This ain’t no Mudd Club I keep bookmarking things and not getting around to blogging them. On the other hand, I got a lot done at work this week. Perhaps there’s a connection.

Chris Bertram of Junius recommends this Financial Times article on the complete absence of democracy in the Arab world, the domination of their polities by intelligence services, their long-term crisis of political legitimacy, and exactly how all this combines to nourish terrorism:

America’s Arab friends have managed to convince successive administrations in Washington that political liberalisation, much less democracy, is too risky. Only the Islamists would benefit and their agenda is “one man, one vote, one time”. Arab leaders and officials earnestly tell you that: “This is not Germany” (in Egypt); “We are not in Norway” (in Bahrain); “This is not Switzerland” (in Syria); “We are not talking about Scandinavia” (in Saudi Arabia); and “You are not dealing with Sweden, you know” (in Egypt again).

Let us first build the middle class, they say, and then we’ll have some liberals to liberalise with.

The argument is spurious. From Algiers to Cairo, the reality is that Arab rulers get endorsement for strategies of repression that lay waste to the entire political spectrum. Real liberals mostly get jailed. The middle class gets devastated or emigrates and some of its sons, as we have seen, fly airliners into buildings to immolate civilians.

Since September 11, Egypt, Algeria, Syria, et al, have been telling western leaders: that “If only you they had seen the light, and cracked down hard like a good Arab despot.” Syria, for instance, believes the way it dealt with a 1982 insurgency by the Muslim Brotherhood razing the city of Hama at a cost of some about 20,000 lives is the work of pioneers in the “war against terror”.

What the Arab regimes have in fact pioneered, however, is a scorched-earth strategy that has been a political gift to the fundamentalists. Blanket repression of the mainstream has given force to the violent tributaries.

There’s lots more. This is a chewy, substantial piece that does an excellent job of knitting together disparate details. [04:15 PM]