The Arabs Spring Into Summer Or Is It Winter?

The Arab Spring remains a seductive illusion. If you beg to differ, kindly consider what's really going on in the Arab Mideast.

Seven months have dissolved into the shifting sands of that region since the Arab Spring first sprung. Substantive elections have yet to be held in either Tunisia or Egypt. Angry demonstrations still reverberate in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Egyptian Salafists openly joust with secular protestors. Ex-President Mubarak is being tried (in a building bearing his name) on charges brought by the same police he appointed. Field Marshal Tantawi, head of Egypt's ruling Supreme Military Council, has banned foreign observers from elections in November. What does all that tell you?

Please also observe that The Madman Of The Mideast still rants in Tripoli while his disloyal Libyan rebels still rave in Benghazi. That is where the top rebel general and his aides were recently assassinated, arguably by even more patriotic rebels. In fact, Benghazi rebels are not only at odds with each other, they also have significant rifts with their rebel compatriots in Libya's west. The Libyan rebels may be as odious and treacherous as are Gaddafi loyalists. That should be old news, but it is not. Why?

Meanwhile, NATO is still bombing Qadaffi-held Tripoli into everything but submission. NATO bombs, designed to protect the Libyan populace, have killed 1,100 civilians. Apparently, there are too few bona fide targets in Tripoli. So NATO deemed it prudent to destroy a Tripoli TV station in order to kill the broadcast of Qadaffi's "murderous rhetoric." Meanwhile, the rest of the Arab world (Qatar excepted) spectates from the sidelines in perplexed apprehension as to which of them is next and for what?

Quietly underreported, the sweeping swath of the Saudi sword has totally cut off the protests of the Bahreini Shia. Their Saudi enforced silence speaks volumes about the alleged fecundity of the Arab Spring.

Affairs in Iraq remain unsettled, severely sectarian and in tragi-comic political disarray. Take faint heart that the absence of more widespread turmoil in the Arab Mideast suggests that the Arab Spring has failed to give birth to either a progressive or a productive Arab Summer. Indeed, not a single Arab monarchy has been seduced by or succumbed to the enticing fragrance of the Arab Spring.

Still, feel free to bemoan the fact that the Arab Spring has miscarried its alluring message of hope. The aborted Arab Spring has even engendered a dismal forecast for further Mideast fragmentation and fracture. If there was an Arab Spring, its air quality was polluted by a variety of toxic pollens to which the Arab world is seemingly allergic.

More pointedly, in this year of the media-perfumed Arab Spring, the sword of Saudi justice has unceremoniously already severed the lives of dozens of its own less-than-exemplary citizens. But that sad circumstance was a mere prelude to incipient legal changes on sacred Saudi soil.

The Saudis -in their infinite Wahabi wisdom- have enacted a litany of new rules. These are designed not to liberalize and democratize Saudi society, but rather to further shackle its citizens in servitude to that nation's reactionary predilections and regressive predispositions. .

Saudi legislation (awaiting official imprimatur) is so draconian that it will criminalize every vestige of legitimate dissent. Said regulations cast a conspicuously wide net of culpability. The chilling effect of these laws turns thoughts of a pervasive Arab Spring into an ice-cold winter of dampened dissent.

Given Saudi Arabia's deeply repressive policies and practices, may I respectfully suggest that a much hotter than normal Arab summer is in progress.

But then you might argue that Saudi Arabia is certainly not synonymous with the Arab Mideast. And you would be quite correct. Indeed, the residue of the Arab Mideast is simply plagued by and infected with a host of problems distinctly peculiar (and I mean peculiar) to each of the disparate Arab nations.

Consider that Yemen remains a chaotic and ungovernable snakepit. Its wounded President is still recovering in Saudi Arabia. His nation is aimlessly wandering in a leaderless wilderness of uncertainty. Yemeni society has splintered into an unpalatable witch's brew of hostile tribes, secessionists, Islamists, pan-Arabists, Jihadists and al-Qaeda opportunists.

Meanwhile, Syria -home to the Mideast's most complex sectarian labyrinth- is the region's most combustible geopolitical flashpoint. The Syrian political weather forecast calls for intermittent military thunderclaps accompanied by bolts of damaging lightning from government weaponry. This poses imminent and lethal danger to protestors. Can it be that NATO is bombing the wrong regime while protecting the wrong civilians in the wrong country?

Premises considered, there regrettably was no Arab Spring this year. That mythical season is now being followed by an all too realistic and undoubtedly sweltering Arab Summer.

But wait. Do not despair. Just because the sudden spring thaw in the four-decades-long Arab Winter was less than pervasive, that does not mean that there can be no truly bone fide Arab Spring. Perhaps the Arabs must first weather The Arab Fall. That's when the leaves fall from the trees in the Arab Mideast. Oh, you are right. Palm trees don't shed their fronds; they just turn brown, hang there and dessicate. Perhaps there is also no such thing as an Arab Fall.

So, do the Arabs have a choice? Can they still opt for a real Arab Spring? Will they remain chilled in an enduring Winter of Arab discontent? Or will they languish in the heated disarray of an Arab Summer?

Personally, as a mere non-Arab who frequently visits ten Arab nations, it looks to me like the Arabs still have a very long, hot summer ahead of them. Need I note that today's actual temperature in Mecca was 111 degrees. The political heat index across the Arab Mideast is much higher and there is no relief in sight!