Category Archives: Middle East

The Sunni-Shia wars

Patrick Cockburn writes: In three of the Arab countries east of Egypt – Syria, Bahrain and Yemen – protesters have challenged their governments over the past year but failed to overthrow them. The reasons for those failures are very different though they have important points in common. In each of these states protesters were frustrated because a significant part of the population had a lot to lose if the ruling elite were reformed or overthrown.

In Syria and Bahrain religious identity helps explain loyalty to the powers-that-be. Protesters in Bahrain might insist that their program was secular and democratic, but everybody knew that a fair poll would affect revolutionary change by putting the majority Shia in power instead of the minority Sunni. In Syria, similarly, democracy means that the Sunni, three quarters of the population, would effectively replace the Alawites, a heterodox Shia sect, as rulers of the state.

This does not mean that the demonstrators in both countries had a secret sectarian agenda. It was simply that political divisions already ran along sectarian lines. In Bahrain the security forces were almost entirely Sunni. As the year went on sectarian hatreds became starker.

At the height of the repression, the government demolished Shia mosques claiming it had suddenly discovered they did not have planning permission. Unlike Tunisia and Egypt, the sectarian homogeneity of the ruling elite in Syria and Bahrain made it impossible for senior state officials to dump an unpopular regime in order to maintain their own power and privileges. In Syria the Alawites came to believe that if President Bashar al-Assad lost so would they.

The Shia and Sunni split has other serious implications. The struggle between these two Islamic traditions, so similar to the battle between Roman Catholics and Protestants in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, has been escalating since the Iranian revolution of 1979. The Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 and Shia-Sunni civil war in Iraq in 2006-7 deepened the hatred between the two sects. Of course it was always much in the interests of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Assad clan in Syria and the al-Khalifa dynasty in Bahrain to play the sectarian card and demand communal solidarity from their co-religionists. As far back as 1991 I remember Saddam Hussein bringing the mutilated bodies of Baathist officials back from Najaf, where they had been lynched by Shia insurgents, and the terror expressed by Sunni friends in Baghdad, previously opposed to the regime, that the same fate awaited them if Saddam was toppled.

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Don’t stop at Iraq: Why the U.S. should withdraw from the entire Persian Gulf

Toby C. Jones writes: The U.S. is finally drawing down its military presence from Iraq, but why stop there? Why not reduce or outright remove our military presence from the entire Persian Gulf? The U.S. has been waging war in the Gulf for more than two and a half decades, since it took up arms against in Iran in the closing stages of the Iran-Iraq war. The human and environmental costs have been catastrophic. The presumptive gains of what has amounted to one long war have proven elusive at best. More often that not, the justifications for war have been either ill-conceived or manufactured. The Persian Gulf today is hardly stable or secure. But permanent war, and our militarization of the Gulf, isn’t so much a reflection of regional instability as it is the cause.

Today, it’s still not clear what the United States’ strategic priorities are in the Gulf. Are we there to secure access to oil? Protect friendly regimes from unfriendly ones? American policymaking is muddled, a combination of concern about energy security, Iranian aggression, and terrorism. This uncertainty is perilous. And the reality is that none of these challenges really require a significant military presence. Indeed, if recent history is any guide, a large military footprint in the Gulf will generate more rather than less risk.

Historically, oil and “energy security” have been at the heart of American strategy in the Gulf. It is home to the richest oil and natural gas deposits on the planet. It was President Jimmy Carter who most clearly made protecting the flow of oil to global markets a national priority. Carter declared oil a “vital interest” and that any assault on it would “be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” Protecting oil meant protecting its producers. Indeed, much of the war-fighting of the last two decades has been rationalized as necessary to defend Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and their oil, from neighborhood threats. The economic logic that has underpinned all this is based mostly on an assumption that oil is a scarce resource, that there is a tight gap between supply and demand, that ensuring supply is essential to stabilize prices and to protect the global economy from potentially devastating disruptions.

None of that is really true. For most of the 20th century, oil companies and oil producing states regularly collaborated to regulate supply in order to limit competition and control prices. There never has been a global oil market. Instead, oil’s production and delivery has been managed by a small network of corporate and national energy elites, whose primary concern has been serving their own interests and maintaining their bottom line.

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Do the Middle East’s revolutions have a unifying ideology?

