https://geopoliticsmadesuper.com/2016/04/20/why-saudi-arabia...
In short: liberal democracy requires liberal elites to be present and not vastly outnumbered. Without this condition fulfilled what you get after a revolution is what you had before despotism: tribalism and sectarianism, permanent civil war and the likes.
It's an entirely Western colonist idea that poor people in developing countries can't handle democracy and therefore have to accept dictatorships (which just happen to align with Western interests).
Look, no one is able to "handle democracy" before being prepared for this. Isn't this obvious? Even the Tsar Peter the Great, who wanted to modernize Russia, went and for a couple of years studied technical skills in Holland (IIRC - I may be wrong on all the details here...) instead of simply saying "let's make our shipyards modern! now!".
I never said that the societies in the Middle East can't ever do democracy. I just said that if they tried right now the results wouldn't be pretty. Give them another two or three decades of successive education and liberalization and they will be able to build a modern, well-functioning democracy overnight!
If the elites are not vastly outnumbered, they kind of aren't elite anymore, they're just normal people.
I think the relationship between the West and western-supported regimes is a lot more complicated.
Does it occur to you that the problem here is that Western-exported democracies aren't democracies, but instead puppet states? This has little resemblance to a real democracy founded by members of its own nation with their own cultural values.
There's a big difference between invading Saudi Arabia and setting up a banana republic, and journalism that criticizes the Saudis for their authoritarianism.
> Tackling that shouldn't be dismissed because we don't like the government.
No one is doing that. We can accurately describe all of Saudi Arabia's issues, including their authoritarian rulers.