Fresh wave of revolt hits Gulf countries as Monarchs unnerved

Fresh wave of revolt hits Gulf countries
3 February, 2013 – By Tony Iltis – GreenLeft

It is now two years since spontaneous mass uprisings against political and economic injustice started to sweep through the Arab countries. This began a period of heightened class struggle known in the West (but not the Arab countries) as the Arab Spring.

The initial uprisings followed a broadly similar pattern: mass street protests demanding the resignation of a brutal and corrupt dictator. But the protests were as much against the effects of neoliberalism — such as include unemployment, food and energy insecurity, removal of subsidies, privatisation and increased inequality — as against political repression.

The different paths of the uprisings in the two years since in part reflects the relative strength of the different regimes in the region. But it also reflects the response of the West, which has varied considerably between different countries.

West’s response

The West’s response has ranged from aiding the crushing of protests by dictatorships to direct military intervention against Muammar Gadaffi’s dictatorship in Libya.

The uprisings took the West by surprise. Not only did they reflect and fuel anti-neoliberal protests in Europe (and influence the Occupy protests in the US), within two months two pro-Western dictators had been overthrown: French puppet President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian tyrant notorious for his slavish obedience to US and Israeli diktats.

Moreover, the uprisings challenged the traditional justification for the West’s continual military interventions in the region: spreading democracy. Mass, mostly non-violent, demonstrations appeared to be achieving democracy while 10 years of US-led occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan had failed.

NATO militarily overthrew Gaddafi in 2011 to reassert its official role of “bringing democracy”. Despite Libya now being neither remotely democratic nor entirely under Western control, the West considers this mission accomplished.

In his January 21 inauguration speech, US President Barack Obama reaffirmed: “We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom.”

The corporate media has dutifully aided the Western response to the Arab uprisings. The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt are declared completed and ongoing protests are explained away with the racist subtext that Arabs have some innate difficulty with democracy.

Continuing protests in most other Arab countries go unreported in the West. The exception is Syria, whose dictator, Bashar Assad, is allied to the West’s rivals, Russia and Iran, and has materially supported some armed resistance to Israel in Lebanon and Palestine.

The West’s diplomacy and selective indirect military aid has strengthened undemocratic elements in the opposition and helped turn a mass uprising into a civil war. Despite this, the saturation media coverage of Syria has turned the Arab Spring into a Western-inspired struggle for democracy against anti-Western tyranny.

The hypocrisy of the Western narrative becomes glaring in the case of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — an alliance of oil-rich absolute monarchies led by Saudi Arabia, the West’s closest ally in the Arab world. …more