Marc Lynch writes: “Why does every nation on Earth move to change their conditions except for us? Why do we always submit to the batons of the rulers and their repression? How long will Arabs wait for foreign saviors?” That is how the inflammatory Al Jazeera talk-show host Faisal al-Qassem opened his program in December 2003. On another Al Jazeera program around that same time, Egyptian intellectuals Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Fahmy Howeidy debated whether it would take American intervention to force change in the Arab world. Almost exactly seven years later, Tunisians erupted in a revolution that spread across the entire region, finally answering Qassem’s challenge and proving that Arabs themselves could take control of their destiny.

Throughout this year of tumult, Arabs have debated the meaning of the great wave of popular mobilization that has swept their world as vigorously as have anxious foreigners. There is no single Arab idea about what has happened. To many young activists, it is a revolution that will not stop until it has swept away every remnant of the old order. To worried elites, it represents a protest movement to be met with limited economic and political reforms. Some see a great Islamic Awakening, while others argue for an emerging cosmopolitan, secular, democratic generation of engaged citizens. For prominent liberals such as Egypt’s Amr Hamzawy, these really have been revolutions for democracy. But whatever the ultimate goal, most would agree with Syrian intellectual Burhan Ghalyoun, who eloquently argued in March that the Arab world was witnessing “an awakening of the people who have been crushed by despotic regimes.”

In March, Egyptian writer Hassan Hanafi declared that the spread of the revolutions demonstrated finally that “Arab unity” — long a distant ideal in a region better known for its fragmentation and ideological bickering — “is an objective reality.” This unified narrative of change, and the rise of a new, popular pan-Arabism directed against regimes, is perhaps the greatest revelation of the uprisings. Not since the 1950s has a single slogan — back then Arab unity, today “The People Want to Overthrow the Regime” — been sounded so powerfully from North Africa to the Gulf. This identification with a shared fate feels natural to a generation that came of age watching satellite TV coverage of Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon over the previous decade. Al Jazeera, since its rise to prominence in the late 1990s, has unified the regional agenda through its explicitly Arabist coverage — and its embrace of raucous political debates on the most sensitive issues.

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Chas Freeman considers the global outlook for 2012

From a speech by Chas Freeman given in Macau, China, yesterday: Europe used to be boringly predictable, which was good for business. Now bits of it have reverted to being excitingly unreliable, which is bad. Repeated crises have addicted European leaders to summits, where they agree on partial solutions to problems and create new ones, then go home to think up still more ways to unnerve each other and investors. The year ahead seems certain to feature more summits and more Eurotorture of the world’s financial nervous system. The fiscal sobriety and punctiliousness of northern Europeans will not soon prevail over the bouzoukinomics and bunga bunga politics of Europe’s exuberantly irrational and overly indebted south.

More fundamentally, however, as a club of clubs, Europe has just shown itself to be much less than the sum of its far too many movable parts. In some of the clubs that make up Europe, members are seriously tired of each other as well as of the way responsibility is apportioned. The mismatch between the eurozone’s membership and that of the European Union, in particular, makes German creditworthiness, not the EU, central to the credibility of the euro. And there is an obvious contradiction between a bureaucratically administered supranational currency and the democratically exercised sovereign authority of Europe’s many nation-states.

As Greece has just demonstrated, the European project is seriously incomplete and vulnerable to disruption by reckless acts of political brinkmanship. In the absence of Europe-wide democracy, national democracy and multinational community-building no longer seem compatible. Decisions based on local interests, no matter how legitimately they are arrived at, can threaten both pan-European and global interests in market stability and economic revival. Sadly, in many ways, Europe remains more colloquium than commonwealth — more a confederation of small minds and big egos than a federal union of peoples. The incongruities and incompetencies of a still far-from-united Europe have become a problem not just for Europeans but for the world.

The destabilizing effects of financial uncertainty may now be Europe’s most notable export. But the United States seems determined to one-up the perversity of European indecisiveness. Europe has the will to act, but not the political machinery to act coherently. America has the mechanisms and the resources needed to make decisions and implement them. It lacks the wit, the will, and the spirit of political accommodation to do so. In effect, the United States now suffers from fiscal anorexia — economic self-starvation born of an obsession with curing the imagined obesity of government. But America’s civilian public sector is already too lean to sustain the nation’s socio-economic health and competitiveness. The United States is disinvesting in its human and physical infrastructure — consuming its sinews — at the very moment when it most needs to rebuild its strength. India may be the world’s largest functioning democracy but America is now seen everywhere as its largest dysfunctional one.

