| Is it not incredible that with all of the oil wealth the middle east has, with all of the military hardware they have purchased, that they seem incapable of fielding a credible military?
The first thing autocrats want to do is control the flow of information. So they restrict things like the Internet, satellite dishes, even copiers and fax machines. That makes it hard to organize dissent, but it seriously impedes the flow of commerce. The second thing they do is stomp the initiative out of people. There are some Mullahs in Kut who have just decided to take over the place and become little dictators. They published a bunch of rules on the wall of the mosque. One of the first rules was, "If something happens, don't do anything. Wait for guidance from the mullahs." There is autocracy in a nutshell. You end up with a military, an economy, in fact an entire society where nobody thinks they can do anything without permission, but where the lines of communication with the permission-granters are severely restricted. It's a recipe for stagnation, ineffectiveness, and an inability to exploit opportunity. Such a thing will always lose in any struggle against a free society where initiative is rewarded and where information flows are fast, redundant, and two-way. Any Arabs who think that the Message of Iraq is that "they need a bigger dictator with a bigger army" are totally missing it. |
It's the autocratic nature of their regimes. That's also what holds back their economies. Exactly the same thing happened in the Soviet Union.