Monthly Archives: January 2011

The Palestine Papers

Introducing the Palestine Papers:

Over the last several months, Al Jazeera has been given unhindered access to the largest-ever leak of confidential documents related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are nearly 1,700 files, thousands of pages of diplomatic correspondence detailing the inner workings of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. These documents – memos, e-mails, maps, minutes from private meetings, accounts of high level exchanges, strategy papers and even power point presentations – date from 1999 to 2010.

The material is voluminous and detailed; it provides an unprecedented look inside the continuing negotiations involving high-level American, Israeli, and Palestinian Authority officials.

Al Jazeera will release the documents between January 23-26th, 2011. They will reveal new details about:

  • the Palestinian Authority’s willingness to concede illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem, and to be “creative” about the status of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount;
  • the compromises the Palestinian Authority was prepared to make on refugees and the right of return;
  • details of the PA’s security cooperation with Israel;
  • and private exchanges between Palestinian and American negotiators in late 2009, when the Goldstone Report was being discussed at the United Nations.

In The Guardian, Seumas Milne and Ian Black write:

The overall impression that emerges from the documents, which stretch from 1999 to 2010, is of the weakness and growing desperation of PA leaders as failure to reach agreement or even halt all settlement temporarily undermines their credibility in relation to their Hamas rivals; the papers also reveal the unyielding confidence of Israeli negotiators and the often dismissive attitude of US politicians towards Palestinian representatives.

Last night Erekat said the minutes of the meetings were “a bunch of lies and half truths”. Qureia told AP that “many parts of the documents were fabricated, as part of the incitement against the … Palestinian leadership”.

However Palestinian former negotiator, Diana Buttu, called on [chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb] Erekat to resign following the revelations. “Saeb must step down and if he doesn’t it will only serve to show just how out of touch and unrepresentative the negotiators are,” she said.

In an article on the origin of the documents, The Guardian reported:

The bulk of the documents are records, contemporaneous notes and sections of verbatim transcripts of meetings drawn up by officials of the Palestinian negotiation support unit (NSU), which has been the main technical and legal backup for the Palestinian side in the negotiations.

The unit has been heavily funded by the British government. Other documents originate from inside the PA’s extensive US- and British-sponsored security apparatus.

The Israelis, Americans and others kept their own records, which may differ in their accounts of the same meetings. But the Palestinian documents were made and held confidentially, rather than for overt or public use, and significantly reveal large gaps between the private and stated positions of Palestinian and, in fewer cases, Israeli leaders.

The documents – almost all of which are in English, which was the language used by both sides in negotiations – were leaked over a period of months from several sources to Al Jazeera. The bulk of them have been independently authenticated for The Guardian by former participants in the talks and by diplomatic and intelligence sources.

The NSU – formally part of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) – is based in the West Bank town of Ramallah under the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat. It has drawn heavily on the expertise of Palestinian-American and other western-trained diaspora Palestinian lawyers for technical support in negotiations.

Al Jazeera has made the complete searchable database of the documents available on its new Transparency Unit site.

Karma Nabulsi writes:

It’s over. Given the shocking nature, extent and detail of these ghastly revelations from behind the closed doors of the Middle East peace process, the seemingly endless and ugly game is now, finally, over. Not one of the villains on the Palestinian side can survive it. With any luck the sheer horror of this account of how the US and Britain covertly facilitated and even implemented Israeli military expansion – while creating an oligarchy to manage it – might overcome the entrenched interests and venality that have kept the peace process going. A small group of men who have polluted the Palestinian public sphere with their private activities are now exposed.

For us Palestinians, these detailed accounts of the secretly negotiated surrender of every one of our core rights under international law (of return for millions of Palestinian refugees, on annexing Arab Jerusalem, on settlements) are not a surprise. It is something that we all knew – in spite of official protests to the contrary – because we feel their destructive effects every day. The same is true of the outrageous role of the US and Britain in creating a security bantustan, and the ruin of our civic and political space. We already knew, because we feel its fatal effects.

For the overwhelming majority of Palestinians, official Palestinian policy over these past decades has been the antithesis of a legitimate, or representative, or even coherent strategy to obtain our long-denied freedom. But this sober appreciation of our current state of affairs, accompanied by the mass protests and civil society campaigns by Palestinian citizens, has been insufficient, until now, to rid us of it.

The release into the public domain of these documents is such a landmark because it destroys the final traces of credibility of the peace process. Everything to do with it relied upon a single axiom: that each new initiative or set of negotiations with the Israelis, every policy or programme (even the creation of undemocratic institutions under military occupation), could be presented as carried out in good faith under harsh conditions: necessary for peace, and in the service of our national cause. Officials from all sides played a double game vis-à-vis the Palestinians. It is now on record that they have betrayed, lied and cheated us of basic rights, while simultaneously claiming they deserved the trust of the Palestinian people. [Continue reading…]

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Globalized kidnapping backed by the US

Christian Science Monitor reports:

They came for Ismail Abubakar at nightfall on Aug. 9, 2010, plucking him from an outdoor market near the mosque where he had just finished teaching young Kenyans how to read the Quran.

