Posted by
Bill Crawford on Monday, March 21, 2011 10:58:14 AM
In 1989, we all watched a bunch of overeager youth taking out their frustrations on the Berlin Wall. It fell at the same time the Soviet Politburo gave up the ghost for a good reason: the former would not have happened without the latter. It was a heady thing to watch for an American who had lived through the ups and downs of the Cold War.
In 1848, for many reasons (mostly economic), a groundswell revolution started in many streets of the old Ottoman Empire, and there were breathless expectations that a new world order was coming in Europe. The autocracies had them all outgunned, though, in money, arms and will to power. It took the first world war eighty years later to bring that empire down.
So, which is it going to be, '48 or '89? The brittle tinderwood that lit up Tunisia sparked a media savvy youth all over the Mideast to take to the streets, and it is playing out live for all of us, interrupted only by new pictures from Japan. It has even managed to take the spotlight off the Wisconsin teacher's unions, which is a Christmas gift they needed badly.
In the Mideast, there is a giant sandwich of interests. At the top, there is a host of autocrats, fueled by oil money, more secular than the Muslims like and using their money to help foster as much of a middle class as they see fit to keep them in power. On the bottom, you have a Muslim fundamentalist movement that is angling to take over the region and run it like Lebanon- fronted by Hamas, Hezbollah, and now Al Queda. In between, you have a huge population of 18-30 year olds (they still have large families there, unlike the U.S. and Europe) who know their way around the internet and obviously smell blood in the air.
For reasons I've gone into before here, Egypt went down peacefully. Libya, being run by a full-ought lunatic, is posing more serious problems. It goes without saying that there will be change in some major governments. The $64 question is, what will fill in the gaps?
The Wahhabi Muslim movement is a cunning creature, and needs to be watched carefully. They have a POV that is built on the Koran, but they hold all the sensibilities of the legions of moral relativists you will find in the West. If you don't believe this, try and understand their de facto alliance with the left in America. They hate us because of our hedonism, drug use and sexual mores. Which end of the political spectrum here would be more likely to lean that way, the left or the right? You would think that Bin Laden and Billy Graham would be barbeque buddies. But these people ally with our left because that is the side here that is less prone to take after them with arms. And if you don't understand that there is a de facto alliance, match up the talking points of John Kerry in 2004 with Bin Laden videos from the time.
Yes, Muslim fundamentalism is a religious movement, but they understand that they have to be political, too. And that they have to make compromises along the way.
Gadhafi and Libya are small time players on this stage. The bigger issue is what kind of position the autocrats will be, a year from now. The less stable they are, the more we will be paying for oil. What I worry about is the chance there will be that the Muslim revolution will eventually be running a state that actually has oil resources.
The great tragedy of all this is that our President doesn't seem to have a clue about what is coming with all this, and he always seems to lean toward non-intervention. Somebody needs to tell him that his cards were dealt with that one after we won WWII. Our military and economic power, along with the diplomacy that attends to it, is the glue that holds our planet together. I'd hate to see any President use their Hamlet indecision to prove that point.
I don't have a problem with Obama's vacations, or his travel plans. A modern American President is never really on vacation, and most of his travel, no matter how relaxing it looks on the tube, is fraught with expanding relations, which is....work. My problem with him is his fundamental ignorance of our place in the world, and of the dangers in trying to markedly change that.
That will be the thing that keeps him from a second term. The energy equation of it will only be the most obvious and politically palatable. That will cross the gap from policy theory to pocketbook issue, and will smote him big time. He thinks he is doing the right thing with a drilling moratorium? See how fast he runs from that one, when gas goes from $3.50 a gallon now, to $4.00. That's when his ignorance will be a migraine for all of us.