Egyptian Revolution or a Potemkin Village on the Nile?

"Oh look!  No Hosni here, no Hosni there, no Hosni there or there or there.   Everything's fine.  Like a nice cup of tea?"

That seems to be the subplot of talks now underway by Hosni Mubarak's successor, Omar Sulieman, and the loosely defined "opposition groups" demanding democracy for Egypt.  It's hard to imagine what sort of talks Mubarak's outfit, the National Democratic Party, really has in mind.

What would democracy mean to the NDP and Egypt's military?   Democracy comes in so many shapes, sizes and flavours that it can mean a great many, genuinely different things to a great many people or interests.  The protesters are probably thinking along the lines of universal suffrage - one citizen/one vote.  To the NDP and the military that must seem like the end of the earth, mob rule.

If there's going to be any legitimate democracy for Egyptians it's going to mean genuine, effective separation of powers.   When you have a state in which civilian and military power have been so enmeshed for so many decades that's obviously where you have to begin.  It's the sine qua non.  You have to separate the two.  And so, the price of democracy is going to mean reforming both the political and the military hierarchies.

How do you go about reforming a military like Egypt's?   Real democracies, at least the healthy ones, are pretty good at keeping the military out of the political realm.  It's a master-servant relationship and it has to be.   The civilians rule, the military obeys.   The status quo for Egypt's generals, however, has been a militarized political class.   Ever since Farouk was sent packing, the top political spots have been held by former top generals.   It was the support of the military, not the support of the public, that was instrumental in keeping a succession of presidents in power.

Egypt's military is unlike any Western  military.  It is not only a martial force that is enmeshed in its national political sphere, it is also a commercial institution.  Like Pakistan, the Egyptian military hierarchy, the top brass, are also industrialists.  The Egyptian military even makes televisions.  It's pretty hard to get a two-headed genie back in that tiny bottle.

How do you get generals in uniform to break from generals in suits in the political and commercial arenas?  Is that even possible?  If that's not possible, on what terms can Egyptians find democratic freedom?

Most people understand that the Egyptian uprising was the culmination of a variety of discontents - political, social and economic.   Those unemployed, educated college kids waving those placards wanted economic reform along with political reform.  They know that the two are interwoven.   They know they don't have much of a future unless the Mubarak model political-class along with its economic cronyism are uprooted.

You know how, sometimes, you can bend something and get a good idea of the point at which it will finally break?  Maybe that's what Egypt needs, not bending but breaking.   Where would that break point be?  My guess is that Egypt needs to break between the majors and below and the colonels and above.  You have to rid the military and the state of those senior officers who simply have too great a vested interest, military, political and economic, in the National Democratic Party.  The military has to be an instrument of the democratic government, the public interest, if it is not be be an instrument of suppression of democracy and the public interest.

Yet it is precisely at this break point that the West will probably betray the Egyptian people.   We don't want a reformed military.  That would be far too risky.  That could threaten the stability of our regional interests.  I think Sulieman reads that unspoken message, that we'll always want Egyptian generals holding the balance of power, poised as a Sword of Damocles over the heads of whoever forms the political leadership of the country.  We want something that looks like democracy but really isn't.

A Century Old Word of Advice Concerning Afghanistan

“When planning a military expedition into Pashtun tribal areas, the first thing you must plan is your retreat. All expeditions into this area sooner or later end in retreat under fire.”

So wrote British general, Andrew Skeen, in the early 1900s in his guide to military operations in the Pashtun tribal belt.  I guess some things never change.

The Rot in America's Supreme Court

It used to be the subject of low grumblings but now influential American voices are coming out to condemn the corruption of their country's highest court.  The two main culprits (there are others) are Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

An editorial in The New York Times eloquently sets out the problem and the damage it causes to American justice.

Justice Scalia, who is sometimes called “the Justice from the Tea Party,” met behind closed doors on Capitol Hill to talk about the Constitution with a group of representatives led by Representative Michele Bachmann of the House Tea Party Caucus.


Justice Thomas, confirming his scorn for concern about conflicts of interest and rules designed to help prevent them, acknowledged that he has failed to comply with the law for the past six years by not disclosing his wife’s income from conservative groups.