Ideological delusion, self-indulgence, arrogance, and unbridled greed got America — and the world economy — into their current mess. Devotion to fanciful concepts, despite their catastrophic results when actually applied, has undermined the credibility of the “full faith and credit” of the United States. Many Americans remain wedded to the bizarre notions that the redistributive functions of government are a net drag on the economy, that reducing government investment and outlays will somehow generate jobs, that financial engineering adds real value to the economy, and that unequal income distribution stimulates economic growth. In a less narcissistic political environment, people would laugh at the idea that cutting public spending — and thereby contracting the economy — could possibly create jobs and stimulate growth or that a “SuperCommittee” of the finest politicians that vested interests can keep in office could magically balance a budget that is 40 percent in the red solely by cutting non-defense expenditures, without raising revenues.

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Nuclear Israel revisited

Joseph Massad writes: How many times must this story be retold? It is common knowledge in the United States, in Europe, in the Arab World, indeed in the entire world. The international press has been reporting on it since the late 1960s. The historical details of the story are also well known. In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower gave Israel its first small nuclear reactor at Nahal Sorek; in 1964, the French built for Israel its much larger and major Dimona nuclear reactor in the Naqab (Negev) Desert; in 1965, Israel stole 200 pounds of weapons-grade uranium from the United States through its spies at the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation company in Pennsylvania; in 1968, Israel hijacked a Liberian ship in international waters and stole its 200-ton shipment of yellowcake. Israel has possessed nuclear bombs since the early 1970s. Despite official US denials, Golda Meir, the fourth prime minister of Israel, reportedly prepared to launch 13 nuclear bombs on Syria and Egypt in 1973 and was stopped short of committing this genocidal act when Henry Kissinger gave Israel the most massive weapons airlift in history at the time to reverse the course of the 1973 war (as Time Magazine reported the story). Israel has had an ongoing nuclear weapons collaboration with the South African Apartheid regime for decades, which only ended with the collapse of the regime in 1994.

Since then, experts have estimated that Israel has upwards of 400 nuclear devices, including thermonuclear weapons with megaton range, as well as neutron bombs, tactical nuclear weapons, and suitcase nukes. It also has the missile delivery systems to launch them with a reach of 11,500km (which can reach beyond Iran). Israel also has submarines that are capable of launching nuclear attacks as well as jet fighters that can deliver Israel’s nuclear cargo.

Israel has diligently prevented its neighbours from even acquiring nuclear reactors for peaceful purposes. It violated international law by bombing the Iraqi French-built Osirak nuclear reactor still under construction in 1981 in an unprovoked raid even though the reactor was going to be used, according to the French and Iraqi governments, for peaceful scientific purposes. Israel also bombed what intelligence reports allege was a North Korean nuclear reactor under construction in Syria in 2007. Israel’s Mossad has also been linked to the assassination of numerous Egyptian, Iraqi, and Iranian nuclear scientists over the decades. Israel continues to refuse to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and refuses to allow members of the International Atomic Energy Commission to inspect its Dimona reactor.

Israel, a predatory and aggressive country that has consistently launched wars on all its neighbours since its establishment, expelled hundreds of thousands of people, created millions of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Egyptian refugees, murdered tens of thousands of civilians and used internationally-banned weapons (from napalm to phosphorous bombs, to name the most notorious cases), continues to occupy the Palestinian territories and the Palestinian people in violation of international law, is governed by a foundational anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist state ideology to which all its leaders, governing structures, and institutions adhere, as does its popular and political culture and a variety of its laws. Indeed, Israel not only consistently launches wars against its neighbours but also urges world powers to invade these neighbours as well, and in the meanwhile sponsors anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist campaigns of hatred in the United States and across Europe in addition to integrating such racism in its school and university curricula and much of its cultural production.

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Can the West stop worrying and learn to love the Islamists?

Tony Karon writes: Tunisia’s election and Libya’s celebration of the overthrow of Col. Muammar Gaddafi won’t have made for a happy weekend among those fevered heads in Washington who believe the West is locked in an existential struggle with political Islam: If anything, the Islamist tones of the Libyan celebrations, coupled with the Islamist victory in the Tunisian polls will have evoked the collapsing dominoes of Vietnam-era anti-communist metaphor.

