If This is Arab Spring, What Would Arab Fall Look like?

Arab Spring

Spring time Roller Coaster

The words of the title of this post are from the first paragraph of an article published by in Small Wars Journal. The article written by Dr. Tony Corn.  The article some 30 pages is worth reading every word. One might not totally agree with Dr. Corn's assessment, but the level of the research that is evident in this paper and the lucid tenor of his argument makes this a worthy paper to study.

There are plenty of reasons to view with skepticism the claim that the current turmoil in the Middle East constitutes a progressive “Arab Spring.” In Egypt alone, 82 percent of the population today support stoning for adultery, 84 percent are in favor of the death penalty for apostasy, and 79 percent would view the emergence of a nuclear Iran as a positive development. If that qualifies as an Arab Spring, one has to wonder what an Arab Fall would look like.

But the one issue that the West should not be unduly concerned with is the fact that 67 percent of Egyptians are in favor of the restoration of the Caliphate.

....More important still, it is time for Western policy-makers to realize that the ideological rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran that has been going on since 1979 constitutes nothing less than a Clash of the Caliphates...

The bad news is that this Saudi-Iranian Cold War has the potential to escalate today into a hot war in the Gulf (Bahrain). The good news is that the Saudi-Iranian ideological duopoloy is being increasingly challenged by the return of Turkey on the Muslim stage. The global export of “Turkish Islam” has the potential to rollback Saudi and Iranian fundamentalisms and significantly alter the “theo-political balance of power” in the Muslim world.

Read the article
The Clash of the Caliphates:Understanding the Real War of Ideas