In Supreme Court opinions, they showed how their impatience for goals promoted in conservative politics is infecting their legal actions. They joined in an unusual dissent from a court decision not to take a case about the commerce clause that turned into polemic in favor of limited government. In an important privacy case, NASA v. Nelson, they insisted the court should settle a constitutional issue it didn’t need to.

Constitutional law is political. It results from choices about concerns of government that political philosophers ponder, like liberty and property. When the court deals with major issues of social policy, the law it shapes is the most inescapably political.

To buffer justices from the demands of everyday politics, however, they receive tenure for life. The framers of our Constitution envisioned law gaining authority apart from politics. They wanted justices to exercise their judgment independently — to be free from worrying about upsetting the powerful and certainly not to be cultivating powerful political interests.

A petition by Common Cause to the Justice Department questioned whether Justices Scalia and Thomas are doing the latter. It asked whether the court’s ruling a year ago in the Citizens United case, unleashing corporate money into politics, should be set aside because the justices took part in a political gathering of the conservative corporate money-raiser Charles Koch while the case was before the court.

2010 Climate Change Recap, Look Back to See Ahead

2010 was hot, hot and wet.   Unless, that is, you live in the Amazon or one of those other places where it's been just hot and dry.   Here's what Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research wants you to keep in mind:

"  There is a systematic influence on all of these weather events nowadays because there is more water vapour lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be, say, 30 years ago. It's about a 4% extra amount, provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it's unfortunate that the public is not associating this with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change.  And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get worse in the future."

Okay, did you get that?   More water vapour in the air, more fuel for severe storms, only gonna keep getting worse probably for the rest of your lifetime at least.   So, what are you doing about it?   What is the leader of your political party of choice doing about it?  Have you received an information package from the government of the day informing you of what to expect, what can be done, how to get evaluation, planning and adaptation programmes underway?

All I know is that the leader of my chosen party has his head up his ass with grand delusions of salvation from bitumen and, no, the government of the day hasn't sent me any of that information because that could only screw up their own infatuation with bitumen and vast, unearned, wealth.

Not Bad for Just 30-Years Work

I know why Hosni Mubarak won't go into retirement peacefully.  With the gig he's got, nobody would.  A report in The Guardian says Hosni and his clan may have amassed a personal fortune of - wait for it - up to Seven Zero Billion Dollars.  That's 7 followed by a shitload of zeroes.  $70,000,000,000.00   I'm getting close myself.  I've got all the zeroes, just not the seven.

Now I'm just guessing here but maybe Hosni got overtaken by events he didn't foresee and hasn't had enough time yet to dig a crater big enough to stash all that loot.   One thing for sure - as soon as he's gone the people of Egypt will have seventy billion reasons to track down him, his family, and their loot.

Maybe the anti-Mubarak people should think this one through.  Is driving this guy out of Egypt really a good idea?

Polar Bear Swam Non-Stop Nine Days to Reach Safety

Researchers at the US Geological Survey in Alaska tracked a female polar bear as it swam nine days to cross 685 kilometres of open Bering Sea before finally reaching the safety of an ice floe.  En route the mother lost her cub.  When she finally clambered out onto the ice she had lost 22% of her body weight.

Only Part of Australia is Flooded

The theory of global warming forecasts severe weather events, particularly cyclical floods and droughts or, as we call it, California.   Look at the evidence.  It's not hard to find.   Brazil inundated, people losing their lives in mudslides.   Meanwhile, just to the west, the Amazon rainforest is being ravaged by mega-drought.   Some stretches of the Amazon River itself have dried up, cutting off transport to upriver villages.

And then there's Australia.   For several weeks news accounts have told us of the awful flooding in Brisbane and parts north - people forced out of their homes, mines flooded, erosion and massive damage to the Great Barrier Reef.  But what about the rest of the country?

Sydney, you know - the place with that strange opera house, well it's roasting.  Sydney is now dealing with its sixth consecutive day of a 40 degree plus heatwave.  It's even 36 degrees on the beaches.   The heatwave is being blamed for wildfires and rolling power outages in the suburbs.

One Less Organ Donor - Vatican Overrules Only Living Disciple

Bless his leathery old heart, Pope Benny is an advocate of organ donation.  Unfortunately, the Vatican isn't.   Some doctor in Germany has been using Joe Ratzinger's donor card from the 70's to recruit new donors.

