"e;I told them Libya would become a failed state. I told them Egypt's military would never surrender power. I told them Syria would become a jihadist wasteland. I said this on television in March 2011, while the revolution was spreading. Nobody wanted to hear it."e; In March 2011, as euphoria swept the Arab world and Western leaders promised a "e;new Middle East,"e; one analyst stood alone in predicting catastrophe. He had lived in Libya under Qaddafi's surveillance state. He had driven through Saddam's Iraq. He had fled a mob in Karbala after violating a sacred shrine. He knew what the experts didn't: that revolutionary success requires more than Twitter and tear gas. The Arab Spring: Autopsy of a Revolution Betrayed asks the question no one wanted to answer: Why did Iran's 1979 revolution succeed while every Arab Spring uprising failed? The answer lies not in recent politics but in 2,500 years of history—in Carthaginian logistics and Persian plateau geography, in Roman administration and Mamluk fragmentation, in the institutional foundations built over millennia that determine whether societies can transform or only collapse.Through a masterful blend of personal memoir and deep historical analysis, the author traces each country's trajectory from ancient empires to modern revolutions: Tunisia, forced by geography to build institutions because it had no oil I Iran, where Khomeini built a revolutionary state while the Shah partied at Persepolis Egypt, where the military recaptured power with brutal efficiency Libya, where NATO's "e;humanitarian intervention"e; produced slave markets and warlords Syria, where the "e;moderate opposition"e; was always a fantasy Yemen and Bahrain, the forgotten proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran This is not another book about the Arab Spring. This is an autopsy—a forensic examination of why Western intervention, no matter how well-intentioned, poisons everything it touches. It is a Cassandra's memoir—the personal cost of being right about disasters while everyone else celebrates revolutions that will fail.For readers who loved Roy Mottahedeh's Mantle of the Prophet, this book offers the same intimate understanding of the Middle East—not from academic distance but from lived experience. Like Mottahedeh's masterpiece on Iran, it weaves personal narrative with centuries of history to explain how the past shapes the present. But where Mantle explored one revolution's success, this book examines why five others failed—and offers a framework for understanding which revolutionary movements can survive and which are doomed from the start. "e;The West still hasn't learned the hardest lesson: that sovereignty matters more than democracy, that institutions matter more than intentions, and that sometimes the most moral act is to do nothing."e;

"e;I told them Libya would become a failed state. I told them Egypt's military would never surrender power. I told them Syria would become a jihadist wasteland. I said this on television in March 2011, while the revolution was spreading. Nobody wanted to hear it."e; In March 2011, as euphoria swept the Arab world and Western leaders promised a "e;new Middle East,"e; one analyst stood alone in predicting catastrophe. He had lived in Libya under Qaddafi's surveillance state. He had driven through Saddam's Iraq. He had fled a mob in Karbala after violating a sacred shrine. He knew what the experts didn't: that revolutionary success requires more than Twitter and tear gas. The Arab Spring: Autopsy of a Revolution Betrayed asks the question no one wanted to answer: Why did Iran's 1979 revolution succeed while every Arab Spring uprising failed? The answer lies not in recent politics but in 2,500 years of history—in Carthaginian logistics and Persian plateau geography, in Roman administration and Mamluk fragmentation, in the institutional foundations built over millennia that determine whether societies can transform or only collapse.Through a masterful blend of personal memoir and deep historical analysis, the author traces each country's trajectory from ancient empires to modern revolutions: Tunisia, forced by geography to build institutions because it had no oil I Iran, where Khomeini built a revolutionary state while the Shah partied at Persepolis Egypt, where the military recaptured power with brutal efficiency Libya, where NATO's "e;humanitarian intervention"e; produced slave markets and warlords Syria, where the "e;moderate opposition"e; was always a fantasy Yemen and Bahrain, the forgotten proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran This is not another book about the Arab Spring. This is an autopsy—a forensic examination of why Western intervention, no matter how well-intentioned, poisons everything it touches. It is a Cassandra's memoir—the personal cost of being right about disasters while everyone else celebrates revolutions that will fail.For readers who loved Roy Mottahedeh's Mantle of the Prophet, this book offers the same intimate understanding of the Middle East—not from academic distance but from lived experience. Like Mottahedeh's masterpiece on Iran, it weaves personal narrative with centuries of history to explain how the past shapes the present. But where Mantle explored one revolution's success, this book examines why five others failed—and offers a framework for understanding which revolutionary movements can survive and which are doomed from the start. "e;The West still hasn't learned the hardest lesson: that sovereignty matters more than democracy, that institutions matter more than intentions, and that sometimes the most moral act is to do nothing."e;

"e;I told them Libya would become a failed state. I told them Egypt's military would never surrender power. I told them Syria would become a jihadist wasteland. I said this on television in March 2011, while the revolution was spreading. Nobody wanted to hear it."e; In March 2011, as euphoria swept the Arab world and Western leaders promised a "e;new Middle East,"e; one analyst stood alone in predicting catastrophe. He had lived in Libya under Qaddafi's surveillance state. He had driven through Saddam's Iraq. He had fled a mob in Karbala after violating a sacred shrine. He knew what the experts didn't: that revolutionary success requires more than Twitter and tear gas. The Arab Spring: Autopsy of a Revolution Betrayed asks the question no one wanted to answer: Why did Iran's 1979 revolution succeed while every Arab Spring uprising failed? The answer lies not in recent politics but in 2,500 years of history—in Carthaginian logistics and Persian plateau geography, in Roman administration and Mamluk fragmentation, in the institutional foundations built over millennia that determine whether societies can transform or only collapse.Through a masterful blend of personal memoir and deep historical analysis, the author traces each country's trajectory from ancient empires to modern revolutions: Tunisia, forced by geography to build institutions because it had no oil I Iran, where Khomeini built a revolutionary state while the Shah partied at Persepolis Egypt, where the military recaptured power with brutal efficiency Libya, where NATO's "e;humanitarian intervention"e; produced slave markets and warlords Syria, where the "e;moderate opposition"e; was always a fantasy Yemen and Bahrain, the forgotten proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran This is not another book about the Arab Spring. This is an autopsy—a forensic examination of why Western intervention, no matter how well-intentioned, poisons everything it touches. It is a Cassandra's memoir—the personal cost of being right about disasters while everyone else celebrates revolutions that will fail.For readers who loved Roy Mottahedeh's Mantle of the Prophet, this book offers the same intimate understanding of the Middle East—not from academic distance but from lived experience. Like Mottahedeh's masterpiece on Iran, it weaves personal narrative with centuries of history to explain how the past shapes the present. But where Mantle explored one revolution's success, this book examines why five others failed—and offers a framework for understanding which revolutionary movements can survive and which are doomed from the start. "e;The West still hasn't learned the hardest lesson: that sovereignty matters more than democracy, that institutions matter more than intentions, and that sometimes the most moral act is to do nothing."e;