[Asharq al-Aswat] During the past few months, as one Arab military regime after another has been challenged or brought down, I have been reminded of a scene I witnessed in Khartoum decades ago.
I was interviewing the Sudanese President, General Jaafar al-Nimeiri, in his office when one of the long, red velvet curtains in the room caught fire.
There was only a small flame that could have easily been dealt with by pulling down the curtain and stamping on it.
But that is not what happened.
The president pressed a bell on his desk before starting to rush towards the door. Within seconds, a group of gunnies poured in, presumably ready to gun down anyone in sight. Soon, I found myself in the courtyard of the palace with the president and everyone else while more armed troops poured in.
A small incident had been transformed into a military operation.
That showed a few things.
First, it was obvious that the general was living in constant fear.
He had been programmed to think that what might look like a small flame on a velvet curtain could be the start of a larger liquidation plot.
Next, the military dictator knew only one way of dealing with an emergency: calling in the troops.
He had come to power at the point of a gun and believed that he could live only under the shadow of a gun.
Finally, the president's entourage acted as a flock of sheep.
Once Nimeiri had ran into the courtyard, they all followed. None of them could think for himself, including a few with degrees from prestigious American universities.
At that time regimes headed by a military man appeared as typical in the so-called Arab world.
The British Middle East expert Peter Mansfield wrote: "The modern Arab state takes shape around the armed forces with the officer elite in the lead."
The trend started with the 1952 military coup in Egypt and spread to Syria which had had its own experience with military rulers for a while. It then reached Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia and Somalia.
Thus, in the past six decades, more than four-fifth of Arabs have lived under a military regime of some sort.
The record of those regimes is both tragic and farcical.
In Egypt, the "Free Officers" led the country into its biggest military humiliation.
Which Egypt celebrates as a great victory. Oddly enough, few know about their successful adventure in Libya. Why d'you suppose that is?
Today, their discredited regime is trying to hang on to its privileges by embarking on Machiavellian manoeuvres.
Syria lives in a sate of semi-suffocation with the "officer elite" spending more time making money than "liberating" the Golan Heights.
Iraq, emerging from half a century of civil and foreign wars, is just starting to heal the wounds inflicted by successive military regimes, a process that might take decades.
After a quarter of a century of wars that have claimed millions of lives, Sudan is being split into two while its military ruler is officially indicted on charges of crimes against humanity.
Yemen has witnessed the liquidation of two military rulers, a war of secession and, more recently, a series of tribal wars. Today, the very foundations of the Yemeni state are shaken, and the country's future uncertain.
Algeria suffered decades of despotism marked by a civil war and the loss of at least a generation as a result of misguided economic policies dictated by the ruling military. It is only since the late 1990s that Algeria has started, ever so slowly, to move away from military dictatorship.
First they had to beat back the vicious GSPC, which subsequently took refuge under the name Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (is there a non-Islamic one?).
Today, Libya is in a state of civil war with an uncertain outcome.
An immensely wealthy country has been turned into a poor house. The ruling elite fouled its own nest because it dreamed it could nest in the west.
No doubt the meaning of that sentence was crystal clear in the writer's head.
The Tunisian military regime came down with whimper. But successive generations of Tunisians are forced to pay the price of mistakes made by the despot and his minions.
As for Somalia, it has become a war zone and may never again return as a proper nation-state. Even the army that once ruled it has evaporated.
With few exceptions, for example Gamal Abdul-Nasser in Egypt and Abdul-Karim Qassem in Iraq who remained personally clean, the military ruler quickly transformed himself into a businessman presiding over immense fortunes.
This week, the London daily Evening Standard published a partial list of the Libyan dictator Muammar Kaddhafi's business interests.
The colonel has a vast portfolio of real estate, industrial and banking shares, and hotel and travel holdings. And this is in London alone. Kaddhafi's business empire is also present in Italy, La Belle France, Switzerland, Austria and Turkey. In addition, the colonel's sons control a $200 billion "investment fund" on behalf of the Libyan state.
Needless to say, most of those funds are now frozen and may end up in the pockets of Western lawyers and governments.
Similar lists could be established of the business interests of Algerian, Egyptian and Sudanese officer elites, among others.
Western experts often speak of the supposed need to separate mosque and states in Arab countries. The real issue, however, is separating business and state.
Far from being the best suited system for Arabs, as Mansfield seemed to believe, the military regime was an aberration.
The Arab military elite copied it from Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Peron and other Latin American caudillos. Between the 1930s and 1970s military regimes were fashionable in much of the so-called Third World, and some Arabs simply followed that fashion.
With the fall of so many military regimes, and the impending end of the remaining ones, a chapter of Arab history comes to a close.
The question is: what system of government should replace the despotism that is, hopefully, gone for ever?
