Winston Churchill once said, “Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.” This image fits the Middle East remarkably well. The region's dictatorships – that is, virtually all of its governments – ride upon a system based on the four legs of demagoguery, ideology, populism, and the external conflict. The tigers are satiated on a rich diet of distracting wars and crises, misinformation and ideas permitting no contradiction, rewards and punishments, the manipulation of nationalism and religion, the cultivation of hatred and deflection of blame onto others, the promotion of paranoid fear, and hopes for utopia. In this case, the tigers do not consume their riders but instead devour the potentialities of those countries and peoples, all the while striding back and forth in their confining cage, getting nowhere.

In the 1990s, more than in any previous decade, this system faced serious challenges. At the time, these factors seemed capable of overturning the existing orders, though later, in retrospect, this belief appears to have been exaggerated. How could one have been so mistaken? Certainly wishful thinking played a role. More important, perhaps, was the difficulty in believing that historical experience could be so disregarded – though perhaps it was merely interpreted differently – and that the modern Middle East could be so different from other places and other times.

To pick one example of such expectations among many, U.S. National Security Advisor Sandy Berger said, “The Middle East is in the midst of a transition unlike anything we have witnessed in living memory.