From Tahrir to Taksim: West Reserves Right to Interfere | Ramzy Baroud

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Ramzy Baroud -- World News Trust

June 27, 2013

The distance between Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Istanbul’s Taksim Square is impossibly long. There can be no roadmap sufficient enough to use the popular experience of the first in order to explicate the circumstances that lead to the other.

Many have tried to insist on the similarities between the two since it is fashionable these days to link news worthy events, however worlds apart, to other events. Following the popular revolt that gripped Egypt in early 2011, deemed with the ever inclusive title "the Arab Spring," intellectual jugglers began envisaging "springs" popping up all over the region and beyond. In recent weeks, when protesters took to the streets of several Turkish cities, comparisons ensued once again.

Intellectual opportunism however is not a distinct phenomenon, but a reflection of a wider western conception of political opportunism. Once the "Arab Spring" was recognized as an opportunity of sorts, the United States, Britain and France were quick to capitalize on it, either to politically reshape the Middle East region or to ensure that the outcome of the revolutionary fervor was to their liking.

While Arab dictators brutalized mostly peaceful protesters, wars, in the full sense of the word, didn’t actualize until the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries began meddling. In Libya, they guided an uprising with a limited armed component to a full-fledged war that resulted in the death, wounding and disappearance of thousands. The war in Libya had changed the very demographic landscape of parts of the country. Entire communities have been ethnically cleansed. Benghazi, whose fate British Prime Minister David Cameron seemed particularly worried about, is now savaged by numerous militias vying for influence. Following recent clashes in the city, the interim head of the Libyan army, Salem Konidi, warned on state Television on June 15, of a "bloodbath." But this time, such a warning barely registered on NATO’s radar.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/from-tahrir-to-taksim-west-reserves-right-to-interfere-ramzy-baroud

[delrem]

1. Why is this directed to I/P?

Is it quarantined here? Or just duplicated?