OPINION:
The seismic popular revolts going on in the greater Middle East are long overdue. These nations have been subjected ever since the end of the Cold War to theocratic and secular dictatorships, which have consistently denied human rights to their people.
In some cases, these dictatorships have ensured their existence by brutal treatment of their people, going so far as to mass-murder minority groups and anti-government protesters, ban free expression and deny basic human rights to women. Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Yemen, to name a few, already have or may be expected to undertake popular revolutions in order to liberate their people from the chains of secular and theocratic dictatorships.
Many wonder why the current administration seems surprised and unprepared for this wave of political unrest and upheaval in the Middle East. This uprising is on the scale of a political Hurricane Katrina. There simply is no end game or exit strategy in sight. The depth of the problems in many of these nations has been covered up or played down by the dictator regimes in charge, as well as by successive U.S. administrations and by the Saudi-dominated Arab lobby in America. Petro-dollars have been used to procure influence and to buy off America’s higher institutions of learning, thereby undermining the traditional, truth-seeking mission of academia.
The popular revolt by citizens in these nations will bring the breadth and depth of Middle East human rights abuses into sharp focus for America and the other Western democracies to observe.
BOB JACK
North Las Vegas, Nev.
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