Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Arab instability and US strategy

Washington's assumption that dictatorships breed stability has been fundamentally challenged by the past year's events.

By Joseph Massad
Al-Jazeera

"....The Americans remain committed not to "democracy" but to stability, a strategy identified by US academic and government consultant Samuel P Huntington in his classic academic book of 1968 on the importance of political order and stability in the changing Third World for imperial interests. That democracy is seen as inherently unstable and dictatorship as ensuring stability is no longer a viable course of action for members of the US administration, though they are still undecided on whether this understanding should be abandoned in some countries while maintained in others. Whereas the region continues to lack the democracy for which its people have been fighting for more than a century, despite the "Arab Spring" and the regime changes it elicited, the main achievement of the uprisings has so far been an instability that could end up changing the strategic rules of the game that the United States introduced to the region after World War II. And that is good news for the Arab peoples. "

No comments: