Arab Spring: Blaming the CIA is foolish. So is funding it.
The last case (7/7) in my series on “black swans” that have surprised America in the Middle East is the so-called Arab Spring, 2011. Until then, Arab regimes seemed immovable. All of a sudden, mass protests toppled dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. And instability deteriorated into civil wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen.
The then-deputy head of the CIA admitted failure: “We failed because to a large extent we were relying on a handful of strong leaders to help us understand what was going on in the Arab street. We were lax in creating our own windows into what was happening, and the leadership we were relying on was unaware of the tidal wave that was about to hit them.”
As we’ve seen, this “outsourcing” of assessments to allies and friends is the source of many a surprise. Surely the Israelis will know if they face an attack before we do? Surely, the Shah will know whether he’s in danger before we do? Surely our Arab friends will know if Saddam is going off the rails before we do? If our friends are complacent, why should we be alarmed? America’s allies in the Middle East provide it with vital intel and insights. But their blind spots also become Washington’s.
Today there’s a whole industry trying to explain the Arab Spring—in hindsight. This is supposed to establish a set of warning signs for when it might happen next. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the man who formulated the concept of the “black swan,” dismissed such efforts in these words:
“The final episode of the upheaval in Egypt was unpredictable for all observers, especially those involved. As such, blaming the CIA is as foolish as funding it to forecast such events. Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by complex systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.”
All the formative events in the Middle East, as long as I’ve been studying it (and no doubt before), have been unpredicted and unpredictable, unimagined and unimaginable. What does that mean for the role of experts? I’ll offer some thoughts in a future post.
UCLA
5 年Some people should have noted the soaring food prices beforehand.and also Cinematic hints about a near collapse of the system. My article :?“Cinema and the Egyptian Revolution: Between Theory and Praxis”, in Film and Cinema: Past, Present and Future Perspectives, Nova Science Publishers, January 2017.