The plainclothes Kenyan police shoved him into a car, took away his cellphone, hooded him, and drove him to a nearby police camp. Within hours, Mr. Abubakar – nicknamed “Mzungu” because of his pink albino skin – would be transported to Uganda to face charges for the July 11 suicide bombings that killed 76 people in Kampala, Uganda’s capital.

Three months later, Abubakar and two dozen other bombing suspects were released for lack of evidence. But the story of his rendition, and the ongoing detention of nine other Kenyans for the bombing, highlights a troubling pattern of extra-judicial abduction and human rights abuses as Africa increases efforts, often at the request of US counterterrorism officials, to combat rising Islamic terrorism.

Abubakar says he was “shocked” when investigators told him that he was about to be charged in the Kampala blasts. “I had never been to the west side of Nairobi, let alone go to Uganda,” he said.

When he was released Nov. 30, Abubakar was penniless and feared being rearrested. Donations from Ugandan Muslims helped him get to the Kenyan border. A travel document from the Ugandan government that said he was no longer a terrorism suspect helped him get across. “I was detained for nothing,” he said.

While condemned by human rights activists and the European Parliament, and criticized by some US military officials as “counterproductive,” renditions are seen by at least 28 US allies as a necessary weapon in the battle against terrorism. Estimates of the number of renditions since the US-led war on terror began after 9/11 are educated guesses, but some human rights organizations put the number over 1,000, and the British human rights group Cageprisoners estimates that 88 men, women, and children have been subjected to extrajudicial transfers from Kenya as of 2007.

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The demand for dignity surpasses all others

There are those who want to portray the emerging trend of self-immolation across the Middle East as the expression of suicidal desperation. For instance, Adam Lankford, attempts to explain away the death of Mohamed Bouazizi — the man who triggered the Tunisian revolution — suggesting that:

By setting himself on fire near a government building during a period of political turmoil, Bouazizi must have anticipated that his act would be interpreted as a sign of political protest. And those who followed him were also no doubt aware of how their actions would be interpreted in this climate. However, it is relatively common for depressed and suicidal people to try to latch on to something bigger and more significant than themselves in their last moments on Earth — regardless of their primary agenda.

Subsequent deaths have been referred to as “copycats” — as though the most intensely solitary moment of anyone’s life would be shaped by thoughts of imitation.

Such observations are glib interpretations of death made by those who view it from a comfortably safe distance.

Michael Slackman recounts the story of an Egyptian man, Abdo Abdel-Moneim Hamadah, which is strikingly similar to that of Mohamed Bouazizi.

Mr. Hamadah had a small sandwich shop in Ismailia. The government bureaucracy suddenly denied him access to a monthly allowance of cheap, state-subsidized bread. After he set himself on fire, the government-controlled media said he was suicidal over that issue.

A relative said, however, that his protest was not about bread but dignity, the same intangible that drove Mr. Bouazizi to light himself on fire and that the governments here and around the region have yet to redress. The relative said Mr. Hamadah snapped after a government official agreed to give him back the bread, not because he was entitled to it, but as charity.

“They spoke to him like he was a beggar,” said the relative, who spoke anonymously for fear of government retribution. After Mr. Hamadah burned himself, the relative said, the government turned over the cheap bread.

“He got his rights,” the relative said. That, he said, was all Mr. Hamadah had been seeking.

In these acts of self immolation, individuals when stripped of every other power are asserting the one and only power they still possess: the power to end their own lives. Whether or not conceived as a revolutionary trigger, this is without question, a political action. It is a demand that the state not treat an individual life as worthless — a demand that such a life not be disregarded and treated with contempt.

The New York Times reports on the political shifts now evident in many quarters of the Middle East, through which ideology is being set aside in response to an even more urgent demand for the restoration of human dignity and liberation from oppression.

Egypt’s most powerful and proscribed opposition movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, has decided that it will not participate in an antigovernment demonstration this week for a curious reason: The protest conflicts with a national holiday honoring the police.

“We should all be celebrating together,” said Essam el-Erian, a senior member of the group, offering an explanation that seemed more in line with government thinking than that of an outlawed Islamist organization whose members are often jailed.

That type of calculation, intended to avoid a direct confrontation with the state, is helping build momentum, many here say, for a political evolution — in Egypt and around the region — where calls for change are less and less linked to a particular ideology like Islamism. Instead, analysts and activists say the forces that brought people to the streets in Tunisia and excited passions across the Middle East are far more fundamental and unifying: concrete demands to end government corruption, institute the rule of law and ease economic suffering.

This is a relatively nascent development in a society like Egypt, which has been depoliticized over the past three decades of President Hosni Mubarak’s one party, authoritarian rule, experts said. But the shift seems to be striking fear in the country’s leadership, which has successfully pacified opposition by oppressing those it cannot co-opt, but which remains anxious about the prospect of a popular revolt, political analysts and activists said.

