The Middle East Explodes...

[Maj]

I've been following the events in the Middle East with some interest, and I'm hoping things will turn out well, though I expect them to end in a mess.

The question is, what are the chances that the rioting countries will have their governments replaced by fundamentalist governments?

[Zinegata]

What everybody is panicking over is the possibility that Egypt, Tunisia, or Jordan can be the next Iran.

But what really tends to happen in the Middle East is that one strongman is just eventually replaced by another one. The strongman is occasionally a fundamentalist looney (I'm looking at you Iran and Libya) who supports state-sponsored terrorism, but most of the time it's just a standard corrupt dictator.

Still, if Egypt explodes, the Middle East is gonna be in chaos. And the only ways out are the Egyptian Army shooting the protestors and initiating a bloodbath, or a long ambiguous "transition" process that will end with people going "So, who the hell controls Egypt now?"

[Maxus]

According to a few articles I've seen, a few hardcore Muslims tried to chant religious bits as well as stuff against the Egyptian government, but got shouted down because they want to keep this about the government, not about the religion.

The people in general are appreciative of being able to protest. Yes, the military was there, but the prevailing attitude seemed to be "Don't start shit and there won't be shit" and they were pretty much there to maintain order.

Any fundamentalist's groups first move will be to basically go "My way or the highway," and I think the people are fed up with that noise.

So I'm cautiously optimistic here

[Zinegata]

The chances of a fundamentalist regime taking over are also pretty small because one in five Egyptians are actually Christian. Iran can get away with a fundamentalist regime because there are so few Christians or Jews within their borders - less than 2% of the population is non-Muslim (and Iran actually treats them very well lest they find themselves with a minority in rebellion).

But in Egypt, the Coptics will pretty much prevent ANY fundamentalist assclown regime from taking power.

Moreover, the Muslim Brotherhood has already been largely discredited as a bunch of idiots. Their last major news item before the current crisis was the bombing of Coptic Churches - which pissed even Muslim Egyptians off so much that they joined a rally denouncing terrorism in mass numbers.

Frankly, I think most Egyptians still haven't forgiven the Muslim Brotherhood for their massacre of some 50+ tourists (mostly Swiss) in the late 90s, which sent Egypt's tourism industry tumbling.

Still, I'm not optimistic. The way the region goes, it's always a strongman that ends up winning in the end - albeit in Egypt's case it will at least be a secular strong man.

[Maj]

It was thought that the military would totally back Mubarak, but then they went and said they weren't willing to use violence on the protesters and as a result, pressure mounted for Mubarak to step down.

He said today that he'd finish this year as President, but wouldn't run again in September, and he's spend the rest of his time working for greater democracy in the government, but the people basically called him a liar and said that he's had 30 years to do it, but hasn't.

Meanwhile, Tunisia's interim government is having security problems, Yemen's president has said he won't seek reelection, Jordan's king sacked his entire cabinet, and Lebanon still has no government, but chances are Hezbollah will dominate it.

It looks absolutely terrible, but like Maxus, I'm cautiously optimistic. And all this because some dude lit himself on fire.

[Zinegata]

There are key differences between the Egyptian military and other militaries of the region (i.e. Iran) which makes any violent end less likely.

First and foremost, the average Egyptian soldier is a conscript. Who probably has family among the protesters. So you can rule most of them out of shooting civilians.

The elite guard are also going to be equally queasy, because they're actually funded largely by US subsidies. And when Obama tells the Egyptian military to play nice, the Egyptian soldiers riding the nice American Abrams tanks tend to listen.

In contrast, Iran's elite guards are drawn mainly from rural villages. Undereducated and religiously indoctrinated, Iranian security forces have shown time and again that they don't care about hurting civilians.

The problem is that Mubarak is still, ultimately, a military man. And other top military leaders in Egypt are gonna be worried that they may end up getting thrown out next "just like Mubarak". Get enough officers worried about their future, and get enough of their loyal troops to follow suit, and you're gonna have a civil war on your hands.

To avert this, the opposition will probably have to give MAJOR concessions to the military. Which is why it's very likely Mubarak will just be replaced by another military strongman.

----

Finally, here's a key thing that all the major news outlets have missed:

What is happening in Iran right now?

Because ultimately, if you want a "Berlin Wall Falls in 1989" situation to replicate itself in the Middle East, you ultimately have to look at what's happening in Iran. Iran has its own large and active dissident movement, which was badly beaten up after the last election.

So far, it seems what's happening in Egypt isn't affecting them yet. But if it does... well, then anything can truly happen now.

[cthulhu]

It was thought that the military would totally back Mubarak, but then they went and said they weren't willing to use violence on the protesters and as a result, pressure mounted for Mubarak to step down.

Army knows he is a loser at this point, and they can easily cough up someone else to replace him in a more democratic government.

[Surgo]

I said this on Facebook yesterday, and it's still relevant:

Tunisia led to Egypt which itself appears to be leading to all sorts of revolts and revolutions in the Middle East. Will the United States work to prop up puppet governments and dictatorships, as it shamefully did throughout the 20th century, or will it actually support the democracy its leaders over the past 10 years have paid lip service to?

[tzor]

The question is, what are the chances that the rioting countries will have their governments replaced by fundamentalist governments?

Really hard to predict. This isn't the 70's the world has changed. Clearly there are some forces that want it to be so. Clearly they are working hard to make it so. (Note that "replaced" doesn't mean immediately, you could have the first replacement government fall to a fundamentalist government. Typically speaking, governments that are formed through this method can suffer instability especially when elements who helped form those goverments desire that instability in order to come in with a non democraticly formed government. Consider the fall of France in the French revolution and the eventual rise of the despot Napoleon.)

But I really have my doubts. As I said, the Iranian revolution was in an eariler time, and then the fundamentalists just wanted to screw enforce strict Islamic law upon their own people who were mostly from their faith. Egypt, for the most part is a secular Kymbya where Christians will actually protect Muslims and vice versa. The Muslim Brotherhood's old NAZI song that constantly motivates them to exterminate Israel is not going to go well with the people at large. (Note there is a massive dissconnect with the Muslim Brotherhood's Arabic and English websites. The latter is like "my little pony" and the former is like war preperation propaganda.)

Clearly this will be the big push for the Caliphate, whether it will work is anyone's guess. The problem is that every attempt creates a power vacuum for another power attempt. So anything can really happen.

[sabs]

I'm not happy with out quickly Obama backpedaled away from this. It smacks of asshatery. We've been supporting the current regime for 30+ years. Until last week we weren't trying to exert any pressure for him to change. And now, all of a sudden. It makes other governments in the area think twice about dealing with us in good faith. Hell, even Israel was upset by how quickly Obama turned the US's back on Egypts current government.

[Username17]

Iran started as a socialist revolution. Americans decided that they'd rather deal with religious fanatics than potential Soviet sympathizers, and here we are. The US of today doesn't really seem to care who is in charge of Egypt and is modestly afraid of Islamic fundamentalists, so they are unlikely to ship guns to any Ayatollah. There just isn't a cold war to justify propping up a brutal fundamentalist regime at the expense of whatever local democratic socialists are rising up.

Another thing to remember is that the revolts in Egypt really have little to do with economic troubles, which really aren't that bad:


It really has nothing to do with a vegetable seller setting himself on fire either. The Egyptian crisis was created when Mubarak's party got greedy in the elections a few months ago:

Leader	Ahmed Nazif	El-Sayyid el-Badawi
Party	NDP	New Wafd Party
Last election	330	5
Seats won	420	6
Percentage	81%	1.1%

Egypt was held together by a fiction of democracy and responsiveness. Yes, the elections were fixed. Everyone knew that. Mubarak was a dictator and he couldn't actually be deposed by election. But the opposition was allowed a minority in parliament and they were allowed to debate things and submit proposals and maintain the fiction that they were being listened to.

