There is an old Chinese curse about wishing your enemy lives in historic times. At present, that is the situation that much of North Africa and Arabia finds itself in.
This part of the world is inherently unstable. The population is generally above the carrying capacity of the land. Food is imported. Most of the region has been run by autocrats. The area has become aggressively Islamic, when it used to have multiple religions. What has kept people fed in the region is oil, but the oil is running out.
If you have a water shortage and a shortage of good soil there are things you can do. You use cheap energy to build desalinisation plants. You can reforest. You can use buildings such as shade houses to produce climate control. You can let the entrepreneurial energy of your people out, and hope that they make things other people will buy.
But autocracy stymies all of these things — because the elite, the nobility, have to be involved, take their cut, and lead, regardless of their competence. This generally fails, unless you have a subset in your population who can break the rules. In medieval Christendom, those people were the Jews, who could charge interest and loan money to lords and corporations. In the early Ottoman empire, much of the energy came from the Christian, Jewish dhimmi, and a fair amount of the military creativity from tribal groups such as the Kurds.
But there are now no licenced groups who can create. The move to aggressive Wahabite Sunni Islamism has driven many Christians from Iraq — and the same noxious ideology is killing not only the groups that were traditionally called Dhimmi but any Muslm who is not part of their particular sect. This means there is not way to be outside the restrictions of those who would have tried to stone at least one of Muhammads concubines (because she was Christian). There are no Dhmmi, nor anyway out. All are narod — serfs or peasants. The leadership tries to import its culture (from both Mecca and Paris) but there is a gap. And that gap — between the cultured and the peasant has led to revolution — from the French to the Iranian. Iran, by the way, is an exception precisely because their leadership is diffuse and they remain the product of a recent popular revolution (although there must be a question as to how long this can continue for).
We should all be praying for our Arab brothers. In particular, as a nation, they have to look at putting energy and money into getting away from dependence on oil, to having some freedoms of thought and conduct, for solving their own problems. The solutions the West came up with, the reformation, enlightenment, and the modern nation-state, may not work. However, the West is not to blame for their predicament. Blame is something Arabia cannot afford — because the fat years are ending. Oil is running out. The West is in depression.
The people of Tunisia, Egypt and the entire region are wanting to be rid of corruption and to be free. But that means they need to be responsible for their fate: indeed the duty of all men is to provide for their family first. The rest of the world should trust the people of the region. They have been through incredibly difficult times before, and survived.
But trust the people, not the autocrat, or those who say they are of the people, but are of the elite.
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