“Ideology now has taken a back seat until we can get rid of this nightmare confronting everyone,” said Megahed Melligi, 43, a longtime member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt who said he quit the group three years ago out of frustration. “This nightmare is the ruling party and the current regime. This is everyone’s nightmare.”

In 1979, the Iranian revolution introduced the Muslim world to the force of political Islam, which frightened entrenched leaders, as well as the West. That ideology still has a powerful hold on people’s imaginations across the region, which continues to feed fighters to jihadist movements. But like Arabism and socialism before it, the political Islam of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran and the radicalized ideology of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden have failed to deliver in practical ways for the millions of people across the Middle East who live in bastions of autocratic rule.

That failure — and now the unexpected success of Tunisians in bringing down their government — appears to be at the heart of a political recalculation among some about how best to effect change in the Arab world. The Tunisians were joined together by anger at oppression and corruption rather than any overarching philosophy.

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America’s treatment of detainees

Glenn Greenwald writes:

Amnesty International has written a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates objecting to the conditions of Bradley Manning’s detention, which was first reported here. The group denounces the oppressive conditions under which Manning is being held as “unnecessarily harsh and punitive,” and further states they “appear to breach the USA’s obligations under international standards and treaties, including Article 10 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” The letter describes Manning’s treatment as particularly egregious “in view of the fact that he has no history of violence or disciplinary infractions and that he is a pre-trial detainee not yet convicted of any offence.” Moreover:

The harsh conditions imposed on PFC Manning also undermine the principle of the presumption of innocence, which should be taken into account in the treatment of any person under arrest or awaiting trial. We are concerned that the effects of isolation and prolonged cellular confinement . . . may, further, undermine his ability to assist in his defence and thus his right to a fair trial.

The letter follows a report from Manning’s lawyer, former Lt. Col. David Coombs, that the conditions of his detention temporarily worsened in the past week, prompting a formal complaint under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. [Continue reading…]

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The National Security State of America

An American teenager, forced into temporary exile and then tortured in Kuwait– almost certainly with the knowledge of the Obama administration — has been freed.

A Northern Virginia teen who had been barred from flying home from Kuwait landed in Washington on Friday morning, four weeks after being detained, allegedly beaten by Kuwait authorities and questioned by FBI agents about possible terrorist connections.

Gulet Mohamed, dressed in a worn hooded sweat shirt and sweat pants, was embraced by his family after he arrived at Dulles International Airport, the end of an ordeal that he said had “made me stronger.”

The United States “is built upon fighting for your rights,” Mohamed, 19, said in an interview.

Civil liberties groups charge that his case is the latest episode in which the U.S. government has temporarily exiled U.S. citizens or legal residents so they can be questioned about possible terrorist links without legal counsel.

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the U.S. government on behalf of 17 citizens or legal residents who were not allowed to board flights to, from or within the United States, presumably because, like Mohamed, they were on the government’s no-fly list. Of those stranded overseas, all were eventually told they could return, often after they agreed to speak to the FBI. None was arrested upon their return.

The ACLU suit, filed in Portland, Ore., alleges that Americans placed on the no-fly list are denied due process because there is no effective way to challenge their inclusion. The government does not acknowledge that any particular individual is on the no-fly list or its other watch lists. Nor will it reveal the exact criteria it uses to place people on its list.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports:

The drone technology that has revolutionized warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is entering the national airspace: Unmanned aircraft are patrolling the border with Mexico, searching for missing persons over difficult terrain, flying into hurricanes to collect weather data, photographing traffic accident scenes and tracking the spread of forest fires.

But the operation outside Austin [described at the beginning of this report] presaged what could prove to be one of the most far-reaching and potentially controversial uses of drones: as a new and relatively cheap surveillance tool in domestic law enforcement.

For now, the use of drones for high-risk operations is exceedingly rare. The Federal Aviation Administration – which controls the national airspace – requires the few police departments with drones to seek emergency authorization if they want to deploy one in an actual operation. Because of concerns about safety, it only occasionally grants permission.

But by 2013, the FAA expects to have formulated new rules that would allow police across the country to routinely fly lightweight, unarmed drones up to 400 feet above the ground – high enough for them to be largely invisible eyes in the sky.

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Why the FBI wants you to join Facebook

Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side Of Internet Freedom, interviewed by RFE/RL:

RFE/RL: One of your chapters is called “Why The KGB Wants You To Join Facebook.” Why does the KGB want us to join Facebook?

Evgeny Morozov: Part of the argument I’m making in the book is that authoritarian governments have immensely benefited from the web, and I point to three features. One of them is propaganda; one of them is new ways of censorship; and one of them is increased surveillance, more sophisticated surveillance.

The reason why the KGB wants you to join Facebook is because it allows them to, first of all, learn more about you from afar. I mean, they don’t have to come and interrogate you, and obviously you disclose quite a bit. It allows them to identify certain social graphs and social connections between activists. Many of these relationships are now self-disclosed by activists, by joining various groups. You can actually go and see which causes are more popular than others.