When the NDP dropped pretenses of listening to their opponents, it was go time. The opposition no longer had a reason to pretend that the country was movable through discourse, so they started putting up plans to riot. The polls opened on December 5th, and as soon as the results came out everyone knew that the country was going to explode. It took about a month to put together the mass protests, but there will people on the street as soon as they put together the new sham government.

Egypt is a miscalculation. I don't know what the hell they were thinking, but you can't claim that your opposition got less than 5% of the vote and expect any credibility. You can get 5% of the electorate to vote for a fucking cat.

-Username17

[tzor]

An interesting argument as to what sparked the situation in Egypt: Kudlow: Bernanke and Ethanol Sink Egypt GOPUSA

Commodities are priced in dollars, and the Federal Reserve has been overproducing dollars for more than two years. Consequently, emerging markets throughout the world -- and the food sector in particular -- are suffering from rising inflation.

The CRB food index is up an incredible 36 percent over the past year, including 8 percent year-to-date. Raw materials are up 23 percent in the past year. Inflation breakouts have occurred in China, among various Asian Tigers, and in India, Brazil and other Latin American countries. Even Britain and Germany are registering higher inflation readings.

In dollar terms, the price of wheat has soared 114 percent over the past year. Corn has surged 88 percent. These are incredible numbers.

And let's not forget that the world's poor are the hardest hit by food-price inflation. They literally can't afford to buy bread. It brings to mind the French Revolution in the 18th century. When you see this kind of mass protest in the streets, spreading from country to country, you see a pattern that cannot be explained by local conditions alone.

The dollar is the world's reserve currency. And the rise of dollar food prices is a global phenomenon. It is a monetary phenomenon, as much as anything.

And that's why one can argue that the worldwide revolt against soaring food prices is an unintended consequence of U.S. Fed policy. That policy is aimed at reigniting inflation here at home. But unwanted dollars circulating worldwide are hitting foreign inflation rates first. We may well catch this inflation virus before long.

[Username17]

Tzor, that is fucking retarded. Bernanke is not causing inflation in China. China is causing inflation in China. They are undervaluing their currency. That acts as a defacto tariff on all foreign goods (as you have to buy them with undervalued Renminbi), and a defacto subsidy to exports (because the central bank effectively pays a bounty on all foreign currencies that exporters take in). But it also provides giant inflationary pressure (as wages and prices normalize with the higher cost of foreign goods).

The price hikes of iron ore and rubber and cotton are real, but they are caused by China having a growing economy, not by monetary policy in the United States.

If you actually wanted to know why the prices of cotton are going up, rather than simply spin bizarre fantasies about why the Fed needs to engage in contractionary monetary policy while the economy is still depressed, I suggest asking China. If you want to know why the price of iron ore is going up, I suggest asking China.

And if you want to know why the price of wheat is up, I suggest asking China Russia.

The United States just doesn't drive world commodity prices, because it doesn't use a majority of the commodities. These are real things, not stocks or other financial wizardry. Their price is driven by world supply and world demand. And hardly impacted at all by confidence fairies or monetary policy.

-Username17

[Username17]

I should add: the Republican fantasies about expansionary monetary policy causing commodity price explosions causing unrest in Egypt doesn't even make sense. Sure, the facts don't support that happening as outlayed in my previous post, but the narrative doesn't make internal sense.

Egyptians aren't buying cotton with dollars, they are buying them with Egyptian Pounds. Sure, in the international marketplace, those pounds may be converted into dollars and then converted into cotton, but the actual bank accounts of actual Egyptians are denominated in pounds, not dollars. So if we actually had a situation where the dollar was genuinely devalued by the printing of a bunch of extra dollars (which has not happened, but imagine for the moment that it did), then two things would happen:

• The dollar denominated value of cotton would rise.
  and
• The dollar denominated value of The Egyptian Pound would also rise.

