Most of these kingdoms were put in power by the British and French. The only exception is Egypt and Tunisia, which weren't kingdoms but republics. But Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Oman are all puppet states, while Iran, Iraq and Libya used to be before the first fell to theocracy and the second two to strong man rule. Morocco is sort of an exception since it has an ancient monarchy, but even there the US is responsible for keeping him in power.

"First, the autocratic governments of North-Africa and the Middle East had been imposed from the outside and maintained in place by the United States' guarantee -- the very real threat of bombers arriving to put down any serious insurrection. When American power began to crumble in the late 2000s, this guarantee turned paper thin and the regimes were suddenly deeply vulnerable to any hard push from inside"

Yeah, I rephrased the sentence in the article, yet it is still true. You refuse to see the analogy, because it shows, how overstretched empires are doomed to fall apart, just like yours.

The Murderous Monster Titans of oil and gas roamed ranted and created tirades over the earth and made long range plans some 30 or 40 years before today’s attacks were made.
By Dwight Baker
March 10, 2011
Dbaker007@stx.rr.com

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/03/10/think_again_arab_democracy

http://www.businessinsider.com/15-oil-and-gas-sp-1500-winners-2011-3?utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Business+Insider+Select&utm_campaign=BI_Select_031011

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-next-leg-up-in-oil-could-actually-send-the-dollar-higher-2011-3?utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Money+Game+Select&utm_campaign=MoneyGame_Select_031011

http://www.businessinsider.com/map-of-the-day-bp-rosneft-deal-2011-3?utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Money+Game+Select&utm_campaign=MoneyGame_Select_031111

MY TAKE --- better think twice before betting with or against the Beast

My Great Great Great Great Uncle William Rockefeller said of his brother J.D. Rockefeller “ monster; merciless in his greed; pitiless in his cold inhuman passions,

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60C1EF8385512738DDDAB0994D0405B878CF1D3

Yet across the pond at the discovery of oil another such villainous family lived that had practiced the craft of banking, and had taken many lands as tribute in their wars built around crooked handling of currency. The Rothschild family dug into the vast markets that waited on the product that lit the night.

Then the evil murderous monster titans [Rockefeller and Rothschild] in a cohort effort sailed the globe and claimed the treasury of oil and gas where geologist had marked out.

Therefore we who can think and study a bit should never be surprised when up jumps a humanoid devil and takes away our wealth.

Islam and Democracy would never stick together!

Look at what happened in Pakistan? Started as a Secular/Democratic nation and where it is now?

Or Turkey that tried to be "Democratic" ended up with Islamists!

Or Malasia that moved from Military to Democracy an dnow Hindus minority is persecuted there!

Is it not true that there is a basic incompatibility between Islam and democracy as it is now being practiced? One essential feature of a democratic government is that the nation is governed according to laws framed by the elected representatives of the people. But, according to the tenets of Islam, there is an over-riding law -the Sharia - which has to be followed. The legislature cannot have the same authority to legislate as it does in modern democracies - and even its legitimacy can be challenged by devout Muslims. Secularism is also ruled out. Can there be democracy without secularism?
The prospects for true democracy in the Arab world - and perhaps in the non-Arab Islamic world as well - are bleak.

There are no 'majoritorian orders' (demos) in servitude to the 'majoritorian will,' in pursuit of 'majoritorian' power anywhere on the face of the globe for some 2,500 years. And even those democracies per their own definition of the word weren't exactly 'people power' - ruling affairs. Women, foreigners, minorities, slaves and other classes of citizens didn't have a say.

For want of a word we in fact have a plethora of pseudo democracies of many forms where individual, economic, political and corporate elites exercise real power in place of the people. Granted, affairs have so evolved in the maturer forms (N.America, Europe) whereby ruler-ship is conferred by consent of the masses for limited and specified periods of time. But democracies, demos, people rule and power they are not.

The 'fire in the minds' of the masses surging across the Arab world today is merely another chapter in a story that started with the French Revolution 300 years ago. What pseudo democratic forms or norms Arabs choose and settle for is their business, as it had been accomplished everywhere previously. Arabs will add newer contexts and forms to the bewildering array of so called democracies.

But for the have's we had better be brighter than the Bourbon's who had "learned nothing and forgotten nothing." An era is passing, the world has changed and changing everyday under our very feet. The Arab Ecumene in all its variety and throes of chaotic change will challenge the world, especially the west in finding new ways of relating to the most strategic resource rich region of the globe.

It is a sign just how far our civilisation has fallen away from reason, that people think that everyone else in the world would be just as peaceful, happy, prosperous and democratic as we ourselves are, "if only the evil USA stopped propping up dictators".

Peaceful, happy, prosperous democracies are an aberration in the history of humanity, not the norm. They require a particular grassroots culture. If and when a people anywhere "get" this grassroots culture, they MIGHT get to establish a peaceful, happy, prosperous democracy if they can overcome brutal reactionary movements within and nearby their own country. It is the height of nonsense to assume that the USA would be an OBSTACLE to any such movement.

