On the heels of the uprising started in Tunisia and the continuing ones in Egypt, comes a new one in Yemen. This is huge - the current Yemeni government is a significant ally to the US in the "War on Terror" even as it serves as a training ground for Al-Qaeda and is subject to terror attacks. These protests could serve as a turning point for autocratic governments in the Arab world. Just imagine if our foreign policy, instead of supporting the status quo, supported the building of new representative governments in these countries, and helped to provide the opportunities that so many of these people are desperate for. What if instead of letting the people get further entrenched into hopeless poverty under repressive regimes, the United States took a stand and helped bring opportunities to people. A 20-something with opportunity in this world, will generally not sign up for a life of militant jihad. This is how we should be fighting the "War on Terror".
Instead it seems as if we will only watch and wait to see what happens. And watch as oil companies flow money into the autocratic regimes to provide stability to region and quash the protests so that they will be able to drill for more oil and post more billions of profit, that end up being larger than the GDP of the countries that they export oil from.
Showing posts with label Middle East. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Middle East. Show all posts
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Turmoil in North Africa
Thomas Hobbes was a seventeenth century political philosopher who wrote the seminal treatise, Leviathan. The most famous principle from this work, the social contract, sets the foundation for man to leave a "state of nature" and enter into "civil society", consenting to be governed. If man rejects the social contract, his choice is to remain living in a "state of nature", which means "...each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world". This ends up leading to a "war of all against all" and "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" lives.
What does a seventeenth century English political philosopher have to do with North Africa? Several things.
Today marked the twentieth anniversary of the fall of government in Somalia. In that 20 years, as the linked article from the Post relates, a whole generation has grown up in anarchy. Children wake up to the sound of gunfire every morning. The young man in the article lost his mother after a gang invaded a neighbor's home and she ran out to help her neighbor. There is rampant poverty. Survival is each child's only form of education. Warlords and gangs fight each other in the streets and roadblocks are set up everywhere, controlled by bribes and intimidation. Foreign Al-Qaeda fighters stream into the country, becoming the new training ground for foreign terrorists (which attacked Russia this week). It is the definition of man in a state of nature. The lives of the people are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short", and there are few signs for any kind of hope of order being restored.
And as Somalia marked the downfall of its government, two other countries have erupted in mass protests against the autocratic regimes that rule their countries. The people of Tunisia and Egypt have taken the world by surprise and are protesting the regimes that have ruled their countries for 30+ years with the hopes of overthrowing them and establishing more representative governments. Tunisia actually has already ousted its leader, Ben-Ali who has fled to Saudi Arabia.
Mubarak, the current leader of Egypt is essentially a dictator. More than 60 percent of the Egyptian population is unemployed under his regime. It is a level that is put into perspective when you remember that the United States is currently experiencing a 10 percent unemployment rate, thereby making the Egyptian unemployment session 6 times as worse as it is currently in our own country. And along with unemployment, the Egyptian people have suffered under political oppression for over 30 years. Yet the government of Mubarak, that has been in power since the assassination of Anwar Al-Sadat, has been unprecedentedly supported by the United States government. Along with Israel, Egypt has received more than a third of all foreign aid provided by the United States. It is an amount that totals to around $1billion a year. A billion of our tax dollars has gone into the pockets of Mubarak and his allies.
The protesters in the streets of Egypt are calling for an end to the oppression and poverty that they have lived with under Mubarak. Emboldened by their counterpart in Tunisia, they have risen up, demanding a new democratic form of government that clearly represents the population - both Muslim and Christian.
And this presents the United States with a conundrum. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did issue a statement today calling upon the Mubarak government to let the protests happen peacefully, but that is all. In my opinion, the Obama administration faces one of its most important foreign policy tests in how it handles this development in this region. Will it continue to give billions of dollars of aid to a country when it cannot guarantee stability and a strategic alliance? I think it will depend upon whether or not a transition of government occurs and how it occurs - whether these popular protests succeed or not. At the most, there is the chance that these developments in Tunisia and Egypt have the potential to prove another political theory, the democratic peace theory - and that would be a worthy investment of any foreign aid.
