Sooner or later the Arab despots David Cameron is selling
arms to will fall, and the states that backed them will pay the price
On the nauseating political
doublespeak scale, David Cameron's claim to "support
the Arab spring" on a trip to sell weapons to Gulf dictators this week hit a
new low. No stern demands for free elections from the autocrats of Arabia – or
calls for respect for human rights routinely dished out even to major powers
like Russia and China.
As the kings and emirs crack down on democratic protest, the prime minister assured them of his "respect and friendship". Different countries, he explained soothingly in Abu Dhabi, needed "different paths, different timetables" on the road to reform: countries that were western allies, spent billions on British arms and sat on some of the world's largest oil reserves in particular, he might have added by way of explanation.....
But even if morality and
corruption are dismissed as side issues, the likelihood is that, sooner or
later, these autocrats will fall – as did the Shah's regime in Iran, on which so
many British and US arms contracts depended at the time. Without western
support, they would have certainly been toppled already. As Rached Ghannouchi,
the Tunisian leader whose democratic Islamist movement was swept to power in
elections last year, predicted: "Next
year it will be the turn of monarchies." When that happens, the western
world risks a new backlash from its leaders' corrupt folly."
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