A perversion of principles

Recently, The Economist took an interest in Arab autocracy, titling a leader on the subject “Thank You and Goodbye.” The premise for this statement was that the leaders of Egypt and Saudi Arabia were getting old, therefore change is coming to both countries “for good or ill.” Change is indeed coming, but the rule in the Arab world has tended to be that the more things change, the more things remain the same. The tenor of the leader was interesting, if for the wrong reasons. After listing the advantages and disadvantages of the policies of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, the magazine carried its argument into a minefield of “ought to.” It advised that the regimes in both countries ought to do this and ought to do that, without really explaining why they would want to do so, given that they have spent decades avoiding the path