PoliticsLibya: War: Arab Revolutions and Govts support generally but some suspicious of Western colonialism

Guardian (Mar20,2k11)

Libya: the Arab view

Compared with the war in Iraq, regional reactions to western involvement in Libya have been cautious and muted

Martin Chulov with additional reporting by Enas Ibrahim

• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 March 2011 17.30 GMT

Update:  We Are All Khaled Said the famous Egyptian revolution's news disseminator:  has tweeted another Guardian story:  Mohamad Nabbous was the first voice I heard on Free Libya Internet station on 17 Feb. He spoke for all Libyans & encouraged them to stand up for their rights & protest peacefully before Gaddafi's forces opened fire on them. He risked his life to spread international awareness about Libyans struggle just like I tried to do for Egypt on this page. Mohamad was killed in battle on 19 March.

Mohammad Nabbous, who set up an independent internet TV station in Benghazi, has been killed

Many Gulf states that condemned the war in Iraq have no reservations about coalition attacks on Gaddafi's forces. Photograph: Sipa Press / Rex Features

Egyptians strongly endorsed amendments to the country's constitution yesterday as aftershocks from the Arab spring revolts rumbled into the furthest reaches of the region.

More than 77% of the estimated 14 million-plus people who voted supported changes that will provide a blueprint for parliamentary and presidential elections to be held within the next six months.

Voting was mostly problem-free across the country, a significant result in a country that is emerging from more than three decades of dictatorship, when elections merely served to rubber-stamp ousted president Hosni Mubarak's rule, and voter turn out was low.

Elsewhere in the Arab world, tentative calls for democratic freedoms were met with force in both Saudi Arabia and Syria. In the Syrian town of Daraa, a second day of clashes with state security officers reportedly left one protester dead, in addition to the four reported killed yesterday.

A council building in the centre of town was burned down during the clashes. Some reports claimed it was a local headquarters of the Baath party, however they could not be verified.

In Saudi Arabia, where demonstrations are banned, protesters tried to force their way into the interior ministry in Riyadh demanding the release of prisoners who they said had been detained for up to two years without trial. Around 15 people were arrested, but no serious violence was reported.

However, the spectre of protests in the Saudi capital is something the Islamic kingdom's leader, King Abdullah, has been trying to avoid as he battles to contain an uprising in Bahrain on his northern border. The Saudi government holds grave fears that the Shia protests in Bahrain could stir unrest in eastern Saudi Arabia, which is home to most of the 12% Shia population.

Bahrain's rulers yesterday claimed to have uncovered a plot involving outside powers – an implicit reference to neighbouring Iran. The government asked Iranian diplomats to leave the tiny Gulf state and later called Lebanon's Hezbollah a terrorist organisation that was destabilising the region and impinging on Bahrain's sovereignty.

The unusually vehement tones underscore the sensitivity in the Gulf, where all the petro-states have been under pressure from their citizens to introduce widespread reforms.

Bahrain is in its second week of a three month period of martial law, which was introduced after weeks of violent clashes between citizens and riot police. The clashes have taken on a sectarian tone that the kingdom is anxious to play down.

Meanwhile, in the south of the Arabian Peninsula, the embattled leader of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, yesterday sacked his cabinet in the latest of a spate of moves designed to cling on to power. The clean sweep came two days after a massacre of more than 40 unarmed pro-reform protesters in the capital, Sana'a, which has drawn widespread condemnation and placed further pressure on Saleh to step down after more than 30 years in office.

The attacks on Libya have left the Arab world largely mute, unlike the opposition voiced before the last western assault on an Arab capital eight years ago.

Amid unrest and rebellion across the Middle East, a clear distinction has been made between the invasion of Baghdad and the bombing of selected targets in Libya. The former was widely condemned by many states that have had no such reservations about the bombing of Gaddafi's forces by US and European planes.

A key reason for that appears to be the west's stated desire not to overthrow Gaddafi but to leave his fate to be determined by Libyan citizens.

However, as the air campaign entered its second day, cracks began to appear in the regional solidarity on show last week when the Arab League voted in support of military action to protect civilians.

Read more of this superb overview by clicking the live-link just preceding or the green blog-entry headline above. - Politicarp

PoliticArabs: 4 Arab countries: Will they tell USA 'We don't want your foreign aid!'

 
An earlier Arab Summit Photographed by أ.ف.ب 


As the number of Arab societies throwing up major opposition movements to challenge existing govts, as that number grows, one wonders whether the overthrow of tyrants will make a difference, first, to the democratic development of each country in turn.  And, second, whether the end of dictators overseeing widespread poverty will result in new dictators (deploying religious rhetoric, rather than democratic talktalk) overseeing widespread poverty.


The countries with mass demos calling for overthrow now include Tunisia, Egypt and a day or so ago Yemen. Lebanon is of course in the throws of far-reaching change with the terrorist Hezbollah taking power, Shiites there displacing Sunnis and Druze allying with Shiite Hezbollah while Lebanese Christians dividing to support either Hezbollah or the Sunnis backed by Saudi Arabia.  At the same time, the Sunni ruler of Bahrain (among the Gulf States) calling for an Arab Summit to head off a recurrence of the mass protests of its Shiites (a majority of its population).


