Are there any Arab democracies? Hussein in Iraq and Gaddaffi in Lebanon were dictators. Under them there was an apparancy of comparable peace. Comparable, of course, to the utter chaos of civil war that followed their removal, and a result of a level of oppression that we in the UK would find unbearable. Am I right in assuming that the main cause of the civil wars that followed the dictator's removals is the conflict between different versions of Islam? Am I also right in believing that this Islamic schism goes back 1300 years? Could it be that there will not be any peace for any Islamic country until the different sides of the Islamic divide devise a means of tolerating each other? Without that toleration, rule can only be achieved by one side oppressing the other, and if the divide of belief is anything other than heavily one sided there cannot be democracy. It begs the questions of a; whether it's worth removing dictators if the result is going to be even more misery and b; how do the differnt varieties of Islam find a way to tolerate each other?. Not, of course, to mention oil, Putin or Trump.
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