The challenge for Arab politicians, intellectuals and citizens on the lam is to look beyond what may be fashionable right now, and tackle the task of developing an alternative that, while rooted in their own tradition and vales, reflects the realities of the modern world.
Arabs have always grappled with the challenge of joining the modern world, a world in the formation of which they played no direct role, without losing parts of their persona they value most.
The events of the past few weeks show that Arabs cannot meet that challenge through military dictatorship.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/26/2011 00:00 ||
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Hat tip Gates of Vienna
I'll admit, there is an argument a thin, riddled, web of an argument that it was U.S. interests that drove military interventions gone wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't buy the argument: It morphed into a nation-building fantasy. It became disastrously, tragically and recklessly mistaken. But I can see at least that tarnished glimmer of national interest flash in the sludge before sinking from sight.
Nothing like this is to be found in the sands of Libya. This is why the weirdo-bizarre assault on Gadhafi's forces led, but supposedly not really, by the United States under order of the U.N. Security Council (motley crew) and the Arab League (rogue's gallery), crossed a fat, red line. The president of the United States sent the U.S. military, already stretched and worn by darn near a decade of wars, into harm's way for no compelling American reason.
...It's as if Obama considers the interest he serves as being above all that Congress-American-people-stuff. "Humanitarians" are like that, and what we're seeing is so-called humanitarian military intervention, the doctrine is promulgated by Obama's human rights adviser Samantha Power. Known as a genocide expert, Power has gone so far as to argue for the insertion of a "mammoth" American "protection" force into Israeli-Palestinian environs to prevent "human rights abuses" code for neutralizing Israeli self-defense.
...If this continues, don't be surprised to find Uncle Sucker "promoted" to world's permanent rent-a-cop, setting up the next no-fly-zone over Israel to intervene for the "humanitarian" cause of Hamas in Gaza. What can I say---the DMGA (Dimona Mushroom Growers Association) is a great comfort to me.
#1
The president of the United States sent the U.S. military, already stretched and worn by darn near a decade of wars, into harm's way for no compelling American reason.
Quislingcrats believe that the presence of ANY American national interest by definition makes an associated American military deployment illegitimate. Even the defense of our own citizens or territory (NatGuard to Mexican border, for example) is deemed an exercise in evil. Only "humanitarian" expeditions under UN auspices are acceptable - oh, and by the way, any "coalition" MUST include the French, or it's not a real coalition.
Posted by: Ricky bin Ricardo (Abu Babaloo) ||
03/26/2011 12:30 Comments ||
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[Asharq al-Aswat] Colonel Qadaffy is a strange subject. From day one, he has countered all demonstrations lodged against him with bullets, waged a fierce war against all the cities that joined the uprising against him, and killed thousands of people using planes, tanks, rocket-launchers and naval warships. Having committed all these atrocities, we now see him screaming that the raids launched against his forces, following the UN Security Council resolution, are "barbaric" and "leading to civilian deaths". How can people believe that Qadaffy cares for civilian lives, after the world saw and heard him ordering his battalions to "attack the rats" and kill them "without mercy or pity", during his threatening speech against the people of Benghazi? It was these threats that led to the issuance of the UN Security Council resolution to militarily intervene to protect civilians.
Qadaffy's remarks are not out of fear for his civilians' lives, but for his own. He bears the responsibility for what is happening today, because his oppressive acts against his people led to this international intervention. He first internationalized the crisis when he recruited mercenaries from all over the world to repress his people, abuse them, and kill them without mercy. He did not hesitate to use foreign security companies - and there are even reports that these included an Israeli company - in order to recruit mercenaries. He also hired public relations firms to assist in the management of media and political campaigns, which were fought in defense of his authority, and not in defense of his people.
The man is floundering today, whilst his regime is tottering. When speaking to foreign correspondents, he denied that the demonstrations were against him, because all his people love him, saying that if there were any demonstrations they would be in support of the regime. He made these statements whilst the entire world watched Libyan cities demonstrating against his regime, calling for its downfall, and tearing up his Green Book. A few days ago, the Colonel tried to seduce the West by saying that he is fighting the Al Qaeda organization and terrorism, yet once he saw signs of military movement against his forces following the UN Security Council resolution, he began to threaten that he would join forces with al-Qaeda. Sometimes he claims to be akin to a policeman, protecting the security of the Mediterranean, Europe and even Israel, and then at other times claims the Mediterranean has become an open battlefield, and that he may undertake retaliatory military measures [against Mediterranean targets]. He also boasts of being the African "King of Kings", then goes on to claim that he is protecting Europe from immigration and that if he ceased to do so, the European continent would "turn black". He warns of the West controlling Libya's oil, and plundering its wealth, meanwhile he was the one who was using oil contracts as incentives for countries not to stand against his regime and not to support the UN resolution for military intervention against his forces. Yet Qadaffy has forgotten that he placed the Libyan people's oil wealth into Western bank accounts, and the freezing of his overseas assets has uncovered accounts and real estate worth billions of dollars that can be traced to him and his children.
