• by Joaquin Roy
• Monday, March 19, 2012
• Inter Press Service

A year ago the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt was greeted with general satisfaction and considerable relief. Was it already possible to glimpse (for example, in the spectacle of the Egyptian leader being judged bedridden in a cage) the difficulties that lay ahead for North Africa and the Middle East fulfilling the promise of the "Arab Spring"? asks Joaquin Roy, 'Jean Monnet' Professor and Director of the European Union Centre of the University of Miami.

In this analysis, Roy writes that the cruel end of Gaddafi, trapped and lynched on nearly live television, and his anonymous burial, were a foretaste of what lay ahead and would cause discomfort to the European powers and the United States, whose intelligence services had already warned of the precariousness of the process of change. After a prolonged period of relative stability in the Israeli-Palestinian situation, thanks to the cooperation of Cairo, which received as much military aid as Tel Aviv, the alarms went off when the Palestinian government decided to go to the UN asking for admission.

The next blow came, as feared, from Iran, which confirmed its rejection of the inspectors' demands and its refusal to stop its project to develop nuclear energy, which was suspected of being a cover for a nuclear weapons programme. If London, Paris, and Washington do not succeed in changing Teheran's path, Israel would be willing and ready to bomb the country's nuclear sites. The US and Iran find themselves at historical loggerheads. The regime of the ayatollahs cannot forgive Washington's long support of the Shah, while Washington still smarts at the humiliation of the seizure of the US embassy in Teheran

(*) Joaquin Roy is 'Jean Monnet' Professor and Director of the European Union Centre of the University of Miami. jroy@Miami.edu

© Inter Press Service (2012) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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