Blogging the democratic revolution
In the twilight of Iraq’s latest successful election, and before the doomsayers have a chance to get back on their callused feet, it’s worth taking the time to examine Iraq’s inexorable progress in gaining freedom — an immense project that is changing not just the lives of twenty-five million people (a praiseworthy feat in itself), but changing the face of the world. Less obvious than Iraq’s newfound and thrice-exercised democratic freedom, but equally important, is its burgeoning economic freedom. As reduced regulation, lowered taxation and less corruption allow resourceful Iraqis to drive their economy into a flexible regional powerhouse, the…
It was Mao Zedong who first said that, as long as a population remains neutral to an insurgency, the ultimate war against a government could be won. He layed out a three-pronged strategy for victory, which consisted of the preparation of an underground infrastructure, limited guerilla warfare, and eventually conventional warfare that would lead to victory. The most important of these stages is the first two, in which the insurgency lays the groundwork for mainstream support among the population so that it can begin engaging in operations. Writing in 1988 for the Airpower Research Institute, Colonel Dennis M. Drew evaluates…
The polls have closed in Iraq. Voter turnout was incredibly large, expected to be even higher than in January and October. All groups participated. For those of you wanting to know what’s going on, here’s a roundup where you can get all the information your heart desires. Pajamas Media has amazing on the ground reporting from several Iraqi cities. Gateway Pundit has a huge roundup. Iraq the Model is updating furiously on the ground. Bill Roggio is blogging from Barwana. Iraq Pundit relates his own experiences. Hammorabi is a blog worth scrolling all the way down. More as I see…
News reports are indicating that all sects of Iraqi society are turning out to vote, including the Sunnis who have made due to come out in full force. Turnout is expected to be larger than in the previous two elections. What we will witness today is not only another historic event as we saw in January and October, but a complete redefinition of the Iraqi political landscape as we know it. The January, 2005, assembly elections led to the utter domination of the parliament by just three parties, including the United Iraqi Alliance, the Democratic Patriotic Alliance of Kurdistan, and…
Today’s parliamentary election in Iraq will be the first that includes all major and minor groups turning out in full, making it the first truly representative government the country has had — ever. The important virtue of this is that of legitimacy, the only quality that will allow the government to operate as it needs to without major resistence. It would certainly begin the spelling of the end of the insurgency since their grievances would be able to be aired in official negotiation with other political parties. I am especially concerned about domination of the Interior Ministry by the Shiite…
The second Mehlis Report on the assassination of Rafik Hariri by Syrian and Lebanese security authorities has been released. You can download the PDF here. I know my headline makes it sound like a bad sequel, but this one actually goes beyond its predecessor, delving into a new depth of intrigue and plot twists. Yet the ending still remains the same. The Syrian regime and its allies in the Lebanese security apparatus have been further implicated in the slaying and have been further shown to be uncooperative with the investigation. This despite the unanimous demands of the UN Security Council.…
Today, the general manager of the anti-Syrian, pro-independence newspaper An Nahar and a legislator from Beirut was assassinated by a car bomb. Almost all of Gebran Tueni’s editorials that have been published in the English-language version of the paper, Naharnet, have been against Syria. The last one published called the mass graves discovered by Lebanese authorities a crime against humanity. It is so strange to think that someone who I read in the Lebanese press — and not just any Lebanese press, this is by far one of the most influential papers — can just be wiped out like that,…
A brief timeline of events: – Iranian President says that Israel should be “wiped off the map.” – The United Nations condemns his remarks. – Iranian President calls for Israel to be moved to Europe and denies the Holocaust. – The United Nations is shocked — shocked! — by the remarks. Oops, I seem to have missed an event right there in the middle, right after the whole “Israel should be wiped off the map” thing. A week ago, the United Nations held a “Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” at the UN headquarters in New York City, which…
Check this out. It’s the launch of a new Middle East human rights initiative to bring together activists from the Middle East and America. They’re doing an essay contest for people under the age of 26 to share ideas about what to do. Check out the website here. It’s being done by a good group of people and I recommend doing so. Click “read more” to see the press release.
