Roger Cohen in the New York Times considers Robert F. Worth 's book on the failures of the so-called Arab Spring, "A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS".
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Who should be blamed for this epic failure? The Muslim Brotherhood for reneging on its promise not to contest Egypt's first post-uprising presidential election? The Egyptian army and corrupt "deep state" for never giving the Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi ("the country's first democratically elected president in six thousand years of history") the means to govern? Morsi himself for his foolish power grabs, inept rigidity and inability to realize that he had to demonstrate he was everyone's president, not merely the Brotherhood's? Egyptian liberals for so quickly abandoning the idea of democracy to side with the military strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and his bloody coup that the United States never called by its name?
Or was it Syria's Bashar al-Assad for burying the Syrian uprising in rivers of blood? Or Saudi money cynically deployed against every agent of liberalizing transformation? Or a wavering Obama administration that, as in Iran in 2009, and Syria since 2011, has wrapped itself in righteous caution as the winds of change coursed through the Middle East? Or the feckless West that intervened in Libya only to abandon it? Or, simply, the impossibility of delivering more liberal, representative societies to a region where political Islam invokes not the power of the people but the all-pervasive authority of God?
