Tom Friedman writes a fabulous column, to illuminate the middle east.
“So there you have it. The news out of China is the crackdown on kindergartens teaching math and English too early, and the news out of Yemen is that Sunni and Shiite factions are fighting over a town that is already so cracked up the water comes on only 36 hours a month and the rest of the time you have to rely on roving water trucks. And that was before the latest fighting.
But at least we’ve found the problem. I’ve read that it’s all President Obama’s fault. I wish. Obama has said and done some boneheaded things in the Middle East (like decapitating the Libyan regime with no plan for the morning after), but being wary about getting further embroiled in this region is not one of them. We’re dealing here with something no president has had to face: the collapse of the Arab state system after 70 years of failed governance.”
Not to say, Friedman has his detractors in the comments section. I give him the benefit of the doubt. He didn’t have room for all of this. But here is an example of many comments:
ando arike
Brooklyn, NY 23 hours ago
To blame the failure of modern Arab states on misgovernance and not mention in the same breath five decades of Western interventions ranging from regime-change operations (Iran 1953; Libya 2011) to massive financial and military support for corrupt dictatorships (Egypt: Mubarak) to Predator drone attacks (Yemen) to full military invasion and occupation (Iraq 2003) — to totally ignore the Western, and particularly the US role, in destabilizing the region is perverse, to say the least. The evidence shows that whenever a secular modernizing regime has arisen in the region, the US has regarded it as a threat and worked to replace it with a more tractable theocratic feudal regime. Libya, Syria, and Iraq each enjoyed relatively high-standards of living and respect for women’s rights before the US decided that either regime-change or destruction was their fate. Talk about blaming the victim…
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