Month: January 2011
Does Egypt = Thailand?
I have been practicing Muay Thai for almost four years now. I read a variety of information sources about Muay Thai, and sort of live that life – I guess you could say.
Over the years of commenting on different blogs and boards I have become friends with more than one professional Muay Thai fighter actually in Thailand, along with many people who go there to train in Muay Thai for pleasure, and some people who go to Thailand to report on the Muay Thai scene.
When the protests in Thailand erupted a few months ago, I was of course scared for the many acquaintances that I knew were over there, on the way there, or on the way back. The shots of the violence in the streets were a bit scary. I admit they weren’t anything like the tanks in the streets of Egypt, but the riot police was called in to Bangkok and the army was “on call”.
Over and over my friends in Thailand reported that not only were they not concerned about the rioting, but that outside of a small, few square mile area of Bangkok that you were really in no danger at all. Outside of Bangkok life was proceeding as usual, and many people didn’t even know what was going on outside of their small towns.
I wonder if it is this way in Egypt. I haven’t heard reports of any city blowing up besides Cairo, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening, of course. I guess time will tell.
Cross posted at LITGM.
Al Jazeera, Egypt, and Guns
The situation in the middle east today with people rising up against autocratic regimes is moving quickly and I have been following this through a variety of sources. One that I have been watching is Al Jazerra English because their journalists seem to be in the middle of the action and I am looking for facts less than commentary or opinion (I can do that myself).
In parallel I found interesting an article of how Egyptian civilians should protest riot police. This guide came from the Atlantic and it is a 26 page article with how to dress, use spray paint on the vision slits of armored vehicles, and use a pot lid to shield yourself from billy clubs.
Throughout all of this it is obvious how dangerous it is to be an unarmed civilian that is trying to protest (peacefully or not) against armed riot police and government thugs that are armed with riot police tools (tear gas, shields & billy clubs) as well as deadly weapons (guns). Basically you are trading the lives of the protesters against the willingness of the government to kill you; if the government maintains its nerves, thousands can be beaten or die (see how the protests were extinguished in Iran, for example).
In parallel, Al Jazeera ran an opinion piece (which, to their credit, they said was the opinion of the writer and not necessarily theirs) called “Shoot first, ask questions never” which blames the NRA for gun violence in the United States and ends with the following paragraph:
The NRA’s 30+ years of extremism is probably best summed up by their current president Wayne LaPierre. Recently he remarked that “those with the guns make the rules”. Perhaps he mistakenly read a copy of the Robespierre’s Constitution, but in the one the Founding Fathers created for this country, their quaint view was that ballots and not bullets would accomplish that feat.
Of all the journalistic outlets that could understand the concept that “those with guns make the rules” you’d think that Al Jazeera would at least concede that point. The reason that the Arab people have to stand up to riot police unarmed is because guns and weaponry are illegal for the general populace so that the state and their actors (the riot police and the secret police) can act with impunity. The only time that things change in the Arab world is when those with BIGGER guns (the army) come and don’t support the riot police and secret police thugs; and then there is a change of power.
The End of Colonialism as an Excuse
One item that has gone relatively un-mentioned with the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt is that the issue of “colonialism” has finally been thrown into the dustbin.
As any viewer of this blog knows, the left and the third world have traditionally blamed virtually all of their woes on the colonialist powers or the United States which came in the vacuum after the colonialist powers left (less often mentioned is the actions of the USSR, since it does not fit their narrative). Either we supported the wrong side, gave them inappropriate borders, or authorized coups that took out the men that would have changed history, but it was always our collective fault.
The Arab world today is predominantly younger, with a very high percentage of their population under 25 years old. The population that is under 40 is even larger; and you’d have to be 40 or over to even remember much of life under the Shah of Iran or even Sadat. The youth in these countries, the broadest segment of the population, knows nothing but the current fossilized dictators that have ruled uninterruptedly during the course of their entire life.