I do not know how many times Qadaffy has repeated himself in recent speeches, saying that he holds no official position, that he handed power over to the people in the 1970s, and that if he had a position, or if he was President, he would throw his resignation in the protesters faces. Yet despite this, we see him and his children desperately clinging onto power, fighting for it until "the last woman and child". His orders were clear for his military battalions, led by his sons, to hunt down and kill what he described as rats, without mercy. All of this was in defense of power that he claims is only "ceremonial" in the first place. However despite this, we have seen and heard him issue all the commands and public directives to wage war on his opponents, enter their homes, and kill his own people whom he does not consider more than "stray dogs", simply because they are tired of his regime, which has oppressed them for more than 41 years. We have heard about the killings, the indiscriminate shelling and shootings, and the mortar fire, which took place after Qadaffy's battalions stormed some cities and attempted to force entry into Benghazi and Misrata. We have also heard fears of a massacre in the city of Zawiya, which the Qadaffy forces stormed after a long siege and heavy fighting ... as opposed to the more usual light or sporadic fighting... , isolating it from the outside world so that nobody can be certain about what happened there.
No sane person wants to see foreign intervention in an Arab country - even though in this case it was sanctioned by a UN Security Council resolution - but it is Colonel Qadaffy who has brought this intervention upon his country. How tragic it is to see the Colonel, up to this very minute, trying to destroy his people, and ignite a civil war. He called for various tribes to start a green march "carrying olive branches" on Benghazi to solve the problems "in a peaceful manner." However just a few hours earlier, Qadaffy had been calling for his arms reserves to be distributed amongst the people, to confront who he labeled traitors. Why did he not confront the peaceful demonstrations from the beginning with olive branches, instead of bullets and shelling?
Qadaffy's regime has lost its legitimacy after the deaths of thousands of its people, and because of the horrors and crises it has brought upon the country today. If he manages to retain power, he will later wreak vengeance on his people. This will also raise problems for neighboring countries, when Qadaffy returns to his adventures and terrorism which squandered the wealth of the Libyan people and brought sanctions upon his country, resulting in billions of dollars in compensation being paid to victims' families, to ensure there was no prosecution.
Thus the Colonel and his regime must leave; the good people of Libya deserve --without doubt -- better leadership, and better lives.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
03/26/2011 00:00 ||
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#1
I was going to say "COLONEL SANDERS???" but methinks I'd used that quip before.
#1
(a) The price of oil. Qadaffy was winning and would have resumed oil production within a week. Now it can go on for months---and if "rebels" receive enough western assistance to win, they'll start fighting among themselves. Libyan oil production could be off-line for years.
(b) Russians oppose any actions by USA as a matter of principle---except when they see the USA about to shoot itself in a foot.
Except the destruction of the opium producers in Central Asia and the willingness of the Americans to pay through the nose for land transport to make it happen.
#4
# 1 you are so spot on. The Russians play this game well. We are supporting the "Rebels" and now Al Qaeda has joined them. Egypt was an ally, what are they now?.
Obama has done it again. Shut down oil production even in another country.
#4
Nope. There is no double standard---because Islam is not a religion the way the concept was defined in USA constitution (it doesn't render into Caesar).
#5
Do any other religions -- or any other groups, for that matter -- get financial instruments tailored to their specific requirements? (A credit card with their name in a cute design on the front doesn't count.)
#6
Time is but toilet paper. If any politician, Judge, or public figure wants sharia law, than they should be very publicly shunned in this day. The ignorance is overpowering.
#7
This article confused me (and I know that it shouldn't surprise me since it's in TIME, but anyway ...)
I'm trying to figure out where the double-standard is that they are asking about. Are they implying that Pawlenty was being too conservative in cancelling the special state financing program? Or are they implying that he had encouraged to have this program started in the first place (which he happened to cancel)?
Or ... did they just want to put up a headline that put Pawlenty's name next to the phrase "sharia-compliant" as a preemptive strike to be used later in case he makes some strides as someone's eventual vice-presidential choice?
#2
Secretary Gates, this is Besoeker from the Rantburg. I have only one question. Will President Obama spend his entire term in Washington without a single visit to the State of Israel?
In Europe, where nuclear power is vastly more common than it is here, the Japanese earthquake is being exploited to the hilt. "If the Japanese," editorializes the British Independent newspaper, "with all their understandable inhibitions about anything nuclear and all their world-leading technology, cannot build reactors that are invulnerable to disaster, who can?"
Well, that's just it. Who said anything, anywhere, is invulnerable to disaster? At 9.0, this was Japan's biggest earthquake and could be the fourth largest ever recorded (it was even detected in Pennsylvania). Perhaps the standard shouldn't be whether Japan's reactor was "invulnerable" but whether it succeeded by taking such a beating without threatening much human life?
