A review by mkesten
A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS by Robert F. Worth

5.0

"A Rage for Order" is just another one of those books I found terribly depressing and enlightening at the same time. A power vacuum sucked all the optimism out of the Middle East after the Arab Spring when the euphoria of overturning dictators wore off. But who to indict first: 1) The disorganized liberal and leftist factions; 2) the moderately organized Islamist groups; 3) the better organized (and corrupt) military bureaucracies; or 4) the moneyed interests in Saudi Arabia? I'll have to leave answering these questions to my Middle East friends. In the meantime, who will take responsibility for the mess in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, or what seems the biggest mess of all: Syria? Syria, like Yugoslavia and Rwanda before it, pits neighbour against neighbour. Family friendships give way to suspicion, distrust, and too frequently violence. Perhaps I knew once, but had forgotten, that Bashir al Assad, pressured by the West to step down, took the unwarranted step of emptying all his prisons of the most radical Islamists and murderers to shift public outrage away from him to the growing jihadi groups. As I recall, he took a page from Fidel Castro's playbook. In order to get even with the US acceptance of boat people from Cuba, Castro emptied his prisons and sent them all to Miami. Figure out how to put the genii back in the bottle in Syria and you will have a formula for reconciliation in the rest of the Arab states. Some day all of these states will need an accounting much like that which was done in South Africa, without packing the jails once again. Truth, reconciliation, forgiveness, and the political will to move past sectarian grievances. Like Ireland a little? We have the mechanisms to wind down the violence. When will our brothers in the Middle East find the political will to do so?