J-Pod raises the crucial issue of authority vacuums in the Middle East in his column today. James Kurth has a depressing take on this problem in the excellent new issue of The American Interest (sub required). Here are a few out-takes to give you a flavor:

As noted, most of the countries in the vast Muslim Crescent possess few or none of the normal prerequisites for democratic regimes, or even for liberal ones. They lack experience with the equality principle, believing in a range of “natural” hierarchies instead. They lack a tradition of political pluralism and of a “loyal opposition” because the ultimate source of law and political authority is taken to be extrinsic to society rather than intrinsic—infallible God and His interpreters rather than councils of mere mortals. And they remain mostly communal, endogamous societies in which the notion of individual agency is very weak. Show me someone who thinks a liberal democracy can be built within a few years in a society that rejects the equality principle, has not internalized the concept of political pluralism, and has little notion of individual agency, and I’ll show you a well-intentioned (usually American) imbecile… In any event, it seems clear enough that for the foreseeable future, the choice for many Muslim-majority states and most Arab ones, and our choice for them, will be limited to either an authoritarian state or not much of a state at all—whether that condition be called a failed state, a turbulent frontier, civil disorder or simply anarchy… In the Muslim world, however, particularly in its Arab core, even efforts to create authoritarian or totalitarian states have only rarely given rise to a strong state with roots in a deep social base… There are, however, two plausible alternatives: the religious state and the ethnic or tribal state. Iran is the archetypal example of a Muslim religious state, in its case the Shi‘i version of Islam. The very name of the state, the Islamic Republic of Iran, testifies to its religious identity. Other Muslim states have also put the word “Islamic” in their official names (most notably, Sudan and Pakistan). In those cases, however, it is the Sunni version of Islam, and thus far these do not have the depth and strength of the Iranian one… What of the ethnic or tribal option?…In most cases, one ethnic community imposes a peace of sorts on the others and then becomes strong enough to form (or inherit) a state. Given the condition of persistent and pervasive ethnic and tribal conflict, this state will be authoritarian—a Hobbesian Leviathan…When the ruling community is especially small, it often compensates for weakness in numbers by extreme brutality in its repressive measures (as in Ba‘athi Iraq and Syria). In any case, the pattern is that the multi-ethnic society is held both together and down by a uni-ethnic state, particularly by its security apparatus…