Every "dictator" "propped up by the USA", can be reasonably considered in the circumstances, as being the lesser evil for his own people as well as the interests of the USA - which interests happen to be aligned with peaceable democracy in the world, not its reverse.

When a US president, for the first time in history, bravely attempts to actually impose a peaceable democracy by force (the only possible way, by the way), why was he NOT hailed as a visionary hero by the same people who blamed the USA for "propping up dictators"? If even the democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan fail, where is the evidence that the Islamic world ANYWHERE is compatible with democracy?

The only parts of the Islamic world that are not brutal theocracies, such as Turkey and Indonesia, have been "secularised" to some extent by what were effectively brutal fascist regimes; look at the sheer murderousness of Kemal Ataturk's regime for example. Or the relatively secular Saddam Hussein. And such "secular" Muslim nations constantly walk a knife edge of violence and counter-violence between the Islamists and the secular government and military.

I do not doubt that there are majorities of Muslims in all these nations that want something other than brutal, reactionary theocracy or brutal, "progressive" secular fascism. But the history of government of mankind, is marked by power struggles between brutal minorities; the most brutal wins. I have no doubt that most Russians did not want the Bolsheviks, most Germans did not want the Nazis, most Frenchmen did not want the Jacobins, most Cubans did not want Castro, and most Iranians did not want the Mullahs (even if they also did not want the Czars or the Bourbons or Battista or the Shah. But which evil was the worst one in each case?)

But as Winston Churchill said "All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing". It is a miracle indeed, that peace-loving men EVER came to rule anywhere in the world; peace-loving men rarely overcome brutal minorities. Something about the USA, something about the English, something about Protestantism, something about post-Papist Christianity; IS "exceptional". We are fools to believe otherwise. This exceptionalism succeeded because it came up from the grassroots, as "culture". It succeeded in spite of the best efforts of totalitarians of every persuasion; monarchists, fascists, communists, theocrats, imperialists; to prevent it.

It is only "our fault" that the rest of the world does not enjoy the same blessings as we do, because we have failed miserably to hold out this exceptionalism to the rest of the world as a shining example. Afghanistan demonstrated that it is a lost cause, when its first democratically elected government passed its first law: the death sentence for apostasy from Islam. It is not "our fault" where Afghanistan goes from here, other than that we have spinelessly gone out of our way to appease this culture of self-destruction.

The word ‘democracy’ is bandied about with a quasi-religious conviction that brooks no opposition and defies dialectical debate. Consideration of democracy should first demand agreement on what precisely is meant by the word, and can only move on when there is a single unequivocal definition. This is all but impossible and attempts simply evaporate in clouds of variously worthy aspirations. Nor can we find a single socio-political system, now or in the historical past, and say, That is what we mean by democracy. The fact that we never-the-less feel we know what it means demonstrates that it is an abstraction, something we conceive in the mind but cannot reproduce in the real world. The only fragment of this abstraction that we are able to reproduce is the ballot. However, elections readily produce results that run completely counter to democracy as a concept. Human nature invariably corrupts ballots in a variety of ways from fiddling with voter registration or the ballot slips, through intimidation, to purchasing voter influence. Any system that results in actions by the elected leadership that conflict with the wishes of the majority cannot be called democracy. The closest democracy gets to manifesting in the real world is in the impulse and endeavour to escape intolerable oppression, not in the details of the destination. This can be clearly seen with the protest movement in Egypt where commentators and analysts were bemused that there appeared to be no policies other than getting rid of the old regime structure.

The authors comments on Europe are again naive and based likely in a soft bigotry. Europe has been a big part of the problem. Furthermore, it's Europe's bankruptcy that has allowed these events to occur. So much of this article is well meant but its stuck in it's Aryan perspective. What's better, these countries will out-last the American empire. The collapse of the American empire is the real reason we aren't able to suppress these revolts, as we did previously, and continuously since the Suez crisis, when we picked up the abusive mantle. This economic recession ISN'T global. The East is chugging along, South America is doing fine. The resource rich ME regimes are mostly doing fine.

our style of democracy and present day islamic religion are just not compatible,unless arab countries evolve into something like turkey where government and religion go their separate ways and coexist with each other, our kind of democracy will not stand much of a chance there.you can't help but see what might be the beginning of a movement in the right direction but it stil could take a long time ,till then its best we don't make too many waves and go with who could harm us the least,in the case of libya,it should be investigated if many of the rebels who are flying the flag of the ex king are serious. another monarchy in the mold of jordan wouldn't be too bad.

I am not a specialist but fact is that Lebanon could handle a democratic republic after the second world war, after the mandate of the French commissionner granted by the League of Nations in 1919 was ended, while "Observers concur that, quite to the contrary, car roof racks for sale, even in the appointment of the lowest echelons of government, became a permanent fixture of Lebanese democracy."