Middle East Turns Back Clock as Remnants of Old Regimes Rise Again

[question everything]

Four years after the Arab Spring began, the new Middle East looks more and more like the old one—but worse.

For decades, the bleak choice in the region was between dictators such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and the Islamist militancy that they always invoked when pressured by the West to liberalize. The uprisings of 2011—often spurred by liberal and secular activists—produced fleeting hopes that the jihadists and autocrats would no longer be the only alternatives. But today, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi oversees a regime that is seen as more repressive than Mr. Mubarak’s in many ways.

This new Egypt and its main financiers and allies—the absolute monarchies of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates—increasingly project power and influence across the region.

On the other side of the equation, Islamic State has seized a Britain-size chunk of Syria and Iraq, and now is spawning affiliates in Libya and Egypt’s restive Sinai Peninsula. It is outmatching al Qaeda of old in wanton barbarity and military prowess.

(snip)

In his three decades in power, Mr. Mubarak often told visiting American dignitaries that the choice was between him and the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s main Islamist organization with branches across the region. He did prove right: A year after his ouster, the country’s first democratic presidential elections put the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi in power. The Brotherhood under Mr. Morsi alienated many Egyptians by clamping down on dissent, excluding other political movements, and imposing its religious agenda.

Another year later, liberals who once joined hands with Brotherhood supporters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square chose a dictatorship that would preserve secular freedoms over a democratically elected Islamist government. Their mass protests egged the army on to end the country’s democratic experiment, putting Mr. Sisi in power and enabling the current crackdown. Egypt’s new authorities have since imprisoned tens of thousands of political foes and imposed new restrictions on protesting, the media, nongovernmental organizations and human-rights groups.

Elsewhere in the region, an outright Saudi military intervention choked the Arab Spring in Bahrain. And in still-democratic Tunisia, the only relative bright spot, voters in December elected as president the 88-year-old former speaker of the ousted dictatorship’s rubber-stamp parliament. He promptly named another senior former regime figure as prime minister. Chastened by the Egyptian example and fearing a similar fate, Tunisia’s main Islamist party, Ennahda, didn’t even field a presidential candidate.

(snip)

After emerging unscathed from the region’s revolutionary upheaval and squeezing out dissent at home, the Saudis and Emiratis now are driving a regional campaign to stifle whatever has remained of the Arab Spring’s hopes of establishing democratic, accountable governments, critics say.

(snip)

“There is not going to be another uprising in Egypt anytime soon,” cautioned Heba Morayef, senior Egypt analyst at the International Crisis Group and until recently, the local representative of Human Rights Watch. “I don’t think Egypt is going to see anything remotely democratic for the next couple of decades.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/middle-east-turns-back-clock-as-remnants-of-old-regimes-rise-again-1421281936

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. I do not understand how "liberals chose" a dictatorship.

How after all the massive protests in Egypt, 2 worse-than people were then "chosen" to head of state.

[question everything]

2. The Muslim Brotherhood were well organized

similar to the teabaggers here.

And, no doubt, as we've seen in other places, liberals tend to be fractured. Thus a well organized opposition can take advantage of it.