NEW YORK TIMES COLUMN: … the comparison with Asia is instructive. After World II, Asia was ruled by many autocrats who essentially came to their people and said, “My people, we’re going to take away your freedom, but we’re going to give you the best education, infrastructure and export-led growth policies money can buy. And eventually you’ll build a big middle class and win your freedom.” Over that same period, Arab autocrats came to their people and said, “My people, we’re going to take away your freedom and give you the Arab-Israel conflict.”
Asian autocrats tended to be modernizers, like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, who just died last week at 91 — and you see the results today: Singaporeans waiting in line for 10 hours to pay last respects to a man who vaulted them from nothing into the global middle class. Arab autocrats tended to be predators who used the conflict with Israel as a shiny object to distract their people from their own misgovernance. The result: Libya, Yemen, Syria and Iraq are now human development disaster areas.
Some saw this coming. In 2002, a group of Arab social scientists produced the U.N.’s Arab Human Development Report. It said the Arab world suffered deficits of freedom, knowledge and women’s empowerment, and, if it did not turn around, it would get where it was going. It was ignored by the Arab League. In 2011, the educated Arab masses rose up to force a turnaround before they got where they were going. Except for Tunisia (the only Arab country whose autocrat was also a modernizer), that awakening fizzled out. So now they’ve gotten where they were going: state collapse and a caldron of tribal, sectarian (Shiite-Sunni, Persian-Arab) civil wars — in a region bulging with unemployed, angry youths and schools that barely function, or, if they do, they teach an excess of religion not math… (more)