The Pope's secretary put that all to rest in a letter in which he informed the doctor that the Pope's elevation to, well Pope, rendered the donor card invalid.   Apparently the Vatican has a lovely collection of retired Popes and really doesn't want to break up the set when Benny croaks.

And now, for your anti-papist amusement, here are some funny protest placards that appeared in Britain during the Pope's last visit there.

Going, Going - No, Still the President

Well they've gotten old grampa Hosni to resign as head of Egypt's National Democratic Party but he's still the titular president.   Also gone is Mubarak's loathed son and one-time intended successor, Gamal.  In an apparent scramble to re-invent itself the party's top brass , its secretary general and the six man secretariat steering committee have also resigned.  They're said to have been replaced with much younger party members.

Easing Mubarak Out of Office

According to The New York Times, Egyptian officials, including the newly-minted vice-president Omar Sulieman and top Egyptian generals are working on plans to show Hosni Mubarak the door.  Among the ideas are to suggest Grampa Hosni go rest for a spell at his seaside home or, perhaps, take a leisurely visit to Germany for one of his annual medical checkups.

If they want to send Mubarak on his way I think the White House could do a little more to help.   I'm sure they could at least lend Egypt the same vehicle they used to get rid of their own tyrant.

First Germany, Now Britain Rejects Multiculturalism

Taking a page from Angela Merkel's playbook, British prime minister David Cameron, while addressing a security conference in Germany, criticized state multiculturalism.   Cameron made it plain his concern is with Britain's Muslim communities.

Mr Cameron suggested there would be greater scrutiny of some Muslim groups that get public money but do little to tackle extremism.


Ministers should refuse to share platforms or engage with such groups, which should be denied access to public funds and barred from spreading their message in universities and prisons, he argued.

"  Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism,"   the prime minister said.

"  Let's properly judge these organisations: Do they believe in universal human rights - including for women and people of other faiths? Do they believe in equality of all before the law? Do they believe in democracy and the right of people to elect their own government? Do they encourage integration or separatism?

"  These are the sorts of questions we need to ask. Fail these tests and the presumption should be not to engage with organisations,"   he added.

Egyptian VP Survives Assassination Attempt? So Says Fox News.

Assassins failed in an attempt to kill newly appointed Egyptian vice president Omar Sulieman.   The report comes from Fox News which claims the attackers targeted a convoy Sulieman was travelling in and killed two of his bodyguards but missed their intended target.

It's hard to tell where Fox got its information.   The White House has refused to comment.   There's no mention of the purported attack on Al Jazeera.   The Israeli newspaper Haaretz is simply carrying the Fox report.   Nothing yet in The New York Times or The Guardian.

This could very well be a Mubarak set up just as the pro-Mubarak protesters were exposed as thugs working on the orders of the government.  Or it could simply be Fox News sensationalist drivel.   The New York Times reports that CNN has rebounded to lead both MSNBC and Fox in the cable news ratings war thanks to its coverage of the Egyptian uprising.    That won't go down well at the Fair & Balanced (or "marginally unhinged") network.

Meanwhile, a US State Department spokesman says the American government is pretty sure the Egyptian government was responsible for recent attacks on foreign journalists:

Harlequin Applies to Patent the Kiss

With Valentine's Day approaching, romance novel publisher Harlequin, has submitted an application for a patent on the "romantic kiss."

The book publisher, whose parent company also owns the Toronto Star, announced Thursday it has submitted a patent application for the “essential romantic kiss” to the United States Patent and Trademark Office. (The patent number is 61438360.)
 
Harlequin describes its proposed kiss in a news release as a way for “two people (to) reciprocate their romantic feelings toward one another in a manner that deepens attachment, provides pleasure and promotes physical and emotional well-being — the essential romantic kiss.” 

If the application succeeds, Harlequin is rumoured to be waiting until after Valentine's Day to apply for a patent on the blowjob.

The Bubble Bursts - Elliot to Step Down as RCMP Commish

William Elliott is packing it in.  He'll resign as Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.   Elliott's resignation takes effect this summer.

Elliott (or "Bubbles" as we called him in law school) has had a controversial, even tumultuous ride as the first civilian commissioner of the force.  The Mounties had their share and more of scandal and disgrace during Elliott's three and a half year reign.   The worst episode was unquestionably the Dziekanski killing at the hands of four officers at Vancouver airport.   Then there were stories of Elliott's reputed hot temper and abusive nature which led to some sort of personality rehab.  Atop that was a near mutiny of top RCMP brass.