“We are an Islamic country,” said Mustafa Abdel Jalili, leader of Libya’s Western-backed Transitional National Council in his speech proclaiming his country’s liberation on Saturday. “We take the Islamic religion as the core of our new government. The constitution will be based on our Islamic religion.” As Jalili spoke of lifting a Gaddafi era ban on polygamy and called for an Islamic banking system (which bans charging interest on loans), he was greeted by thunderous chants of “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”). The character of Libya’s rebellion, at least among those doing the fighting rather than those doing the talking to Western governments, has been far more Islamist than its NATO backers may care to admit. Indeed, conspicuously absent from Jalili’s Benghazi liberation speech was Mahmoud Jibril, the Western-backed interim prime minister forced out at the behest of Islamist and regional militias, who accused him of trying to sideline them.

Jalili’s comments underscore the likelihood that a post-Gaddafi Libya will have a strongly Islamic character. Having emerged from a 42-year secular dictatorship, the smart money says that some version of political Islam will likely trounce any liberal rivals in the race to represent a national vision when a country riven by tribal and regional rivalries goes to the polls eight months from now.

In Tunisia, meanwhile, where some 90% of voters turned out to vote in the Arab rebellion’s first democratic poll, the only question remains whether the Islamist Ennahda party wins an outright majority, or must settle for a plurality of the vote that will requires it to lead a coalition government. Opposition parties had conceded on Monday, even before the count was completed, it was clear that Ennahda had won by far the largest share. The party’s leaders made clear, however, that they intended to seek a coalition.

There’s good reason to suspect that Tunisia’s electoral outcome will be repeated in an Egyptian poll: The main political contest there may turn out to be the one between the Muslim Brotherhood and its more radical Salafist challengers than between the Brotherhood and the secular liberals.

There’s no inherent contradiction between Islam and democracy — the range of political parties in the Muslim world claiming to be guided by Islamic values ranges from Turkey’s moderate, modernizing AK Party to the radical fundamentalist Salafis. Post-Saddam Iraq has been ruled by coalitions led by Shi’ite Islamist parties since its first election in 2005.

Democratically elected governments in the Arab world — most of which are likely to include a strong Islamist component, particularly when emerging from years of secular dictatorship — are highly unlikely to follow U.S. policy on Israel or Iran, but that doesn’t preclude them establishing pragmatic, cooperative relationships with the West. And if Washington’s yardstick for judging Arab political outcomes was the extent of support they yield for its own positions on Israel and Iraq, the U.S. would have to rely exclusively on dictators and monarchs.

Jonathan Steele writes: Having launched what became known as the Arab spring, Tunisia has now led the region by holding a clean election with an enthusiastic turnout and highly encouraging results. The three parties that have come out on top in the most democratic of north African states have no links with the capital city’s upper middle class or those sections of the business community that benefited from the ousted Ben Ali dictatorship. They both have a tradition of struggling for democratic values.

As in post-Mubarak Egypt, there was reason to fear that the old regime would re-emerge in Tunisia with new faces, but this now seems unlikely. The party that has emerged from the poll most strongly is An-Nahda (Renaissance), which suffered massive repression under Ben Ali and has won great respect for its sacrifices. This party of modern democratic Islam campaigned hard on the two issues that concern most Tunisians: corruption and unemployment, particularly youth unemployment.

While several smaller secular parties tried to manipulate Islamophobia – a relatively easy card to play given the official state-controlled media’s demonisation of the Islamists over several decades – their efforts have failed. Voters had their first chance to listen to An-Nahda’s candidates and they were not put off by what they heard. An-Nahda made special efforts to show that it wanted an inclusive government of national unity and would respect all points of view. It also reached out to voters in the more impoverished interior, making it clear it would not be just a party of the Mediterranean coast as Ben Ali’s regime had been.

The Associated Press reports: A moderate, once-banned Islamist party in Tunisia was on track Tuesday to win the largest number of seats in the first elections prompted by the Arab Spring uprisings, according to partial results.

The Tunisian electoral commission said the Ennahda party has won 15 out of 39 domestic seats so far in a 217-member assembly meant to write a new constitution. Together with the results announced Monday from Tunisians living abroad, Ennahda now has 24 out of 57 seats total, or just over 42 percent.