So the amount of cotton that Egyptians could buy with their Egyptian Pounds would be the same. They would need more dollars to buy cotton, but when they traded their pounds in for dollars they would get more dollars. The international exchange currency doesn't really matter. They could buy things with Yen or Rubles or yak futures, it's not important. The people of Egypt are actually buying things with Egyptian Pounds, and when the Indian farmers send their cotton to Egypt they are actually selling it for Indian Rupees. The exchanges are handled by intermediary banks, who take the same transaction fees whether the intermediary currency is a strong dollar, a weak dollar, or some other currency entirely.

It's not that Kudlow's theories aren't true, it's that they can't ever be true. There is an identity being violated in that equation, and such an event is literally incapable of happening.

-Username17

[sabs]

Republicans seem to think that all international transactions are done in US Dollars.

[Maj]

Hell, even Israel was upset by how quickly Obama turned the US's back on Egypts current government.

Yeah, but that's because Egypt and Israel have a delicate peace agreement, and Israel is worried that any new government in Egypt won't honor it.

It really has nothing to do with a vegetable seller setting himself on fire either.

Yes and no. While the reasons the people are protesting may be different than Tunisia, the fact that the Tunisians actually ran their president out of the country is what really got people to protest en masse. Otherwise, you'd end up with the same old, same old - people come out to protest, security forces squish the demonstrators, everyone goes home/jail/heaven, and things go on as normal.

[Zinegata]

Iran started as a socialist revolution. Americans decided that they'd rather deal with religious fanatics than potential Soviet sympathizers, and here we are.

Uh, what?

Frank's position is, again, blatant revisionism that is only being peddled by biased sites like www.socialist.net. Which is barely an improvement from his "Turkish Missile Crisis" wherein he's the only one using the term outside of alternate history speculators.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution

On February 1, 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran in a chartered Air France Boeing 747.[109] The welcoming crowd of several million Iranians was so large he was forced to take a helicopter after the car he was being transported in from the airport was overwhelmed by an enthusiastic welcoming crowd.[110] Khomeini was now not only the undisputed leader of the revolution,[111] he had become what some called a "semi-divine" figure, greeted as he descended from his airplane with cries of 'Khomeini, O Imam, we salute you, peace be upon you.'[112] Crowds were now known to chant "Islam, Islam, Khomeini, We Will Follow You," and even "Khomeini for King."[113]

You cannot fake several million people showing up on the streets in support of Khomenei. This was not the CIA orchestrating some coup to replace a noble socialist revolution with an Islamic fundamentalist regime. Nor could the US really have done a whole lot when 3 million people show up and demand Khomenei become king.

From start to finish, religious figures played a major part of the Iranian revolution - and they're the ones who eventually won not because they were supported by the US, but because they had enormous support on the ground.

Also, I left in the citations in the quote for a reason: Lots of sources support the fact that Khomenei had huge on-ground support and it was the main reason why he won in the power struggle that followed. In contast, those who pedel the "Iran was a socialist revolution that the capitalists subverted!" myth:

http://www.socialist.net/iranian-revolu ... -myths.htm

Don't cite any sources. At all.

Heck, even the Marxist writers back in '79 admit that Khomenei was gonna win, and not because of US support or lack of support for the opposition:

http://www.marxist.com/iranian-revoluti ... 090279.htm

At best, you can make the case that the Iranian revolution was initially secular-socialist in nature, and that it morphed on its own into a fundamentalist regime after an internal power struggle. But even that would already be a hard sell, because again you've got 3 million people coming out for Khomenei alone.

And either way, Iran's fundamentalist government is a product of their own society. There was little anyone outside of Iran could have done about it.

Stuff that happened between the US and Iran later - such as Iran-Contra - was based on the reality of Iran being fundamentalist and no one being able to do anything about it. Not because of the US's unwillingness to deal with socialist regimes in favor of Islamic ones.

[Prak]

You know, yesterday I was reading about what was going on in Egypt in the paper before class. As I read, I realized there was no where I'd rather be than there, in the middle of the struggle of the people, shouting at their government, covering the story myself. I'm keeping an eye on this, and hope they get what they want.

[Zinegata]

Well, things seems to have made a turn for the worse.