Elliott has resisted demands that he step down now, saying it would only leave the country in a state of chaos leading to a takeover by Islamic radicals.

Understanding the Danger in the Global Food Crisis

Record food prices are instrumental in the upheaval spreading through the Middle East and the situation is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.  Reuters has a good analysis of what's happening and what that's likely to mean:

Catastrophic storms and droughts have slammed the world's leading agriculture countries in recent months, including flooding and a massive cyclone in Australia and a powerful winter storm that swept across the United States.

Dubbed "  Stormageddon,"   one of the biggest snowstorm in decades dumped up to 20 inches of snow in some parts of the U.S. grain belt this week, paralyzing the shipment of grain and livestock.

A deep-freeze forecast for the Midwest, the bread basket of the United States, threatens the region's winter wheat because it may lack sufficient insulating moisture to withstand the cold.

Sugar prices also have surged to three-decade highs on fears of damage Cyclone Yasi would bring to the Australian cane crop. Prices for Malaysian palm oil, a cooking staple in the developing world, hit 3-year highs on flooding.

Big companies have had to adjust to higher raw material costs. Kellogg Co, the world's largest breakfast cereal company, said on Thursday it has boosted prices on many of its products to offset rising costs for ingredients such as grains and sugar.

During the last food price crisis, the World Bank estimated that some 870 million people in developing countries were hungry or malnourished. The FAO estimates that number has increased to 925 million.

"  2008 should have been a wake-up call, but I'm not yet sure all the countries in the world that we need to support this have woken up to it,"  the World Bank's Zoellick said.

Indonesia, Southeast Asia's biggest economy, last week bought 820,000 tons of rice, lifting rice prices, while suspending import duties on rice, soybeans and wheat.

Algeria last week bought almost 1 million tons of wheat, bringing its purchases to at least 1.75 million since the start of January, and ordered a speeding up of grain imports.

On a day of bloody confrontation in Egypt, where protesters are demanding an end to the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak, the U.N. World Food Programme's Executive Director Josette Sheeran said the world was now in an era where it had to be very serious about food supply.

"  If people don't have enough to eat they only have three options: they can revolt, they can migrate or they can die. We need a better action plan,"   she said.

c

Oh, the Horror! Al Qaeda Targeting Wall Street Moguls?

The Global Security Newswire, picking up on a story from NBC earlier this week, reports that US intelligence officials fear Islamist extremists intend to target Wall Street banks or their top managers.

Intelligence researchers said there is a nonspecific but increasing fear that extremists in Yemen could make another attempt at shipping hidden explosive devices or chemical and biological weapons materials to New York financial institutions. U.S. authorities think extremists operating from Yemen were responsible for the packaged bombs addressed to Chicago-based synagogues in late October. The explosive devices -- hidden inside printer cartridges -- were intercepted in the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom but officials think they could have been designed to detonate in midflight (see GSN, Nov. 3, 2010).

Al-Qaeda's official magazine, "  Inspire,"   in its most recent issue included a mention of attempting to deploy the biological pathogen anthrax in a terror strike, officials said.

Al-Qaeda member Abu Suleiman al-Nasser in a recent blog post exhorted, " "Rush"  my Muslim brothers to targeting financial sites and the program sites of financial institutions, stock markets and money markets."

GSN says intelligence officials are warning the heads of some of America's top financial institutions to beware Yemeni terrorists.

The more I mull this over, the less sense it makes.   al Qaeda's ambition is to bring down the United States.   The best al Qaeda has managed is to bring down two skyscrapers, bomb a ship and destroy a couple of foreign embassies.  By contrast, Wall Street has done far more to weaken and undermine America than al Qaeda could manage even in its wildest dreams.

Sarah Palin - Shrewd Opportunism or The Height of Conceit?

Sarah Palin and her spawn, Bristol, are applying to trade mark their names.  Really.

In the last several months, Politics Daily has learned that the Palin family lawyer, Alaska attorney Thomas Van Flein, has filed applications to the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark "  Sarah Palin®"   and "  Bristol Palin®."

