Irrespective of the term coined by the press to name what it happening in the Arab world since the end of 2010, the “Arab Spring”, this revolution is neither an isolated historical fact, nor the first, but it is the third revolutionary phase that the Arab world has experienced, being the first the short-lived 1916-1918 Arab revolution; the second the Pan-Arabic 1954-1970 revolution, which came abruptly to an end through reactionary coups; and this third one, which started on 17 December 2010, when a young unemployed Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, immolated himself in Tunis.
1. The first Arab revolution: 1916-1918
The first Arab revolution was started by the last person who held the position of “Sharif al-Mecca” (or “Noble of Mecca”, an institution that had been in custody of the holy place of Islam, Mecca, since the X century C.E.), Hussein bin Ali. Hussein bin Ali started the first Arab revolution in 1916, during the First World War (WWI), with the aim of granting independence to the Arab lands stretching from Syria to Yemen, which were still controlled at the time by a collapsing Ottoman Empire. In theory, Hussein’s plans had the acquiescence of the United Kingdom, through what has been labelled as McMahon-Hussein correspondence, being McMahon at the time the British High Commissioner in Cairo.
The Arab rebels fought against the Ottomans in the Arabian Peninsula on the coastal area of the Red Sea during 1916 and 1917, until they seized Aqaba port in July 1917. In 1918, they successfully sabotaged on several occasions the Ottoman railway lines to Medina. Finally, in September that year they reached Damascus with the intention of liberating it. T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), who had been working for the British Government as an intelligence officer in Cairo since 1914, helped coordinate since 1916 the supply of British arms to the rebels.
Nevertheless, Frances’s and UK’s vested interests materialized in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement by which both countries, with the acquiescence of the Imperial Russia, distributed among themselves their respective areas of influence in the Middle East in the post-Ottoman scenario. That agreement played against the success of this first Arab revolution, inasmuch as, having finished WWI, Franco-British “Real Politik” got the upper hand; and the great independent Arab state that had been promised was finally never created.
2. The second Arab revolution: the Pan-Arabic: 1954-1970
In the middle of the XX century, the Arab world experience a wave of anti-colonialist revolutions, that forced France and UK to quit the Arab countries they were still occupying either directly or thorough monarchs under their influence.
Thus, Morocco became independent of France and Spain in 1956; Algiers of France in 1962; Tunisia of France in 1956; in Libya Muamar el Gaddafi overthrew in 1969 the monarchy of King Idris I that had been established by the UK; in Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew in 1952 the monarchy of King Faruk I that had been established by the UK; Syria and Lebanon became independent of France in 1946; in Iraq General Abdel Karim Kassem overthrew the monarchy that the UK had established with Faysal I; in Iran General Mohammed Mussadaq overthrew in 1951 the Sha Reza Pahlavi [and Reza Pahlavi in turn was the son of another General who in 1921 had overthrown Sha Ahmed and in 1925 had proclaimed himself Sha of Persia]; in North Yemen the monarchy had been overthrown in 1962; and South Yemen had a Communist Government from 1967 to 1990, and in the 1960s it joined the Pan-Arabic movement led by Gamal Abdel Nasser.
In this period of Pan-Arabic and liberating effervescence from the colonial yoke, which were the 1950s and the 1960s in the Arab and Persian worlds led by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, important self-reaffirming milestones took place, like the nationalization of Suez’s Canal, or the alignment, in the framework of the Cold War dynamics, with the USSR.
Although nearly all Arab leaders of that time were military [it must be noted that the Armies were one of the few institutions that allowed at that time social mobility in the Arab world], they established liberal political models, which allowed, for the first and only time in the history of nearly all those countries, for their populations to enjoy wide public liberties, similar to the concept of Western democracy, which included widespread female emancipation.
3. The reactionary coups that put an end to the second Arab revolution: the Saudi-wahabi and the Ashkenazi-Zionist tongs
This second Arab revolution came abruptly to an end after 1970 with the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, a man that had been thus far the great protector of Arab Pan-Arabism. A lot has been discussed in the Arab world about Nasser’s death and the suspicion that he was poisoned by the Israeli secret services though a poison put in the oil he regularly used for his massages [the same strong suspicion many Arabs have about Yasser Arafat’s fate in the hands of those same services]. If Nasser died of a heart attack aged 52 as official records tell us, or was murdered, is not relevant here. The relevant fact is that his disappearance from the political scene meant that Pan-Arabism was deprived from its staunchest supporter, and thus it was the beginning of the end of Pan-Arabism.
