Has the Arab Spring just dried up?

I won’t pretend to be an expert on the Middle East. Frankly, it baffles me. The politics, the religion, the oil: it is at the same time the most terrifying and the most intriguing area of the world. Most people, in my experience, tend to divide in to two utterly dogmatic and one-dimensional schools of thought when it comes to thinking about it, roughly based on being a supporter of either Israel or Palestine. I certainly won’t pretend I know the answer, but I don’t think these people have it either. I don’t know how to untie the complex knot of geopolitical tensions, brutal dictatorships and repressive religious theocrats – but I don’t believe that the Western world does either.

The Arab Spring was supposed to change all this. The knot was supposed to unravel itself; Democracy would be organic, not artificially imposed by Washington hawks. Middle Eastern democracy was supposed to blossom. Awkward metaphors aside, the point is this: the uprisings across the Arab world were meant to become the next great revolution. And they have failed to do so.

Egypt is symptomatic of the failures of the Arab Spring. Tahrir Square was the new Berlin Wall. It all seemed so radical at the time. Mubarak went, as did Ben Ali of Tunisia. Syria has not been so lucky. But after the fall of Mubarak, then what? Egypt’s progress since hasn’t been revolutionary – it’s hardly even been evolutionary. Mubarak might be gone, but change has ground to a halt.

Last Wednesday saw the deaths of 74 football fans in a post-match riot in the Egyptian city of Port Said. Nobody expected a smooth transition to liberal democracy, of course, but this is alarming. Hosni Mubarak’s minions still lurk in the shadows of various government departments. The ruling military council denies it, but many suspect that the failure of the security forces to protect football fans caught in the riots was an act of revenge for the revolution.

Many have put their faith instead in the shadowy Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political entity with dubious links to various terrorist groups and a history of hard-line anti-Zionism. A friend of mine, working as an intern at the Centre for American Progress in Washington DC, observed that ‘people want stability back now… the only politically structured, cohesive network is the Muslim Brotherhood.’ That may be so, but that does not make them the right option, and the tensions between the voters and the military council only exacerbate the climate of confusion.

The outcomes of the revolution remain to be seen. Few would be bold enough to predict a transformation to functioning, stable democracy. Arab states have proven to be resilient to this sort of change in the past – just look at Iraq and Afghanistan. Look at the failed revolutions in Syria and Iran. In the heat of the protests we allowed ourselves to get carried away. The Middle East is not Eastern Europe; and revolutions cannot topple dictators like dominoes as in former Soviet Bloc countries. The situation is altogether more complicated.

Nobody really knows what’s going on in Egypt. Indeed, nobody knows what will happen in the Middle East in general. When troops leave Afghanistan it is quite likely that it will revert back to its former model. Iraq remains an impossible puzzle, and Syria appears to be free to torture, maim and murder its own citizens as long as Vladimir Putin (who happens to sell arms to Assad) sees fit to stop the UN Security Council passing any meaningful resolutions against it. Iran’s theocracy has ruthlessly supressed the so-called ‘green’ revolution and Saudi Arabia is happy to shun the international spotlight, maintain its dictatorship, and trade with the oil-thirsty West.

Did we really think the actions of the masses could bring lasting change to this mess? The Arab Spring never stood a chance of really overhauling the corrupt, repressive regimes that blight the Arab world.

This isn’t the fault of the people of the Middle East. They have fought bravely to see their people set free. The failure of their uprisings is simply a result of the deep complexity of the region. We hoped that finally we had finally worked out how to solve the riddle. In fact, the Middle East has beaten us all again. We are the victims of our own high expectations.