Update - Both applications, Sarah's and Bristol's, were summarily rejected (temporarily) because neither of them managed to sign the forms.

Mubarak's Base Fractures - Government Officials Join Protesters

A big development.  A number of prominent Egyptians have joined the anti-Mubarak demonstrators.   According to The New York Times, they may be severing their ties to Mubarak.

Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League and a former foreign minister serving Mr. Mubarak, appeared among the crowds in Tahrir Square, seeming to align himself with the protest. Twice he sought to address the crowd, but both times he was drowned out by roars of approval at what seemed a tacit endorsement of their cause.


Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi, the defense minister and deputy prime minister, appeared in the square as well — the first member of the government elite to do so — but he seemed to be concerned mostly with reviewing the troops and did not seek to speak to the crowd, though he did chat with some protesters.

And Mohamed Rafah Tahtawy, the public spokesman for Al Azhar — the center of Sunni Muslim learning and Egypt’s highest, state-run religious authority — told reporters that he was resigning because “I am participating in the protests and I have issued statements that support the revolutionists as far as they go.” 

Now I have to assume that in a place like Egypt where reckless dissent carries an awfully steep price, these appearances weren't spur of the moment, impulse decisions.   These are folks who know how to read the writing on the wall, how to manage risks, how to recognize opportunity.   I think they have an idea who is packing his bags.

Making Sense of the F-35

It's a safe bet that Canada has never seen a more controversial defence acquisition than the current plan to buy the Lockheed Martin F-35 strike fighter.

There have been a lot of claims made for and against this airplane and they run the honesty gamut from unquestionable truth to unquestionable lie.  Part of the problem is that there's a lot we don't know about the F-35.  From my perspective, an even greater problem is that we can't assess the realities this airplane will have to meet in a decade from now when it is deployed.  We've banking on some awfully expensive technology that could be obsolete before this fighter ever comes into service.

Back in October, 2008, long before most of us even knew of the F-35, Defense Industry Daily published what seems to be a carefully thought out analysis of the aircraft, its strengths and its obvious weaknesses and vulnerabilities.  If you're interested in this controversy, it's a very worthwhile read.

Water, Water Everywhere - Except Where It's Needed Most

News accounts lately have focused on widespread flooding in Australia, Sri Lanka and Brazil.  It creates the impression of a far wetter world.  What we hear very little about is the severe drought impacting other regions.   For example, Brazil may be enduring deadly mudslides but the Amazon is reeling from drought and may, according to The Guardian, have reached an ecological "tipping point."

The dense forests of the Amazon soak up more than one-quarter of the world's atmospheric carbon, making it a critically important buffer against global warming. But if the Amazon switches from a carbon sink to a carbon source that prompts further droughts and mass tree deaths, such a feedback loop could cause runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences.

"  Put starkly, current emissions pathways risk playing Russian roulette with the world's largest forest,"   said tropical forest expert Simon Lewis, at the University of Leeds, and who led the research published today in the journal Science. Lewis was careful to note that significant scientific uncertainties remain and that the 2010 and 2005 drought - thought then to be of once-a-century severity - might yet be explained by natural climate variation.

"  We can't just wait and see because there is no going back,"  he said. "  We won't know we have passed the point where the Amazon turns from a sink to a source until afterwards, when it will be too late."

What Exactly Are Egypt's Dissidents After?

Yesterday the Egyptian newspaper Ash Sharouk printed a statement said to be signed by leaders of the pro-democracy movement.   This is their proposal as translated by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:

The current regime, represented by the president of the republic, has agreed to a limited number of the popular demands that have been clearly expressed. The people who have come out in the millions in Cairo and all Egyptian cities still insist on the following legitimate demands:

1. The President must delegate to his Vice President the responsibilities of managing the transitional period that began yesterday and will be completed by the end of the president’s current term.
2.  The Vice President must agree to the following: dissolve the Shura Council and People’s Assembly and form a legislative committee consisting of constitutional experts and independent judges who will prepare for the necessary constitutional amendments.
3. Form a government of experts and independent figures that are accepted by the public to administer executive operations during this transitional period.
4. End the rule by Emergency Law and create specific mechanisms to hold accountable those responsible for attacks on the people as well as public and private property and for unprecedented intimidation of the public. Those in the various state institutions who contributed to exposing the nation and the public to the effects of this absence of security must also be held responsible.
5. Ensure the safety of the youth that have congregated in Tahrir Square and other streets in Cairo and various Egyptian cities during this transitional period, and protect them from prosecution, persecution and violation of their rights. Their rights, including freedom of expression and peaceful assembly and their legitimate means of expression, must be protected. We note our full solidarity with the youth and call on all signatories of this statement to protect the protesters and their personal safety.
6. We assert on record our appreciation and praise of the responsible, patriotic role of the military.