Deploying your own supporters to beat up the other guy's supporters. Meh, part and parcel of Middle East shenaningans. This is going to take a lot more blood and a lot more time to sort out.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Things have apparently gone completely sideways in Cairo.

...dozens of pro-Mubarak supporters had erected barricades on either side of a road, trapping the pro-democracy supporters. They were gathering stones, breaking streetlights and using balaclavas to cover their faces, apparently in preparation for a fresh standoff with the pro-democracy crowd.

...the military allowed thousands of pro-Mubarak supporters, armed with sticks and knives, to enter the square.
...the army seemed to be standing by and facilitating the clashes.
...pro-Mubarak supporters were dragging away protesters they had managed to grab and handing them over to security forces.
...a group of pro-government protesters took over army vehicles.
...security guards have also been seen amongst the pro-Mubarak supporters, and it may be a precursor to the feared riot police arriving on the scene.

A witness said organisers were paying people $17, to take part in the pro-Mubarak rally, a claim that could not be confirmed.

Source: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middl ... 97789.html


Revolutionary leaders don't normally make good government leaders, so revolutions tend to end with despots in power. Still, that's no reason to be completely cynical.

Also, China has apparently censored "Egypt" from the internet. People are still talking about "Mu Xiaoping", though, which gives the government some reason to be paranoid.

[Maxus]

I had a break before work today and watched CNN while I got lunch at Subway.

One of the CNN reporters said at yesterday's anti-Prez rally, people were being screened for weapons. Military checkpoints to get to the rally grounds, random spot checks.

Then the pro-Prez protestors showed up, and they miraculously got knives, machetes, and the good old Molotov Cocktail past the military check points.

Oh, and a CNN news team got the snot kicked out of them by a mob.

[mean_liar]

I said this on Facebook yesterday, and it's still relevant:

Tunisia led to Egypt which itself appears to be leading to all sorts of revolts and revolutions in the Middle East. Will the United States work to prop up puppet governments and dictatorships, as it shamefully did throughout the 20th century, or will it actually support the democracy its leaders over the past 10 years have paid lip service to?

Fuck lip service. Most of those countries being run by strongmen is what's keeping the Middle East from blowing up into war. Its been a self-generated momentum, since the dictators feed the people pablum and bullshit to stay in power and twenty years later they don't just digest it and leave you alone, they actually believe it.

A democratic Egypt is a weapons channel to Gaza, followed by a Hamas blow-up, with possible implications for the actually-democratic Hezbollah-ruled Lebanon. A democratic Saudi Arabia is Taliban Afghanistan without the drugs. A democratic Syria is... something I can't really conjecture about because I don't know what their deal is other than they've been under a thumb for a long time. A democratic Egypt won't be fundamentalist, but they'll almost certainly increase the possibility of an Israeli war in the next decade. Extending it just a bit further, you sure as shit don't want a democratic NUCLEAR-ARMED, fundamentalist-Muslim Pakistan.

There's a reason why a whole host of countries don't tip those teetering regimes over and why democracy isn't that awesome. It's predicated on a (marginally) educated electorate with a free press and access to information, and those are all noticeably absent in the Middle East.


...


The socialists were disorganized and the theocrats stayed focused and on-message while also obfuscating their intentions. Pinning it on the US is... a strange conclusion, one I haven't seen before. The masses turned out and the socialists were full of jargon operating at cross-purposes and the clerics were full of (short, unexplained) answers and a real focus on counter-revolution.

The success of the theocrats in the Iranian Revolution is a good example of why democracy needs a strong society to back it up: something like 90% of the Iranian people voted for an Islamic Republic in the first major referendum on governance despite no one really knowing what the hell that meant, and the Ayatollah just kept on running with it.

I don't think the socialist accounting of the Revolution really a correct emphasis on the cycle of murderous oppression of the Muslim memorial services honoring dead protesters, held every 40 days after the previous protesters holding memorial services. The whole thing was cast in a very Shah v Islam light, especially since the whole cycle that really started the mass demonstrations was sparked by a crushed demonstration against an anti-Khomeini article in a government newspaper.

