People are dancing in the streets of Sana, Yemen after their president Ali Abdullah Saleh fled to Saudi Arabia to seek treatment for “burns and scratches” he received when his mosque was hit by artillery-fire. The truth is probably more ominous. I think Mr. Saleh is more badly injured than he’s willing to let on.
In any case, it’s doubtful that the Saudis will ever let him return to Yemen even if he makes a full recovery. So, now things get very interesting.
The vice-president has taken over now, which comports with their Constitution. But the Yemeni protesters want democracy. They’re happy now, but after a few days they’ll want more progress. The Saudis want stability. They also want to stop this wave of political freedom and aspiration. But they hold the fate of Yemen in their hands. Will they allow democracy there, as the people demand? And can Yemen work as a country without a strongman at the top?
Will a vacuum of power turn Yemen into this decade’s Afghanistan and a lethal sanctuary for big-minded terrorists?
Who knows? I certainly don’t. As far as I am concerned, the Arab Spring won’t be complete until Gaddafi, Assad, and the whole Saudi Royal Family are driven out of power. The Sauds are responsible for their actions. They all belong in the Hague.
I don’t know how it will turn out if these Arab Spring protest movements succeed in overthrowing the region’s governments.
But I know how it will turn out if they do not: stagnation and oppression under the stifling hand of antiquated, corrupt autocratic regimes.
I spent the Iraq War telling self-righteous neocons, as they waved their purple fingers and accused me of considering Arabs unworthy of democracy, that democratic reform can’t be imposed by outsiders conquering a nation and imposing a government, that it can only come from indigenous, popular reformist movements.
Well, here they are.
The dilema price that stability will bring for the Saudis is if they allow for a bent toward democracy in Yemen the Saudi people will want the same and if they opt instead for more repression AQ will utilize the grassroots to overthrow any kind of Saudi friendly power structure in Yemen.
They’re not the only ones who have to take that into account.
During the Cold War, when the masses in Central American nations rose up against the oligarchy, we let ourselves end up on the wrong side of history. We ignored or opposed those movements out of a confused anti-communism, and out of a desire to maintain pre-existing business and political relationships with the dictators. As a result, we handed those movements over to the Soviets in a basket with a pretty pink bow.
The same thing can happen this time, except instead of the Soviets jumping at the chance to cast themselves as the heroes by backing the uprisings, it could be al Qaeda. That’s what they did, successfully, for a while in the Sunni Arab part of Iraq.
It isn’t just our ideals that compel us to back the protesters/rebels. If we put ourselves on the wrong side of history again, or even just stay neutral, it would come at a serious cost to our own security and interests – and countries like Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain are a whole heck of a lot more important, in a geopolitical sense, than Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Indeed.
As do the architects of the Bush II administration.
“Arab Spring?”
Whence comes the American Spring?
I’m waiting…
Meanwhile, my article War + Revolution as Earthbound, Traveling Infections…which sunk and rapidly disappeared here only a couple of weeks ago…predicated among other things the following idea. That the so-called “Arab Spring” was moving rapidly…
“Hmmmmm” indeed!
Read the news from Italy yet?
Maybe not so much an “east to west” movement as a clockwise one. Now the storm is moving west to east from Portugal and Spain through Italy and right on into Greece.
Hmmmmm….
Like I said…
Whence comes the American Spring?
I’m waiting…
Any day now.
Aaaaaaany day now…
As soon as the media are defeated.
Oh.
You mean it ain’t coming?
Oh.
No…it ain’t coming.
The contemporary Marie Antoinettes?
Instead of “Let them eat cake” it’s now “Make ’em eat shit.”
The winds of change are running in a clockwise circle around the Mediterranean. The high pressure area…media division thereof… over America will not allow the perfecting storm to cross the ocean.
Too bad.
Berlusconi, Bush, Cheney, the Saudis and Mubarak all on the same dock in The Hague?
A nice dream.
Maybe next time.
Maybe the next storm.
So it goes.
Later…
AG
The most interesting part of this statement is that Berlusconi is the most likely of this list to pay for his malfeasance — but not in the Hague. It would be interesting if the much-maligned Italian criminal justice system brought him down. The Italian elites can find another one of their members to put forward.
Egypt is likely to do something about Mubarak or let him die in legal limbo (the Slobodan Milosovich route).
Bush and Cheney have passed the statute of limitations on the most material charges that could be brought.
The problem with the Saudis is deciding which Saudis to seek indictments for. In the complexity of family politics in a 1000+ member royal family, that cannot be underestimated. If push comes to shove, I would not be surprised if some of the older (and less influential?) Sauds “submitted” to a call to the Hague in order to take pressure off the family.
There is a statute of limitations on mass murder? Because that’s what it was. Mass murder.
AG
What it was actually and what it was legally are two different things. Because of Congress’s collaboration (including Democrats), you can’t call it an illegal war. For international courts to be involved, some nation would have to back the bringing of charges, and the ones that aren’t US allies want to hold out their rights to be mass murderers too. It’s the international jurisprudence version of the “Too big to fail” syndrome. You can haul a Milosevich, Karadich, or Mladic before the court, a Charles Taylor after he’s out of power, maybe even a Gaddafi removed from power, but one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council? Forget about it.
