GOOD BOOK ON 'ARAB SPRING'

Anybody remember the high hopes we had 5 years ago for the "Arab Spring" revolts.  Four disasters and only one decent result (Tunisia).  Obama recklessly declared that Assad must go in Syria thus locking the U.S. into a position that has not worked out.  How much did the administration expend to support rebels in Syria and elsewhere? Another Obama foreign/military policy disaster.


"Mr. Worth’s book [A Rage for Order] is about the core of that tragic springtime story born five years ago: the “Arab republican states,” the five nations that in 2011 rose up against their longstanding regimes of secular nationalist strongmen.
Of these, Egypt ended up where it started, with its former head of military intelligence in charge of a moderately unhappy country that seems relieved to have escaped from brief, democratically legitimate rule by the Muslim Brotherhood. Syria remains in the middle of civil war. Libya is outright chaos. Yemen is in the grip of a full-blown Saudi-Iranian proxy war, with its government exiled, its capital in the hands of Shia rebels and much of the coast an emirate of the world’s strongest al Qaeda franchise.

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Only Tunisia—the place where it all began, when a 26-year-old street vendor, humiliated by corrupt local officials, immolated himself in December 2010—is today relatively stable."