This past week a senior official at the U.S. State
Department stated that “the war on terror is over” and later continued in
saying “Now that we have killed most of al Qaida, now that people have
come to see legitimate means of expression, people who once might have gone
into al Qaida see an opportunity for a legitimate Islamism.”
It appears that the recent reforms in the Middle East have
eliminated some of the major motivations individuals had for joining al Qaida
and other terrorist groups. It is
interesting to consider how much the presence and actions of the U.S. in the
Middle East affected the Arab Spring, or did the U.S. have little influence on
it at all? An even better question
is, did the direction that the Middle Eastern nations change prove beneficial
to the United States? Or even,
have we moved the terrorist organizations from their hideouts and into the
capitols of various Middle Eastern nations?
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal discussed the
changes in the Middle East, particularly in Egypt; the Egyptians are forming a
democratic government just like the U.S. has wanted to promote in the Middle
East since the Bush administration however the WSJ also predicted that an
Islamist will be elected president of Egypt and that in the near future, the
Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty would likely be eliminated. In his book The Future of Freedom:
Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, Fareed Zakaria discusses the idea that
some nations are best with non-democratic forms of government as well as the
fact that other nations such as the U.S. are also better off if those
government remain in their non-democratic form. It appears that in the case of Egypt that Mr. Zakaria was
right, if tensions between Israel and Egypt increase because of Egypt’s
newfound democracy, the U.S. will also be force to become involved and would be
better off with a non-democratic Egypt, and while al Qaida will cease to be a
threat soon the U.S. will just find itself at a different end of the sandbox
that is the Middle East.
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