The Buggy Professor: what has changed since Saddam?
January 14, 2004

I was thinking that a “State of the Middle East” look at the transformative changes that have clearly been rumbling through the region would be helpful. Thus I was happy to discover one written by a UCSB professor, Professor Michael Gordon of the Political Science department. Professor Gordon – recognized by students as one of our most sought-out professors – began a blog last January, dubbed The Buggy Professor, and since then has been publishing piercing and lengthy commentaries on a broad range of subjects. Increasing every day, the site is visited daily on average by hundreds worldwide, with whom he entertains frequent exchanges.

In the following probe, he examines the recent positive changes in the Middle East, which he argues have arisen – or been accelerated by – the destruction of the Saddam regime. That robust departures have been made from the Middle East’s deplorable business-as-usual patterns is obvious to all but the most blinkered of observers. Briefly: Afghanistan and Iraq have embarked upon the region’s first liberal democratic projects; Muammar Qaddafi has forsaken his WMD program; the Iranian hardliners have opened their nuclear site to UN inspectors, having lied about them for years; Syria, threatened by U.S. troops on its border and Israeli assertiveness about their three decades of terror-sponsorship, has made limited peace overtures; Arafat, king of the West Bank, is derided and isolated; Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have been severely weakened, approaching the point of ineffectiveness, evidenced by their inability to carry out bombings (not for lack of trying, mind you). How can these changes be ignored?

Professor Gordon’s posting can be viewed on his site, The Buggy Professor.