The final results from Sunday’s elections could boost other Islamist parties running in elections in North Africa and the Middle East.

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Arab world indifferent about death of unknown American cleric

But the headline says: “As the West Celebrates a Cleric’s Death, the Mideast Shrugs.”

The New York Times, forever the trumpet of institutional power, apparently sees no need to draw a distinction between the White House and the West — even though most people in the West, like those in the Middle East, wouldn’t, until a few days ago, have been able name Anwar al-Awlaki, identify his photo or say anything about him.

The report itself is more clear-eyed:

Until about two years ago, few in Yemen or the Arab world had heard of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born propagandist for Islamic radicalism whose death President Obama celebrated as a major blow against Al Qaeda.

“A dime-a-dozen cleric” was one response, by Gregory Johnsen, a Princeton professor who studies Yemen. Another: “I don’t think your average Middle Easterner knows who Anwar al-Awlaki is,” said Emad Shahin, a scholar of political Islam at Notre Dame University.

While Western officials and commentators saw the end of Mr. Awlaki as another serious loss for Al Qaeda, a very different reception in the Middle East was the latest reminder of the disconnect between American aims and Arab perceptions. In a region transfixed by the drama of its revolts, Mr. Awlaki’s voice has had almost no resonance.

“I don’t think this will really get people’s interest, I can’t imagine why it would,” said Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center. “It seems totally irrelevant to how Arabs view the world right now. They don’t care about Awlaki.”

It is a remarkable feature in the Arab world these days how little Al Qaeda actually comes up in conversations. Even before the eruption of revolts and revolutions, a group that bore some responsibility for two wars and deepening American involvement from North Africa to Iraq was losing its significance. When Osama bin Laden died, his killing seemed more an epitaph for another era. As is often remarked, the events of Sept. 11 seem a historical note to much of an Arab population where three in five are younger than 30.

In that atmosphere, many saw Mr. Awlaki’s death as an essentially American story: here was a man that American attention helped create, and its Hellfire missiles killed, in a campaign born out of American fears of homegrown militancy. What distinguished Mr. Awlaki was not his ideas or influence but his American upbringing, passport and perfectly idiomatic English.

“When the Obama administration and the U.S. media started focusing on him, that is when Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula pushed him to the fore,” Mr. Johnsen said, referring to the group’s Yemeni branch. “They were taking advantage of the free publicity, if you will. And any stature he has now in the Arab world is because of that.”

Another analyst, Michael Wahid Hanna, a fellow at the Century Foundation, echoed the idea that Mr. Awlaki’s fluency in English generated more interest about him. “The U.S. focus on Awlaki was a function of his language abilities and their understanding of his role as a recruiter and propagandist. If recent events can be said to further marginalize violent rejectionists such as Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, then there is very little room for a virtual unknown such as Awlaki to command any serious attention.”

Mr. Hanna said that was even more the case with the Arab world having plunged into what he described as “this transformational juncture.”

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Palestine vote showcases the decline of American power

Juan Cole writes:

The United States, castigated by its critics as recently as a decade ago as a “hyper-power,” is now so weak and isolated on the world stage that it may cast an embarrassing and self-defeating veto of Palestinian membership in the United Nations. Beset by debt, mired in economic doldrums provoked by the cupidity and corruption of its business classes, and on the verge of withdrawing from Iraq and ultimately Afghanistan in defeat, the U.S. needs all the friends it can get. If he were the visionary we thought we elected in 2008, President Obama would surprise everyone by rethinking the issue and coming out in favor of a U.N. membership for Palestine. In so doing, he would help the U.S. recover some of its tarnished prestige and avoid a further descent into global isolation and opprobrium.

It is often the little things that trip up empires and send them spiraling into geopolitical feebleness. France’s decision to react brutally to the Algerian independence movement from 1954 arguably helped send its West African subjects running for the exits, much to the surprise and dismay of a puzzled Gen. Charles de Gaulle. Empires are always constructed out of a combination of coercion and loyalty, and post-colonial historians often would prefer not to remember the loyalty of compradors and collaborators. But arguably it is the desertion of the latter that contributes most decisively to imperial collapse.

Thus, it is highly significant that an influential Saudi prince warned the United States that a veto of Palestine at the U.N. could well cost the latter its alliance with Saudi Arabia. The kingdom is the world’s swing petroleum producer and has done Washington many favors in the oil markets, and although such favors were seldom altogether altruistic, Riyadh’s good will has been a key element in U.S. predominance.