But also, it is possible to start identifying trends on the macro level. You can actually go and, using data posted to social-media sites (not just Facebook — I’m talking here more broadly about blogs and about tweets), you can actually start identifying which way social sentiment in a country is going. And that way you may get ahead of real developments.

If the Tunisian government had a sophisticated system of data-mining and analyzing everything that is happening in the country on social media, I bet they would have been much better prepared for what followed. Much of that outrage has been growing on Facebook early on and it was possible to go and check how angry people really were.

And I think many of these tools have already been developed by Western companies mostly, to do brand analysis. So there are a lot of interesting tools already to track consumer sentiment toward goods, and they can very easily be redeployed to study political sentiment. So this is one of the things which I think drives interest from governments in social media.

And not just authoritarian countries, but in the West as well. We have something called In-Q-Tel, which is the venture fund of the CIA, which has been investing in such social-media tracking and monitoring tools for several years now. It is definitely something that is attractive to all governments — not just authoritarian ones.

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A president with no principles

Maybe Barack Obama thinks of himself as some kind of Taoist president — attuned to the moment, like water that effortlessly flows around rocks, the warrior who can deflect every blow through the power of non-resistance.

Before he entered office, he exhibited a certain kind of poise that allowed some of us to indulge in fantasies about how radically different he might be from his predecessor.

An abundance of possibility was wrapped in an equal amount of mystery, but once he assumed office we’d all get to find out who Obama really is — except, two years later it sometimes seems harder to determine what, if anything, this president stands for than it was when he was a candidate.

Midway through his first term, some observers will say it’s too early to make judgments about the man, but if we can’t judge him now, what’s the basis on which to judge whether he’s worth voting for again? The next two years during which most of his actions will have been tailored to enhance his re-electability?

When it comes to determining what Obama stands for, I’d say the absence of evidence is already evidence of absence. We don’t know what Obama stands for because he doesn’t stand for anything — which is precisely why some of his wild-eyed enemies see him as some kind of Manchurian candidate.

That suspicion no longer seems so far off the mark. There is plenty of evidence that he has allowed himself to become an instrument of external forces — those forces simply aren’t as exotic as the ones the conspiracy theorists imagined.

Jacob Bronsther writes:

Quick quiz: In one sentence, describe FDR’s political philosophy. Good, now summarize Reaganism. Pretty easy, right?

OK, do the same for President Obama. Still thinking? Don’t worry, Mr. Obama is, too. And that’s bad news for all of us. Because no matter how you feel about Obama, his lack of clear philosophical values is not only a political problem for Democrats but a moral problem for America.

It didn’t start like this. Obama surfed into the White House on a wave of seeming principle: change, bipartisanship, reason, deliberation, pragmatism. What we didn’t realize is that all these concepts are methodological. They concern the process of forming public policy. But they are not bedrock principles upon which we can orient the ends of government.

They are so general that they provide little analytical or moral traction. Who objects to deliberation and evidence-based policy? Well, maybe George W. Bush, which is why Obama’s “change” narrative worked so well in the election. But since his inauguration, Obama’s methodological political theory has proved thin and sometimes incoherent. He will never support tax cuts for the rich, until he will. He criticizes Bush’s expansive view of presidential war powers, then adopts it. The list goes on.

It’s not that he breaks his policy promises more than other politicians. It’s not that he seeks compromise – a virtue. It’s not even that his policies are wrongheaded. It’s the fact that when he compromises, when he reaches policy conclusions, there’s no sense that it derives from anything other than ad hoc balancing.

There is no well of enduring principle upon which he seems to draw. Even if he’s a pragmatist, eschewing universal principles in favor of context-specific values and concerns, we still don’t know what those temporal values and concerns are, or why he believes in them. So far he’s the piecemeal president.

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Britain’s humiliation in Palestine

In The Observer, Rachel Cooke writes:

In 1999, shortly after his film about the British peace-keeping force in Bosnia, Warriors, was screened by the BBC, Peter Kosminsky received a letter. It was from an old soldier, who had found Warriors moving, and wanted to thank its director. At the end of the letter, though, was a line – thrown out more in hope than expectation – that caught Kosminsky’s eye. “You should do a film about the British soldiers who were in Palestine,” it said. “No one remembers us.”

As psychological bullets go, this one was well aimed. Kosminsky is nothing if not in the business of remembering. The kind of things that governments like to forget are his stock in trade. Down the years, he has made films on a variety of uncomfortable subjects, from the activities of the police in Northern Ireland (Shoot to Kill) and New Labour control-freakery (The Project), to British-born Muslim suicide bombers (Britz) and the suicide of Dr David Kelly (The Government Inspector), each one trailing controversy – if not always a sudden bout of recovered memory on the part of the establishment – in its wake. The soldier’s letter was duly passed to Kosminsky’s researchers, who began interviewing veterans.