The Dumbing Down of America

Pulitzer prize winning pundit Leonard Pitts wrote an anguished op-ed piece for the Miami Herald, lamenting the humbling of his beloved America through self-inflicted stupidity.  What set Pitts off was a report that less than a third of American high school science teachers follow their National Research Council guidelines urging them to present students with evidence of evolution while 13% explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design.
 Once upon a time, there lived a stupid giant.

The giant had not always been stupid. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say the giant had once revered intelligence, reason and the byproducts thereof. Indeed, the giant was renowned for an ingenuity and standard of living that made it the envy of the world.

...stupidity crept over the giant with the stealth of twilight, a product less of one abrupt moment than of a thousand moments of complacency, of resting on laurels, of allowing curiosity to be teased and bullied out of bright children, of dumbing down textbooks so kids could get better grades with less work, of using "  elite"   like a curse word. And, of behaving as if knowing things, and being able to extrapolate from and otherwise make critical use of, the things one knows, was a betrayal of some fundamental human authenticity -- some need to keep it real.

Stupidity stole over the giant until it could no longer tell science from faith, or conventional wisdom from actual wisdom and in any event, valued ideological purity above them all. Stupidity snaked over the giant until science teachers shrank from teaching science, history books contained history that wasn't history, late-night comics got easy laughs from people on the street who could not say when the War of 1812 was fought, political leaders told outright lies with blithe smiles and no fear of being caught...

It is impossible to dispute Pitts' argument.  In reading this I kept coming back to Trudeau's motto, "Reason over Passion."  Trudeau believed passionately in many things but he was almost always able to defend his beliefs with forceful reason.  It was why, when he left politics, he was pretty unpopular but yet still enormously respected.  That was the Holy Grail that Brian Mulroney so desperately sought but never attained.

We live in a world today where outright lies have become the stock in trade of many, very powerful individuals.   Lies fuel the entire rightwing movement in the United States and afford no small comfort to their counterparts in Canada.

I watch these supposed leaders on television.  Most of them are obviously educated.  There is no way they can possibly believe what comes out of their mouths.  They are deliberately selling their own people a toxic gruel of deception warmed up with overheated emotion.   How many Americans have been trained to believe that the answer to their federal government's debt crisis is to slash its revenues through tax cuts for the very rich?  That is the very essence of magical thinking.  How many Canadians and Americans have been trained to believe, even to this day, that global warming is a hoax?  As Pitts notes, how many have been trained to distrust, even despise voices of intelligence, of reason?  How many have been duped to equate 'elite' with 'elitism'?

The hardest part is the knowledge that no good can come to those who are trained to believe these things, to think this way.   They are, as I've said before, a bit like round-eyed North Koreans.

Don't Be Fooled, Egyptians Aren't

Today may be the day that Hosni Mubarak steps down as imperator/president of Egypt.  At least that's the story line coming out of Washington.  Mubarak clears out his desk so that his handpicked successor, vice-president Omar Sulieman can navigate Egypt to a transition to democracy.

I know, I know, it smells.   That's because, as Asia Times' "Pepe Escobar" explains, it's bullshit:

Anybody believing that Washington's "  orderly transition"  led by Vice President  Omar Suleiman (aka Sheikh al-Torture, according to protesters and human-rights activists) could satisfy Egyptian popular will believes Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin could have gotten away with a facelift.

The young, urban masses in Egypt fighting for bread, freedom, democracy, Internet, jobs and a decent future - as well as their
counterparts across the Arab world, two-thirds of the overall population - see right through it.

Real "  change we can believe in"   (the Egyptian version) means not only getting rid of the dictator of 30 years but of his torturer-in-chief, who happens to be so far a key interlocutor of Washington, Tel Aviv and European capitals, and a key exponent of a regime rotten to the core, dependent on pitiless exploitation of its own citizens, and receiver of US aid to pursue agendas virtually no one would vote for in the Arab world.

