General Discussion

In all those countries, what order existed was maintained by despotic rule of a quite cruel nature.

All of the places mentioned were inherently unstable. Iraq and Libya were colonial districts cobbled together from disparate elements, which regarded one another with hostility. Syria's ruling faction is a small ethnic and religious group bitterly resented by the predominant portion of the population. Sooner or later things would have broken out, even in Iraq. In fact, in Libya and Syria they did break out, and the fantasy the risings there began as concoctions of Western intelligence agencies has no grounding in reality. It can be argued that once they began, there might have been a better policy than military support in one instance and a hands-off attitude while allowing regional players their heads in another, but that is a different question.