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The Arab Spring Is an Economic Revolt

(Wall Street Journal) Fouad Ajami - For generations the Arab populations had bartered away their political freedom for economic protection. They rose in rebellion when it dawned on them that the bargain had not worked, that the system of subsidies, and the promise of equality held out by the autocrats, had proven a colossal failure. The old order of merchants and landholders was upended in the 1950s and '60s by a political and military class that assumed supreme power in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Algeria and Yemen. As a rule, they hailed from the underclass and they put the merchant classes to flight. In the 1950s the Jews, Greeks, and Italians who had figured prominently in the economic life of Egypt were sent packing, taking with them their skills. In Iraq, the Jews of the country, on its soil for well over two millennia, were dispossessed and banished in 1950-51. In Syria, the Alawites, the religious sect to which the Assad clan belongs, had been poor peasants and sharecroppers, but political and military power raised them to new heights. If the tremendous upheaval at play in Arab lands is driven by a desire to capture state power - and the economic prerogatives that come with political power - the revolution will reproduce the failures of the past. The writer is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
2011-07-08 00:00:00
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