Showing posts for "North Africa"
Hi folks,
Below is an excerpt from my piece on TheAtlantic.com that appeared today. To read the full text, click here.
A couple of days before Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was finally forced from office, it rained in Cairo. When the storm passed and the sun re-appeared, one of the protesters pointed out on Twitter that a rainbow had appeared over downtown — a sign, she believed, of the freedom and prosperity that was to come. Caught up in the romance of the barricades, it was hard for demonstrators and democracy activists, in Egypt and beyond, not to think that way. It seemed that Middle East was on the verge of a democratic breakthrough. It was one thing for Tunisians to force a tin-pot dictator like Zine Abidine Ben Ali to flee to Jeddah, it was quite another for Egyptians to dump the Pharaoh. That’s not supposed to happen. And as Tunisians inspired Egyptians, what the revolutionaries in Cairo accomplished gave impetus to Pearl Square, where Bahrain’s own protesters have gathered, and to Benghazi, the base of Libya’s rebellion against Muammar Qaddafi. Yet the successes of Tahrir or November 7 squares have not easily translated to these other places. It seems entirely possible that the Arab spring could end on the banks of the Nile. What went wrong?
Hi folks,
Below is my article on Tunisia that is now up on Foreign Policy. Enjoy.
Aren’t Middle Eastern militaries supposed to crack down and kick butt? Aren’t they supposed to be the “backbone” of regimes? The guarantors of last resort? The ultimate instrument of political control? Read any account of civil-military relations and the Middle East — including my own — and the answers to these questions are a resounding yes. So when the Tunisian armed forces, allegedly at the command of General Rashid Ammar, told Tunisian President Zine Abidine Ben Ali that the military would not shoot protesters demanding the strongman’s ouster and then pushed him from power, the commanders were clearly not playing to type. The role that the military has played in the Tunisian uprising thus far is intriguing and as Tunisia grapples with phase two of the post-Ben Ali era, what the military does (and doesn’t do) will be critical in the country’s political trajectory.
Update: Hats off to those who saw the unraveling of Ben Ali’s regime coming. The army moved in today and Ben Ali is no longer in control. This is good, but only the first phase. Best that I can tell from Washington, it seems that the military command has understood the demands from Tunisian society. What they do now is crucial. I know that the best way to support democracy is to support democracy, but in a way, the military’s intervention (and the way the officers intervened), may yet set the stage for a democratic Tunisia.
On From the Potomac to the Euphrates, Cook provides a lens for viewing how debates about Mideast policy in Washington connect to the region, with a special focus on Egypt and Turkey.
This article originally appeared here on ForeignPolicy.com on Wednesday, June 13, 2012. I hope you find it interesting and look…
My friend, Karim Mezran, weighs in with a guest post today on an under-reported meeting between a prominent Libyan Islamist…
Yesterday there were two interesting Syria pieces in the Sunday papers. The Washington Post ran a story by Liz Sly—who, by…
Before there was Mohamed Bouazizi there was Khaled Said. The official “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page that helped instigate the…
Bad Behavior has blocked 1772 access attempts in the last 7 days.