Thomas Friedman doesn’t dig deep, but he gets this mostly right:
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.
I’m pretty sure Libya, Syria, and Iraq are disasters due to foreign invasions and sanctions, not domestic policy.
I poked a cat once. And again. And again. And again. I’m scratched and you’re not. It’s the cat’s fault.
“I’m pretty sure Libya, Syria, and Iraq are disasters due to foreign invasions and sanctions, not domestic policy.”
Really? Today Saddam would be what? Almost 80 years old. Kadhafi was what? 70′s. Assad was the son of the dictator.
Technology, Regime Age, and their failures made Islamic narrative, replacing the Socialist narrative, made the war inevitable.
For example, one thing that irritated many common Libyans is that for all its oil Libya was not “nice like Dubai”. In fact it was a dirty ugly country in worse state than when was under Fascist Italy. What is noticeable in Libya? Roman and Fascist Architecture and some old Turkish fort. The rest is a disgrace.
When you deny HBD, you are forced to come up with magical superhero bullshit like Friedman does here. If only Lee Kuan Yew had been placed in charge of Syria, Iraq, Libya, or Yemen, he seems to say, today that country would be prosperous westernized and pro-Israel. The populations are totally interchangeable, only the Great Leader matters.