Although by then each country had taken its own path, after the 1970s, the Pan-Arabic and liberating spirit started being suppressed in the whole Arab and Persian world by reactionary coups, led nearly all of them by military or clergy, ideologically conservative, that started limiting their population’s political and vital space; homogenising the regimes; and assimilating them to a large extent to dictatorships deprived from the rights, freedoms and minimal guarantees provided by the rule of law; dictatorships that resembled very much to the Saudi absolutist monarchy.
In Morocco the big voting frauds of 1963 under Hassan II and the subsequent assassination of Mehdi Ben Barka in Paris in 1965, were followed by attempts to kill the Alawite monarch in 1971, and that unrest could only be settled through finding a common enemy, origin of the Green March on to Western Sahara in 1975.
In Algiers, Huari Bumedian gave a military coup in 1965; and overthrew Ahmed Ben Bella, who was for the supremacy of civil power over military power.
In Tunisia, President Habib Bourguiba started as of 1970 to turn towards more conservative policies, while maintaining ideological moderation and the advanced status of women which had always been characteristic of Tunisia in the Arab world. Zine el Abidine Ben Ali overthrew Habib Bourguiba in 1987 and perpetuated himself in power since then until this month of January 2011.
In Egypt, Mohamed Anuar el Sadat, which succeeded Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970, abandoned Pan-Arabism and signed the Camp David Agreement with Israel in 1979. And his successor, Hosni Mubarak, followed the same line foreign policy line, reinforcing its dictatorial rule at national level until he was overthrown in 2011.
In Syria, an Alawite military Hafed al-Asad gave a coup d’état in 1970 and established a dictatoriship, in which he was succeeded, at his death in 2000, by his son Bashar al-Asad. And although all Alawites are also Shi’ias, followers of Ibn Nasser, we can’t forget the military and dictatorial nature of the Syrian state.
Lebanon, which was known at the beginning of the 70s as the “Switzerland of the East” for its prosperous economic situation (and which had it continued at that pace could have put Israel in the shade); and where all the religious strands of the main religions of the Middle East tried and continue trying to coexist, went through a terrible civil war from 1975 to 1991.
In Iran, on 11 February 1979, Ruhollah Jomeini [representative of the most extreme Shi’ism and the most staunch ideological opponent of wahabism, its antithesis –“the extremes touch themselves”-] became the Supreme Leader and established Islamic Law or Shari’a.
In Iraq, few months after the political change in Iran, specifically in July of that same year 1979, Saudis and Zionists supported behind the scenes the appointment of Saddam Hussein as President of Iraq with the objective of stopping its unruly Iranian neighbour [that is why Saddam Hussein was allowed and supported when he was fighting against Iran in the 80s, but he was stopped when he attacked Kuwait in 1991, ideologically an ally of Saudi Arabia].
North and South Yemen unified in 1990; and since then its President had been Ali Abdullah Saleh, military, who had been President of North Yemen since 1978.
Contrary to the first Arab revolution which had been aborted by the Franco-British Real Politik, this second Arab revolution was, in my opinion, aborted mainly by regional forces, a Saudi wahabism which had no interest in Pan-Arabism colliding with its tribal mercantilist interests; and supported behind the scenes by Ashkenazi Zionism. Between both forces they made a pair of tongs, understood as two sources of pressure or independent ballasts (the Saudi wahabi ballast and the Zionist Ashkenazi ballast, about which I have spoken at length in previous articles), which came together to ensure a reactionary victory in the area.
It’s important to bear in mind that North Africa West of Tunisia trod increasingly its own path, as did Turkey, or the Gulf monarchies, or the Pakistan-Afghanistan binomial; and all of them will be important actors in the present XXI century dynamics.
4. The Jihadist movements
After the reactionary conservative Governments had become established in the 1970s, putting an end to the liberal and liberating Pan-Arabic movements, two new phenomena started gaining pre-eminence in the 1980s and the 1990s in the Arab world: Jihadism and Islamism.
