Politics Middle Eastern power shifts

View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGBs1FEsoR8


I'm not sure what is going on over there, but this is bad. I wouldn't bet against a civil war breaking out in Egypt over the next few weeks if this keeps up.

 

there are reports this morning that the coup is considering an outright "legal" ban of the muslim brotherhood. legal in quotes because what does it mean in a state of emergency, really?
what's obvious is that the army has decided to crush the muslim brotherhood. what's also obvious is that the mb recongizes this and is reacting on those grounds. so they see no need to back down either.

i am not sure how this will turn out either, in part because i don't see the sense of trying to militarily crush a large patronage-based political organization like the mb.

at the same time, that this situation exists at all is a direct result of scaf calling fast elections after mubarak fell in order to reduce its political exposure...then there were the mb follies afterward, from the farce of the constitutional writing process to morsi attempting to declare himself emperor basically to distract from signing a large imf loan and so on. also, it seems the military didn't feel its impunity adequately protected. and insofar as people are concerned, the mb never did shit about the interior ministry/police. so they were in a difficult situation politically, which they handled by being incompetent.

obviously at this point, the united states backs scaf.
this is kinda interesting:

It's not about Democracy: Top Ten Reasons Washington is Reluctant to cut off Egypt Aid | Informed Comment

 

I can't help but appreciate SCAF's PR banner of "Egypt Fights Terrorism", under which they make their transparent announcements and commit their horrendous acts.

New tally of 683 people dead in the initial, much-covered massacre. Another 173 people have apparently died nation-wide on Friday due to clashes caused by revenge attacks.

This doesn't bode well at all. One can only hope the public outcry will become strong enough for the SCAF to be forced to reconsider their political strategy.

 

i havent read anywhere on international news outlets anything about the release of Hosni Mubarak. It seems that after the fall of MB, that the same cronies are back in power and pulling the same strings. A man who crushed a populace for 3 decades, and then tried to crush an uprising and clearly has blood on his hands is freed after 2 years, and Morsi is jailed for 'jail-break' for this 'crime' he commited when he was arrested as a political prisoner days before the fall of the Mubarak regime.

This really is fucked up. Ive lost any hope of any short term solutions for Egypt.

as for syria, the massacre of thousands of civilian with the use of nerve gas is concerning. I can finally see the US/UN finally doing more than pay lip service to the Syrian people. My concern here is the power vacuum that would ensue, which would probably be filled by islamists with wahabbi elements who are fighting for the re-establishment of the caliphate. Unless the US/UN have a concrete plan to fil the void, Syria is going to dwell in anarchy and civil war for a few mor years. With yesterdays twin bombings ( which targeted sheikhs that support the syrian rebels) in Tripoli killing 27 civilians, and the bombing the week before in hezbollah controlled beirut, i can only hold my breath when i see the spill-over into Lebanon.

sometimes i think life would have been easier in the arab world under the power of these dictators. The arab spring has brought about change, but its also brought about anarchy. i havent seen one revolution move forward and flourish, partly because there's been no planning process or long sighted-ness in this whole mess.

 

on egypt: fuck scaf. fuck the muslim brotherhood. o yeah...fuck scaf.

on syria: things are getting curiouser and curiouser. for example, it's not at all obvious where the weapon used in last week's gas attack came from. brown moses is the best source: Brown Moses Blog

it looks like some kind of nato action is under way. what exactly are they going to do? blow the fuck out of damascus?

 

And where is Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan...?

 

In the Middle East, silly.

 

Syria's happening right now.

New international military conflict seems very probable at the moment, while completely ignoring the statements from Hans Blix or that the UN investigations have just started.

US government contractors, get ready to make many sales in the upcoming destruction & reconstruction effort.

As an aside: How much of an indicator of the FSA's imminent defeat is the West's scramble these past few days to initiate a military intervention (with or without the UN's blessing)?

