WHEREAS, THE SECOND GULF WAR WAS AN INCREASINGLY SUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT....:

Overdue end to the old world order: The Arab uprisings shocked us all – but perhaps the even bigger surprise is that these empty regimes have taken so long to crumble. (Mick Hume, February 23, 2011, Spiked)

The political earthquake now bringing down shaky and rotting regimes across the Arab world has already done more than to remove some long-entrenched dictators such as Mubarak in Egypt, Ben Ali in Tunisia or even Gaddafi in Libya. More significantly it has removed one of the last remaining props from the old world order. In so doing, it has torn aside the veil that hid the weakness of both ‘strongman’ regimes in the region and of the Western powers – while revealing at the same time the gap where a radical political opposition ought to be.

UK prime minister David Cameron’s trip to the Middle East this week confirmed how far things have changed in the region. First, Cameron flew unannounced into Egypt, a former colony where British governments once organised coups and invasions, looking less like a powerful world statesman than a third-rate celebrity in search of a photo opportunity, an irrelevance to the historic events unfolding around him.

Then Cameron went on to Kuwait for what was supposed to be a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the victory of the US-led alliance over Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the first Gulf War. In the event, it served more as an inadvertent advert for just how badly the Western alliance has lost its grip on events over the past two decades. Didn’t President George HW Bush declare that the 1990-91 war would found his ‘new world order’ of global peace and prosperity under American leadership? Twenty years on, some of the last vestiges of the old world order appear to be falling apart in the Middle East, and few seem prepared to take their orders from the West.

That first Gulf War was, lest we forget, an attempt to assert US and Western authority in the Middle East and the wider world, in the wake of the instability unleashed by the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end of the Cold War.

...to assert the authority of the Muslim citizenry over themselves. The former was little different than the dictatorships. The latter is little different than how we govern ourselves. It makes the Middle East Western, which is what Wilson should have done after WWI, instead of trading decolonization for the League.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 23, 2011 6:51 AM