Cyclones of Change

The oh-so-clever-and-trite for its time sobriquet of the "Arab Spring" has lost its spring to the reality that removing tyranny that exists for its own sake, creates a vacuum that nature invites itself to fill. And in the rush to do so, those who exposed themselves to danger out of their desire and need for change, aid, liberty and justice suddenly find themselves ruled by malignantly powerful theocratic masters intent on enslaving them completely to their idea of the divine.

There was a template readily available for minute examination. Where the Shah of Iran was forced to leave his peacock throne and his avuncular ambitions for his people, unaware that his vicious secret service had poisoned the atmosphere beyond redemption. Oblivious too to the fact that the exiled fanatical ayatollahs purposed to return would take his country and its people to complete totalitarian rule.

It did not, after all, take all that very long for the Middle East to understand just how wretchedly anti-human-rights and repressive the Islamic Republic of Iran was in its commitment to its very particular vision of Shia Islam's capability of finally presenting as the real power in the Middle East to which all others through covert machination and deadly intrigue would be happy to genuflect toward.

The ambitions of the ayatollahs were greater than merely submitting their Republic to stern and strict Islamism. They were harbingers of change, but they also sought to accelerate that change by creating divisions between Muslim societies and the West. Their viral hatred of the West and their conspiracies to foment harm by inciting to violence, by nurturing terror, has done irreparable damage both to the Middle East and to the larger world.

The nationals of other Muslim countries looked at their Persian neighbour but were unable to recognize their own future therein. They rebelled against endemic poverty, unemployment, oppression and hopelessness, and asked for change. Denied them, they turned their protest into rebellion and succeeded in removing the autocratic regimes only to find themselves locked into the control of true tyranny.

Tunisians now are attitudinally conflicted between those who see their desire to be ruled by Islamists fulfilled and those who view that as a backward step in their evolution toward the future. Libyan authority has lost control of parts of the country where tribalism and the schisms of sectarianism have surrendered to roving armed gangs wreaking havoc, destroying and looting when the mood takes them.

Egypt had its flirtation with Islamism and decided that the Muslim Brotherhood was far too eager to cement itself and its ideology deeper than the pyramids whose roots spoke of a proud inheritance but which is considered meaningless to the bigoted rigor of a religion that considers all others to be abominations assaulting the dignity of Allah, and all symbols of an early heritage ripe for destruction.

Syria is violently imploding, performing a slow dance of destruction from two ends meeting gradually toward the middle; on one side the Alawite regime, on the other the Sunni rebels with their reluctant acceptance of battle-mad jihadists inexorable in their determination to bring Syria to a state reflecting that of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Lebanon trembles on the cusp of its own stumble back into civil war, Iran's Hezbollah clients trailing them alongside Syria.

Iraq convulses in the throes of agony, assaulted by Sunni terrorists whose mission is to destroy the Shia administration and if Shia civilians are slaughtered so much the better. Jordan's stability is in peril with the Muslim Brotherhood hovering in the shadows as the country is forced to absorb greater numbers of Syrian refugees and relations between Shia and Sunni continue their slow and steady deterioration.

Beyond the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan present as countries weaving perilously close to succumbing to the relentless onslaught of their countless Islamist groups menacing stability.  The one Muslim country that managed to re-create itself as a reflection of both East and West, separating religion from the affairs of the state into a democracy stood as a beacon of hope that Muslim countries could indeed embrace.

And now that long experiment appears to be coming to an end. The previous secular-focused governments that led Turkey to prosperity and good relations with its neighbours to the West have been overtaken by the incursion and occupation of an Islamist government which is steadily removing Turkey from its Western influences and reasserting Islamism to the core of the country's values.

This then, is the state of grace that Arab and Muslim countries find themselves within. North African countries like Somalia, Sudan, the Western Sahara and Algeria are in turmoil. Countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, Bosnia and Bangladesh appear to be stable, less infected thus far by extreme Islam, and comfortable in their versions of democracy.

The Middle East and North Africa present as cyclones of change, and certainly not for the better.