Tag: Iran
Implosions, more and less advanced
While the rest of the world catches up with the question of “how does Libya end,” which I dealt with yesterday, let’s take a look ahead. Today’s big news was not the explosions in Libya, but rather the implosion in Yemen, where President Saleh is now facing an opposition strengthened by defections from his army, government, parliament and diplomatic corps. He is appealing for “mediation” by the Saudis, which is being interpreted in some circles as a plea for Saudi guarantees if he agrees to step down in six months. He had already agreed to step down at the end of his present term in 2013.
It very much looks as if Washington may lose its spear carrier in the fight against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). This is a problem, since no one–including Saleh–seems to think AQAP is a serious threat to Yemen, which it uses as haven and launching pad. No one in his right mind would want to try to govern it.
Washington will have to convince whoever takes over–the betting seems to be on General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, but these things are inherently uncertain–that AQAP merits his attention. This will be difficult: Yemen is a place with a lot of problems. Water and oil are running out, there are more or less perennial rebellions both north and south, the population is high half the day on qat, and the authority of the government barely extends to the outskirts of Sanaa, the capital.
In Syria, the process of popular protest is far less advanced, but firing on demonstrators by the security forces has reaped an increase in demonstrations in the south. No telling whether the Syrians have the stomach to go all the way to revolution, and Bashar al Assad is a clever autocrat. But he too is lacking resources and tied to Iran in ways that make it difficult for him to do what most Syrians want: an opening to the West and foreign investment, which necessarily entails reducing ties to Iran and Hizbollah and settling up somehow with Israel. Syria also has ethnic and sectarian issues: Kurdish citizens treated as second class and a Sunni majority governed by an Alawhite (more or less Shia) but secular majority.
Bahrain, now under Gulf Cooperation Council protection, seems to be doing its best to turn its rebellion into sectarian strife, which is not how it began. It is hard to believe that is in the interests of the (Sunni) Khalifa monarchy, which governs a less than prosperous Shia majority. But when Saudi Arabia decides to embrace you, I guess you have to hug back.
It has already been an extraordinary few weeks in North Africa. While the monarchies in Jordan, Morocco and Saudi Arabia seem to be learning how to keep the lid on, the pot is boiling over in Yemen and may still do so in Syria and Bahrain. It would be nice if the heat rose under the Iranian pot, but that does not appear to be happening, no matter how often the Secretary of State and the President wish it so.
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What will Friday prayers bring?
Tomorrow is Friday again, and across the “greater” Middle East there will be prayers and restlessness. The big questions:
- Saudi Arabia: intellectuals have been signing petitions in favor of constitutional monarchy, but the experts are still betting that people will not go the street–it is illegal to demonstrate, and socially disapproved. We’ll see.
- Libya: most of the country is liberated already, but will crowds risk turning out in Tripoli?
- Egypt: Mubarak’s buddy prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, has stepped down. El Baradei at least is calling this a turning point. Will it open the way for real regime change that the military has been resisting?
- Tunisia: Ben Ali’s buddy prime minister has already stepped down, opening the way for real change, but the country is burdened with refugees from Libya. The Brits are at least trying to relieve that burden.
- Yemen: President Saleh has said he’ll step down in 2013. The political party opposition, buoyed by tribal support, is proposing he do it by the end of this year. Will that be enough to split his opponents and save his tuchas?
- Bahrain: formal opposition parties have presented reform demands in an opening bid for negotiations with the monarchy. Will that split them from the demonstrators?
- Iraq: The violent crackdown last weekend amplified what otherwise might have been relatively quiet demonstrations against corruption and for better services. Has the government learned its lesson?
- Jordan and Syria: little noise, as their king who allows demonstrations and president who doesn’t try to feed a reform half loaf to relatively weak oppositions. Will they succeed?
- Iran: crackdown in full swing with the arrest of Green Movement stars Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi and their wives. Ahmedinejad is increasingly dominant and effective against both clerical and lay opponents, inside and outside the regime. Can he keep it up?
I can’t remember a time I looked forward so much to Friday, with anticipation but also with trepidation. The world could be looking very different by Sunday.
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Mad north northwest
Col. Muammar Gaddafi is widely assumed to be mad. President Ali Abdullah Saleh also laid claim to the adjective today when he said Washington and Tel Aviv were behind the protests spreading throughout the Arab world.
