Goodbye to recent delusions - the age of nationalism is back with a vengeance

World View: Intervention was meant to produce democracy in the Middle East and stability in Europe. Now we know it was a con

By Patrick Cockburn

"The crises in Europe and the Middle East are very different but they are beginning to cross-infect each other, creating a general mood of uncertainty and fear. In the Middle East, the Arab Spring was at first seen as wholly positive, as dictatorships and police states tumbled or came under democratic assault from Tunis to Bahrain. A bright dawn was breaking across the region.

A year later, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya are still beset by power struggles, largely electoral in Egypt but increasingly militarised in Syria. Their outcome is unclear. What is evident is that these countries are in for an extended period when governments and states will be weak, disunited and vulnerable to outside interference.

Such foreign intervention, going by what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, is much the same as old-style imperialist takeovers. The interventionists consult their own interests first and last, largely ignoring the wishes of Iraqis or Afghans. Why, for instance, is the increasingly dictatorial Nouri al-Maliki prime minister of Iraq? Mainly, as one Iraqi politician put it to me, because "the Great Satan [the US] and the Axis of Evil [Iran] decided that he was the Iraqi leader they could both live with"......

What Greeks, Iraqis and Afghans have all learned is that the price of foreign powers determining their future is very high. It always amazed me in Baghdad and Kabul that the Americans and British imagined that the Iraqis and Afghans did not notice or care that the US and its allies, and not local puppets, were mismanaging their affairs. Likewise, in Athens over the past six months, I found it astonishing that Germany and its allies could not see that imposing austerity on the Greeks without popular consent would be a political death warrant for the Greek political parties supporting the measures......."