The House of Saud has other options, after all. It has been thinking hard about whether its ideological differences with the Chinese Communist Party are not outweighed by common interests. Among these mutual goals is the preservation of a model of authoritarian, top-down governance combined with rapid economic advance to forestall popular demands for participation, as an alternative to Western liberalism. For its part, China has invested $15 billion in the Arab world in recent years and is an increasingly appealing destination for Arab capital. Beijing is supporting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ initiative for recognition in the U.N.

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In riddle of Mideast upheaval, Turkey offers itself as an answer

Anthony Shadid reports:

Not so long ago, the foreign policy of Turkey revolved around a single issue: the divided island of Cyprus. These days, its prime minister may be the most popular figure in the Middle East, its foreign minister envisions a new order there and its officials have managed to do what the Obama administration has so far failed to: position themselves firmly on the side of change in the Arab revolts and revolutions.

No one is ready to declare a Pax Turkana in the Middle East, and indeed, its foreign policy is strewn this year with missteps, crises and gains that feel largely rhetorical. It even lacks enough diplomats. But in an Arab world where the United States seems in retreat, Europe ineffectual and powers like Israel and Iran unsettled and unsure, officials of an assertive, occasionally brash Turkey have offered a vision for what may emerge from turmoil across two continents that has upended decades of assumptions.

Not unexpectedly, the vision’s center is Turkey.

“Turkey is the only country that has a sense of where things are going, and it has the wind blowing on its sails,” said Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Istanbul Bilgi University.

The country’s foreign policy seized the attention of many in the Middle East and beyond after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s tour this month of three Arab countries that have witnessed revolutions: Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Even Mr. Erdogan’s critics were impressed with the symbolism of the trip.

Though many criticize his streak of authoritarianism at home, the public abroad seemed taken by a prime minister who portrayed himself as the proudly Muslim leader of a democratic and prosperous country that has come out forcefully on the side of revolution and in defense of Palestinian rights.

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Gaddafi’s fall unlikely to alarm Arab leaders

Brian Whitaker writes:

Just a few days before completing his 42nd year in power, Muammar Gaddafi appears to have become the third Arab dictator to fall in the past eight months.

Tunisian president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali was the first to go, hounded out of the country in January after 23 years in power. In February it was the turn of Hosni Mubarak, when a popular uprising by the Egyptian masses ended his 29-year rule.

In the wake of that, hopes of political change swept across the region as protests broke out in Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, plus others on a smaller scale in Morocco, Jordan, Algeria and Oman.

But then came a hiatus, prompting speculation that the Arab spring was running out of steam. The opposition in Bahrain was brutally crushed, the Yemeni youth movement was sidelined by tribal warlords and military chiefs jockeying for position, while protests in Syria brought deadly reprisals and failed to make much of a dent on the Ba’athist regime.

The question now is whether the events in Tripoli will change the picture once again. While they may prove inspirational to opposition activists across the region, the Libyans’ own achievements in battling against Gaddafi are also overshadowed by their dependence on Nato support.

As for Arab leaders, it is unlikely they will lose much sleep. In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad may reasonably conclude he is safe so long as Nato does not intervene and the Libyan experience has little relevance to Yemen where President Ali Abdullah Saleh, still recovering in Saudi Arabia after being injured in a bomb attack on his own palace last June, flatly refuses to resign.

Arab rulers in the Gulf are also unlikely to draw lessons from Gaddafi’s fall, viewing him as an ill-behaved and troublesome eccentric who insulted almost all of them at some point, and whose comeuppance is no less than he deserved.

In terms of Arab geopolitics, Libya – unlike Iraq or Egypt, for example – is one of the less important states, and perhaps even more inconsequential in the future without Gaddafi’s unpredictable antics to place it in the spotlight.

It is in north Africa, rather than the wider Middle East, that the effects of the Libyan revolution will mostly be felt. Together, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia form a contiguous bloc of post-revolutionary states, which ought to prompt some soul-searching further west, in Algeria and Morocco. Algeria’s government faced riots earlier this year and fended them off by spending money, a palliative that cannot work indefinitely.

In Morocco too, where King Mohammed recently introduced a mildly reformist constitution in response to demonstrations, events in Libya can be expected to maintain or increase the pressure for more comprehensive change.