It seems to me the Tunisia Revolution may turn out well.  But I doubt that elsewhere the democratic moderates like Mohammed ElBaradei, now back in Egypt, will prevail against the Muslim Brotherhood which woud impose, it woud seem, a Taliban-like regime.  My chief concern at the moment is the fate of Egypt's several millions of Christian Copts and other Christians who have suffered much already under the ''benign negligence'' of Hosni Mubarak's regime.  I had thawt the situation there mite have been easing, as two of Mubarak's sons joined the vigil outside a threatened Christian church in which numerous Sunni Muslims formed a cordon sanitaire to protect the Christian worshippers inside.  Therefore, I'm rooting for ElBaradei -- who knows that if he succeeds, the USA will continue its enormous subsidies.  If instead the MuslimHoods win the current fite, one can expect that they will undergird the terrorist Hamas govt across Egypt's border in Gaza.  Will the Muslim Brotherhood break with Saudi Arabia (leader of the Sunni common front)?  Of course, the Hoods woud turn down USA aid, which the USA woud not offer any more, anyway.  So where woud Egypt get the wherewithal to govern and develop the country?  Hamas is already getting $25 million a month from Iran, how coud the latter finance the 70 million souls of an Egypt that, without USA dollars, woud, despite its relatively large middleclass, revert to a basketcase.  It's industry is too underdeveloped to support its ever-burgeoning population, despite the ruling of al-Azhar university that birth control is okay.


Bahrain, I'd tend to think, woud be next.  Surely, besides Gaza, the Iranians woud step in to ''liberate'' the Shia majority in that Gulf State.


So, it's back to Tunisia, about which I'm still able to be quite hopeful, for the moment.


Update:

Egypt:  This time, the protests have no clear leader, and no limit to how large they could grow. Those who have taken part see no limit to what they might achieve. In a region where transfers of power are almost always either hereditary or at the barrel of a gun, events this week have raised the prospect that Mubarak may be forced by popular unrest to yield authority before he can hand it to his son, Gamal.

Mubarak's government will not go quietly, of course, and security services have attempted to crush the protests through force. But with demonstrators driven by deep resentments and long-suppressed rage, police have been unable to squelch the nascent movement.

'It will be like Tunisia'


While the primary organizers have beenuniversity students, others have spontaneously joined the demonstrations as those in the streets beckoned in unison to those watching from the balconies: "If you are Egyptian, why don't you come with us?"

Many have, and while the demonstrations Wednesday and Thursday were significantly smaller than those on Tuesday, organizers said they were planning a much larger show of force after prayers Friday, despite a government ban on such gatherings.

Until now, the protests have been distinctly secular, with few representatives of the country's largest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood. Whether it will stay that way after Friday is an open question. Those involved in organizing the protests say they hope their movement to oust Mubarak is not overtaken by a group that has said it wants to bring Islamic law to Egypt but is widely suspected of occasional complicity with the government.

Washington Post
"Egyptian protestors feel the world has passed them" by Griff Witte (Jan27,2k11)

-- Politicarp

Israel: Iran: Israel must juggle negotiations with Palestinians, threat of nukes from Iran, massing Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Gaza under Hamas

New York Times (July 6, 2010), report by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mark Landler:

President Obama said Tuesday that he expected direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians to begin “well before” a moratorium on settlement construction expired at the end of September, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel pledged to take “concrete steps” in the coming weeks to get the talks moving.

Don't miss the following detail:

--><. Saudi Arabia: We will not give Israel air corridor for Iran strike - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News> (Monday, August 23, 2010)

Politics: Israel / Gaza: Columnist analyzes the naval blockade and war going on in the Med, with parallels to to past USA blockades

The brilliant syndicated columnist of Washington Post (WaPo) writes analytically and succinctly of the precedents of the blockade maintained by Israel against the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza, the tiny enclave of a million souls that snuggles into the shore line of the East Mediterranean sea between Israel's 6 million and Egypt's 80.5 million. I quote a brief snippet from WaPo's edition today (Jun3,2k3):

Oh, but weren't the Gaza-bound ships on a mission of humanitarian relief? No. Otherwise they would have accepted Israel's offer to bring their supplies to an Israeli port, be inspected for military materiel and have the rest trucked by Israel into Gaza -- as every week 10,000 tons of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies are sent by Israel to Gaza.


Why was the offer refused? Because, as organizer Greta Berlin admitted, the flotilla was not about humanitarian relief but about breaking the blockade, i.e., ending Israel's inspection regime, which would mean unlimited shipping into Gaza and thus the unlimited arming of Hamas.

Krauthammer makes an informative geostrategic analysis of the h+ly relevant concepts pertinent to the specifics of Israel's defense against Hama terrorism from Gaza. The concepts to which he attends are Forward defense and Active defense, and there's a third, Passive defense which must be added given the present situation in the "international community."

Rookmaker Club files

Reformational political philosophy has rarely taken up the questions of military and strategic concerns. The Rookmaker Club files edited by Politicarp allow the community of the Protestant philosophy initiated by Dooyeweerd, Vollenhoven, Mekkes, Rookmaker, and Stafleu (all of whom underwent the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, two of whom were  Dutch military -- Mekkes and Rookmaker -- they ending up in prison camps for the War's duration), allows the present-day Protestant Christian philosophical community in the USA to address one another as Americans not in denial about terrorism, the present wars, and future mass conflict.

Under the first rubric, he wr+ts:

Land for peace. Remember? Well, during the past decade, Israel gave the land -- evacuating South Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. What did it get? An intensification of belligerency, heavy militarization of the enemy side, multiple kidnappings, cross-border attacks and, from Gaza, years of unrelenting rocket attack.

Since the Active Defense strategy did not work (2000, 2005, Krauthammer notes that Israel "then had to switch to active defense -- military action to disrupt, dismantle and defeat (to borrow President Obama's description of our campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda) the newly armed terrorist mini-states established in southern Lebanon and Gaza after Israel withdrew" (2006, 2008-09).

The punch of the article is heady, and it comes under the heading Passive Defense. I urge refWr+t readers to clickup the article to read it in its entirety.
-- Politicarp