Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (2013)
“By 11 February, Hosni Mubarak was gone, and protests were spreading across the region: to Yemen, where the first ‘day of rage’ took place on 27 January; to Bahrain, where protesters occupied the Pearl Roundabout on 14 February. Then, on 17 February, security forces started shooting marchers in Bahrain and the Libyan people rose up against Gaddafi. On 25 March the long, tortured battle for freedom in Syria began.
Nobody had seen this coming. Nobody with any influence, anyway. The stock image... of Arabs in the Western media was of a passive but violent race, often filed under the categories of ‘terrorism’ and ‘insoluble problems’. The Middle East specialists in the diplomatic and intelligence communities worked with a scarcely more sophisticated version of the same view. The Economist magazine’s celebrated yearbook, published in December 2010, contained just four predictions for North Africa and the Middle East: Sudan would split; Iran’s economy would suffer; Iraq would continue to be a headache; and there would be new peace talks over Palestine.1 Mubarak, Ben Ali, Gaddafi, Saleh and Assad were deemed to be of no interest.MoreLess
Nobody had seen this coming. Nobody with any influence, anyway. The stock image... of Arabs in the Western media was of a passive but violent race, often filed under the categories of ‘terrorism’ and ‘insoluble problems’. The Middle East specialists in the diplomatic and intelligence communities worked with a scarcely more sophisticated version of the same view. The Economist magazine’s celebrated yearbook, published in December 2010, contained just four predictions for North Africa and the Middle East: Sudan would split; Iran’s economy would suffer; Iraq would continue to be a headache; and there would be new peace talks over Palestine.1 Mubarak, Ben Ali, Gaddafi, Saleh and Assad were deemed to be of no interest.MoreLess
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