Patrick Cockburn takes stock of the disastrous round of revolutions in the Arab world:

The uprisings of the Arab Spring have so far produced anarchy in Libya, a civil war in Syria, greater autocracy in Bahrain and resumed dictatorial rule in Egypt. In Syria, the uprising began in March 2011 with demonstrations against the brutality of Assad’s regime. ‘Peace! Peace!’ protesters chanted. But ‘if there was a fair election in Syria today,’ one commentator said, ‘Assad would probably win it.’

It isn’t only the protesters and insurgents of 2011 whose aspirations are being frustrated or crushed. In March 2003 the majority of Iraqis from all sects and ethnic groups wanted to see the end of Saddam’s disastrous rule even if they didn’t necessarily support the US invasion. But the government now in power in Baghdad is as sectarian, corrupt and dysfunctional as Saddam’s ever was. There may be less state violence, but only because the state is weaker. Its methods are equally brutal: Iraqi prisons are full of people who have made false confessions under torture or the threat of it. An Iraqi intellectual who had planned to open a museum in Abu Ghraib prison so that Iraqis would never forget the barbarities of Saddam’s regime found that there was no space available because the cells were full of new inmates. Iraq is still an extraordinarily dangerous place. ‘I never imagined that ten years after the fall of Saddam you would still be able to get a man killed in Baghdad by paying $100,’ an Iraqi who’d been involved in the abortive museum project told me.

Why have oppositions in the Arab world and beyond failed so absolutely, and why have they repeated in power, or in pursuit of it, so many of the faults and crimes of the old regimes?

He then tries to explain it. Part of the answer, Cockburn says, is that we foreigners looked to these revolutionary movements and saw what we wanted to see. The revolutionaries looked like us Westerners, in the sense that they wanted (or said they wanted) to be more like us. So we deceived ourselves about the complex realities of those societies — and the people who made these revolutions may have deceived themselves. Cockburn:

The inability of new governments across the Middle East to end the violence can be ascribed to a simple-minded delusion that most problems would vanish once democracies had replaced the old police states. Opposition movements, persecuted at home and often living a hand to mouth existence in exile, half-believed this and it was easy to sell to foreign sponsors. A great disadvantage of this way of seeing things was that Saddam, Assad and Gaddafi were so demonised it became difficult to engineer anything approaching a compromise or a peaceful transition from the old to a new regime.

Read the whole thing. The American delusion that the way our middle class lives is the natural state of mankind is inexhaustible. We only ended a kind of apartheid in our own country well within living memory. That happened through lots of violence and struggle. Why did the removal of legal oppression not result in the US black population broadly achieving economic parity with whites? There are lots of answers, of course, but I think just about everyone, left and right, would agree that undoing an oppressive regime may be necessary to achieve freedom, broad prosperity, and happiness. But it is not sufficent. Not remotely.

UPDATE: Good comment from reader Mohammad, who lives in Iran:

I did not have the slightest illusion about the whole Arab spring right from the beginning. I was too well familiar with the Arab youth! First of all, almost all people in this part of the world believe very strongly in the power of state and in central planning for just anything, including culture, economy,…. They might disagree as how to use this power, but they all believe that it is the State’s role and duty to shape the society. It has become almost a religious dogma, even though the idea originally came from west and from communist Russia.

Secondly, there is nothing conservative in the young population of the Muslim world. Even the Salafis, labeled wrongly as being conservative, are hugely anti-tradition, their conservatism usually restricted to the women’s veils. I had some friends from north Africa when I was in the USA. They did not pray, always went to the bars, picked up girls whenever they could, but at the same time they would express a strong desire for an “Islamic State,” or worse, for a unified state of all Muslims. You should never trust some young men so much uprooted from their true roots.

I could never understand why Americans were so eager to support the Arab uprisings. Right at the beginning, one could see the end result clearly, and for that you didn’t have to be a genius.

This brings to mind an essay I read years ago arguing that Islamic fundamentalism is, at its root, a modernist (= anti-traditionalist) movement. I wish I could remember who wrote it. I would like to re-read it.