Using the Israeli apartheid matra is perhaps not hateful, but still one dimensional and ignorant. Western (and other) involvement is well known to most of us, at least to the extent Sultan has filled us in. However, excusing 100s of millions of people of the ills of their societies decades later is doing them a massive disservice. One of the major drawbacks of their societies was dictators exploiting them while pointing blaming fingers at outside evils.
There are countless other nations who have endured outside intervention for just as long and as recently as the Arabs have. I'd argue that you'd still find differences in how those have handled freedom since compared to how the Arabs, to a great extent collectively, have done. To brush that aside as "arrogant dismissal" is ignoring facts, which sometimes is the easier route. I dismiss claims of "Arab democracy" not because I think they're incapable of adopting the system, but because they're light years away still. I am basing my analysis on observations- a fair few of them, whereas others might prefer experiments at the cost of tens of thousands of lives because "democracy rarely hits the ground running".
You may want to check the first few pages of this thread to notice the same divide- the gung-ho "freedom is around the corner" attitude vs. the caution of making sure Arabs don't end up worse off than they were to begin with.
This is a strange argument. It is very easy and true to say that there has been a lot of Western (and Soviet) involvement in the ME (pretty much all of it to encourage either death or a lack of democracy) while also saying that the Arabs have a feckload of problems which they have to deal with which are caused by the Arabs themselves. The two are not in any way mutually exclusive.
For example, the US funded and supported the dictator Mubarak for 30 years, who ran a brutal dictatorship. Any attempts at protest were met with fire and torture. More than this, he ruined every state institution. It is easy to blame the Egyptians for their ignorance while ignoring that 40% of the population are illiterate because Mubarak's schools don't teach. However, the Egyptians have also allowed ignorance and a Gulf more extreme version of Islam to seep into their society and look to their religious leaders for answers for things they shouldn't be asking them in the first place. They need to have a good long look at themselves and what is wrong with their society.
Really? Which groups of nations have come out of independence 60 or 70 or so years ago, had a dictator grab power (or to make it easier come out as democracies straight away), have had outside interference and have come out as flourishing democracies? How are the Latin American democracies doing for example despite gaining independence more than a hundred years before the Arabs? When did the Spanish, Italians, Portugese, Germans come out of dictatorship? How about the Africans?
Of course they're light years away, that is why democracy (and revolutions) are a process, not an event.
Others may 'prefer experiments' but you have said multiple times before that you preferred the rule of a corrupt brutal autocrat, in some kind of fantasy deal where Obama gets him to stay on (by slaughtering protesters I'm guessing cos Obama had no control over these protesters) and suddenly become a much better leader.
Things rarely get better straight after revolutions (can you name me 10 countries that did?). In fact, a lot of the time, they get worse, a whole lot worse. They may not get better for a very long time. But you have to try, otherwise there is no chance of the country improving. Mubarak's next in line was his son, even more corrupt than him and, unlike Mubarak, who at least grew up in a reasonable background and had known war, Gamal had known nothing but excess and splendor.
I find it a bit confusing that you think the Arabs are light years away from democracy and yet seemingly would have preferred they do nothing about it and let Mubarak for example stay on.