Between 1945 and 1948, some 100,000 soldiers served in the British-controlled Mandate of Palestine. Kosminsky’s team spoke to around 80; he found the men’s stories to be both gripping and moving, so he carried on, wading next through letters, diaries, memoirs and history books. Slowly, a theme began to emerge. “The thing that came out most strongly,” he says, “was that the men all arrived in Palestine feeling incredibly pro-Jewish. A few of them had helped to liberate the [concentration] camps, so they had seen what had happened [to the Jews] with their own eyes. And everyone had heard the stories and seen the newsreels.

“When Jewish refugees arrived in Palestine off the boats, and were caged and beaten by British forces [the British placed strict limitations on Jewish immigration to Palestine], many soldiers didn’t like it all. They knew what these people had been through. Over time, though, the soldiers’ attitudes changed. Some of this was just the usual British support for the underdog; there’s no question that by 1948 [when Israel declared itself an independent state] the Arabs were perceived as that. But also, if you’re being attacked on a daily basis [by the Jewish resistance], if you’re under constant threat of kidnap, if you’re confined to barracks behind a lot of razor wire, your feelings are bound to change.”

Kosminsky’s first idea was to make a drama about a British soldier who would exemplify this shift. “I suppose it started out as standard Kosminsky fare, which was pointing the finger at Britain. First of all, these men don’t have a memorial; they’re forgotten. It’s only recently that they were allowed to march to the Cenotaph. When they came back to Britain, no one wanted to know; pulling out of Palestine was a terrible humiliation, a total defeat. Second, we were the colonial power in Palestine and, as in so many other examples of our retreat from Empire, we left it totally fucked up. Chaos. We washed our hands of it. I wanted to say: if you think the Israeli-Palestinian situation is not our problem, think again. We were there, we left, and 60 years later, it is still a problem.”

The trouble was, something else kept nagging away at him. “The more I read their stories, the more I began to be struck by some odd parallels,” he says. “For instance, if there’s a suicide bombing in Israel, usually the Israeli Defence Force immediately goes [to the West Bank or Gaza] and blows up the house of the bomber. I’d always assumed this tactic had been invented in the modern era. But in the veterans’ interviews, they described doing exactly the same thing. When a member of Etzel [the Israeli name for Irgun, the Zionist paramilitary group that operated in the Mandate of Palestine from 1931 until 1948] or Lehi [better known as the Stern Gang, another militant Zionist group] attacked them, the British would find the family home and dynamite it.”

On the other side stood the Irgun, as ruthless as any 21st-century terrorist organisation. When the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which served as the British Mandatory authorities’ headquarters, was bombed in July 1946, 91 people died, many of them civilians. “They were extremely effective. You only have to compare the attack on the King David to something like the Brighton Bomb [in which the IRA killed five people] to see that. There’s a moving memoir by the colonial secretary, who survived. He spent a week attending the funerals of his friends, became unhinged and had to be invalided out. He lost his reason.”

Somewhere along the line, Kosminsky decided that his film would need to tell two stories: one set in the Mandate of Palestine, the other in Israel, 2011.

Eleven years later and the result of all this research and ambition is shortly to be screened on Channel 4. Was it worth it? I think it would have been worth it if it had taken him twice as long. The Promise, which will be screened in four parts, and runs to some seven and a half hours, is the best thing you are likely to see on television this year, if not this decade. It is not only that it is so exciting, moving, and full of exquisite performances; it’s also that the extraordinary detail and thoughtfulness of it – the sheer scale of the canvas on which its director works – subtly imparts so many emotional and factual truths that you feel your own allegiances, whatever they may be, suddenly shifting uneasily, sometimes on a minute-by-minute basis. Revelatory is an overused word, but The Promise is exactly that: the power of its storytelling will open eyes more effectively than any leaked document, any piece of rhetoric, any news bulletin.

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The rise of the new plutocracy

At the Atlantic, Chrystia Freeland writes:

If you happened to be watching NBC on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, you would have seen something curious. There, on the set of Meet the Press, the host, David Gregory, was interviewing a guest who made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become “very distorted.” In the wake of the recession, this guest explained, high-income individuals, large banks, and major corporations had experienced a “significant recovery”; the rest of the economy, by contrast—including small businesses and “a very significant amount of the labor force”—was stuck and still struggling. What we were seeing, he argued, was not a single economy at all, but rather “fundamentally two separate types of economy,” increasingly distinct and divergent.

This diagnosis, though alarming, was hardly unique: drawing attention to the divide between the wealthy and everyone else has long been standard fare on the left. (The idea of “two Americas” was a central theme of John Edwards’s 2004 and 2008 presidential runs.) What made the argument striking in this instance was that it was being offered by none other than the former five-term Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: iconic libertarian, preeminent defender of the free market, and (at least until recently) the nation’s foremost devotee of Ayn Rand. When the high priest of capitalism himself is declaring the growth in economic inequality a national crisis, something has gone very, very wrong.

This widening gap between the rich and non-rich has been evident for years. In a 2005 report to investors, for instance, three analysts at Citigroup advised that “the World is dividing into two blocs—the Plutonomy and the rest”:

In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.