There is a statute of limitations on the actions at Guantanamo in US law.
Possession of the legal apparatus is 9//10 of the law.
I certainly don’t buy everything you write, Arthur, but you are absolutely correct in identifying Pakistan as the Ground Zero of these protest movements.
I wish more people remembered the lawyer-led street protests against Mushariff – the ones the Bush administration told us were full of skeery al Qaeda Mooslems, which threatened to hand Pakistan’s nukes to the Taliban, and overthrow the most awesome anti-Taliban ally ever.
American Spring? Don’t make me laugh.
Too much racial hate and propaganda to ever succeed.
.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."The canary in the coal mine in Yemen is the treatment of the protesters who have stayed in the streets for over four months in order to move the Yemeni government. They haven’t succeeded in moving the government, but their presence in the street cause Saleh to destabilize his own country in order to hold on to power claiming that he uniquely stood between the Yemeni people and chaos, even as he was creating the chaos. That tactic has come back to bite Saleh big time. Three times the Saudis gave him a political out that would ease the transition; three times he pretended but finally did not take it.
Establishment of the expectation of democratic processes is what will lead to stability. You will know that by the treatment of the protesters as they push for each step in that direction. As long as there is to and fro of protest, the dynamics are working in the direction of stability that at least bows in the direction of popular will. And then it will be a matter of watching what institutions are put into place. Especially the organization of the army and security forces.
The emirates and kingdoms in the region — Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait–should know by now that they retain power only by giving it up and moving to an authentic constitutional monarchy. They might put in a phone call to King Juan Carlos of Spain to discuss how to accomplish this.
The Saudis have by far the harder job if they decide to move in this direction, but the handwriting is on the wall; it’s only a matter of time. Trying to re-establish a friendly arc of autocracies in the Arab Peninsula might work in the short run but it does not buy the Saudis long-term security.
Gaddafi should look at the treatment of Ratko Mladic in the Hague and observe that even though the room is small, it is not a bad life. You have a TV and an un-networked computer on which to write your memoirs. If Saudi Arabia starts getting shaky, the folks who should worry in addition to the Royal Family are the retired dictators club at the resorts around Jeddah.
In an interesting twist of fate, the Arab Spring might exert some influence on some of the last holdouts in Eastern Europe. Belarus is experiencing shortages and inflation unseen since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Sustained protest could come to Greece and Portugal if austerity measures play out as most economists and few bankers expect.
In the US, there is little possibility of a student movement like that in the Arab world. That is because the Congress and state legislatures are already moving to head it off by cutting university funding and student aid. And the US does not have the tradition of student protest of other countries. The years from 1965 until 1970 are pretty much it.
No, TD. You are wrong. The reason that we do not have effective protest movements of any kind in the U.S. is because the control of our hypnomedia by the the PermaGov is a thousand times more effective than that of any other culture in the world with the possible exceptions of China, N. Korea, Japan, Australia and Great Britain. It’s not university students who are moving these “Arab Spring” countries and the recent related developments in Southern Europe, it’s working people. ure, here are students in there, but without the support of thousands of badly treated workers the “students” would have folded.
Here?
Too many FatBurgers and too many television hypnoshows.
Ain’t happening as a result.
Simple as that.
Bet on it.
Instead of bread and circuses it’s BadBurgers, beer and
unreality shows.Bet on it.
Too dumbed down to be able to stand up.
Bet on it.
S.
What the “permagov” controlled media have to contend with is cognitive dissonance among people in the population. After the McCarthy era, adults in the 1960s could deal with a huge amount of cognitive dissonance. But that era also was big on teaching “American values” in the schools. So you got a lot of politically aware kids who were saying “these actions are not lining up with the values you taught us were American”. The Civil Rights movement showed the power of a movement. And Vietnam sent a significant number of people to seek political action to resolve that cognitive dissonance.
The anti-intellectualism that began with Spiro Agnew’s attack on the “nattering nabobs of negativism” was implemented in increasing real cuts to school and university budgets and student aid. And parallel to that the development of the great GOP Wurlitzer and it’s right wing sidemen like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and a whole cast of people seeking wingnut welfare.
Dumbed down and distracted with anger is the bulk of adults. Which is why it took students in the most liberal university in arguably the most liberal state in the union to respond to what four decades ago would have been unthinkable action by a governor and a legislature. And even that is bordering on the edge of tepid. That is the remnant for whom cognitive dissonance is a call for action and the success of action starts converting people who are smart in spite of the education system and even their own inclinations to perk up and begin to think about doing something. A lot of conservative Wisconsin teachers got a whack up side the head from a governor that they voted for. Can’t get much more cognitive dissonance than that.
I repeat…
Dumb down enough people and the “elites” become so marginalized that no matter what they do, there are not enough walking-down-the-street working people remaining who are awake enough to support the movements suggested by the elites.
Match and game over.
As has been obvious since the late ’60s for anyone w/the eyes to see.
AG