By John Galt
October 23, 2011 – 12:30 ET
The dangerous turn of events in the MENA region are being paid their obligatory lip service from American politicians such as Senator Lindsey Graham on FNC”s Sunday news program, but the reality is the failure of U.S. foreign policy since President George H.W. Bush to address the balance between freedom, economics, and geopolitics in the area. The so-called “Arab Spring” has yielded promises of elections and the majority of citizens fully expect that their wishes are expressed at the ballot box and the current systems of dictatorial rule will come to an end. As this entry is completed, the first real test is occurring in the nation of Tunisia, with results of great consequence to the West, especially those nations of Southern Europe.
On Saturday, and article appeared in the French newspaper, Le Figaro, which outlined the dangers of this election:
La Tunisie s’attend à une percée islamiste
(Tunisia Expects an Islamist Breakthrough)
From the piece (Google Translation with some corrections by me for clarity):
A favorite in the election this Sunday, Ennahda, “la renaissance” in French, is trying to get rid of the image of fundamentalist bugbear that prevailed under Ben Ali. Its leaders multiply the signs of openness. Upon his return from exile in late January, its leader, Rached Ghannouchi, 70, said he did not want to impose Sharia law and respect the status of Tunisian women, the most advanced in the Arab world. A former preacher, who preached in the 1970 rupture in Iran, presents himself as a responsible democrat inspired by the Turkish example.
This evolution of the Islamist movement in Tunisia is not an example of what was witnessed in Iran during the 1970′s as the instigators and leaders learned from their mistakes and the bloody results after the Iranian revolution. The model being duplicated now, as indicated in the extract above, is from the Islamist movement in the westernized and formerly secular state of Turkey, where the challenge to the military’s supreme authority is continuing on two fronts with European human rights groups on one side, Islamic radicals posing as “reformers” on the other. This modern version of the Iranian revolution has opened the door to the deconstruction of Turkey as a Western ally and opened the door for a new hybrid Islamic republic which aligns itself with the historical roots and regions of Islam itself.
Turkey’s fight for a right to establish an Islamist political movement came at a great expense to the leaders of this movement but in the end, Turkey and Iran are now encouraging legitimate challenges to the old Arab dictatorships which maintained the balance of the Islamic religion with the needs to expand their economies via strategic dealings with the West. Nations like Egypt and Tunisia were left behind due to a lack of natural resources and a fading strategic importance after the Cold War ended, but now, early in the second decade of the twenty first century this titanic shift is about to impact the west once again.
Initial reports out of Reuters (see: Huge turnout in Tunisia’s Arab Spring election ) the concerns are already being expressed by Tunisians fearing the fractured secularists will allow the Ennahda party to win a sizable majority allowing the Islamists to hold sway over Tunisian politics for years to come. The key actions to watch for tonight as the results start to filter out via media reports are if the Islamists achieve a greater than 30-35% share of the vote. Initial projections indicate it will be closer to 30% but again, those projections are by Western analysts who did not even see the Arab Spring coming.
If the Ennahda party wins enough votes to establish a dominant leadership position in Tunisian politics, look for Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and Iran to offer strong financial assistance and regional political support to help rebuild that nation’s economy. This is a key building block to re-establishing the dream of a modern Caliphate where the yoke of French and European colonial influence is destroyed once and for all. Unfortunately for the now faltering West, it will mean the end of centuries of dominance and influence and possibly mark a starting time for the period of a new Dark Ages, as freedom will be defined by radicals, as well as rationed by corrupt oligarchs replacing the current group who abdicated their responsibilities to their nations in exchange for a globalist dream of world unity and peace.
Follow JohnGaltFLA
Read all my posts, updates, Tweets, etc.