I don’t think either one is nuts. Saleh knows as well as anyone else that both Washington and Tel Aviv are discomforted by the protests, which threaten not only himself but other American and Israeli favorites. But Saleh also knows that labeling the protests as an American/Jewish conspiracy is a good bet for inducing Yemenis think twice about whether they merit support.
Gaddafi’s sartorial tastes and wild-eyed lying about not using violence against the protesters and about how much his people love him certainly merit being labeled as extravagant and delusional. But he knows that dictatorship is in large measure theater, and his efforts to create an alternative reality have served him well for more than 41 years. How Christiane Amanpour gets through an interview with him without laughing in his face I don’t know.
Neither Yemenis nor Libyans seem inclined to fall any longer for their leaders’ tall tales. Going along to get along was a reasonable strategy when you felt alone with your local autocrat and his security apparatus. But once you have 10,000 compatriots with you, the need to go along evaporates, along with the fear.
Unfortunately, there is still reason to fear both Gaddafi and Saleh.
Gaddafi is laying siege to his opponents in Zawiya, a town not far from Tripoli to the west, and is attacking there and farther afield using aircraft. The UN will feel obliged to impose a No Fly Zone if that continues. It would be easier and cheaper to act unilaterally to nail his planes to the tarmac, but I imagine cooler heads will prevail. One of his henchmen should at least try to remind Gaddafi that blocking food to Zawiya and shelling civilians are arguably crimes against humanity, for which he can expect to pay if he survives. Or maybe Christiane can work that into her next set of questions: “Do you know that you might be charged with crimes against humanity if you bomb civilians or deny them food?”
Saleh is a more complicated case. He is offering his opponents a role in government, which they have refused, preferring that he step down. He has been losing tribal support but now and again allows a peaceful demonstration without his thugs attacking it, as he did over the weekend. But his army sometimes shoots at demonstrators, especially if they are in Aden, where international scrutiny is less rigorous.
These are not madmen. They are men so attached to power that they cannot imagine living without it. And likely they are right. While Mubarak is setting a good example by withdrawing to Sharm el Sheikh to lick his wounds, I doubt either Saleh or Gaddafi will find a comfortable retirement home. And both can tell a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is southerly.
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So much to keep track of!
So I thought a quick update on the revolutions of 2011 might be in order:
- Libya: Gaddafi holding on in Tripoli, where his forces indulge in random killings, but most of the rest of the country seems to be in rebel hands. Tribes and a hodge-podge of local authorities seem to be the mainstay of law and order, insofar as it exists. The army is split. Lots of high level defections. The Americans have finally imposed unilateral sanctions freezing assets and banning travel. The UN Security Council is still debating its draft, which may have to lose the referral to the International Criminal Court in order to get past India, China and Russia (none are states parties to the ICC).
- Yemen: Protests have grown dramatically with adherence by some important tribes, President Saleh took the Gaddafi vow to fight to the last drop of blood, and the opposition seems intent on continuing despite Saleh’s vows to leave office in 2013 and not install his son.
- Egypt: Big demonstration yesterday to keep pressure on the military, force out the prime minister, who is Mubarak’s buddy, and end the state of emergency, which the military has promised to do once order is restored.
- Bahrain: Another big demo, but the monarchy clearly committed for the moment to avoiding violence. An important Bahraini Shiite leader returned to the country from exile and was allowed to speak.
- Tunisia: Protesters Friday pressed for faster change. Pro-Ben Ali youth rioted Saturday. Violence in both instances. The good guys should really wear white hats and maintain non-violent discipline, as that will help to distinguish them from the bad guys.
- Iraq: At least eight killed around the country in the first big demonstrations, mainly by undisciplined security forces. The Speaker of Parliament says he supports the demonstrators’ right to protest, Prime Minister Maliki tried to fend off both protests and criticism, and Ayatollah Sistani weighed in on the side of the improved public services and an end to corruption. Sistani is the one really worth listening to, but he hasn’t got a lot of influence in Kurdistan, where violent demonstrations continue.
- Jordan: A big, peaceful demonstration Friday, but big is much smaller (4000) than in other places. The call is still far more for reform than for regime change.
- Iran: The regime still has things “under control,” mistreating its own people even as it praises the rebellions in Arab countries. The video at that link, by the way, demonstrates a lack of discipline on both sides of the confrontation, but the text is useful for understanding why demonstrations in Iran have been less than fully successful.
