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David Warren does not think we will see real change in Tunisia. Yet we can always hope for a miracle for the Tunisian people.
In a startling development, the “Arab Street” has exerted itself, spontaneously… But the explosion in Tunisia — of all places, with its reputation for stability, and only two presidents since independence from France more than half a century ago — runs off the chart of precedent.
…We should not now assume there will be any fundamental changes in Tunisia, no matter how much blood is shed. The new “president for life” — whether for minutes or decades — is one of Ben Ali’s flunkies, just as Ben Ali was one of Bourguiba’s. Mohamed Ghannouchi is working on consolidating his power and will succeed or fail. Even without being able to read his mind, I can assure my reader that he isn’t fantasizing about some new dawn of representative democracy and a limited government of laws, not of men. Nor is any potential rival.
For the dictators of Third World countries would not be so if they did not appreciate another of Chairman Mao’s memorable apophthegms, that: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” To gloss this: Democracy happens when the preponderance of guns is on the democratic side.
There is no such side in places like Tunisia. In my view, perhaps jaded by the recent historical experience of Iraq, it would be false to hope for anything but the appearance of a new strongman, wherever in the Arab world an old strongman falls. This is because the conditions for constitutional government have not developed in any of these countries; and where there was promise of a responsible opposition, it was thoroughly erased. …
In her latest article in the Jewish World Review, Caroline Glick addresses a number of events in the Middle East, and the blundering US responses to each. She also criticizes some of the tired ideas that our foreign policy bureaucracy still hold as sacrosanct.
…The Tunisian revolution provides several lessons for US policymakers. First, by reminding us of the inherent frailty of alliances with dictatorships, Tunisia demonstrates the strategic imperative of a strong Israel. As the only stable democracy in the region, Israel is the US’s only reliable ally in the Middle East. A strong, secure Israel is the only permanent guarantor of US strategic interests in the Middle East.
…Saudi Arabia has to be balanced with Iraq, and support for a new regime in Iran. Support for Egypt needs to be balanced with close relations with South Sudan, and other North African states.
…At the same time, the US should fund and publicly support liberal democratic movements when those emerge. It should also fund less liberal democratic movements when they emerge. So too, given the strength of Islamist media, the US should make judicious use of its Arabic-language media outlets to sell its own message of liberal democracy to the Arab world. …
Jennifer Rubin says that Tunisia’s revolution may be contagious.
The revolution in Tunisia is resonating in Egypt. This AP report tells us:
…News of the Tunisian uprising has dominated the Egyptian media over the past few days, with opposition and independent newspapers lauding the fall of Ben Ali and drawing parallels between his toppled regime and that of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled for nearly 30 years.
…Nearly half of all Egyptians live under or just below the poverty line set by the U.N. at $2 a day. Mubarak and his ruling National Democratic Party have been pledging to ensure that the fruits of economic reforms benefit more Egyptians.
Stephen McInerney of the Project on Middle East Democracy e-mails me, “The Egyptian activists are all definitely energized. Two hundred of of them spontaneously went to the Tunisian Embassy to celebrate within an hour after Ben Ali stepped down on Friday, and they shouted chants for Ben Ali to take Mubarak with him.”
It seems that freedom is catching.
Bret Stephens notes that Stuxnet did not end Iran’s nuclear program.
…And yet the Iranian nuclear program carries on. Stuxnet appears to have hit Iran sometime in 2009. As of last November, U.N. inspectors reported that Iran continued to enrich uranium in as many as 4,816 centrifuges, and that it had produced more than three tons of reactor-grade uranium. That stockpile already suffices, with further enrichment, for two or possibly three bombs worth of fissile material.
Nor can it be much comfort that even as Stuxnet hit Iran, North Korea began enriching uranium in a state-of-the-art facility, likely with Chinese help. Pyongyang has already demonstrated its willingness to build a secret reactor for Syria. So why not export enriched uranium to Iran, a country with which it already does a thriving trade in WMD-related technologies and to which it is deeply in debt? Merely stamp the words “Handle With Care” on the crate, and the flight from Pyongyang to Tehran takes maybe 10 hours.