Perhaps this is where the people of Somalia could find a reason to hope. That when a population rises up together, forgoing religious and ethnic differences, they can establish a social contract with each other for a reasonable government. I hope that some day in my lifetime there will be improvements in that country that will afford the citizens a chance for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That no more generations will grow up in a state of perpetual anarchy.
(Footnote - Even though I make no mention of Lebanon in this post, there has been a huge development in that country as well with Iranian-backed Hezbollah taking control of the government. Afghanistan is suffering its own woes with a deadlocked parliament. And Palestinians are taking to the streets in Gaza in response to leaked documents from Mohammed Abbas on his negotiating positions with the Israelis, further derailing any kind of talks between the two nations. I wish that the 24hr news networks would report on these issues and give them the kind of attention and detailed analysis that they give to a remark by Sarah Palin or on a book about a method of parenting.
Also, to get more insight into the plight and situation of the Somalians from a Somali, I suggest that you listen to the raps of K'Naan, a Somali-Canadian hip-hop artist who doesn't hold back from describing the living situation that he came from.)
What does a seventeenth century English political philosopher have to do with North Africa? Several things.
Today marked the twentieth anniversary of the fall of government in Somalia. In that 20 years, as the linked article from the Post relates, a whole generation has grown up in anarchy. Children wake up to the sound of gunfire every morning. The young man in the article lost his mother after a gang invaded a neighbor's home and she ran out to help her neighbor. There is rampant poverty. Survival is each child's only form of education. Warlords and gangs fight each other in the streets and roadblocks are set up everywhere, controlled by bribes and intimidation. Foreign Al-Qaeda fighters stream into the country, becoming the new training ground for foreign terrorists (which attacked Russia this week). It is the definition of man in a state of nature. The lives of the people are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short", and there are few signs for any kind of hope of order being restored.
And as Somalia marked the downfall of its government, two other countries have erupted in mass protests against the autocratic regimes that rule their countries. The people of Tunisia and Egypt have taken the world by surprise and are protesting the regimes that have ruled their countries for 30+ years with the hopes of overthrowing them and establishing more representative governments. Tunisia actually has already ousted its leader, Ben-Ali who has fled to Saudi Arabia.
Mubarak, the current leader of Egypt is essentially a dictator. More than 60 percent of the Egyptian population is unemployed under his regime. It is a level that is put into perspective when you remember that the United States is currently experiencing a 10 percent unemployment rate, thereby making the Egyptian unemployment session 6 times as worse as it is currently in our own country. And along with unemployment, the Egyptian people have suffered under political oppression for over 30 years. Yet the government of Mubarak, that has been in power since the assassination of Anwar Al-Sadat, has been unprecedentedly supported by the United States government. Along with Israel, Egypt has received more than a third of all foreign aid provided by the United States. It is an amount that totals to around $1billion a year. A billion of our tax dollars has gone into the pockets of Mubarak and his allies.
The protesters in the streets of Egypt are calling for an end to the oppression and poverty that they have lived with under Mubarak. Emboldened by their counterpart in Tunisia, they have risen up, demanding a new democratic form of government that clearly represents the population - both Muslim and Christian.
And this presents the United States with a conundrum. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did issue a statement today calling upon the Mubarak government to let the protests happen peacefully, but that is all. In my opinion, the Obama administration faces one of its most important foreign policy tests in how it handles this development in this region. Will it continue to give billions of dollars of aid to a country when it cannot guarantee stability and a strategic alliance? I think it will depend upon whether or not a transition of government occurs and how it occurs - whether these popular protests succeed or not. At the most, there is the chance that these developments in Tunisia and Egypt have the potential to prove another political theory, the democratic peace theory - and that would be a worthy investment of any foreign aid.
Perhaps this is where the people of Somalia could find a reason to hope. That when a population rises up together, forgoing religious and ethnic differences, they can establish a social contract with each other for a reasonable government. I hope that some day in my lifetime there will be improvements in that country that will afford the citizens a chance for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That no more generations will grow up in a state of perpetual anarchy.