Thus the leaders can blame Israel and the US and the colonialists but it buys them nothing because the streets know that these countries haven’t been significant actors during their lifetimes. All they know is 1) a small elite band of the rich and powerful control the state 2) secret police and thugs control their lives should they step out of line or demonstrate 3) nothing much is changing, except that it is getting worse with higher prices for basics and low prospects for formal employment.
No one knows the future – the forces of the dictatorships could re-assert control, the radical Islamic factions could take power and then hold it violently, or some sort of freer society could emerge. But at last we aren’t hearing the same old noise that this is all the fault of events that occurred decades ago.
Afghanistan, Egypt and Obama
I have previously posted my opinion that Afghanistan is not worth the cost. I stated my reasons why we should leave here and here and here. Nothing has changed there but a lot is happening elsewhere in the Middle East.
Egypt’s escalating tensions amount to the first real foreign crisis for the Obama administration that it did not inherit. The crisis serves as a test of Obama’s revamped White House operation. Daley, a former Commerce secretary in the Clinton administration, is now running a staff that is briefing Obama regularly on Egypt.
They have handled it badly. This is a very dangerous time for us. The Egyptian Army seems to be siding with the protesters. That may or may not last.
The left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz says that Egyptian army officers in Cairo’s central square have tossed aside their helmets and joined the crowd. “The Army and the people are one,” they chanted. MSNBC’s photoblog shows protesters jubilantly perched on M1A1 tanks. The real significance of these defections is that the army officers would not have done so had they not sensed which way the winds were blowing — in the Egyptian officer corps.
And even as Mubarak tottered, the Saudi king threw his unequivocal backing behind the aging dictator — not hedging like Obama — but the Iranians continued to back the Egyptian protesters. The Saudi exchange tumbled 6.44% on news of unrest from Cairo. Meanwhile, the Voice of America reports that Israel is “extremely concerned” that events in Egypt could mean the end of the peace treaty between the two countries. If Mubarak isn’t finished already, a lot of regional actors are calculating like he might be.
But Washington will not be hurried. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that President Obama will review his Middle Eastern policy after the unrest in Egypt subsides. The future, in whose spaces the administration believed its glories to lie, plans to review its past failures in the same expansive place. Yet time and oil wait for no one. Crude oil prices surged as the markets took the rapid developments in. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu observed that any disruption to Middle East oil supplies “could actually bring real harm.”
Of course, Mr Chu should not worry as we have wind and solar to take up the slack. Actually, we get our oil from Canada and Mexico but the price of oil shifts with the world’s supply.
The present Obama commitment to Afghanistan is ironic since he promised to bring troops home but he has declared that Iraq was NOT necessary and Afghanistan is. This is slightly crazy. The Iraq invasion was an example of US power being applied in a critical location; right in the middle of the Middle East. Afghanistan is a remote tribal society reachable only through unreliable Pakistan. It has minimal effect on world events. We went there to punish the Taliban for harboring the people who attacked our country. Thousands of them have been killed. We have little of interest there now. We should have left last year.
With a Shi’ite dominated government in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and a Muslim Brotherhood that may keep Egypt in neutral or tacitly accept Teheran’s leadership, how could things possibly get worse?
They can if Saudi Arabia starts to go. And what response can the U.S. offer? With U.S. combat power in landlocked Afghanistan and with the last U.S. combat forces having left Iraq in August 2010, the U.S. will have little on the ground but the State Department. “By October 2011, the US State Department will assume responsibility for training the Iraqi police and this task will largely be carried out by private contractors.” The bulk of American hard power will be locked up in secondary Southwest Asian theater, dependent on Pakistan to even reach the sea with their heavy equipment.
This is not where we want to be. The problem is that Obama and Hillary and the rest of this administration have no concept of strategy.
The Obama administration made fundamental strategic mistakes, whose consequences are now unfolding. As I wrote in the Ten Ships, a post which referenced the Japanese Carrier fleet which made up the strategic center of gravity of the enemy during the Pacific War, the center of gravity in the present crisis was always the Middle East. President Obama, by going after the criminals who “attacked America on 9/11” from their staging base was doing the equivalent of bombing the nameless patch of ocean 200 miles North of Oahu from which Nagumo launched his raid. But he was not going after the enemy center of gravity itself.
