s of our own societies.
There are many arguments that say that the Muslim world has remained a prisonner of its historic memory, that it has not been able to go beyond the trauma of colonialism, and renovate through the implementation of the modern values ​​that colonialism had revealed and the organization of an extensive social and political debate; that it has not been able to solve the question of political legitimacy because it did not succeed in developing workable models, or because intellectuals did not play their role as critics within society, and that all this is not the U. S. nor Europe's fault. But this is only half true. The Muslim world is not an hostage of the past, since foreign intervention was not limited to colonialism itself but has been ongoing up to now, and even more so since the Gulf War.
There has also been a responsibility of the West in the failure of all attempts to build political models oriented toward democratization. The first attempts to set up a constitutional order in the XIXth century in the Arab provinces of Tunisia and Egypt, or at the very heart of the Ottoman Empire with the Turkish reforms, were torpedoed by France and England. The experience of liberal government in the first half of the XXth century in Egypt, Irak or Syria were to a great extent undermined, in their democratic exercice, by the interests of those two European powers, that wanted to keep control over their ancient colonies. In the case of Lebanon, the cause for the disaster that plunged the country in a bloody civl war for 15 years is to be found in the creation of a State that was conceived to grant political supremacy to the Maronite Christian minority (that is to say France's main clientele in the Middle East) over the Muslim majority. After the long interlude of socialist governments that were up to the soviet autocratic model they had adopted, the neo-liberal governments that followed, implemented economic liberalization reforms coupled with a growing political despotism that is "laundered" by their European and American allies, for the great misery of the population who is submitted to a fierce repression. The most open and transparent elections held in the region, took place in Algeria in 1991 and they were reduced to ashes by a military coup that was supported by the whole of the Western world.
Regimes that are in place in Algeria, Tunisia or Egypt, (to take just the most striking examples) survive by using repression as a mean of social control with European and American support, both at economic and political level. The Western allies do not want to know of the ongoing human rights violations that are denounced by all N. G.O. s.
The Gulf War against Saddam Hussein is immediately brought to an end from the moment he could have been overthrown by the most representative opposition movement in the country, simply because the resistance was led by the Irakian Shiis, and thi...
