愈演愈烈的阿拉伯战争

Jul 1, 2015 Maha Yahya

贝鲁特—过去四年中阿拉伯国家的暴力也许只是整个过程的第一阶段。日益升级的残酷性和政府行动让阿拉伯人民承受了巨大的压力。如果情况不发生改变，结果极有可能是冲突深化和新一轮暴动——并且不再是和平暴动。

自一战结束以来，阿拉伯国家从未出现过如此激烈的剧变。至少九个国家爆发冲突，杀戮惨绝人寰。冲突在名义上仍处于和平的国家也不能幸免。长期价值体系日益式微，曾经坚实的社会基础正在土崩瓦解。

叙利亚、伊拉克、苏丹、利比亚和也门的战事分裂了整个社会。伊斯兰国所施加的种族清洗颠覆了几百年来的宗教、种族和文化结合，将近两百万人赶出家园。

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John Jones Jul 9, 2015

This is a very timely warning for the whole world community. The Arab Spring has certainly turned to Winter. We are all to blame for imagining that the planet can promote peaceful coexistence when it has no structures to enable this. The UN was set up to "deliver humanity from the scourge of war". It has failed so miserably because it has alllowed nation states freedom to build up armies and invest huge sums in 'defence'. We surely should have known this could never work - and never will. We must all agree to defer trans-national security to the world body and confine our local powers to our own borders.
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Eric Green Jul 7, 2015

A gloomy outlook as Maha peers into the crystal ball. In 2011 a Project Syndicate columnist, Mai Yamani from Saudi Arabia, accurately predicted, in the wake of Bin Laden's killing, that Al Qaeda/offshoots would proliferate unless the USA got to grips with a root cause of much of the violence, the State sponsored Wahabhi violent ideology of the Saudi Kingdom...but no, the USA/UK continue to support(instead of confronting and sanctioning....I can see the smiles) their Saudi allies as they bomb Yemen and support(with Israel in on the act as well)Al Q in its destruction of Syria....read what she said in 'Bin Laden's ghost'....Mai now seems to be in hiding? Her web site seems dead?
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John Doyle Jul 7, 2015

I think we need to factor in problems with low fertility of the land and high fertility of the humans. This is an epic problem even an existential one. Population has grown because there is more food and better healthcare. But food is imported, mostly paid for by oil export revenue. Eventually this will stop, and the Middle Eastern countries will not be able to buy food for such a large population. There is no way the land will support them. After 5000 years of occupation the land is largely degraded with poor topsoil and bare hills and low rainfall. Immigration to Europe will be denied as they have their own problems and Middle East peoples have little experience of European customs etc. There will be conflict and for those at home a humanitarian disaster will happen sooner not later. Our whole civilization is on the skids and it cannot be avoided. We missed our opportunity to live within the planets limits decades ago. Now we have to face the consequences.
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Cary Fraser Jul 6, 2015

It may be useful to remember that in 1979, three major events shook the Islamic world - the collapse of the Shah of Iran's regime opened the year and led to the creation of the Islamic Republic; it was followed by the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamic militants in November; and, it closed with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December. The Islamic and Arab worlds have yet to recover from those events and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war. The Arab Spring was but another phase in the crisis of Arab/Islamic regimes that has it roots in the 1970s and the recent escalation of violence will continue as various regimes collapse under the weight of failed governance. This process will be multi-generational and it may be useful to reflect on the era of Europe's religious wars to understand the scale of events since 1979.
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j. von Hettlingen Jul 3, 2015

Maha Yahya is right to worry about the "violence unleashed in Arab countries" in recent years. She predicts there would "be further conflict and a new wave of uprisings", even worse than what we have seen, if there is no "change of course".
Indeed the popular unrest in 2011 in many parts of the Arab world did take us by surprise. It seems politicians, policymakers, analysts etc. had failed to see it coming. No doubt collective mobilisation was made possible with help of social media, allowing protests be staged simultaneously across the region. At the beginning of Arab Spring protesters showed that they could rise up against oppressive dictatorships without resorting to terrorism. The removal of four autocrats in Egpyt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen through peaceful demonstrations was possible without al-Qaeda.
Initially, Osama bin Laden seemed to many frustrated Muslims to be the answer to years of humiliation at the hands of despotic and corrupt regimes, which were empowered by the US, in an effort to secure peace with Israel and to guarantee stability in the region. However the 9/11 attacks hadn't weakened the US. On the contrary the neocons in the Bush administration used 9/11 as a pretext to wage war on terrorism. The fall of autocrats, like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen had dealt a heavy blow to Washington, as they were strategic allies in the region.
The Iraq invasion in 2003 stirred up a hornet's nest, triggering new Shia-Sunni tensions. Iraq, like Syria and Yemen had soon become a venue of a proxy war fought between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Taking advantage of the mayhem in Syria, al-Qaeda affiliates, and since the last year emergence of ISIS, they had established their strongholds in areas they captured.
However eager the West is to combat ISIS, it sees oppressive regimes in the Middle East as the lesser of two evils. As long as dictators like Bashar al-Assad and Abdel Fattah al-Sisi rule with an iron fist in Syria and Egypt, violence in the region will spiral out of control. The tragedy with leaders in the Middle East is that any efforts to "introduce inclusive political processes, end state-sanctioned violence, ensure due process" will be seen as a sign of weakness. As long as "socioeconomic injustices" remain unaddressed, youth bulge and high unemployment will hang like a Sword of Damocles over the leaders' heads.
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Shoshon Tama-Sweet Jul 2, 2015

Thank you for this insightful, though discouraging, point of view. We in the west, particularly the US, tend to imagine that things will just naturally get better; that the pendulum will swing the other way. What is discouraging is how long the bad times can last, and how much worse they can get. Weather it is the us of gas on civilians in Syria, or indiscriminate bombing in Yemen, we may be seeing the tit-for-tat cycle of violence that leads to 'total war'- no restraint, no norms. When you realize that Afghanistan has been at war since 1979, (36 years), that Somalia has not had a government for for 24 years, you realize that madness does not have an expiration date. It is also true that almost no-one appears to have any plan, strategy, or vision for a way forward- except by more violence.
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