but, we can do an accounting of this.

- the uprising in tunisia was legitimate, and did not get substantively co-opted. they're the single success case, and they should have been supported.
- the uprising in egypt was legitimate, but it got co-opted by the islamists, who were just fronts for the state. morsi wasn't leading a counter-revolution, exactly, but he was a fraud and a pawn. the end result was that the state was able to mobilize a religious movement to counter and drown out the real revolutionary movement. history records that morsi won the election, but it doesn't record that the revolutionaries understood what was happening, realized that the vote was a farce, and boycotted it out of protest. they knew that morsi was just a front for the old guard. and, when he was eventually torn down and replaced by a neo-mubarak in sisi, all the secularist left could do was shrug - we told you that that was what was happening.
- there was never a revolution in syria at all, there was just an invasion by foreign mercenaries. assad remains extremely popular in syria, and would easily win free elections, still.
- libya is what would have happened in syria if assad lacked popular support. but, talking about it like it was a revolution is disingenuous. this was a nato bombing campaign and basically a navy seals operation, more comparable to iraq or afghanistan.
- there were protest in turkey, but turkey is a democracy, and it's a different context. i'm always in solidarity with park drinking, though. especially during the day.
- there were also protests on the peninsula, but you can't do that there, and they didn't last long.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this.