Here's a little reflection that ends with a scary thought:
The fact that, in regimes like Assad's and Gaddafi's, popular uprising turn into civil wars has far more to do with the kinds of regimes they built than with the particular strategies or tactics of the respective revolutionaries.
Assad's and Gaddafi's regimes were police states built from the ground up to do one thing and do it well - repress. These regimes may be fierce, but they're brittle, Libya descended into war within weeks; Syria within months.
Compare with, say, Egypt and Tunisia, which had relatively less repressive and more institutionalized regimes. Popular uprising didn't lead to war, it lead to transition (flawed or coopted as it were).
My point here is, it's true that the uprisings in both Libya and Syria ended up with intervention, but this has everything to do with the kind of regimes Gaddafi and Assad built. Brittle regimes that snap to savagery; not institutions that can be reformed.
Very few civil wars (if ever) do not involve any foreign intervention - not to mention civil wars in highly strategic, highly charged regions with mixtures of tyrants, terrorists, proxies, and foreign interests. It's not surprising that Libya and Syria ended up with intervention.
So it's not that Libyans and Syrians are inherently more violent or less strategic than Tunisians or Egyptians. I mean, yes, strategies differed due to many factors, but one huge factor was the kind of regime
Once you have an Assad or a Gaddafi kinda regime, you're gonna have war somewhere down the line. This isn't to mention the daily war that such regimes wage on their own people. Police states are far more likely to snap and fall apart than reform.
Now here's the scary thought. In 2014 the regional dictatorships had a golden opportunity; they had stemmed the tide of the uprisings. They could have pursued reform to ensure no 2011 redux. Instead, they did the exact opposite: They built even more repressive states.
Arab regimes learned all the wrong lessons from 2011. They thought the problem was that they weren't repressive *enough*. So they decided to take the path of Assad and Gaddafi. I guess you see where this is going.
MBS and his Vision 2030 were in fact *golden* opportunities for the Arab dictatorships to pursue reform (or even pretend to). MBS's implosion is a huge strategic defeat. They can no longer pretend they're "reforming". They missed a huge opportunity. What idiots.
You're handling a pressure cooker that's already deformed from the built-up pressure within. Anything can set it off. I said it in 2014, and then again in 2018 - what we're projecting is further collapse in the Arab region. Our region hasn't bottomed out yet.
And when the next huge crisis comes along, they'll tell you that it's the Arab Spring's fault. It's not. It's really not. Arab dictators sealed the region's fate, in an attempt to rule it forever as unaccountable, unchallenged autocrats.
So the dictators create a situation where you have to either accept complete and permanent subjugation, or you revolt knowing that it can lead to collapse. This was never communicated as blatantly as in Syria, in the two slogans "Assad forever" and "Assad or we burn the country".
This formula: "Assad forever" and "Assad or we burn the country" has since 2011 been replicated. The dictators may have plotted against Assad but they admire him and are in certain ways modeling themselves after him. Repress, repress, repress, and seek foreign sponsors.
This formula, though, invariably ends with a burning country. To live under permanent subjugation without resisting it - that's against human nature. It's easier to break regimes - regardless how repressive they are - than to permanently bend human nature.
"You can't break the Law. You can only break yourself against the Law".