Overall: lots of ups and downs this week, but it is clear that few real dictators will survive much longer. The question of what will replace them is still an open one, but it is looking more and more as if re-imposing autocracies will be nigh on impossible. The people simply won’t stand for it. More power to them!
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Bahrain gets smart, others continue crackdowns
Bahrain’s monarchy got smart today, withdrawing the tanks and the police, allowing Pearl square to fill again with protesters, sending the Crown Prince out to give a conciliatory speech, and telling the protesters they could stay, presumably as long as they are peaceful. The Crown Prince is talking reform, sectarian harmony, dialogue. A smart move that went over well, to judge from the limited evidence available from my Twitter feed (credit to @SultanAlQassemi and @Emile_Houkayem). And now more evidence from CNN:
No such conciliatory moves elsewhere. Libya, with its internet communications cut off, is reportedly killing dozens of protesters and trying to scare the rest into submission. Benghazi is especially restive. Yemen has unleashed thugs and police in both Sanaa and Aden. Algeria walloped a small demonstration with obviously excessive force, presumably as a lesson to others. Iran continues its crackdown, which faces the challenge of a big “Green Movement” demonstration called for tomorrow. Saudi Arabia, obviously nervous, is denying it has any problems, even as it detains political activists in anticipation of demonstrations called for March 11.
It is of course impossible to predict where and when a popular revolution will succeed in one of these anachrocies (that’s my word for a regime that has outlived its legitimacy). None of them seem to me immune. A lot depends on the capabilities of the organizers to turn out a big crowd that crosses social divides, stays nonviolent despite provocations, and attracts some international attention. But I might bet today on the Khalifa monarchy outlasting the others.
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Why the violence?
Violence isn’t new to the wave of Tunisian flu that is sweeping through the Arab world, but it seems to be getting worse, hitting Bahrain, Libya and Yemen during more or less the past 24 hours.
Why?
The short answer: this is the regime response to seeing the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt taken down. While some accounts are not clear, it is certain that the violence in Bahrain this morning was initiated by the police, who attacked a peaceful (and mostly sleeping) encampment in Pearl Square unprovoked. Police and allied thugs seem to have been initiating violence in Yemen as well. The accounts of events in Libya are sketchy, but I would bet that there too the police are rioting. Kings and presidents are concluding that Ben Ali’s mistake was to flee without a fight and Mubarak’s was to step down without cracking down.
How should peaceful protesters deal with this development? They are unlikely to beat the police and thugs in a street fight. What they need to do is mass greater numbers, stay particularly attentive at night, befriend the security forces, beef up their connectedness to foreign and domestic journalists, and make sure their own cadres include people from across the social, ethnic, sectarian and other divides. If they can’t do these things, they need to stay away from confrontation until they can.
You can also hope that the Americans will be telling the regimes in Sanaa and Manama that crackdowns of the sort they are pursuing are counterproductive and likely to spawn more violence. But I doubt Washington has all that much sway in either place at the moment, and they surely don’t want one of those regimes to fall without a safety net in place.
President Saleh is no doubt declaring himself indispensable to the war on Al Qaeda, but there really isn’t much time before the “use by” date on that bag of potatoes. One way or another, he is finished within the next few years (if not the next few months). Time to get some sort of safety net in place, preferably a more democratic one with some prospect of holding north and south together by sharing power between them.
Qadhafi is of no concern in Washington–they would just as soon he take his tent to the desert.
But the Khalifa monarchy in Bahrain is a real dilemma for the Americans. You know: 5th fleet vs. the possibility of a Shia (some presume Iranian-dominated) regime. But the question for the Americans (and for the regime) is whether the kind of police riot the monarchy indulged in this morning will make things better or worse. My bet is worse, maybe much worse if it turns what has been a mild-mannered expression of dissent into a sectarian war that the Sunnis are likely to lose. It is not enough for the monarchy to have allowed municipal and legislative elections last fall. And the 5th fleet is more in danger from getting behind the curve than getting out in front of it. Mr. Obama needs to remember what he said about universal rights–they won’t stop at Manama.
Nor should they if they are going to make it all the way to Tehran, where in many respects the violence and crackdown is at its worst. That is the good news: the theocracy is feeling threatened by Tunisian flu. It dreads the fate of Mubarak, as well it should.
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