Good News?

There is little new under the Sun and precious little of that is good news but the uprisings in the Middle East are both.

They are novel in that they genuinely seem to be popular uprisings unmediated by elites or provocateurs. They are good news for those of us who believe liberty and self-determination.

It is a measure of American hypocrisy that after 30 years of expensively propping up the Egyptian client dictatorship that they are now urging accommodation and reform while keeping the money spigot flowing. It may also be a measure of American weakness that they have so quickly jumped on the bandwagon.

There are always concerns about how these uprisings evolve. If they descend into revolutions then it becomes impossible to predict the outcome as all sorts of opportunists interfere and manipulate to suit their preconceived agendas. If they lead to bloodless displacements, as in Tunisia, then we may hope for the best.

I believe that once freedoms are granted they are very hard to remove save in cases of near complete state failure such as Afghanistan has endured for 30 years. So, let us hope for swift and bloodless popular coups everywhere that American satraps have lingered for so long and that Arabs can show Bush et al. what ‘Let Freedom Reign’ is really about.

It would certainly be wonderful to see another ‘domino effect’ of dictatorships toppling in succession as we saw in 1989. There is unlikely ever to be a better time for the Arabs. America is weak in blood and treasure after two stupid wars and a property bubble. Russia has not fully recovered and China has not yet established itself.

I don’t think this good news for oil consumers, though.

1 Comment

Michael MiklisJanuary 29th, 2011 at 19:53

The problem is we are all oil consumers of oil and we are far away from getting independent of it! And it is not only oil, it is a whole array of “raw-materials”, which the northern-hemisphere sees as the limiting restraints in the new growth hype.
They do not relay realise, that the world is limited… it will be a rough awakening for the people which have been living the high live on the back of the poorer southern-hemisphere people, they are better equip t to the lifestyle looming.
But their are things more important, like the emerging spring heralded by the morning chorus, of the singing birds.
I await their symphony with a tremble of hope, the next soft day’s will start them off,hope you all can enjoy them!

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