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August 24, 2016
Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart
For all their revolutionary rhetoric, the dictators of Libya, Iraq and Syria remained ever mindful that their nations were essentially artificial constructs.What this meant was that many of their subjects’ primary loyalty lay not to the state but to their tribe or, more broadly, to their ethnic group or religious sect. To keep them loyal required both the carrot and the stick. In all three nations, the leaders entered into elaborate and labyrinthine alliances with various tribes and clans. Stay on the dictator’s good side, and your tribe might be given control of a ministry or a lucrative business concession; fall on his bad side, and you’re all out in the cold. The strongmen also carefully forged ties across ethnic and religious divides. In Iraq, even though most all senior Baathist officials were, like Saddam Hussein, of the Sunni minority, he endeavored to sprinkle just enough Shiites and Kurds through his administration to lend it an ecumenical sheen. In Hafez al-Assad’s Sunni-majority Syria, rule by his Alawite minority was augmented by a de facto alliance with the nation’s Christian community, giving another significant minority a stake in the status quo. - - The New York Times
Posted by gerardvanderleun at August 24, 2016 4:08 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
An Egyptian diplomat told us at the outset of the 1990-91 Gulf war, "Egypt is the only true Arab nation. The rest are just tribes with flags."
And he was right.
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at August 25, 2016 7:04 AM
Sounds a lot like regular ol' machine politics in the big cities.
Posted by: OldFert at August 25, 2016 1:17 PM
The machine politicians aren't as willing to use car bombs on opposition voters, at least not yet.
Posted by: Vermont Woodchuck at August 26, 2016 4:50 AM