It would not have happened without the Printing Press, Television, Radio, AK47s designed in Russia and Made in China, the Suez Canal or Saudi Oil either. Of al

It would not have happened without the Printing Press, Television, Radio, AK47s designed in Russia and Made in China, the Suez Canal or Saudi Oil either. Of all possible contentious issues with respect to the Arab Spring uprising (and there are many) - this is not one of them. It definitely was not an 'inciting' factor. Frankly, if you want to point at 'the thing' it would be Chelsea Manning's cable leaks: determined to show her own nations foibles, she did nothing of the sort, rather she exposed the vast, totalitarian corruption among Arab state leaders, which lit the match in Tunisia and then elsewhere. It was a raw, populist uprising against the 'dumb tyranny' of those systems and had predictable results in each of the nations. It was completely outside the scope of US/Western control, and by and large totally outside the foreign policy objectives of most US/Western players. Nobody really wanted it - way too much instability and risk. There were also no winners, and a bunch of losers for sure, sadly.