An Arrested Middle East – The ‘New Strategy for Securing the Realm’ Dissipates

An Arrested Middle East – The ‘New Strategy for Securing the Realm’ Dissipates

Some eight years ago, I wrote about the outbreak of popular stirring in the Middle East, then labelled the ‘Arab Awakening’. Multiple popular discontents were welling: demands for radical change proliferated, but above all, there was anger – anger at mountainous inequalities in wealth; blatant injustices and political marginalisation; and at a corrupt and rapacious…

The Middle East – The Betrayal by the Elites

The Middle East – The Betrayal by the Elites

An esteemed Arab League ‘grandee’ recently thundered that it was impossible for the Arab world to accept anything – ‘other’- than 21st century modern secularism: Islamism was forbidden. Egypt’s ‘coup’ (“if you wish to call it such”, against the elected Muslim Brotherhood government) was absolutely appropriate, he insisted. An Islamist government would have been intolerable,…