From Tom Paine
By Shadi Hamid

Some commentators –including most recently the American Prospect’s Matt Yglesias –have argued that the central problem in the Middle East is not so much its lack of democracy but, rather, the enduring legacy of imperialism. According to this line of reasoning, the solution to our Mideast dilemmas would be to change the policies that Middle Easterners hate the most. Unfortunately, the list of grievances is so long, that to actually redress them would, one suspects, take a very, very long time. Moreover, in a region where our vital interests are engaged, it is unlikely that an avowedly anti-imperialist foreign policy–whatever that might mean in practice–will stand a chance of being supported by either political party. More fundamentally, however, this diagnosis fails to grasp the real source of our difficulties in the Middle East.

It’s not so much that people are angry at us, but rather that people have no political outlet with which to express their anger in a peaceful, legitimate manner.

Even if the intractable Arab-Israeli conflict was to be solved through hands-on American diplomacy, it would be shortsighted to think that this would be the victory that some imagine it will be. For if the conflict is resolved, it does not change the fact that millions of Arabs live in humiliation, treated as little more than petty subjects, to be manipulated, controlled and repressed at will. The greatest indignities Arabs and Muslims face–the ones that, for them, are most immediate and tangible–come from their own authoritarian governments. And of course, we, in our continued support for unrepentant autocrats, are complicit.

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