Chronologically the first of the two phenomena was Jihadism. Some authors prefer to use the term Salafism, instead of Jihadism, but the term Salafism refers specifically to a group of fathers of Islam which came after the Prophet and the purist vision they had of Islam. It is thus a term with strong religious connotations and which can seriously affect susceptibilities when used in the context of a warlike-political analysis; whereas “Jihad” is a term that does imply a war motivated by religious ideals, and it would seem thus more appropriate to qualify the phenomenon that appeared in Afghanistan at the end of the 1970s.
Saudi Arabia was also originally behind the phenomenon of Jihadism, specifically a Saudi wealthy man Osama bin Laden. To be able to contextualise this phenomenon, we must go back to 1978. In April 1978 Nur Mohamed Taraki took power in Afghanistan and he brought for the first time to that country free state education which also included women, land reform, separation of State and Religion, establishment of a minimum wage, banning of opium trade, and legalisation of trade unions. USA and Pakistan supported the toppling of Taraki; and the USSR, which had signed a Treaty of Friendship with Taraki’s Afghanistan, sent its troops into Afghanistan in December 1979. USA started sponsoring rebel groups, through wahabists like Osama bin Laden, which started channelling Jihadist combatants from the whole Arab world towards Afghanistan. These forces fought on the side of the rebels (self-named “Talibans”, which means religious “students”) until the USSR left Afghanistan in 1989. From that moment on the Talibans established in Afghanistan a theocratic absolutist regime, similar to the one that exists in Saudi Arabia.
However, as soon as the war on Afghanistan had ended, thousands of ideologically extremist combatants were “freed”, and they set off to spread their ideology to the rest of the Muslim world. Thus, in Libya the Libyan Jihadists that had returned formed the “Libyan Islamic Fighting Group” at the beginning of the 1990s, which fought against Muamar Gaddafi for years, until he managed to win over them, and expel them from Libya onto Egypt. In Somalia, the toppling of Said Barre in 1991 was the origin of the infiltration of returning Jihadists, who took advantage of the country’s misgovernment and started creating alliances of advantageousness with the local warlords, in a conflict which has carried on for twenty years and has no clear prospects for resolution, having become the Indian Ocean a swarm of pirates grown thanks to that same mismanagement and to the war against the Jihadists from al-Shabaab (“al-Shabaab” means “the youth”).
While what was happening didn’t affect the West, Jihadism was allowed and supported.
What the West didn’t intuit yet was that the Jihadists had a long term plan, which was the destruction of the West, as Jihadists perceived Western democracy as contrary to their ultra orthodox interpretation of Islam. It was following the attacks on the USA Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and above all the attacks on the Twin Towers in USA on 11 September 2001, that USA opened its eyes; and on 7 October 2001 USA started a war on the Taliban (and the Jihadists that still lived there) in Afghanistan, a war in which we are still bogged down in May 2011. The Jihadists were still strong and they stroke another bloody strike in Madrid in March 2004 and another one in London in July 2006, after which came other smaller ones. In a global marketing era the brand the Jihdists took was Al Qaeda [meaning “the base” (for military training)].
I think that even before the Jihadists took off the mask in 1998, they had already acted against Western interests in the Arab world, but they had pinned the blame on somebody else. Thus, uncontrolled Jihadists struck by fanaticism were, in my opinion, behind the assassination of Anuar el Sadat in Egypt in 1981, and behind the attacks on tourist and hotel interests in the summer of 1994 also in Egypt, specially in Cairo [and before the coincidental later tourist development in Sharm Al Sheik, geographically closer to Saudi Arabia and Israel].
5. The Islamist Movement
Both terrorist attacks in Egypt, the one in 1981 and the one in 1994, were quickly labelled, in my opinion in a rather simplistic way, clearly interested in safeguarding the status quo, as Islamists, when, in my opinion, they were also Jihadist actions that sought to create the enemy at home, so as to frighten through terror policies both the local populations in the Arab and Muslim countries, as well as the West.
When they labelled these terrorist attacks as Islamist they meant that behind them was the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood are Sunni Islamists followers of a peaceful doctrine (and specifically because of that repeatedly reviled and criticised by Osama bin Laden), which was elaborated by Hassan al-Banna in 1928; and which was the only ideological-political space Sunni Islamists had after their nobles were expelled from Mecca by the Saudis in 1924.
