries find that they are even less able to cope in lands that offer political and economic freedom. Governments in the West must decide soon if they want to maintain their generous status as the escape valve for broken lands, at the risk of importing the very conditions that will hasten the West's societal decline. Thanks to newly-empowered voters' insistence on voting for reactionary theocrats and stupid thugs, things are only going to get worse over there -- and most likely, over here.

Jonathon Narvey is the Editor of The Propagandist