Before the recession, it was relatively easy to ignore this concentration of wealth among an elite few. The wondrous inventions of the modern economy—Google, Amazon, the iPhone—broadly improved the lives of middle-class consumers, even as they made a tiny subset of entrepreneurs hugely wealthy. And the less-wondrous inventions—particularly the explosion of subprime credit—helped mask the rise of income inequality for many of those whose earnings were stagnant.

But the financial crisis and its long, dismal aftermath have changed all that. A multibillion-dollar bailout and Wall Street’s swift, subsequent reinstatement of gargantuan bonuses have inspired a narrative of parasitic bankers and other elites rigging the game for their own benefit. And this, in turn, has led to wider—and not unreasonable—fears that we are living in not merely a plutonomy, but a plutocracy, in which the rich display outsize political influence, narrowly self-interested motives, and a casual indifference to anyone outside their own rarefied economic bubble.

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It’s nice to have Twitter, but it’s even nicer to have the army on your side

Noting that Tunisia did not just have a Twitter revolution, Doyle McManus writes:

Now that the dust has settled, it’s clearer that Tunisia’s upheaval, like all revolutions, arose from local circumstances that don’t foretell what will happen anywhere else. Ben Ali’s government was a family-run kleptocracy; the economy was stagnant; and most important, he had failed at a dictator’s first job: securing the loyalty of the armed forces. Next door, Algeria has corruption, unemployment and demonstrations too, but its armed forces are the core of its government and unlikely to switch sides. An old-fashioned lesson for revolutionaries: It’s nice to have Twitter, but it’s even nicer to have the army on your side.

The Economist makes a similar point:

There is another way in which Tunisia’s experience could prove subtly inspiring. “The one constant in revolutions is the primordial role played by the army,” said Jean Tulard, a French historian of revolutions, in an interview in Le Monde. So far Tunisia’s army, kept small to forestall coup attempts, has won kudos for holding the fort, and not playing politics. Yet it is the army which is believed to have persuaded Mr Ben Ali to leave. Perhaps a few generals elsewhere in the Arab world are thinking that they, too, might better serve their countries by doing something similar.

Meanwhile, in Tunisia, some of the police are switching sides.

Al Jazeera reports:

Thousands of demonstrators, including police officers, lawyers and students, have taken to the streets of Tunisia’s capital in another day of upheaval in the North African country.

While many protesters are continuing to demand the dissolution of the interim government, police officers who have also joined the protests are seeking better working conditions and an improvement to what they call unfair media portrayal.

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Turkey’s dynamic role in the Middle East

James Traub writes:

In the fall of 2009, relations between Serbia and Bosnia — never easy since the savage civil war of the 1990s — were slipping toward outright hostility. Western mediation efforts had failed. Ahmet Davutoglu, the foreign minister of Turkey, offered to step in. It was a complicated role for Turkey, not least because Bosnia is, like Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country and Serbia is an Orthodox Christian nation with which Turkey had long been at odds. But Davutoglu had shaped Turkey’s ambitious foreign policy according to a principle he called “zero problems toward neighbors.” Neither Serbia nor Bosnia actually shares a border with Turkey. Davutoglu, however, defined his neighborhood expansively, as the vast space of former Ottoman dominion. “In six months,” Davutoglu told me in one of a series of conversations this past fall, “I visited Belgrade five times, Sarajevo maybe seven times.” He helped negotiate names of acceptable diplomats and the language of a Serbian apology for the atrocities in Srebrenica. Bosnia agreed, finally, to name an ambassador to Serbia. To seal the deal, as Davutoglu tells the tale, he met late one night at the Sarajevo airport with the Bosnian leader Haris Silajdzic. The Bosnian smoked furiously. Davutoglu, a pious Muslim, doesn’t smoke — but he made an exception: “I smoked; he smoked.” Silajdzic accepted the Serbian apology. Crisis averted. Davutoglu calls this diplomatic style “smoking like a Bosnian.”

Davutoglu (pronounced dah-woot-OH-loo) has many stories like this, involving Iraq, Syria, Israel, Lebanon and Kyrgyzstan — and most of them appear to be true. (A State Department official confirmed the outlines of the Balkan narrative.) He is an extraordinary figure: brilliant, indefatigable, self-aggrandizing, always the hero of his own narratives. In the recent batch of State Department cables disclosed by WikiLeaks, one scholar was quoted as anointing the foreign minister “Turkey’s Kissinger,” while in 2004 a secondhand source was quoted as calling him “exceptionally dangerous.” But his abilities, and his worldview, matter because of the country whose diplomacy he drives: an Islamic democracy, a developing nation with a booming economy, a member of NATO with one foot in Europe and the other in Asia. Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is a canny, forward-thinking populist who has drastically altered Turkish politics. Erdogan and Davutoglu share a grand vision: a renascent Turkey, expanding to fill a bygone Ottoman imperial space.

In as much as this New York Times Magazine article is filled with interesting anecdotes, it presents a useful portrait of Davutoglu. At the same time, it is peppered with insinuations and overt claims that Davutoglu and the government he represents have over-sized ambitions which implicitly infringe on America’s “right” to impose its power.

