Kenneth M. Pollack: Winds of Change in the Middle East
[Kenneth M. Pollack is the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and the author of "A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East."]
On Feb. 11, 1979, Islamic revolutionaries took power in Tehran. On Sept. 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorists launched their attacks on New York and Washington, killing nearly 3,000 Americans. On Feb. 11, 2011, Hosni Mubarak resigned as president of Egypt.
That these things all occurred on the 11th of the month is coincidental, but the events themselves are not unrelated. One of the worst mistakes Americans have made over these three decades has been to overlook their common roots.
The Muslim Middle East sits on a vast reservoir of popular anger and frustration over the region's economic, social and political dysfunction. The same dissatisfaction that galvanized crowds in Cairo's Tahrir Square also drove young Iranians to bring down the shah. And it also has aided the recruitment efforts of Bin Laden and other Islamist terrorists since the early 1980s....
We have no one but ourselves to blame for misunderstanding the common sources of our problems all across the Muslim Middle East. The people of the region have hardly kept quiet about their grievances: unemployment, underemployment, massive gaps between rich and poor, callous and corrupt autocracies that did nothing to alleviate distress and much to exacerbate it. The United States got repeated wake-up calls, beginning with the collapse of the shah, but we never bothered to question our convenient insistence that the problems were discrete and manageable by repression and denial....
Read entire article at LA Times
On Feb. 11, 1979, Islamic revolutionaries took power in Tehran. On Sept. 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorists launched their attacks on New York and Washington, killing nearly 3,000 Americans. On Feb. 11, 2011, Hosni Mubarak resigned as president of Egypt.
That these things all occurred on the 11th of the month is coincidental, but the events themselves are not unrelated. One of the worst mistakes Americans have made over these three decades has been to overlook their common roots.
The Muslim Middle East sits on a vast reservoir of popular anger and frustration over the region's economic, social and political dysfunction. The same dissatisfaction that galvanized crowds in Cairo's Tahrir Square also drove young Iranians to bring down the shah. And it also has aided the recruitment efforts of Bin Laden and other Islamist terrorists since the early 1980s....
We have no one but ourselves to blame for misunderstanding the common sources of our problems all across the Muslim Middle East. The people of the region have hardly kept quiet about their grievances: unemployment, underemployment, massive gaps between rich and poor, callous and corrupt autocracies that did nothing to alleviate distress and much to exacerbate it. The United States got repeated wake-up calls, beginning with the collapse of the shah, but we never bothered to question our convenient insistence that the problems were discrete and manageable by repression and denial....