For all the myriad flaws of US and Israeli policy in the Middle East, no one who looks at the region with an unbiased eye can fail to note the Arabs' role in this season of their own discontent. From Algeria, Morocco and Sudan to Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, government and opposition parties alike are engaged in all manner of underhanded and self-destructive activities. Arab regimes meddle in one another's domestic affairs with abandon and refuse to differentiate between sedition and legitimate dissent, preferring instead to repress both with equal enthusiasm. Many of those who rail against the current Arab condition refuse to offer policy platforms, lending credence to the theory that their only goal is to replace the existing order atop a mountain of authoritarianism and corruption. In essence, all are making war on one another and on their own peoples.
The region was not always this way. Even when conservative and revolutionary regimes clashed over how to deal with Israel and the West in the early years following the creation of the Jewish state, a certain decorum generally prevailed. Egypt's Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Saudi Arabia's King Faisal championed views that were diametrically opposed and even engaged in proxy warfare, but they also had enough respect for each other - and for the Arab world as a whole - to impose certain limits on just how far the contest could go.
Then came the bitterness over what some have described as the "lost victory" of 1973 and the premature peacemaking with Israel that cost Anwar Sadat his life. Soon whatever rules had ever existed were cast aside, and the region began its inexorable slide toward the wretched state that it knows today.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&article_id=83273&categ_id=17