This image of the Turks as upstarts is epitomized in a statement from one of Traub’s sources. Noting the opposition Turkey faces in Washington, Traub writes:

The truth is that for all his profound knowledge of the history of civilizations, Davutoglu misread the depth of feeling in the U.S. about both Israel and Iran, or perhaps overestimated Turkey’s importance. This is the danger of postimperial grandiosity. “They talk as if they expect a merger between Turkey and the E.U.,” says Hugh Pope, head of the Turkish office of the International Crisis Group. “They think they’re more important than Israel.”

Turkey — a country with a population close to 80 million; 17th largest economy in the world; located at a strategic hub between three continents that could reasonably be called the center of the world; a bridge between the West and the Islamic world — and they have the audacity to imagine they are more important than a country smaller than New Jersey that throughout its existence has been a center and source of strife?! How dare the Turks!

Traub’s account is at its worst when he deals with the Mavi Marmara massacre — an event he clearly didn’t take the trouble to research with any care. “The flotilla refused Israel’s demands to alter course, and a helicopter-borne commando assault on the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship, turned deadly, with eight Turkish citizens and one American killed.” In fact, it had altered course, was heading west and was in international waters. But such details would obscure the intended narrative that the flotilla was in some sense a Turkish act of provocation and Israel’s response unavoidable.

Traub notes:

One of Davutoglu’s greatest diplomatic achievements was the creation of a visa-free zone linking Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, thus reconstituting part of the old Ottoman space. The four countries have agreed to move toward free trade, as well as free passage, among themselves. As part of the zero-problems policy, Turkey moved to resolve longstanding tensions with Cyprus and Armenia and, more successfully, with Greece and Syria. Turkey’s decades of suppression of Kurdish demands for autonomy put it at odds with the new government of Iraqi Kurdistan, which sheltered Kurdish resistance fighters. But the Erdo­gan government reached out to Kurdistan, America’s strongest ally in the region. Relations with the Bush administration had been rocky since 2003, when Turkey’s Parliament voted against permitting U.S. forces to enter Iraq through southeastern Turkey. But by now the U.S. was eager to use Turkey as a force for regional stability. The rapprochement with Kurdistan thus smoothed relations with Washington and made Turkey a major player in Iraqi affairs. Turkish firms gained a dominant position not only in Kurdistan but also, increasingly, throughout Iraq. And Iraqi Kurdish leaders had cracked down on the rebels. It was a diplomatic trifecta.

But Davutoglu’s vision extended far beyond securing the neighborhood for Turkish commerce. One of his pet theories is that the United States needs Turkey as a sensitive instrument in remote places. “The United States,” he says, in his declamatory way, “is the only global power in the history of humanity which emerged far away from the mainland of humanity,” which Davutoglu calls Afro-Eurasia. The United States has the advantage of security and the disadvantage of “discontinuity,” in regard to geography as well as history, because America has no deep historic relationship to the Middle East or Asia. In Davutoglu’s terms, the U.S. has no strategic depth; Turkey has much. “A global power like this, a regional power like that have an excellent partnership,” Davutoglu concludes with a flourish.

Davutoglu’s point about the effects of America’s geographic isolation is well made, though it clearly doesn’t impress Traub.

Perhaps it would have been helpful if the reporter had made some attempt to contextualize the Turkish foreign minister’s initiatives by contrasting them with the diplomatic successes of the US in the Middle East over the last decade, or the vision that animates the work of the current US Secretary of State.

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Lebanon Druze leader Walid Jumblatt sides with Hezbollah in crisis

The Los Angeles Times reports:

The U.S.-backed parliamentary coalition led by caretaker Prime Minister Saad Hariri was on the verge of losing its tenuous grip on the Lebanese government after a key politician defected Friday to support the Shiite militant group Hezbollah.

The decision by Walid Jumblatt, a Druze chieftain and longtime player amid Lebanon’s fractious parties, to back Hezbollah, which is supported by Syria, highlighted the dangerous regional maneuverings across the troubled Lebanese political scene. The move was a blow to Washington, which had worked with Hariri until his 14-month-old unity government collapsed this month.

“The party will stand firm in support of Syria and the resistance,” Jumblatt, head of the Progressive Socialist Party, said at a news conference in Beirut. He did not, however, reveal how many of the 11 members of parliament with his party would side with him. But Jumblatt’s support is crucial for any party jockeying to form a government.

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Algeria’s midwinter uproar

Jack Brown writes:

Soon after the onset of protests which eventually toppled Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, a wave of riots swept through Algeria as well, with many neighborhoods in the capital of Algiers and dozens of smaller cities overwhelmed by thousands of angry young men who closed down streets with burning tires, attacked police stations with rocks and paving stones, and set fire to public buildings. For Algerians a few years older than the rioters, these events recalled the uprising of October 1988, in which violent unrest upended the single-party state.

