- Joined
- Sep 13, 2011
- Messages
- 3,491
- Reaction score
- 2,546
- Location
- Lafayette, Louisiana
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Conservative
Culturally, Arabs and Americans are too different. They are still locked in to a cycle of petty dictatorships, with no democratic revolutionary movement on the horizon. At best we could have replaced Hussein's brutal dictatorship with a slightly less brutal one. Humanitarians worldwide would have rightly condemned a move like that. Instead, we had close to a decade of pointless "nation building" with a recalcitrant and resentful population.
But who knows? Changing the culture of a billion people isn't going to happen overnight. Maybe with this "Arab spring" the style of dictatorship of the past will morph into something authoritarian but less personality oriented, perhaps setting the stage in decades to come into a hybrid representational monarchy region wide.
That, of course, is dependent on preventing Iran from getting the bomb. If they do, only WWIII will change the region.
But who knows? Changing the culture of a billion people isn't going to happen overnight. Maybe with this "Arab spring" the style of dictatorship of the past will morph into something authoritarian but less personality oriented, perhaps setting the stage in decades to come into a hybrid representational monarchy region wide.
That, of course, is dependent on preventing Iran from getting the bomb. If they do, only WWIII will change the region.