London Review of Books:

By 2011 the complexity of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan was evident to journalists in Baghdad and Kabul if not necessarily to editors in London and New York. But by then the reporting of the wars in Libya and Syria was demonstrating a different though equally potent form of naivety. A version of the spirit of 1968 prevailed: antagonisms that predated the Arab Spring were suddenly said to be obsolete; a brave new world was being created at hectic speed. Commentators optimistically suggested that, in the age of satellite television and the internet, traditional forms of repression – censorship, imprisonment, torture, execution – could no longer secure a police state in power; they might even be counter-productive. State control of information and communication had been subverted by blogs, satellite phones and even the mobile phone; YouTube provided the means to expose in the most graphic and immediate way the crimes and violence of security forces.

In March 2011 mass arrests and torture effortlessly crushed the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain. Innovations in information technology may have changed the odds marginally in favour of the opposition, but not enough to prevent counter-revolution – as the military coup in Egypt on 3 July showed. The initial success of street demonstrations led to over-confidence and excessive reliance on spontaneous action; the need for leadership, organisation, unity, and policies that amounted to more than a vague humanitarian agenda – all that was ignored. History – including the histories of their own countries – had nothing to teach this generation of radicals and would-be revolutionaries. They drew no lessons from what happened in Egypt when Nasser seized power in 1952, and didn’t ask whether the Arab uprisings of 2011 might have parallels with the European revolutions of 1848, when easy victories were swiftly reversed. Many members of the intelligentsia in Libya and Syria seemed to live and think within the echo chamber of the internet and had few practical thoughts about the way forward.

Conviction that a toxic government is the root of all evil is the public position of most oppositions, but it’s damaging to trust one’s own propaganda. The Iraqi opposition genuinely believed that Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic problems stemmed from Saddam and that once he was gone all would be well. The opposition in Libya and Syria believed that the regimes of Gaddafi and Assad were so demonstrably bad that it was counter-revolutionary to question whether what came after them would be much better. Foreign reporters have by and large shared these opinions. 

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