Three Powerfully Wrong--and Wrongly Powerful--American Narratives about the Arab Spring

There are probably a few more narratives; e.g., one i'm following at the moment is it's all CIA Colour-Revolution tactic that was designed from the beginning to destabilize the Arab region. Yet, this dismisses the suprising aspects of the uprise, the continued resistence, the flip-flopping by various govts and most importantly it takes the impetus and responsibility for the movements away from Arab ability and intent effectively reducing the Arab to a poor proxy. This is the tactic of Webster Tarpley. Although he says a lot of things he has strong connections to 'crisis teams'. He's a doppleganger i think!

Thank you for this concise article. It will help me to talk to the people who watch "news" that tells them what to think. I appreciate the help.

the western involvement is in libya and syria.

Great article. I'm particularly interested in the collective identity piece and the articulation of political and economic aspirations on national terms. I wonder how that notion applies to the 'nation' of Palestine.

Thanks for this interesting article. #2 suggests the usefulness of tracking just how economic democracy gets 'decoupled' from political democracy in different places and situations. In the states, for instance, would you say that campaign financing and lobbies backed by media are the main instruments for accomplishing this?

Interesting article. A few comments from the perspective of someone living in Tunis.

The second narrative "These revolutions are about democracy, not the economy" misses the point about political systems. Speaking only about Tunisia, it's true that much of the debate has been about very technical questions, as opposed to what the ultimate role of the state should be. However, this is for two reasons that are unrelated to the narrative the West likes to portray about the region.

1) There are legitimately democratic interests that think that elections should be held before those questions are decided. The revolutions, as you pointed out, toppled regimes, and arguably called for greater political voices, however, it did not call for a specific system to be in place. Elections offer the population a democratic way to express themselves on this question. It is thus quite natural to have these technical debates before the people have had chance to express themselves.

2) In many ways, these technical debates shelter society from the extreme fissures that have been exposed with the toppling of the regimes. The reality is that Mubarak and Ben Ali maintained regimes that unified their countries, albeit artificially. Without these constraints, these societies are finding that they are not nearly as unified as they thought. And this makes people justifiably nervous. In many respects debating technical issues offers a way for discourse to continue for political interests that otherwise could not engage one another in public discourse.

Too detailed for my liking, :) All I know is that no matter what your background, your belief or your views about the political and non-political world are, I only know one thing to be centre of everything and that is "Evil will never win no matter how specific, calculated or planned it is". If you don`t believe in that sentence above, well you`ll allways be going round in circles trying to find an explanation to each calculated step the world is put thru, just believe that there are minds in this world, as cleverer as the Devil himself.