The Failure of the Arab Spring Reviewing Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in The Arab Uprising By James Finck, Ph.D.Even while the war in Gaza has been ongoing for about five months now, there is renewed attention to the region as Iran launched drone and missile strikes against Israel on April 13.With help from the U.S., England and Jordanian forces, the Israeli missile defense system shot down the vast majority of the incoming missiles and drones were before they reached Israel. Iran’s attacks came in response to Israel’s April 1strike against the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, that killed 11.Israel and Syria have been at odds ever since the Syrian civil war ravaged the nation leading to thousands of deaths and countless refugees.Gilbert Achcar, professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the University of London, in his 2016 publication Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in The Arab Uprising examines the Middle East after the Arab Spring, especially Syria and Egypt, to understand how a time of such democratic promise went so wrong. When discussing Syria, Achcar puts much of the blame on one source: Barrack Obama.Beginning in Tunisia in 2010 and quickly spreading into other Arab nations, demonstrators, aided by social media, began protesting governments to the point that several regimes fell in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen. However, in Syria the protests led to a civil war as the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad received support from both Russia and Iran.Rebel forces backed by NATO and the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf were able to hold their own initially, but the situation got even more complicated in 2014 when ISIS invaded creating a three-way fight, not to mention periodic skirmishes against Kurdish and Turkish forces.This is the point where Achcar picks up his dialogue. He explains why he believes the Arab uprisings failed where the Eastern European nations succeeded around the fall of communism, writing, “A crucial qualitative difference made it impossible for the Arab uprising to reproduce the pattern of ‘Velvet Revolution,’ which had characterized most of the Eastern European transformation. And that crucial factor is neither religious nor cultural. The crux of the matter is that the state system that ruled Eastern Europe was very exceptional historically, in that it was dominated not by propertied classes but by party and state bureaucrats, i.e. functionaries and civil servants. The vast majority of those bureaucrats—especially at the lower tiers ...