The Muslim Brotherhood has carried out and carries out in Egypt, above all, social policies. The Islamist movement represents the moderate liberal ideology in political terms, and social justice in economic affairs.
The deterrent effect of the adjective Islamist was also played on by many Arab and non-Arab leaders with little interest in democratising their countries or allowing the democratization of its neighbours, throwing en passant the Arab world into a renewed second wave of repression.
6. The second wave of reactionary coups on the basis of the Islamist ghost
Dictators such as Hosni Mubarak in Egypt or Zine el Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia frequently used the Islamist ghost to continue getting resources from the West to prop up their dictatorships. Zine el Abidine Ben Ali kept the current Secretary General of the Tunisian moderate Islamist party, Hamad Jebali, sixteen years in prison.
A similar strategy was followed by the Algerian military. Thus, when a multi-party system was allowed in 1989 in Algiers, and the moderate Islamist party Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) democratically won the elections in 1991, a military Junta gave a coup d’état; eliminated the FIS; and started a bloody war in Algiers which lasted until 2002, and took an estimated toll of 100.000 lives.
And Saudi Arabia and Israel followed a similar strategy in Palestine, although later on in 2006. In January that year, another Islamist party Hamas won also democratically the Palestinian parliamentary elections. In that moment, neither the West, nor Fatah, nor above all the rest Saudi Arabia and Israel, left any political space for Hamas to articulate a Government and rule in Palestine.
During the 1980s and the 1990s double games were played and double standards were applied, which consisted in supporting the Jihadists and reviling the moderate Islamists. That West has had to pay a high price during the first decade of the XXI century because of that game, which was a groundless and completely unjustified game.
7. The third Arab revolution: 17 December 2010 in Tunisia
This third Arab revolution started on 17 December 2010, when an unemployed young Tunisien, Tarek al Tayyib Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in the tourist city of Sidi Bousaid in Tunisia in front of the municipality as an act of protest against the humiliating way in which the Tunisian police had treated him, confiscating the small wheelbarrow the used for selling fruits and vegetables in the streets.
That day marked the beginning of protests in the streets of Tunisia asking for an end of the dictatorship. The death of Tarek al Tayib Mohamed Bouazizi, as a result of the resulting severe burns, took place in a Tunisian hospital on 4 January 2011; and it brought about the intensification of the protests and the peaceful demonstrations, that reached their peak on 14 January 2011, when the Tunisian people managed to force its dictator, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, into exile. Who was behind that dictator is crystal clear, especially after that country agreed to grant him asylum for an “unlimited time”: Saudi Arabia.
On 25 January 2011 the Egyptian people started trying to emulate the heroic deed of its Tunisian brother and started peaceful demonstrations in the Square of Liberation, “Maydan al-Tahrir” in Cairo. Irrespective of the attempts of President Hosni Mubarak to blacken the positive opinion the international press had on the peaceful demonstrators by allowing his thugs to attack the demonstrators on 2 February, causing over a hundred deaths, he didn’t succeed and he was compelled to leave power on 11 February 2011. In my opinion, it was also Saudi Arabia who was behind the dictatorial rule of Hosni Mubarak in Cairo.
The Tunisian-Egyptian example has set on fire countries like Yemen and Bahrain since February, Syria and Oman since March or Jordan and Morocco more recently. The general characteristic has the violent suppression of peaceful demonstrations, especially in Bahrain, Yemen and Syria [and thus the continuous denunciations by Amnesty International (AI)]. 8. The reactionary forces that are against this third Arab revolution being successful
Beyond Saudi wahabism and askenazi Zionism, which, in my opinion, are both still contrary to any democratic revolution in the Arab world, there are other regional forces that are acting against the popular uprisings that are demanding democratisation in their own countries.
8.1. The Qatari-wahabi ballast, the Bahrein-Sunni ballast, and the Omani-Ibadi ballast: the survival of absolutist monarchies
Saudi Arabia and Qatar have something fundamental in common: the wahabi religion of both reigning families.
In the mid 1990s, the Qatari monarchy launched the television channel Al-Jazeera, through which it has become, in an era of globalisation, a regional actor with an independent voice. Al Jazeera has contributed to the information opening in the Arab world with public debates and critical positions on the regimes in power. The red line has always been not to inform critically about anything that could jeopardize Qatari interests. This red line can be easily observed these days watching Al-Jazeera, both in English, and Arabic. These days of revolts in the Arab world, Al-Jazeera won’t inform on the revolts in Oman, and will only provide very limited information on the revolts in Bahrain, while it will be very critical with what is happening in Yemen, Syria and Libya.
