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Was the "Arab Spring" that recently swept the Middle East an authentic grass roots movement for democracy, or just another set of US-sponsored "Color Revolutions", aimed at toppling non-compliant rulers? Mainstream media portray it as a wave of spontaneous uprisings by impatient youth against old-line dictators, but this book shatters this myth. With Egypt and Libya as case studies, it exposes the Arab unrest as US-engineered destabilisation, targeting nationalist resistance to Western and Israeli domination. We see how the "Arab Spring" fits into history, and explore the tactics used. There is a world tendency to shift away from US hegemony to a system of multiple centres of power. To stave this off while buttressing Israel, Washington think tanks manufactured the "Arab Spring". Avoiding GW Bush's crude and direct approach, the Obama team leaned on less direct means, a synergy of soft and hard power: so-called smart power. Through alliances with ambitious regional powers, NATO states, and naive local proxies, ranging from idealistic secular youth to Islamist extremists, they unleashed regional conflagration. Disguised by lofty romantic platitudes, the outcome was the breakdown of societies, civil war, terrorism, and the mass flight of refugees from chaos and bloodshed.
