Feb. 6 updates

EGYPT
• I see your 'death panels' and 'refudiation,' and I raise you this. I'm no raving Democrat - I've voted R more often than D - but Sarah Palin's opinion about the administration's blunders is so completely illogical - hell, call it what it is - loony, that I don't even fully understand where she's coming from. There are certainly aspects of the administration's policy with which you can (and I do) take serious exception. But this: "And nobody yet has, nobody yet has explained to the American public what they know, and surely they know more than the rest of us know who it is who will be taking the place of Mubarak and no, not, not real enthused about what it is that that’s being done on a national level and from D.C. in regards to understanding all the situation there in Egypt. " What the hell do you MEAN? Obviously, the Administration knows more than it lets on - that's called diplomacy. The second half of this statement is just completely incoherent. God save us.

Feb. 5 updates

TUNISIA
• Seriously, Sarkozy, how long can you keep her around? More calls for the French FM to quit.
• State of emergency will be lifted next week
• TAP reports that meetings are scheduled to discuss the role of women journalists, who faced a number of challenges under the Ben Ali regime.
• Obviously, I don't know much about the people who have been appointed to a fact-finding panel about the revolution. But judging by job titles alone (a risky proposition, to be sure), it seems like they've picked precisely the kind of people you'd want to pick for such an endeavor.

EGYPT
• Suleiman says 'journalists have full freedom in Egypt.' Yeah, full freedom to get the snot beat out of them.
• Terrorism or accident? Natural gas pipeline blows in the north Sinai, and the Egyptian government is giving conflicting reports.
• The people have stopped tanks from rolling into Tahrir Square - a visual nearly on par with Tienenman Square.
• I hate to say it, but if Mubarak's made it this far, you've got to believe he might make it. AP reports on regime's plans to ride it out.

Feb. 4 updates

TUNISIA
• Dear France: Prepare for blowback. Turns out the French supplied tear gas to Ben Ali's goons two days before he beat feet. Let's make it worse: In the midst of the unrest, Michele Alliot-Marie, the French foreign minister, decided to come down to Tunisia to vacation a bit - on a plane owned by one of Ben Ali's cronies. And then let's put a nice little evil cherry on top: In October, the French trained the Egyptian state police in crowd control. Nice reportage, LAT.
• Ouch - tourism took a 40% hit during the January unrest. For a nation whose economy is largely dependent on this industry, this is a major, major setback. With luck, it will bounce back for the important March-April season. Disney's cutting Tunisia as a stop on their Mediterranean lines. It's a damn shame. But - lemons from lemonade, right? The provisional government's tourism minister says he expects the new openness to attract more tourists eventually.
• Talk about burying the lede. This AFP story talks about how life is returning to normal in Tunis & Gabes... and then near the very end says that there have been more protests in Sidi Bou Zid after two detained men were brought to the hospital by the cops... with suspicious marks on their bodies.
• This kind of bugs me. The administration people are obviously leaking their dissatisfaction with the quality of intelligence regarding the collapse of Ben Ali, and the unrest in Egypt. And I'm thinking: Are you kidding? Number one, anyone in the White House who gives a whit about the Mideast and North Africa ought to have one window open to AJE all day. They called Tunisia back around New Year's Day; so did the estimable Marc Lynch by Jan. 5, and Sultan al-Qassemi, whose reporting was absolutely top-shelf. God, I'm not tooting my own horn, but if a high school teacher from a town of 900 people could figure this out by about a week out, I have no doubt that the much smarter people in the professional intel community had it. Hell, the Wikileaks cables prove that Godec was sending back intel about the regime's lack of support a year or so prior! What's troubling to me is not the intel that the administration may or may not have received, but the fact that their initial reactions were not just hesitant, but contradictory from time to time - even with the secretary on the ground in the Arab world. Blaming the intel seems to me to be a way to CYA for a slow-footed reaction.

EGYPT
• Obama's line on Mubarak has been getting harder. Today's take: Egypt needs to enter transition phase immediately.
• If you want to read the really crazy s***, check out WND's Egypt coverage. But first, be sure to put tinfoil over your head. And if you want the Things That Make You Go Hmm, read the Guardian's round-up of right-wing talk radio's 'analysis.'

• 

Feb. 3 updates: You miss too much these days if you stop to think

EGYPT
* Desperate... will it be effective? Mubarak's forces launching a wide assault on foreign press. It's horrible, but also probably pretty predictable.

