Lawrence Wright's analysis of the bin Laden story ... (he wrote "The Looming Tower")

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/05/bin-laden-hey-hey-goodbye.html

"...But bin Laden’s death comes at a time when Al Qaeda has been sidelined by the democratic surge that has unsettled the Arab world. Zawahiri and other Al Qaeda leaders have attempted to frame the changes as an Islamist awakening. Now, with bin Laden gone, we will be able to test the truth of the observation that radical Islamist terror is a manifestation of the repressive governments that dominated the region.

"Democracy and civil society are the cure for the chronic misery of Muslim countries that has fed the rise of Islamic extremism. The death of the most notorious terrorist the world has ever seen, whose mission was to create a clash of civilizations, will allow the door to open more widely to the tolerance, modernism, and pragmatism that is so badly needed and so long awaited in a part of the world where despair, corruption, brutality, and fanaticism have laid waste to so many generations. ..."

has been on the verge of dawning for a decade, at least.

but we interfered b/c of fears of communism gaining control

I hope we don't repeat the same mistakes now.

that's what i mean by the willful distortion of history.

From the twenties to the fifties, the norm was direct colonial rule, or 'protectorate' status, with governments put in place after World War Two being headed chiefly by figures who had been puppets of England or France earlier. These governments went down in a wave of nationalist military coups in the wake of Israel's victory in the '48 war. The Soviet Union won the bidding war with most of these governments, which as modernizing nationalist lines were hostile to fundamentalist religion. Fundamentalist bodies arose in the years after the First World War, and steadily gained strength, quite independent of foreign favor or disfavor. Most actions by them in the Near east, typified by the assassination of President Sadat, were quite inimicable to U.S. interests. The United States did indeed foster fundamentalist zealotry in Central Asia, in opposition to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, during the eighties, and did a damned poor job of cleaning up afterwards. But even there, it hardly created the movement, which dates there back to the mid-nineteenth century, or even strengthened it very much there, save in the narrowest military sense.

for the most part revolutions undertaken in the name of democracy/modernization/secularization.

i'm speaking of the period beginning with ataturk & egyptian independence.

we'll have to disagree on the US responsibility for modern fundamentalism in the middle east.

Gen. Kemal, later Ataturk, can be accused of many things, but democracy is hardly one of them. He would certainly plead guilty to modernization and secularization, but he pressed these by ruthless force against the inclination of much of the Anatolian populace.

Egypt was hardly 'independent' till after World War Two, in any meaningful sense of the word: the most that could be said was that the Egyptian monarch had some limited 'home rule' after the early twenties. While it is true the place was formally independent, England ran foreign affairs, and 'advised' concerning internal ones, held absolute sway over its military arrangements, and maintained a substantial garrison, regarding the Canal as English soil. No one pretended there was anything democratic about the regimes of either Faud or Farouk. It is true there was a parliament, but it ha little power in practice, though many were attached to it as a mark of patronage and immunities.

The Soviets simply out-bid us for Col. Nasser....

the fact is that there was popular support for democratic reforms in the middle east in the 20s through the 60s, and it was indeed the dead hand of the former colonizers that foreclosed those possible futures as actual democracy was not acceptable -- and still isn't.

Democracy...........not a Potemkin Democracy