(Footnote - Even though I make no mention of Lebanon in this post, there has been a huge development in that country as well with Iranian-backed Hezbollah taking control of the government. Afghanistan is suffering its own woes with a deadlocked parliament. And Palestinians are taking to the streets in Gaza in response to leaked documents from Mohammed Abbas on his negotiating positions with the Israelis, further derailing any kind of talks between the two nations. I wish that the 24hr news networks would report on these issues and give them the kind of attention and detailed analysis that they give to a remark by Sarah Palin or on a book about a method of parenting.
Also, to get more insight into the plight and situation of the Somalians from a Somali, I suggest that you listen to the raps of K'Naan, a Somali-Canadian hip-hop artist who doesn't hold back from describing the living situation that he came from.)
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
It's Complicated...
As Monthy Python would say, "And now for something completely different". No book reviews or random thoughts today. No, today I am still digesting a program I watched on WETA PBS last night called "Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust in Arab Lands".
First, this is a subject that is near to my heart. The conflict between Israel and Palestine and Israel and the Arab world at large is something that has interested me since high school, so much so that it drove me to be a foreign affairs major at UVA. Seeking to understand the root causes of a decades old conflict that still dramatically affects the shape of our foreign policy to this day has always been vastly interesting to me. And yet while it is vastly interesting, it also is vastly depressing and disheartening - which is why I work at a local cabinet company instead of a think tank in Washington DC. So when I read about this program airing, I was very keen to watch and learn more about Jewish and Arab relations.
It was fascinating to say the least. Whenever the Holocaust is discussed, it mainly focuses on the fate of European Jews and the atrocities that were uncovered at the concentration camps in Europe. But the fate of Jews living in North Africa during World War II is hardly ever discussed or mentioned. Truly, unless you take a university history class on World War II, most discourse is focused on the battles that occurred in Europe or the in the Pacific, but hardly ever talk about the campaigns in North Africa, which was where the tide of the war truly started turning. But did you know that there were more concentration camps across North Africa than there were in Europe? That Jewish people who had cohabited with their Arab friends peacefully before the war were suddenly singled out by European invaders and forced to either go to one of these concentration camps or wear yellow Stars of David signifying their ethnicity?
What Robert Satloff, the executive director for the Washington Institute of Near East policy uncovers though are tales and stories (that are authenticated and verified through meticulous research and first person interviews) of Arabs who help their Jewish neighbors escape from the fate of concentration camps - much like there were Europeans who helped their Jewish neighbors escape the nightmares of concentration camps. Satloff sought to show that though these two ethnicities proclaim hatred for each other now, there were some Arabs that saw only their common humanity and were unwilling to be complicit in the suffering of fellow human beings.
What is remarkable, or rather actually sad, about this is how much this history is suppressed by the descendants of these individuals today. There are some Arabs, because of their political views on Israel, that would rather not acknowledge the heroism of their grandparents during the Holocaust in North Africa. The view of a common humanity has been replaced with a simmering hatred of Israel and the atrocities that Israel commits against the Palestinians today. In fact, the documentary showcases a meeting in which Satloff is presenting his findings and a participant becomes so upset that the Holocaust of the Jews is only being discussed and that no mention of the persecution of Palestinians is made, that he storms out of the meeting, shouting and slamming the door on his way out. It is a reflection of how deep this hurt and hatred runs, that the man could not sit through a presentation about fellow Arabs who helped save their Jewish neighbors from atrocities unimaginable.
The Holocaust served as the catalyst for the creation of a political state based on an ethnicity and religion, and as such its repercussions are as much a part of our present foreign political state as it was in our past. Without the Holocaust, it is doubtful that Zionists would have been able to make a successful case for the creation of their own political state to the world. But guilt, coupled with a powerful lobbying force in the United States and the diminished power of the British, helped bring about the state of Israel and the problems of the modern Middle East. While it might be a stretch to say that if there was no Israel there would have been no September 11th or War on Terror, the justification for those attacks by the terrorists would have been based on other reasons. And yet, if there had been no Anti-Semitism brought to light by such events like the Dreyfus Affair or pogroms in Russia or most evidently, by the Holocaust, there would have been no need for a Jewish political state.