The damaged reactors are ruined, but so what? Cars are designed to be ruined after a major accident too. We routinely, and wisely, trade salvageability for survivability. Few skyscrapers in the United States can withstand a 9.0 earthquake; should we stop making tall buildings?
More to the point, much of the discussion about what this means for American nuclear energy leaves out that even the Japanese reactors are 30 years out of date compared with new designs. So-called Generation III plants have passive cooling systems that do not depend on the electricity grid. Hence any moratorium on new nuclear construction - as being discussed in Congress - would prevent building plants that have leapfrogged the problems we see in Japan. Congress has to protect us from something - everything - ourselves, cigarettes, bicycle crashes, global warming, nuclear energy, Big Macs, ad nauseum.
And yet, many in the industry fear that the unscientific hysteria over the Japanese reactor will deal a mortal blow to nuclear power. You would at least think that climate change activists, who want fossil-free energy (and to bolster the reputation of scientists) would be throwing coolant on the public meltdown. After all, a major backlash against nuclear will be a boon not for wind and solar - still profoundly inadequate to our energy needs - but for coal and natural gas. Caves. Can't have coal - that equals climate change. Back to the caves!
Of course the situation is grave. And who knows what the lessons of this tragedy will be? But rather than worry about letting this crisis go to waste, this strikes me as a great moment to simply cope. Get over it!
Posted by: Bobby ||
03/26/2011 11:52 ||
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#1
This is so retro. There will always be an element in society who will recoil in fear at any opportunity. Simply cope is to do nothing. "Which shall it be, Which shall it be". Do we develop our natural resources. Do we press forward into the unknown future or cower living in fear of what might be. When we stop reaching for the stars we will simply exist. The future is for those who chose to embrace it;
Syria has opened fire on protesters as unrest spreads to Damascus and Aleppo. Hundreds took to the streets in the cities of Homs, Hama, Tel and Latakia and in towns surrounding Deraa, with smaller protests in the major cities of Damascus and Aleppo, which are more firmly under the watch of security forces. Troops reportedly opened fire in some cases.
...The US commitments in Libya will mean that Syria may not have to worry about any consequences, even in principle, beyond a State Department protest for its repression of demonstrators. For any of us who wondered why EU bimbos/Bama are so eager to attack Libya, and why Russia/China are letting them---food for thought?
Excerpt: Were the Russians, Cubans, Chinese, North Koreans, etc., working together in organized units or did they just have a common presence in Mexico? WARNING: You might get a very sick feeling in your stomach while reading this ..article....
#1
Compare wid TOPIX >[US] DOJ MEMO CONFIRMS TERRORISTS [violent Jihadists] HAVE CROSSED THE BORDER, into the USA as approved by the COUNCIL OF ISLMAIC COURTS, AL-SHABAAB, + the AL-ITTIHAD-AL-ISLAMIC GROUP.
* "POLTERGEIST" Movie > THEY'RE H-E-E-R-E-E, but just haven't made or succeeded in a major Terrop yet - YET.
versus
* VARIOUS NETTERS/BLOGGERS = once the number of Mexican-Hispanic illegals reached a "decisive" point, i.e. enough population to control the local Economy + espec any outcome of normal State-Local Elections, THE FORMER WILL USE THEIR NEWFOUND INFLUENCE TO ELECTORALLY = LEGALLY FORCE THE SECESSION THE SW REGION FROM THE REST OF THE US???
You know, the "RED DAWN" REMAKE = THE NORTH KOREANS ARE COMING, THE NORTH KOREANS ARE COMING!
#6
The Honorable Gentleman from the Pacific Islands and his.... 'upper case' text have long been grandfathered. Besides, it reminds me of the old OCR formatted Genser traffic. I've come to love it.
#10
Joe's comment has echoes of the chicano claims to 'Atzlan'. From Wikipedia:
The name Aztlán was first taken up by a group of Chicano independence activists led by Oscar Zeta Acosta during the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. They used the name Aztlán to refer to the lands of Northern Mexico that were annexed by the United States as a result of the Mexican-American War. Combined with the claim of some historical linguists and anthropologists that the original homeland of the Aztecan peoples was located in the southwestern United States, Aztlán, in this sense, became a symbol for mestizo activists who believe they have a legal and primordial right to the land. In order to exercise this right, some members of the Chicano movement propose that a new nation be created, a Republica del Norte.
Groups who have used the name Aztlán in this manner include Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, "Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán"), and the Nation of Aztlán (NOA)...
The claim by some Chicano activists of entitlement to roughly the southwestern third of the United States (on the grounds that, allegedly, this area was once dominated by Aztecs and should therefore be returned) has been critiqued as being founded upon historical inaccuracies....
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