For all of its defects the campaign in Iraq was at least in the right place: at the locus of oil, ideology and brutal regimes that are the Middle East. Ideally the campaign in Iraq would have a sent a wave of democratization through the area, undermined the attraction of radical Islam, provided a base from which to physically control oil if necessary. That the campaign failed to attain many of its objectives should not obscure the fact that its objectives were valid. It made far more strategic sense than fighting tribesmen in Afghanistan. Ideology, rogue regimes, energy are the three entities which have replaced the “ten ships” of 70 years ago. The means through which these three entities should be engaged ought to be the subject of reasoned debate, whether by military, economic or technological means. But the vital nature of these objectives ought not to be. Neutralize the intellectual appeal of radical Islam, topple the rogue regimes, and ease Western dependence on oil and you win the war. Yet their centrality, and even their existence is what the politicians constantly deny.
Events are unfolding, but they have not yet run their course; things are still continuing to cascade. If the unrest spreads to the point where the Suez and regional oil fall into anti-Western hands, the consequences would be incalculable. The scale of the left’s folly: their insistence on drilling moratoriums, opposition to nuclear power, support of negotiations with dictators at all costs, calls for unilateral disarmament, addiction to debt and their barely disguised virulent anti-Semitism should be too manifest to deny.
Leftism is making common cause with Islamic terrorism. Why ? I don’t really know. Some of it may be the caricature of Jews making money and being good at business. Some may simply be the extension of animosity to Israel extending to all Jews. The people behind Obama are not free of these sentiments. His Justice Department is filled with lawyers who defended terrorists at Guantanamo. Holder seems uninterested in voting rights cases if a black is the offender. He was even unwilling to say that Islamic terrorism was behind 9/11.
Because it will hit them where it hurts, in the lifestyle they somehow thought came from some permanent Western prosperity that was beyond the power of their fecklessness to destroy. It will be interesting to see if anyone can fill up their cars with carbon credits when the oil tankers stop coming or when black gold is marked at $500 a barrel. It is even possible that within a relatively short time the only government left friendly to Washington in the Middle East may be Iraq. There is some irony in that, but it is unlikely to be appreciated.
I would add a bit to this from one of my favorite essays on the topic. It compares Gorbachev to Obama.
Nor are the two men, themselves, remotely comparable in their backgrounds, or political outlook. Gorbachev, for instance, had come up from tractor driver, not through elite schools including Harvard Law; he lacked the narcissism that constantly seeks self-reflection through microphones and cameras, or the sense that everything is about him.
On the other hand, some interesting comparisons could be made between the thuggish party machine of Chicago, which raised Obama as its golden boy; and the thuggish party machine of Moscow, which presented Gorbachev as its most attractive face.
Both men have been praised for their wonderful temperaments, and their ability to remain unperturbed by approaching catastrophe. But again, the substance is different, for Gorbachev’s temperament was that of a survivor of many previous catastrophes.
Yet they do have one major thing in common, and that is the belief that, regardless of what the ruler does, the polity he rules must necessarily continue. This is perhaps the most essential, if seldom acknowledged, insight of the post-modern “liberal” mind: that if you take the pillars away, the roof will continue to hover in the air.
In another passage:
There is a corollary of this largely unspoken assumption: that no matter what you do to one part of a machine, the rest of the machine will continue to function normally.
A variant of this is the frequently expressed denial of the law of unintended consequences: the belief that, if the effect you intend is good, the actual effect must be similarly happy.
Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.
With an incredible rapidity, America’s status as the world’s pre-eminent superpower is now passing away. This is a function both of the nearly systematic abandonment of U.S. interests and allies overseas, with metastasizing debt and bureaucracy on the home front.
The turmoil in Egypt is a test that, I fear, Obama and his Secretary of State, will not pass.