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U.S. impotent in face of Middle East events

Zvi Bar’el writes:

How long will the Syrian protesters wait until the United States and its allies deign to intervene in their slow massacre? What is the critical mass of people who must be killed for the “international community” to act? When there’s an earthquake, countries jostle each other to be visibly first in line with rescue forces for the victims; when thousands were killed in Darfur, the “community” went into deep hibernation until roused to assist.

In Syria, the barometer of bloodshed is still not a cause for concern. Condemnation, scolding and a few weak sanctions made it clear to President Bashar Assad that he’s still far from danger. Against Muammar Gadhafi, Washington quickly raised a military coalition. It called on Hosni Mubarak to resign; in Yemen it stirred things so as to prevent the return of its president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to Sana’a. And in Syria? The key statement, “Assad has to go,” is still stuck in Washington’s throat.

The rational explanations for American restraint are not to be taken lightly: concern over Iran’s response; the desire to avoid putting a Western umbrella over a popular revolt so as not to impair its legitimacy; concern over the status of the United States in the Middle East if it finds itself facing a new front after Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, Washington must take “the day after” into consideration. But understanding for the considerations of “the day after” is what makes possible a murderous “today.”

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Does Islam stand against science?

Steve Paulson writes:

We may think the charged relationship between science and religion is mainly a problem for Christian fundamentalists, but modern science is also under fire in the Muslim world. Islamic creationist movements are gaining momentum, and growing numbers of Muslims now look to the Quran itself for revelations about science.

Science in Muslim societies already lags far behind the scientific achievements of the West, but what adds a fair amount of contemporary angst is that Islamic civilization was once the unrivaled center of science and philosophy. What’s more, Islam’s “golden age” flourished while Europe was mired in the Dark Ages.

This history raises a troubling question: What caused the decline of science in the Muslim world?

Now, a small but emerging group of scholars is taking a new look at the relationship between Islam and science. Many have personal roots in Muslim or Arab cultures. While some are observant Muslims and others are nonbelievers, they share a commitment to speak out—in books, blogs, and public lectures—in defense of science. If they have a common message, it’s the conviction that there’s no inherent conflict between Islam and science.

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How the GOP and America’s Arab allies support slavery

Time magazine reports:

Three days before the congressional elections last fall, Hillary Rodham Clinton stood halfway around the world, pledging to young victims of human trafficking at Cambodia’s s Siem Reap Center that they would continue to enjoy the support of the U.S. State Department, which then provided some $336,000 to the shelter. The acclaimed center, situated near the magnificent temples of Angkor Wat, was an oasis of peace for some 50 survivors who, before they were rescued or escaped, had endured slavery in brothels, where they were forced to have sex with as many as 30 men a day. At the shelter, they received counseling, studied hairdressing, learned to sew, and otherwise worked to rebuild their lives and reclaim their humanity. In the evening, they did aerobics together.

On Monday afternoon, some eight months after that visit, as she unveiled the State Department’s 11th annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report to a packed room in the department’s ornate Benjamin Franklin Room, Clinton only hinted that the result of the congressional elections had left the long-term value of her pledge to the survivors in doubt. “Even in these tight economic times, we need to find ways to do better,” Clinton told the overflow crowd.

Clinton’s confidence belied the fact that in April, Congress slashed the grant-making capacity of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. When the Republicans won the House last November, the office’s $21.2 million annual budget to fight the war on slavery was already microscopic. At the time, it was barely equal to the U.S. government’s daily budget to fight the war on drugs. For fiscal year 2012, Congress sliced away nearly a quarter of those antislavery funds, as part of its broader $8 billion State Department budget cuts.

Brian Whitaker writes:

Efforts to combat human rights abuses are easily undermined by politics. Often – and with good reason – the US and other western countries are accused of highlighting abuses by their enemies while turning a blind eye to similar abuses by their friends.

One way of pushing political considerations into the background is to look at the problem comparatively, by considering where each country stands in relation to others. That is what the US state department has been doing for 11 years now, with its global reports on human trafficking.

The result, as seen in the latest report issued on Monday, is a robust critique, which places some of the staunchest US allies – Kuwait and Saudi Arabia – in the same rotten boat as long-time foes such as Cuba, North Korea and Iran.

“Trafficking in persons” covers various forms of exploitation including, in the words of the international Palermo protocol, “sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs”.

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