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Reflections a Year after Hosni Mubarak's Resignation

February 11, 2012

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1. Dewy-eyed predictions of democracy within the year proved to be as silly as they appeared to be back then. Instead, a power-hungry military leadership shows it will do whatever necessary to remain in the saddle.

2. The real action has yet to come. The Syrian regime seems destined to fall and that could have destabilizing repercussions in the Middle East's most important country, Iran.

3. Do not confuse Arab regimes with Arab peoples. One of my consistent themes for years has been "if you are pro-Arab, you must be anti-Arab regimes." Events in Libya and Syria have emphatically made this point.

4. The Realpolitik regimes in Moscow and Peking will pay a price for their backing police states, and especially the Syrian one. Likewise, the pathetic Turkish foreign policy slogan of "zero problems" turned out to mean zero problems with police states.

5. Islamists are pursuing the age-old Middle Eastern habit of splitting just as they attain success: The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis find cooperation difficult in Egypt. Hamas now boasts the Haniyeh and Meshaal factions. When Islamists take over in Damascus, they will break with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Ankara and Tehran are often at odds.

6. My favorite statement summing up the past year's complexities: The IDF has prepared humanitarian assistance for Syrian refugees in a buffer zone between Syrian- and Israeli-controlled territory, including thousands from the ruling Alawite sect, prompting Israel's chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, to muse: "I am not sure all the Alawites will run toward Israel," but many will do so.

(February 11, 2012)

Blame the UN's Power on George H.W. Bush

February 7, 2012

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Future U.S. president George H.W. Bush in 1971, at the start of his U.N. ambassadorship.

From about 1950 to 1990, the United Nations Security Council was essentially toothless, as the Soviet and U.S. governments disagreed on issue after issue. As a result, anyone wanting to get things done generally by-passed this forum, from the Berlin problem to the Vietnam War to Arab-Israeli negotiations.

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 constituted the first post-Cold War crisis. The great powers could have handled it any number of ways – in NATO, with a "coalition of the willing," or with a new organization – but Bush (himself a former U.S. ambassador to the UN) took the matter to the Security Council for decision making.

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Embassy Baghdad in Decline

February 7, 2012

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One of Embassy Baghdad's fine buildings.

Now comes the news that this hubristic exercise will be cut down to size. Reports The New York Times in "U.S. Planning to Slash Iraq Embassy Staff by Up to Half" that the Iraqi government is not processing visas or permitting food deliveries on a timely basis, that it is confounding security measures, arbitrarily confiscating documents, computers and weapons, spreading conspiracy theories, and otherwise honing nationalist resentments against the White Elephant. Therefore, the staff there will be cut in half.

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Panetta Predicts an Israeli Strike on Iran

February 4, 2012

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It's not every day that someone like the U.S. secretary of defense forecasts an ally's move but this just happened when Leon Panetta said that he believes, in the paraphrase of a Washington Post reporter, that "there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June." Thoughts on this unusual statement:

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Are Egypt's Islamists Heading for a Fall?

February 4, 2012

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Terrified of the secular/modern/liberal demonstrators who made their presence known in Tahrir Square, as well as of the soccer hooligans, Mohamed Tantawi and Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces have forged a mutually beneficial relationship with the country's Islamists, thereby blocking their joint opponents from power. Very clever – but maybe too clever by half. Here's why:

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The Middle East Forum: Strategy, not Advocacy

January 31, 2012

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Given the many excellent organizations dealing with Middle Eastern and Islamic issues, what niches does the Middle East Forum's fill? We provide strategic counsel, as opposed to advocacy or apologetics. To understand what this means, look at the Arab-Israeli conflict, which attracts particularly intense attention and vehement views.

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Anarchy, the New Threat

January 28, 2012

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The scourge of the twentieth century was overly-powerful governments; could the looming problem of this century be too-weak governments?

The political scientist R. J. Rummel estimates, in his evocatively titled study, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N.J.:  Transaction, 1994) with revised numbers in 2005, that deaths at the hands of one's own government in the period 1900-87 amounted to 212 million persons, while deaths from warfare numbered 34 million. In other words, victims of their own government (what he calls democide) were in fact over six times greater than those killed in the century's wars.

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Egyptian Nuclear Power Plant Ransacked

January 16, 2012

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Egypt Independent reports on vandalizing, looting, and fighting at the nuclear power plant being built at El-Dabaa, a town in the desert to the west of Alexandria. The account draws on an unnamed source at the Ministry of Electricity and Energy who

El-Dabaa nuclear power station in its full glory.

accused security authorities and the governor of North Sinai of "causing the disaster." The official said the initial losses were around LE0.5 billion [= US$83 million]. He also accused a businessman and former member in the defunct National Democratic Party of being "behind the chaos," but did not name the businessman allegedly involved.

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Will No-Interest Banking Undo Turkey's Economy?

January 10, 2012

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That's the thesis implicit to David Goldman's analysis at "Recall notice for the Turkish model." After dubbing the Turkish economy a bubble that "is bursting, starting with the stock market and national currency," he makes this observation about the prime minister:

Erdoğan has the weirdest economic views of any serving head of government. He justified the credit bubble on religious grounds, pledging repeatedly to cut the "real" interest rate (the cost of interest minus the inflation rate) to zero. "We aim to cut the real interest rate in the long run, so people will increase their incomes through working, not through interest," he said last April. "Eventually we aim to equalize the interest rate and inflation rate." Erdoğan believes that this would fulfill the Islamic injunction against lending for interest; if the real interest rate is zero, he seems to think, the sharia ban on interest is fulfilled de facto.

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L'Institut d'Égypte – In Memoriam

December 26, 2011

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Title page of the first volume of the Description de l'Égypte (1809).

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