Wrecking Realpolitik

FUBAR!

A NATO term roughly meaning 'fouled up beyond all repair" - it is equally applicable to the played, sad, ancient corrupt cult of stability - that realists - (whee!) have twistedly clung to long after the expiration date of 911 arrived.

Little Satan's Russian dissident expat and daemoneoconic avatar dynamically explains why cats who freak and fear the Middle East in the New Millennium are wasting their substance hoping for new, improved corrupt unfree regimes that can return to biz as usual and the 'forever quest' for stability

"...The worried among us fear the possibility of long-term chaos and/or the emergence of regimes even more repressive than those that are crumbling. Their arguments are serious and deserve an answer.

"...For decades, the free world's policy toward the Middle East was based on the desire for stability, purchased by deals struck with leaders. That the leaders were corrupt autocrats mattered little. To the contrary, tyranny was seen as guaranteeing stability, corruption as guaranteeing that tyranny's friendship could be bought.

"...This was rationalized by considerations of realpolitik and the comforting assertion that we had no right to judge the moral standards of societies different from our own.

"...That pact, however, has been definitively exposed as a sham, yielding not stability but its opposite. And it has been broken - not by us or the autocrats but by the peoples of the region. Their great awakening has shattered the truism that, unlike "us," they have no real desire for freedom. With tremendous courage, they have risked their lives to declare otherwise.

"...Surveying the fall of the dictators, some in the West have reflexively turned to other, already organized structures within the societies shaped by dictatorship: notably, the army or Islamist groups. The unspoken idea is to replicate the old pact but with a different set of players. Once again the goal is stability, rationalized now by the alleged absence of other centers of potential leadership within Arab society and by the "discovery" of moderate elements within some of the region's worst actors.

"....This is delusion squared: an abdication of the free world's ability to influence developments in the Muslim world. Take the interest expressed by Washington in "engaging" the Muslim Brotherhood.

 "...It effectively turns a blind eye to the unprecedented opportunities of the present and repeats, obsessively, all the mistakes of the past. 

Pic - "All of the main alternatives to democracy either disappeared, turned into eccentric survivals, or retreated from the field to hunker down in their last strongholds."