Mayhem in the Middle East.

• Author: Danahar, Paul
• Position: Worldview

THE COUNTRIES engulfed by the Arab Spring are on the road from dictatorship to democracy. Together they shape the New Middle East, but why did some uprisings lead to the overthrow of regimes while others did not? Why did some revolutions take weeks while others took many months? Why in some of the most undemocratic countries in the Arab region did widespread protests not take place at all? Where revolutions did happen, why did some countries then vote for Islamist parties while other equally pious nations rejected them? Why was there international agreement to send NATO planes into the skies over Libya to preempt a possible massacre, whereas little was done in Syria when chemical weapons were deployed and the bullet-riddled corpses of small children stared out at us from the front pages of our newspapers over morning coffee? Where and why did Western realism trump Western idealism?

To answer these questions properly, it helps to have seen the transformation of the region from the beginning, when U.S. troops drove into Baghdad a decade ago to impose a democratic "Freedom Agenda" on the Arab world. My work as the BBC's Middle East bureau chief also took me to the front lines in Libya and the protesters' barricades in Egypt. I heard the debates with ultra-Orthodox Jews about the merits of Madonna and theological rows with West Bank settlers over their serf-declared right to kill Arab children. There stood Col. Muammar Gaddafi at the beginning of the Libyan revolution, and there was his bloodied and beaten dead body at the end. In Syria, a civil war has soaked villages in blood, dividing the country, the region, and the world.

We in the West need to understand this region, because the Vegas roles do not apply here. What happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East. We have no choice but to try to make sense of the changing dynamics there because, as Pres. Barack Ohama has acknowledged, 'Whether we like it or not ... when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them, and that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure."

The new governments emerging from the revolutions no longer Hill act as client states doing America's bidding, so "leading from behind" will not be enough. "We are in the middle of this struggle; it is going to take a generation; it is going to be very arduous and difficult, but I think we are making a mistake, a profound error, if we think we can stay out of that...