The straightforward but shrewd act was the equivalent of an unspoken bargain with the US - I will fight your bad guys, as long as I am allowed to destroy mine.
Libya's Muammar Gadaffi exploited US priorities as well. His regime's constant emphasis on the presence of al-Qaida fighters in the rank of the opposition received a fair amount of validation in Western media.
Gadaffi went for the jugular in his desperate attempts at wowing the West, even suggesting that his war against the rebels was no different to Israel's war against Palestinian "extremists."
The strange thing is that the language spoken by the US and that by Arab dictators is largely absent from the lexicon of oppressed, ordinary Arabs aspiring for their long-denied basic rights.
Arabs are not unified by the narratives of al-Qaida or the US. They are united by other factors that often escape Western commentators and officials.
Aside from shared histories, religions, language and a collective sense of belonging, they also have in common their experiences of oppression, alienation, injustice and inequality.
The third UN Arab Development Report, published in 2005, surmised that in a modern Arab state "the executive apparatus resembles a black hole which converts its surrounding social environment into a setting in which nothing moves and from which nothing escapes."
Things didn't fare much better for Arab states in 2009, when the fifth volume in the series stated: "While the state is expected to guarantee human security, it has been, in several Arab countries, a source of threat undermining both international charters and national constitutional provisions."
A Time magazine story published in May was entitled How The Arab Spring Made Bin Laden An Afterthought. It seemed to celebrate the collective, secular nature of Arab revolutions when it reminded readers that "there were no banners hailing Osama bin Laden in Egypt's Tahrir Square, no photos of his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri at anti-government protests in Tunisia, Libya or even Yemen."
The truthful depiction, reproduced in hundreds of reports throughout Western media, is still deceitful at best.
The fact is that the al-Qaida model never captured the imagination of mainstream Arab society.
Arab revolutions didn't challenge Arab society's perception of al-Qaida, for the latter had barely occupied even a tiny space of the collective Arab imagination.
However, these revolutions are yet to truly challenge the official US perception of the Arabs.
An Arab Attitudes 2011 survey was published last July by Zogby International. It communicated unsurprising views of six Arab nations, including the fact that Barack Obama's popularity among Arabs had sunk to a new low of 10 per cent.
When Obama delivered his famous Cairo University speech in 2009, many Arabs saw that US-Arab priorities were finally meeting at some points.
But the fact that US policy didn't go on to shift an iota in any favourable direction made Arabs realise that US policies were fixed.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