This is a long tangled history that can fill more than this meager blog post, but "Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust in Arab Lands
" has added an interesting layer to these relations that is relevant and almost hopeful, for it shows that when we transcend our ethnic and religious beliefs at times, we find that we are all made of the same cloth. Hopefully, instead of using religious beliefs to divide, perhaps there will come a time in which we can use them to see what we have in common more than what we don't.
First, this is a subject that is near to my heart. The conflict between Israel and Palestine and Israel and the Arab world at large is something that has interested me since high school, so much so that it drove me to be a foreign affairs major at UVA. Seeking to understand the root causes of a decades old conflict that still dramatically affects the shape of our foreign policy to this day has always been vastly interesting to me. And yet while it is vastly interesting, it also is vastly depressing and disheartening - which is why I work at a local cabinet company instead of a think tank in Washington DC. So when I read about this program airing, I was very keen to watch and learn more about Jewish and Arab relations.
It was fascinating to say the least. Whenever the Holocaust is discussed, it mainly focuses on the fate of European Jews and the atrocities that were uncovered at the concentration camps in Europe. But the fate of Jews living in North Africa during World War II is hardly ever discussed or mentioned. Truly, unless you take a university history class on World War II, most discourse is focused on the battles that occurred in Europe or the in the Pacific, but hardly ever talk about the campaigns in North Africa, which was where the tide of the war truly started turning. But did you know that there were more concentration camps across North Africa than there were in Europe? That Jewish people who had cohabited with their Arab friends peacefully before the war were suddenly singled out by European invaders and forced to either go to one of these concentration camps or wear yellow Stars of David signifying their ethnicity?
What Robert Satloff, the executive director for the Washington Institute of Near East policy uncovers though are tales and stories (that are authenticated and verified through meticulous research and first person interviews) of Arabs who help their Jewish neighbors escape from the fate of concentration camps - much like there were Europeans who helped their Jewish neighbors escape the nightmares of concentration camps. Satloff sought to show that though these two ethnicities proclaim hatred for each other now, there were some Arabs that saw only their common humanity and were unwilling to be complicit in the suffering of fellow human beings.
What is remarkable, or rather actually sad, about this is how much this history is suppressed by the descendants of these individuals today. There are some Arabs, because of their political views on Israel, that would rather not acknowledge the heroism of their grandparents during the Holocaust in North Africa. The view of a common humanity has been replaced with a simmering hatred of Israel and the atrocities that Israel commits against the Palestinians today. In fact, the documentary showcases a meeting in which Satloff is presenting his findings and a participant becomes so upset that the Holocaust of the Jews is only being discussed and that no mention of the persecution of Palestinians is made, that he storms out of the meeting, shouting and slamming the door on his way out. It is a reflection of how deep this hurt and hatred runs, that the man could not sit through a presentation about fellow Arabs who helped save their Jewish neighbors from atrocities unimaginable.
The Holocaust served as the catalyst for the creation of a political state based on an ethnicity and religion, and as such its repercussions are as much a part of our present foreign political state as it was in our past. Without the Holocaust, it is doubtful that Zionists would have been able to make a successful case for the creation of their own political state to the world. But guilt, coupled with a powerful lobbying force in the United States and the diminished power of the British, helped bring about the state of Israel and the problems of the modern Middle East. While it might be a stretch to say that if there was no Israel there would have been no September 11th or War on Terror, the justification for those attacks by the terrorists would have been based on other reasons. And yet, if there had been no Anti-Semitism brought to light by such events like the Dreyfus Affair or pogroms in Russia or most evidently, by the Holocaust, there would have been no need for a Jewish political state.
This is a long tangled history that can fill more than this meager blog post, but "Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust in Arab Lands
" has added an interesting layer to these relations that is relevant and almost hopeful, for it shows that when we transcend our ethnic and religious beliefs at times, we find that we are all made of the same cloth. Hopefully, instead of using religious beliefs to divide, perhaps there will come a time in which we can use them to see what we have in common more than what we don't.
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