And, in my opinion, the red line is set by the Qatari interest (and which unites them very firmly to the Saudis) of maintaining the elitist privileges of the reigning monarchies, and that is what lies behind the staunch support of two other absolutist and dictatorial monarchic regimes: the reigning family of Bahrain, Sunni, not wahabi; and the reigning family of Oman, Ibadi (neither Sunni, nor Shi’ia).
Although Qatari wahabism has placed an apparently very different role to the Saudi one, and A-Jazeera was often critical of the Saudis (that was obviously before the beginning of this third Arab revolution), what is taking place now could end up affecting even the dictatorial systems in the Gulf, and thus the Qatari leadership in taking international attention far away from the area. Thus, while Saudi troops were entering Bahrain mid-March to help the local monarchy violently repress their peaceful demonstrations that were calling for political and social reforms, Qatar became the champion of the Arab position against Libya, adamantly supportive of a no-fly zone, and of bombing. And for weeks television would only inform about what was happening in Misrata, and the atrocities of Manama, the capital of Bahrain, were thus silenced. The same can be said about Oman, where demonstrations take place daily, without us hearing about it here in the West.
That spirit of monarchic comradeship is guided by their willingness to support the continuation of the privileges their despotic regimes, their absolutist monarchies grant them. The recent invitation by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to Morocco and Jordan (the only two Arab monarchies not part of the GCC) to join them, is done with that same intention.
8.2. The militarist Syrian-Alawite ballast, the militarist Libyan ballast, and the militarist Yemeni ballast: the survival of military who inaugurated lines of succession
The regional example set decades ago by Reza Phalevi, a military who had overthrown the Sha of Persia; had self-proclaimed himself Sha; and had institutionalized the line of succession among his sons, has been an appetising example for other Arab leaders. Hafed al-Assad did it in Syria; and Hosni Mubarak, Muamar el Gaddafi and Ali Abdullah Saleh had the intention of doing the same in Egypt, Libya and Yemen respectively.
The Syrian regime has had in place an Emergency Law uninterruptedly since 1963. The regime rests on a single party (the Baatz party) and on the absolute control by the Alawites (a Shi’ia minority which accounts for only 7% of Syrian population) of all the political and military means.
The Libyan regime is the only survivor of the second Arab revolution, and its leader, Muamar el Gaddafi, was always an uncomfortable guest among his Arab colleagues, as he always denounced, without the slightest political correctness, the double standards Arabs applied to each other. In turn, he had, as nearly all the rest, a militarist dictatorial regime, and his two sons were firm candidates in the line of succession.
The Yemeni regime has evolved towards an autocracy, where Ali Abdullah Saleh had the intention of institutionalising the line of succession on his son, Ahmed Saleh.
At the end of November 2011, the Syrian-Alawite regime simply fights for its survival, without it having any possibility of exerting its deterrent influence against democracy and freedom beyond its borders. In turn, the Yemeni President has spent several months negotiating his immunity, forcing quick-paced meditation processes by the GCC. It is difficult to calculate the death toll until present in Syria and Yemen, but in both cases it is already well beyond three thousand.
Nevertheless, the fact that Libya has been the only country where NATO has decided to intervene has made the scenario even more complicated that in Yemen or Syria, also covered with blood, but Saudi backyard the first one, and Turkish backyard the second one, and thus “unintervenable”. In essence, what Libya has gone through until October 2011 has been a civil war between one part of the Libyan population that fought Gaddafi’s dictatorship with NATO’s and Jihadist support; and another part of the Libyan population who interpreted this support as neo-colonialism, and although they might not have been satisfied with the existing corruption in the regime, they preferred to support it, rather than supporting what they perceived as oil-driven neo-colonialism.
8.3. North Africa’s militarism: the Algerian-militarist ballast and the Morocco-Alawite ballast
Algeria continues to be under the control of the military which didn’t acknowledge FIS’s victory in the 1991 elections, and continuous to be a non democratic regime.
