Middle East Governments: Rock-Paper-Scissors

Daniel Greenfield of Sultan Knish has composed yet another fascinating piece about Middle East culture.  This one is about governmental styles:

Every government is only a few bad months away from losing power, and so every government fears being overthrown by its enemies and implements a regime of secret police and prisons. No sooner do the revolutionaries step out of prison to usher in a new era than the same thugs are rehired to torture enemies of the new regime.

The victors of the Arab Spring know that another few bad months could toss them out of power as easily as the bad months put them into power.  Like every other regime in the Muslim Middle East, their main priority is staying in power by making it impossible for others to do to them what they did to their predecessors.That leads to a cycle of repression, broken by temporary liberalization as alliances with the opposition are explored and then abandoned, because the opposition cannot be trusted not to seize power for themselves.

Everyone in the region is playing rock-paper-scissors all the time, which leads to total regional paranoia and conspiracy theories. Everyone distrusts everyone else by necessity and keeps trying to guess how many fingers their rivals will put out while defending against their own weaknesses by preemptively attacking everyone else.

Military governments persecute ideologues. Ideologues imprison top officers. Tribals seek out military protectors-- and then undermine them by backing their ideological enemies so as to stay in control of the relationship.

That is what happened to us and the Saudis, who, along with the other Gulfies, depend on our protection, but undermine us by supporting terrorism and Islamization to gain the upper hand. Paradoxically, the more that the Saudis need us, the more they undermine us, much as any feral population that is dependent on the charitable welfare of the majority lashes out against that majority to the exact degree that it is dependent on it.

The borders of Muslim nations are artificial and fluid. Their nationalism has no depth no matter how often Socialist ideologues borrow from European nationalism to proclaim the glories of the nation. The Muslim Middle East is not purely nomadic, but it is nomadic enough that large families stretch out across different nations and their tribal allegiances stretch with them. Ethnic groups like the Kurds cross national borders, carrying with them the dream of an ethnostate carved out of the Sunni states that dot the desert.

 Read the whole article here.