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Jordan’s Government Shaken Up, Not Stirred
On Friday, I suggested that a key indicator of Jordan’s future tranquility, in light of recent countrywide demonstrations, will be how King Abdullah addresses the issue of corruption. Today we saw decisive action: Abdullah sacked his prime minister, Marouf Bakhit, and replaced him with Awn Khasawneh, a venerated legal jurist.
General Bakhit was not the right man for the job when he was appointed in February of this year, and the chattering classes in Amman immediately recognized it. At the time, Jordanians were clamoring for a new government to tackle the country’s rising commodity prices, political stagnation, and corruption. The appointment of a military man with strong security credentials was not what was needed, and suggested that the King’s priorities were domestic stability, not change. In the subsequent eight months, Bakhit was a reluctant reformer, and his government never gained traction. That was made abundantly clear by the resumption of widespread demonstrations.
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Interim Tunisian Leader With Ties to Old Ruler Defends a Gradual Path
TUNIS — As the country that kicked off the Arab Spring prepares for its first free election this month, Tunisia’s transitional prime minister, Beji Caid Essebsi, has some advice for his counterparts in Egypt, Libya or other former Arab autocracies dealing with impatient public demands unleashed by the revolutions.
“When someone is hungry asking for food, you only give him what he needs,” Mr. Essebsi said, describing his go-slow approach to meeting protesters’ demands for jobs and freedoms. “You don’t give him more, or else he might die, so we offer a step-by-step approach.”
Mr. Essebsi, 84, was picked as prime minister in February because during a long career as an official of the Tunisian dictatorship he built a record of trying to change the system from within. But as interim leader he found himself obliged to deal with continuous eruptions of protests demanding jobs, wages and immediate retribution against members of the former ruling elite.
He said he often let the protesters express themselves — but sometimes found the need to crack down.
Mr. Essebsi said it was a choice between yielding to chaos, or loosening the grip gradually, defending his occasional reliance on riot police and tear gas to keep order. His approach has won him broad support but also led a few activists to compare him to the ousted dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.
“Sometimes the proponents of freedom have demands that go beyond logic,” he said, “and it is more difficult to protect freedom from the proponents of freedom themselves than from the enemies.”
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Roads to Freedom
by Wendell Steavenson August 29, 2011
I arrived in Damascus on a Friday at the end of July, a few days before the start of Ramadan, and five months into a grimly repetitive series of protests and crackdowns in towns and cities across Syria. When I checked into my hotel, I discovered that I was the only guest. I also found that I could not connect to the Internet. “Friday, Saturday—Internet very bad,” the desk manager explained. I learned later that the government steps up its restriction of Internet service on the Islamic weekend, because that is when most of the protests occur.
I walked through the Old City—the Christian quarter and the Shia quarter, the Sufi mosques and the souks of Sunni merchants, the labyrinthine passages and hidden courtyards. It was quiet without the usual throng of browsing tourists. In cafés, I was often the only customer. The Old City is, in some ways, a microcosm of modern Syria, a secular state that comprises an array of ethnic and religious groups. At the heart of the Old City is the magnificent Umayyad Mosque, a part of which was built originally as a Byzantine church. Sunni worshippers mingle with Shia pilgrims visiting the shrine of the martyr Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson, and with Christians visiting the tomb of John the Baptist.
Syria came under the secular, socialist rule of the Baath Party in 1963. For the past four decades, it has been controlled by the Assad family—first by Hafez al-Assad, who took power in a coup, and, since his death, in 2000, by his son, the current President, Bashar al-Assad. The Assads belong to one of Syria’s most distinctive minority groups, the Alawites, who are followers of a secretive dissident offshoot of Shiism, and historically come from villages in the country’s mountainous west. The Assad regime has kept minorities it favors protected within a majority Sunni population by maintaining a rigidly authoritarian state. Syrians are mindful of sectarian strife in neighboring Lebanon and Iraq—more than a million Iraqi refugees have taken shelter in Syria since 2003—and, for many of them, lack of freedom has been offset by the consolations of stability and security, in a region without much of either.
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Must Read 2 Oct 2011
What’s Next for the Arab Spring? Author Marwan Muasher
Moammar Qaddafi’s exit from Libya is a reminder that the Arab awakening will not just fizzle out, despite what some observers are saying. Recently, commentators pointed to the public cheers heard in Egypt as the army pushed protesters out of Tahrir Square as a signal that the uprisings were petering out and the hope of the Arab Spring would soon be lost. The doomsayers were wrong.
Indeed, the uprisings are entering a difficult but inevitable phase where the two sides — the protesters and the leaders — are at a loss on how to proceed. Read More
The Ghosts of Israel’s Past Author John Barry
“There were two hunters,” Yitzhak Rabin began. It was 1975, and Rabin was prime minister of Israel. He was trying to explain to a visiting reporter Israel’s policy toward “the Palestinian question.” And, as usual, he was telling a story to make his point. “The hunters were stalking deer in thick brush. Suddenly, a deer appeared in front of them. They fired and the deer dropped. They took the deer by its antlers and began to drag it back toward their car. But the deer’s antlers caught in the brush. Finally one of the hunters suggested: ‘If we drag it the other way, the antlers won’t catch like that.’ So they took the hind legs of the animal and began to drag it the other way. After a while, the first hunter said: ‘There, didn’t I say it would be easier this way?’ ‘Yes,’ the other replied, ‘but aren’t we getting a long way from the car?’ ” Read More
My Unfinished 9/11 Business – Author BILL KELLER
Ten years after the attacks, we memorialize the loss and we mark the heroism, but there is no organized remembrance of the other feelings that day aroused: the bewilderment, the vulnerability, the impotence. It may be difficult to recall with our attention now turned inward upon a faltering economy, but the suddenly apparent menace of the world awakened a bellicose surge of mission and made hawks of many — including me — who had a lifelong wariness of the warrior reflex. Read More
If Obama Is a One-Term President – Author JULIAN E. ZELIZER
“I’D rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” President Obama confessed to ABC News’ Diane Sawyer last year. Other than the “really good” part, Republicans would be happy to see this wish fulfilled.
With waning approval ratings and a stagnant economy, the possibility that Mr. Obama will not be re-elected has entered the political bloodstream. Suddenly, the opposition party envisions a scenario in which its presidential candidate could defeat Mr. Obama in a referendum on his job performance. Mr. Obama needs to think hard about his own statement and consider what it takes to be a successful one-term president, in the light of history. Read More
Love and War – Author JANINE DI GIOVANNI
MOGADISHU, winter, 2002. The sun was beginning to drop as I climbed the roof of my guesthouse and began the finicky task of setting up my satellite telephone. From the roof, I could hear the call to prayer from a nearby muezzin. It was the time of evening between twilight and night — what the French call “entre le chien et le loup.” I took out my flashlight and began to phone the other world. Read More
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Welcome to the Counter-Jihad
Robin Wright contends that the Arab world’s young people are at the vanguard of a sweeping and seductive cultural revolution.
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The Waning Appeal of Radical Sheik
A decade after 9/11, a sociologist says the mystery isn’t why so many Muslims turn to terrorism, but why so few.
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