History's like a puzzle

For the past few years at school, I've begun the year by giving teams of three kids a small jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing. I give them 20 minutes to complete the puzzle. 

Invariably, at least one kid from one group complains loudly that they don't have all the pieces. And thank God they do, because the lesson wouldn't work if they didn't!

I then ask them, do you need all of the pieces to get the bigger picture? They generally answer that they can tell what the big picture is. Then we get into the messier part: What are we missing? What details might be missing that would change our impressions of the overall picture? Even if we think we know the big picture, are there things that might be on those missing pieces that would change the meaning of the big picture? 

I've been thinking about this quite a bit as it relates to Rashid el-Ghannouchi and the Ennadha Party, because it seems like the 'puzzle' of Tunisian history in the late 1980s and early 1990s gives us most of the edge pieces, and none of the middle.

Tunisia's 'official' history of the time, written by the former Ben Ali regime, was that Ennadha in general, and el-Ghannouchi in particular, were extremists bent on the radical Islamization of Tunisia. Specific plots in this version of history include an assassination scheme against Ben Ali, and the targeting of U.S. owned properties in Tunisia for bombings. After trials of some members in person, and others in absentia, Ennadha was banned from operations because it presented a threat to the single-party, yet socially pluralist, government of Tunisia. And from personal observation I can attest that Ben Ali's Tunisia indeed did protect and promote the social rights of women and religious minorities (and, of course, violated everyone's political rights equally!).

Ennadha's interpretation of history is almost completely the opposite. In their version of events, the party simply wanted to be a moderate, Turkish-style religious party, and was committed to women's rights and religious tolerance. Ennadha claims that religion was simply one of many common strands in their party, and that they had no ties to, nor common cause with, regional actors like the Muslim Brotherhood and the P.L.O., which at about the same time, was based in Tunis. 

Most of the known pieces of the puzzle - things that Ben Ali claimed happened, and Ennadha admits; and things that Ghannouchi and his lieutenants have said up until the past seven weeks - lend more credence to the Ben Ali version of the story than the new-and-improved Ennadha version of the story. Even Ennadha spokesmen admit the bomb plots against U.S. targets in the early 1990s - and justify it some 20 years later because of the presence U.S. forces in the Land of the Two Mosques. They, and some academics, make the case that the Ennadha of 2011 is not the Ennadha of 1989.

More important to me are the things my friends are saying. All of my Tunisian friends are college-educated, pluralist, and urbane, but they hail from around the nation; from Bizerte to Tunis to Tataouine. They are all, overwhelmingly and vociferously, as enraged by the rise of Ennadha in the post-Ben Ali era as they were under the previous regime - 'Why trade one oppressor for another?' is what one friend wrote. Their take - from on the ground in Tunisia, with a lifetime of experience - is quite simply more valid and more meaningful to me than anything written by al-Jazeera or the NYT. And it's also a little bit frightening.

It all remains to be seen how this will play out. There are a lot of missing pieces, and if we can't make out the big picture of Ennadha, we'll likely not make out the details, either. 

Feb. 2 updates

ADM Ackbar is NOT the new director of national security. Yet.

TUNISIA
• (late update, 1838 ET) The government also dismissed all of the governors of the Tunisian provinces (known locally as governorates). New governors were immediately announced. The new national securirty director is Admiral Ahmed Chabir, which is close to, but unfortunately, not Admiral Ackbar.

• As an educator, this article is of the utmost interest to me: A Mideast organization devoted to studying tolerance found that Tunisian textbooks - revised in the late 20th century - were remarkably balanced about Mideast issues, and even promoted democracy and separation of religion and government.
• AFP had reported vandalism of a small Jewish synagogue in the South, but the source is allegedly telling TAP that he can neither confirm nor deny that it occurred.
• The new, new Cabinet met for the first time today. An interesting development from the meeting; perhaps necessary, perhaps not - Interim President Fouad Mebaaza wants the power to issue laws by presidential decree, making an end-run around the legislature, in order to 'speed up the transition to democracy.' Pretty tough case to make.
• The new government also sacked the top leaders at the Interior Ministry - a department known as the hangout of Ben Ali's henchmen - and replaced them with more... reliable? hands.
• Things must be getting somewhat back to normal - a new football coach has been named for the Carthage Eagles!
• Ports at La Goulette and Rades are back to full operations.