[tzor]

Tzor, that is fucking retarded. Bernanke is not causing inflation in China.

Ohhh, I must have found one of Frank's buttons. I am so tempted to keep pressing it. He's also got a China fixation. I wonder if he is aware of how little arable land there is in China and that land is getting smaller and smaller each year. Here is a more recent news article.

Arable land across China dropped dramatically from 130 million hectares in 1996 to about 122 million hectares in 2008 due to rapid urbanization and natural disasters, figures from the National Bureau of Statistics show.

But back to food, Food Companies and the Unspoken Price Elephant in the Room

In December, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Food Price Index smashed past its June 2009 peak, reflecting increases in world prices of all commodities. Particularly high was the FAO Cereal Price index, which includes staples such as rice, wheat and maize, which were 39% higher than a year earlier.

So who are you going to buy wheat from, oh great guru of all things? Let's see, the two big bread baskets in the world are the US and Russia ... oh crap is't just the US.

Food Prices Are Rising

Wheat prices are soaring as weather problems for production of the crop continue in many countries. Australia, the world's seventh largest wheat producer and fourth in exports is undergoing terrible flooding in major production areas. Other countries, such as Egypt and Russia, two of the world's top wheat exporters have recently announced that they will not sell any wheat to outside countries, due to abnormal growing conditions.

Hmmm, did I just see Egypt?

[Zinegata]

You know, if you really want to debunk the "Egypt has no economic crisis" idea, just go to wikipedia.

Because upon closer inspection, the graphs showing GDP growth are WRONG. Why the hell is the Philippines there, and why the hell do we have a negative 5% growth rate?

The Philippines hasn't had a negative GDP growth in the past decade:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_Economy

A newly industrialized emerging market economy, it posted a real GDP growth rate of 5.3% in 2006 and 7.1% in 2007. Growth slowed to 3.8% in 2008 as a result of the global financial crisis. In 2009, the real growth rate was 0.9%.[1][10] The Philippine economy grew by 7.3% in 2010, which several reports described as the fastest growth in 24 years

Our slowest rate was in '09, which was at 0.9%, but it immediately rebounded in 2010.

Moreover, the Philippine economy has an unemployment rate of just under 7% despite the crisis, and that doesn't count several million migrant workers.

Egypt by contrast...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_economy

Doesn't have a recession either in the past decade, but its unemployment is at 9% - almost roughly the same as the American unemployment rate.

And I'd say that ultimately unemployment is a greater source of disastifaction than minor shifts in GDP.

[Username17]

Tzor, you just killed your own argument. The theory you linked to was that American monetary policy was driving up the cost of commodities and that higher commodity prices were squeezing the Egyptian people.

Except... the example was wheat. You just noted that Egypt is a wheat exporter, and that wheat prices are high because bad weather in Russia and Egypt has harmed the wheat production in those countries and that they are unable to sell the stuff to other countries. Decreased supply is leading to high international prices, but it doesn't really help them because the prices are high because their supply is low - so they don't have any to sell at those high prices.

If the driving force of wheat prices was US economic policies in any way, and the wheat price was high, then wheat exporting countries like Egypt would be swimming in money. But of course, it's not and they are not. The price of wheat is driven by actual Econ 101 Supply and Demand, and Egypt has less Supply, because of that Global Warming stuff you don't believe in.

Because upon closer inspection, the graphs showing GDP growth are WRONG. Why the hell is the Philippines there, and why the hell do we have a negative 5% growth rate?

The Philippines hasn't had a negative GDP growth in the past decade

That is a chart comparing three crises. That's the Philippines just before Marcos got the boot and Indonesia just before Suharto got the boot. So yes, that data is decades old. That's the whole point. That's why it is labeled "years before crisis" rather than "2010" or something. Those GDP figures are accurate for the various times and places.

The point is merely that people drawing parallels between the unrest in Philippines and Indonesia is myopic. Egypt is much much better off economically than those countries were when hell broke loose.

In general, if you inspect a graph closer, you should read the axes, not just look at the pretty colored lines.

-Username17