…And so Iran has fallen for a neat computer trick. That may be a source of satisfaction in Jerusalem, Washington and even Riyadh. But it cannot be a cause for complacency. …
P. J. O’Rourke was in January 18th’s Pickings with a broadside against the NY Times. James Taranto wishes to differ in some respects.
… We do not dispute O’Rourke’s opinion of this report, but we are prepared to defend reporter Zernike (Hulse we don’t know from Adam), for we are familiar with her work outside the Times. She is the author of “Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America,” a 2010 book that we happen to have reviewed for the January issue of Commentary. Our review began:
“The author of Boiling Mad is a New York Times reporter, and the title suggests a hostile view of the Tea Party movement as a cauldron of undifferentiated rage. The book itself is a pleasant surprise. Kate Zernike has produced a largely fair and measured account of the populist rebellion against Barack Obama’s aggressively liberal presidency.”
“Boiling Mad” wasn’t perfect. We faulted it for weak analysis and occasional tendentious liberal asides. But it convinced us that Zernike, whatever her political leanings, is a fair and honest reporter. If yellow journalism appears under her byline in the Times, it is the fault of her editors and the paper’s corrupt culture.
How corrupt? So corrupt that the Hulse-Zernike piece was, by the standards of the Times last week, a relatively minor case of journalistic malpractice. Even the editors who assigned it at least have the excuse of having been under deadline pressure at a time when the facts were not yet in about the suspect’s motives. The same cannot be said for the Times editorial board and Paul Krugman, who on Jan. 10, as we noted last Tuesday, were still linking the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to “uncivil rhetoric” from the right, even after the facts had disproved any connection. The Times has made no acknowledgment yet of this gross journalistic wrong.
Pinch Sulzberger, the Times scion who became publisher in 1992, is said to be a fan of “putting the moose on the table,” a management-consulting gimmick. Like the elephant in the living room and the hippopotamus at the water cooler, the moose is an ungainly animal that serves as a metaphor for an uncomfortable and unacknowledged truth. During the Jayson Blair scandal in 2003, it was reported that Sulzberger carries around a stuffed moose and literally puts it on tables to encourage honesty among his company’s executives.
This past weekend, the metaphorical moose was very much off the table in the pages of the Times. Writer after writer weighed in on what had happened without mentioning their own newspaper’s scurrilous conduct. …
The Economist reports on something else that will agitate the green fascists.
…Dust aloft cools the land below, as Europe’s meteorologists found out in May 2008. It does this directly, by reflecting sunlight back into space, and indirectly, by helping clouds to form. The effect is significant. The carbon dioxide which has been added to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began has a greenhouse effect equivalent to the arrival of about 1.6 watts of extra solar power per square metre of the Earth’s surface. The direct effects of dust are estimated to provide a countervailing cooling of about 0.14 watts per square metre. Add the indirect effect on clouds and this could increase markedly, though there are great uncertainties.
This dust-driven cooling, though, is patchy—and in some places it may not even be helpful. Dust that cools a desert can change local airflow patterns and lessen the amount of rain that falls in surrounding areas. This causes plants to die, and provides more opportunities for wildfires, increasing the atmospheric carbon-dioxide level.
To get a better sense of the net effects brought about by the ups and downs of dust, it would help to have a detailed historical record of the dustiness of the planet. And this is what Natalie Mahowald of Cornell University and 19 colleagues have achieved. They analysed cores from glaciers, lake bottoms and coral reefs and measured how the levels of some telltale chemicals changed with depth, and thus with time. They then used models of global wind circulation to deduce which dust sources have become stronger and which weaker. Their conclusion, published recently in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, is that in fits and starts over the past century the air became twice as dusty. …