Morocco has continued to be nearly impervious to democratic reforms until the third Arab revolution has put pressure on the reigning Alawite monarchy to democratise the country.
The terrible relationship existing between Algiers and Morocco adds salt to injury to the unresolved question of Western Sahara, and the growing terrorist violence in the Sahel.
8.4. The Iraqi ballast and the Iranian ballast
Since the contrary to international law USA led intervention in Iraq in 2003 to eliminate Sadam Hussein, a former collaborator turned unpleasant [similar to what happened on 1 May 2011 in relation to Osama bin Laden], Iraq is a constant dripping of human lives. Official figures vary enormously according to the sources. Until April 2009 Associated Press had calculated 110.000 deaths, and although no aggregated data have been found since then (even though there are still deaths taking place every day, and in terrorist attacks on a big scale), it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to assert that the war in Iraq has implied around 130.000 deaths, and two million refugees, in a country which is still prey of sectarian clashes.
The theocratic Iranian Shi’ia dictatorship benefits also from instability in Iraq. Until democracy reaches Iran, Iraq won’t be pacified. And the Kurdish question needs also to be addressed.
8.5. Turkey’s role: its conservative ideology and status quo have the upper hand
Turkey is governed since 2002 by the AKP (the Party for Justice and Development), party which had been created in 2001 after two previously existing Islamist parties had been declared unconstitutional. That is why AKP has insisted from the outset on its conservative ideology (centre-right), which “has no religious base”, as its then and still current leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan put it. Irrespective of that theoretical insistence, AKP is usually considered an Islamist party, ideologically linked in its origin to the Muslim Brotherhood.
However, if Turkey positioned itself last year clearly for the Palestinian cause and the end of the siege to Gaza, sponsoring the June 2010 flotilla, which implied an abrupt spacing out from its traditional ally, Israel; and the joint effort with Brazil for mediation in the Iranian dossier, were depicting a different and differential role of Turkey in the region; the role of Turkey in the current situation, since January 2011, has been different. AKP is above all a conservative party, and is acting accordingly, trying to preserve its elitist interests and the status quo of reactionary forces in the region. This explains the support for the first Saudi and then OIC decision on 8 March (afterwards endorsed by the Arab League) of bombing Libya.
9. The progressive forces that want this third revolution to succeed
9.1. The populations and transitional councils of Tunisia and Egypt
Although people in both countries are aware of the strong drive reactionary forces have, in both they are aware of the huge potential their own push can have.
The Intra-Palestinian Agreement of 3 May 2011, facilitated by Egypt, shows clearly that the deal had been long struck, but there was no willingness on the part of Israel and Saudi Arabia for the deal to be implemented, and that is why its announcement was being delayed for years. A free again Egypt has been able to act as an honest and speedy broker.
9.2. The most progressive monarchic forces: UAE and Kuwait
The third Arab revolution has led some monarchies in the Gulf to collide to hold onto their perks, others on the contrary are moving quickly to solve problems. Kuwait has been specially active in the last months mediating between UAE and Oman; and UAE has been fundamental in the mediation efforts between the Yemeni President and the opposition.
9.3. The Palestinians and the countries more affected by the Palestinian question: Jordan and Lebanon
The Palestinian people, maybe because they have been those that have suffered most in the last sixty years, are maybe the most democratic. The Palestinian people want this revolution to thrive; they want to strike a peace deal; and to be able to create a state: Palestine, which will put an end to sixty years of provisional status.
Whatever happens finally with the Palestinians, will definitely affect two quite democratic countries by regional standards (Jordan and Lebanon); countries which took on and continue to bear the main burden of Palestinian refugees.
9.4. The populations, mainly youth and women, in the whole Arab world
The protagonists of this third revolution are the youth (there are 40 million unemployed youngsters under 25 years in the Arab world) and the women of all those countries.
10. Conclusion
The forces and the powers that are against this third Arab revolution spreading to the whole Arab world, becoming a success, and maybe being the starting point of a new reality in the Mediterranean, and, by extension, in the whole world, are much more numerous.
However, we live in a new era, which has nothing to do with that close in time 2003 when the West was bombing Iraq. I am absolutely convinced that the legitimacy of the popular Arab demands asking for dignity of the human being, basic political democratic freedoms and social justice will succeed. New technologies won’t allow present injustices to perpetuate themselves. Third time, lucky!
