RJP
2008-04-14 06:22:50
There is no Arab spring. Most of the countries named aren’t even Arab. Regardless of the situation in Iraq, all of the region’s leaders are secure in their posts. Look at Egypt, which has 33% of the Arab population. Last week there was a general strike, and it was easily put down by the government through a combination of co-opting parts of it and oppressing the rest. And the Islamist groups? Easily the most powerful opposition in the country. The liberal and socialist reformers number only in the hundreds.
Islamist societies aren’t imploding, except in a few cherry-picked cases. How can they be imploding when only a handful of the leaders are Islamist? You have to rule in order to lose the people’s trust.