EGYPT
• Unless you've been living under a rock, you've seen the ugly turn that protests have taken in Cairo - grassroots vs. Astroturf protesters, and major assaults by the 'pro-Mubarak' crowd against the media.
• Obama again 'calls for calm,' as U.S. credibilitometer nears zero with pro-democracy crowd. With the plainclothes cops and interior personnel launching molotovs, the US is looking more and more feckless in its policy.
• Really good blog from AJE from Tahrir Square.
• Ben Smith from Politico calls this Hillary's '3 a.m. moment' from the primaries. I think he's right. The open question is: Are they even picking up the phone, much less making decisions?

Feb. 1 updates

TUNISIA
• If you've never listened to APR's "The Story, with Dick Gordon," you're missing out on the best show on radio. Last night, he featured the story of a young Tunisian-American woman who returned to the Maghreb to be part of the change. Just a fantastic piece.
• More reliable numbers are coming out regarding the death toll in the Tunisian Revolution - though there's still some disparity. These numbers are a LOT closer to what we were tallying - from social media and traditional media accounts, I had an informal count of 188 dead. Reuters says the UNHR team has the number at 147; while BBC is claiming 219. Considering the interim government had a total of 78, and Ben Ali was saying 32, I think these numbers are a lot more honest, if not precise...
• Not trying to beat a dead horse, but...
-- International media is falling over itself writing stories that fall into two categories about Islamist Ennadha Party leader Rachid Ghannouchi's return. Some stories (e.g., Al-Jazeera) say that he's nothing to worry about - a religious man who respects secular society. Other stories (e.g., Wall St. Journal) say he's an advance man for al-Qaeda. But let's listen to people actually from Tunisia. One of our friends wrote last night: "ghanouchi is really dangerous dangerous for tunisia!!" He's not alone; of my dozen or so friends in Tunisia, each of them has had a message of concern or worry about Ennadha hijacking the revolution and twisting it to their message. Ennadha's strength is in the interior and the south - it will be absolutely critical when Tunisians revise or rewrite their constitution after formation of the new government that representation in a new legislature is based on more of a 'Virginia Plan' than a 'New Jersey Plan' (to steal a few American metaphors). If each governorate gets equal power, Ennadha would have a real chance of dominating the country. But if there's representation based on population, the religiously-fundamentalist Ennadha will be to Tunisia as the Constitutionally-fundamentalist Tea Party is to the US - a fringe group with strongly-held ideas who can influence the debate, but not actually implement purist doctrine. 
• ICRC is finally getting into prisons that had been closed to international inspection for decades.
• Very good analysis piece from CNN about how the Tunisian/Egyptian situations weaken al-Qaeda, instead of the other way around. As my friend Matthew wrote about this column: "The party line from the loonies has always been that violence is not just associated with government change, but that violence is REQUIRED for government change. This is the bad idea they stole from Lenin, and has been the root cause of nearly every act of wholesale slaughter since WWI. Tunisia has shown them another way."
• EU has frozen all Ben Ali family assets in member nations.
• There's so much to be learned in the differences between the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions. NPR is reporting on the power vacuum if/when Mubarak finally falls. In Tunisia, that vacuum was filled in about 48 hours by a professional and low-key military. I am still not sure if my Tunisian friends realize how fortunate they were at those critical moments.

EGYPT
• You owe it to yourself to watch some of the video coming out of Tahrir Square from the Million Man March today. It's truly breathtaking, and somewhat sobering as an American - is there anything Americans care about enough anymore to take to the streets?
• If you're one of the six people left who believe that the free market provides the best predictive intel about outcomes, then Egypt's about to stabilize. Oil prices came down under $100/bbl  today.
• A pretty interesting column from the Sydney Morning Herald. It spells out the doom and gloom scenarios for Israel if a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated coalition comes to power in Egypt. The column calls out the US and the Quartet for their ineffectual peace process. The column nibbles around the edges of the biggest problem: Israel, Egypt, and Jordan never had any incentive to actually reach a 'two-state solution.' The US kept the money flowing to these three nations as part of the process... so why would they ever want the process to end? Now, as the underpinnings of the process are in shambles, Israel will have tough decisions to make - and Israel's tradition of shoot-first-ask-questions-later might suggest that the next year or two will be very, very interesting in the Sinai.
• Hey, Iran: SHUT UP!

ELSEWHERE
• Jordan's Abdullah Deuce dismisses government, reorganizes in response to protests. More and more, I'm thinking my Jordanian student might be right that Jordan's next.
• Syria's Assad says his country will be immune to revolution, but there are lessons to be learned. Bashar says Syria is stable because everyone hates Israel. Hmmph.