 

The clusterfuck that is the middle east

on a personal note, the bombing of the mosque ( Masjid Al Taqwa) in Tripoli, Lebanon ( not to be confused with Tripoli, Libya) hit close to home. Tripoli is my 'hometown' which is where my parents hail from. The bombing of the mosque happened less than a kilometre from where my parents grew up, and a stone throw away from where i spent a lot of my time in Tripoli. It also occured just outside a restaurant that my pregnant cousin worked at. All the windows were blown out of the restaurant. Luckily her and her baby are ok, but it really does give you an indication of how indiscriminate these types of 'wars' are. Its most likely some form of payback for a bombing a Shia area in Beirut. When will these silly fuckers realise that fighting someone elses fight on your own turf isnt going to get you anywhere?

Ive always had mixed thoughts on Syria.. After seeing and hearing how the Syrians treated the lebanese over a 30 year period, i have little pity for Syria. I do pity the innocents though, and it breaks my heart to see fathers carrying the dead bodies of their kids who've just been gassed by president Bashar's men. The only reason for the US to enter this war isnt for the gassing of the masses though. Its most likely because they'd want a say in who's going to run syria post Assad. I very much doubt that they'd want al-qaeda linked fighters from all over the muslim world to gain control and implement a similar system of governance that was the Taleban.

we are lucky to be living in societies where we dont have to think about these sort of things happening every day.

 

i still have no idea what the thinking is behind the announced strategy from the obama admin, which seems to be the usual thing for air war at the level of language, but which seems to translate into levelling damascus. and maybe aleppo. and some air fields. i imagine with 3 or more days warning, it really isn't about doing anything to dislodge asad. many analysts i have been reading argue that this will result in the west appearing even weaker than it currently does...to wit:

Punitive strikes ineffective, even counterproductive, analysts say - latimes.com

i also found this to be interesting, both for what it says and reveals about the strange arbitrariness of communication surveillance outcomes:

Exclusive: Intercepted Calls Prove Syrian Army Used Nerve Gas, U.S. Spies Say | The Cable

meanwhile, on the ground, brown moses has been tracking weapon systems in syria and has been the best source of close-to real information about them. he's interesting on this attack:

Brown Moses Blog

 

I do not support any US military action in Syria.
I do not believe the President has the Constitutional authority to use the military in Syria without congressional approval.
Given the President's past rhetoric on war in the ME I find it hard to understand why he is giving it serious thought.
Other than blusterous statements about "red lines", there is no US interest in Syria. And perhaps in the future when our President speaks about who should be removed from power and red lines, he is actually prepared to back it up with the support of the American people.

 

Yes. In my mind massive indiscriminate murder is the issue not the weapon(s) used. Our President has not made a case for US interest and what needs to be done. The President made a passing and empty remark about Assad needing to be removed from power but he did not make a case for his removal. I doubt anyone took his comment serious.

I did not support the use of military force in Iraq because of WMD. I supported the use of military force because of Saddam's Husein's defiance and history of invasion if neighboring countries, mass murder and his overt threats against the US and our interests. President Bush made his case to the UN, allies, to Congress and the American people. He even spoke to the Iraqi people. Revisionists have created their own fantasy to rationalize why they supported the use of military force when it became unpopular. I openly state the I supported the initial use of military force to remove Saddam and was later unsupportive of continued nation building. In the end I do believe US actions where good for Iraq, the ME, democracy, and US interests in the region.

If we compare Bush to Obama in this situation with Syria, I would think progressives would be against any military action in Syria. Is this correct or incorrect?

 

it's a problematic situation. to my mind, there's no doubt that asad's military has used chemical weapons repeatedly.

read this:
Chemical warfare in Syria

and the latest entry in the brown moses blog.
there's other information available to us little people as well.

it's not obvious what, if anything, should happen at this point. the us response is basically conditioned by the fact that they drew a red line. apparently 100,000 dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees isn't motivation.
at the same time, these humanitarian interventions haven't worked out so well.

it's simply wrong to see syria as not important geo-politically.
it's obviously the case that asad is an asshole--but not as big an asshole as his father was.
which may explain the revolt.

the administration's plan as it exists in public at the moment seems to me likely to result in more dead people and little else.

 

All I know is I wouldn't want to be Commander in Chief right now.

The only option I see working is if the international community can stop both sides from being aggressive against the other side. Have a long list of targets that could be hit if the aggressor starts fighting against the other side that the aggressive side would not like to lose...