Egypt has now completed the first round of the the third stage of its three-stage parliamentary elections, and is now completing the run-offs for the third stage. Egypt’s electoral system is complex and sometimes confusing to outsiders because the same election involves three stages, each for a specified geographic region of the country, followed by run-off votes in districts where no candidate received a majority. So there are six total election days. Following the first two stages, with roughly 300 out of 454 seats determined, the ruling National Democratic Party had 195 seats, the banned Muslim Brotherhood, running candidates as…
With the Muslim Brotherhood gaining an unprecedented amount of seats in this month’s parliamentary elections, the authorities in Egypt clamped down to the point of surrounding polling stations with riot police and knifing down voters. These voters, in turn, went as far as using ladders to sneak into polling stations so as to simply cast a ballot. But there is another group that factors into this electoral equation: judges, who are at every turn ruling against the regime on a number of electoral issues. In this case, the court has decided that NGOs can monitor the electoral process through video…
This past Sunday, Egypt completed the run-off to the second of three rounds of parliamentary elections. The system is set up such that roughly a third of the 444 seats are up for contest in each round. Because the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is legally banned, they run candidates as independents and so ascertaining their strength, as well as that of President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), lies partially in how many independents end up aligning with them. The results now available are that the NDP won 75 seats bringing its total to 195, while the MB won 29…
A Saudi national studying at Arizona State University, a party school by all counts and from my own recollection, thinks that the school should sanction the possibility of expelling students for wearing any clothing with the ASU logo when posing for dirty, dirty magazines. The ASU Web Devil reports! If one student leader has his way, ASU students will no longer be able to grace the covers of Playboy and other sexually explicit magazines without consequences. Undergraduate Student Government President Yaser Alamoodi is hoping to pass a rule that would prohibit males and females from posing in magazines he believes…
I managed to watch some of Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the trial of Saddam Hussein. While he was in power, it was known that he was a semi-literate thug, albeit an exceptionally cunning one. He was reportedly frustrated by his inability to converse with other members of the Iraqi elite on equal terms because he couldn’t speak grammatically. This was certainly on full display today. It is hard to say how it would have sounded to a native speaker, but I thought that he came across as mentally dishevelled, using lots of non-standard Arabic vocabulary. This would be highly abnormal for…
I have now posted my Middle East Week in Review news bulletin. News briefs for the week deal with issues in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Iran and Chechnya. Lots of election news this week, although some of it is “election” news. Democracy watchers may want to focus on the news on Qatar, for they are now announcing elections to parliament for the first time, pursuant to their 2003 constitution. The democracy news was less appealing from Palestine, where convicted terrorist Marwan Barghouti won a landslide victory in an internal Fatah primary; from…
This article will discuss the recently concluded Cairo conference of “national reconciliation” mostly as it was seen through the Arab media. The result is perhaps best summed up by Al-Hayat‘s headline on Nov. 22: “Cairo Conference: A Pass on American Withdrawal and Agreement on the ‘Legitimacy of Resistance’ and Rejection of ‘Terrorism’.” According to the same article, the final statement provided that Iraq sought “the withdrawal of foreign forces according to a fixed timetable, and the immediate establishment of a national program to rebuild the national security forces with regard to training, weapons and numbers on a peaceful basis, empowering…
This article was posted to my blog over the weekend, prior to the second round of voting. As indicated in my Middle East Week in Review post, the second round took place on Sunday amid a major crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood. Early indications are that this crackdown has had the result intended by the regime. A more detailed analysis is to follow when the results of the second round are clear. The first stage of Egypt’s three-stage elections, including both the initial round and the run-off, has left three basic results clear: the ruling National Democratic Party is showing…
Two rounds of voting out of three have been undertaken in Egypt’s parliamentary elections, with the Muslim Brotherhood scoring approximately one fourth of the total seats. But after its initial strong showing in the relatively peaceful first round, the government took the initiative to crack down on the organization by arresting hundreds of its members during the second round. DAMANHOUR, Egypt: Police arrested hundreds of activists from Egypt????????s strongest opposition group and thugs trying to intimidate voters shot dead a man in legislative elections yesterday. The thugs shot Mohamed Ibrahim in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and set fire to…
I have now posted my Middle East Week in Review bulletin for the past week. Topics for this week’s bulletin include Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Morocco, Yemen and Iran. Notable for democracy watchers is that the second round of Egypt’s parliamentary elections took place on Sunday, and this time the government clamped down hard on the Muslim Brotherhood, even reportedly sending armed thugs to polling places to attack MB supporters.
Election results from Egypt’s first round of parliamentary elections are coming in, and due to the greater transparency and lesser violence than before, the Muslim Brotherhood took a big chunk of seats. Of course, there were instances of fraud, intimidation, and genereal irregularities, but they seem to be committed on an individual basis instead of being part of a widespread campaign. Members of the more liberal opposition, however, didn’t fair so well despite that the Al-Ghad party candidate, Ayman Nour, taking second place in the presidential election. Egypt’s ruling party won 112 seats in the first stage of the country’s…
It seems that regime thugs in Tunisia are giving French journalists the kind of treatment American journalists have come to expect from the Sudanese. This is from Al-Sharq al-Awsat, Information Summit: Crisis Between Tunisia & France Because of Assaults on Journalists: On the evening of the “World Summit on the Information Society” which Tunisia is hosting tomorrow lasting through Friday, the French government demanded from the Tunisian government a guarantee of freedom of the press after a French journalist was physically accosted by unknown individuals. This comes in the context of increasingly tense relations between Tunisia on the one hand…
I’ve never been one to put it past Assad to have much class, but this is a bit much. The Syrian government has called unequivocally, through its state-run media, for people to take to the streets of Beirut in order to topple Lebanon’s first independently elected government. Anyone else thinks the heat is starting to get to his head? Syria has called through its state-controlled Damascus daily Tishreen for a massive demonstration in Beirut Thursday to overthrow Premier Saniora’s government as Lebanon’s confrontation with the Assad regime and its Lebanese supporters seems to be climbing to a new peak. The…
I have just posted my Middle East Week in Review news bulletin for the past week. This week’s bullet-points include links on Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Yemen, Iran and Australia. I have a separate post, Abdullah’s Struggle With Islamic Terrorism, which is a follow-up to last week’s attacks in Amman. It focuses on the counter-terrorism angle, but some of the analysis is also relevant to why, despite having the Arab world’s most liberal ruler, Jordan has had very little democratic reform.
I just spat my drink out through my nose, or would have if I’d been drinking, when I came across this subtitle at Reason: Palestine, not Iraq, is the best shot at an Arab democracy. I suppose in part that’s because I was recently planning on using the same comparison to make the point that externally imposing democracy is more likely to succeed than, well, anything at all in Palestine. After running through the usual pie in the sky hopes naive liberals commonly hold of a peaceful Palestinian people laying down their arms and taking up democratic politics, or at…
Egyptian blogger Abdal Karim Soliman was released from jail after a massive effort pressing for his release. He had been arrested simply for what he wrote on his blog, which was a denunciation of attacks by Muslims on a Coptic nun. It sparked an outrage in the Egyptian blogosphere, prompting a worldwide campaign on his behalf. Bloggers wrote posts to create the buzz, readers wrote letters to the Egyptian embassy, and it took off from there. The Egyptian government finally buckled and released him. It was the end of The Sandmonkey’s post, however, that made me start thinking about this…