"East of the River Jordan, the defining geopolitical and religious schism in the Middle East pits Saudi Arabia against Iran"
"The strength of the pro-democracy movements in the Middle East is such that, for the first time in the Arab world, revolution has not attached itself to some grand, supranational cause: pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, socialism, support for the Palestinians, anti-colonialism, anti-Zionism or anti-imperialism. These new movements are patriotic rather than nationalist, taking root in a domestic context and confronting the authorities without accusing them of being puppets of a foreign power.
This is not to say that the great geostrategic fissures have disappeared, but they exist primarily in the minds of the leaderships still in place which, when they haven't been content simply to fight for their own survival (as in Libya or Yemen), have interpreted the revolts in terms of their wider regional implications. This is also true of the Israelis, who, like the Saudi regime in Riyadh, have been concerned only to calculate the likely consequences of the recent unrest. Though the western powers are congratulating themselves on a wave of democratisation that they have encouraged, they, too, are highly sensitive to the geostrategic dimension, as their silence on the repression of protests in Bahrain demonstrates.
What we are witnessing is the emergence of a strange dichotomy, wholly unprecedented in recent times. Until now, all revolutionary movements have worked to the benefit, real or imagined, of a great power or ideology. For a long time, it was the Soviet Union, then Islamism - and we should not forget the role played by the west during the demonstrations that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall"...............READ MORE
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