The disturbances of January 2011 were sparked by a sudden increase in commodity food prices, local journalists maintained, although much of the international press also linked them to a domino effect emanating from neighboring Tunisia. Both of these accounts are strikingly incomplete, however: Food price spikes were certainly one immediate cause of the Algerian unrest, but they were not the underlying reason that crowds of youths spontaneously decided to set upon policemen and other symbols of the state. Likewise, the theory of Tunisian contagion, while it may capture another contributing factor, ignores the national economic and political specificities that both triggered the Algerian rioting and determined its eventual course.

In Algeria, in contrast to (formerly) famously quiet Tunisia, rioting is anything but unprecedented. Local street violence is almost a regular occurrence, and appears to have become a primary means for the country’s deprived to express discontent with a state that otherwise would pay them little attention. In some cases, groups of disenfranchised Algerians show notable self-awareness about the role of rioting, warning about the possibility of turmoil and even calling press conferences to discuss plans to raise a ruckus in the streets if certain demands are not met. Despite the unusual salience of urban unrest in Algerian politics, the midwinter riots fizzled out without really shaking the state. A more detailed comparison with Tunisia’s protests is useful for understanding why.

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Protests in Jordan

Brian Whitaker writes:

The “Tunisia effect” continues. Several thousand protesters took to the streets of Jordan yesterday, for the second Friday in succession. More than 5,000 marched in the centre of Amman, with smaller demonstrations in several other cities, according to agency reports. The protesters are said to have ranged across the spectrum, from leftists and trade unionists to Islamists.

As in the earlier stages of the Tunisian uprising, the mobilising factor is economic hardship, though there are also calls for the prime minister and government to resign.

Yesterday’s Jordan Times reported that the government is to “reset” its spending priorities to address rising living costs, with pay rises for government employees and increased susbsidies on some goods. However, this can really be no more than a temporary palliative and the protesters seem to recognise that.

Trade unionist Maisarah Malas told AFP: “These measures are designed to drug people, nothing more. We need comprehensive reforms.”

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Al Jazeera owned the Tunisia story

Reuters reports:

As events unfolded in Tunisia, a country where Al Jazeera’s bureau had been closed, the channel again innovated among Arab broadcasters by using mobile phone footage and social media.

It no longer has a news monopoly in the Arabic satellite TV space. And some viewers say it treads a fine line between reporting and taking sides. But they stay glued regardless.

“Al-Jazeera is like a media brigade,” said Jordanian Maisara Malass, an opposition activist. “By its coverage of events it has helped far more than any other outlet such as Facebook to spread the revolution from one city to the other.”

From its very early days, Al Jazeera stunned the Arab world with heated debates and tough questioning of Arab officials, until then virtually unheard of. It won broad international attention, and U.S. grumbles, with its 2003 Iraq war coverage.

Tunisia may prove another defining moment. Al Jazeera was swifter than most to grasp the enormity of the protests that delivered what many Arabs thought impossible — an Arab autocrat hurled out of office by ordinary people.

“This marks the maturity of Jazeera television as a political force that can play a role in changing political orders,” Beirut-based analyst Rami Khouri wrote, saying that the channel’s avid viewers “may want to launch their own protests.”

When Tunisia’s Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire because police seized his vegetable cart, an act that spurred the protests, Al Jazeera was one of the first outlets to broadcast pictures of his self-immolation.

“Al Jazeera’s strength has been that it ‘owned’ the Tunisia story,” said Firas Al-Atraqchi, a former senior editor for an Al Jazeera website and now at the American University in Cairo (AUC). “Others had to catch up and try and ride its coat-tails.”

The channel relied on mobile footage for 60 percent of its material to circumvent an official media blackout, a channel executive said. To some, that made it seem part of the revolt or that it was siding with protesting Tunisians.

“Al Jazeera was like one of those protesting in the streets of Tunis and made people live with the events,” said Zeid Abu Oudeh, founder of Jordan Days, a Jordanian website and blog styled after YouTube.

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Islamists and the democratization of the Middle East

Olivier Roy notes that there was no visible Islamist dimension to the uprising in Tunisia.

Instead, the protesters were calling for freedom, democracy and multi-party elections. Put more simply, they just wanted to get rid of the kleptocratic ruling family.

At the end, when the real “Islamist” leaders returned from exile in the West (yes they were in the West, not in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia), they, like Rached Ghannouchi, spoke of elections, coalition government and stability, all the while keeping a low profile.

Have the Islamists disappeared?

No. But in North Africa, at least, most of them have become democrats. True, fringe groups have followed the path of a nomadic global jihad and are roaming the Sahel in search of hostages, but they have no real support in the population. That is why they went to the desert.

Nevertheless, these highway robbers are still branded as a strategic threat by Western governments at a loss to design a long-term policy. Other Islamists have just given up politics and closed their door, pursuing a pious, conservative, but apolitical way of life. They put a burqa on their lives as well as on their wives.

But the bulk of the former Islamists have come to the same conclusion of the generation that founded the Justice and Development Party in Turkey: There is no third way between democracy and dictatorship. There is just dictatorship and democracy.

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