"  Orderly transition"   may also be regarded as a ghastly euphemism for sitting on the fence - way distinct from an explicit call for democracy. The White House has morphed into a succession of white pretzels trying to salvage the concept. But the fact is that as much as Pharaoh Mubarak is a slave to US foreign policy, US President Barack Obama is boxed in by geopolitical imperatives and enormous corporate interests he cannot even dream of upsetting.

A crash course on 'stability'
 
To cut to the chase; it's all about oil and Israel. That's the essence of Washington's foreign policy for the past six decades as far as the Middle East, Arabs and the Muslim world at large are concerned. This has implied coddling an array of dictators and assorted autocracies, and sprinkling their countries with military bases. A crucial example - the story on how the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) brought down democracy in Iran in 1953. [1] Geostrategically, the code word for this state of things is "stability".

Egypt plays out a very special strategic role. This is how Obama himself spelled out the strategic value of Hosni Mubarak and his regime when he went to Cairo in June 2009 to deliver his freedom message to the Arab world; "  He has been a stalwart ally in many respects to the United States. He has sustained peace with Israel which is a very difficult thing to do in that region."

So as one of the pillars of the "  cold peace"   with Israel, Egypt is a paradigm. It's a bipartisan phenomenon, in US terms; Republicans and Democrats see it the same way. There's the Suez Canal, through which flows 1.8 million barrels of crude a day. But "  partner with Israel"   in the 1979 Camp David accords is what explains all the billions of dollars showered on the Egyptian military and the three decades of unconditional support to the corrupt Mubarak military dictatorship (and make no mistake, the US implication in that vast shop of horrors is all documented in the vaults of the regime). On a parallel track, "  stability"   also translates as a lousy quality of life for virtually the totality of Egyptians; democratic rights of local populations are always secondary to geostrategic considerations.


It's easy as hell to fool the folks back home on this one but it's not going to fly on the Arab Street.  Eventually we're going to have to accept that, when democracy arrives, it will have to be their notion of democracy, not ours.

Harper Government Onside With Mubarak Regime

The Harper government says it supports Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's plan to step down in September.  Lawrence "Loose" Cannon said his government is concerned that a democratic Egyptian government might break its peace treaty with Israel.

There it is.  It's not about Egypt or the Egyptian people, it's all about Israel.  As the Globe & Mail described it rather dryly,   "The comments appear to set the Canada at odds with the U.S. and several other Western countries that have sought to persuade Mr. Mubarak to step down sooner."

Yeah well those other countries were probably looking at this from Egypt's not Israel's perspective.

Girl, 14, Beaten to Death for "Affair" With Married Man

Police in Bangladesh have arrested four clerics who ordered a 14-year old girl whipped for having an affair with a married man.  The clerics sentenced the girl to 100-lashes.  She received 70-strokes from a bamboo cane before she collapsed.  The girl later died in hospital.

The married man?  Well he seems to have fled.

Now I could be wrong but I'm guessing that when a married man has sex with a 14-year old girl, it's not an 'affair' but something considerably more odious.  Religious tolerance is fine but any religion whose clerics give orders like this and whose adherents obey them needs to be suppressed.

If You Want to See What Collapse Looks Like - Check Out Central Asia

They're names we've become vaguely aware of since our troops' arrival in Afghanistan - Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.  Now, the International Crisis Group warns, the "Stans" are literally falling apart and are on the verge of descending into chaos.

The report paints a picture of something straight out of  a post-apocalyptic movie.

Almost two decades after independence, Central Asian countries have nearly run down the schools, clinics, hospitals, roads and power plants built in Soviet times. The region is entering a period when systemic collapse of infrastructure for education, healthcare, transportation and energy is becoming increasingly likely. The risk is particularly high in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. 

“In five to ten years there will be no teachers to lead classes, no doctors to treat the sick and the absence of electricity will become a norm”, says Paul Quinn-Judge, Crisis Group’s Central Asia Project Director. “The time for reform is running out. Continuing declines in the provision of services will exacerbate social tensions in an already volatile region. This in turn could well heighten the potential for future conflict”.


As part of the Soviet Union, the five countries were tightly woven into a single system. These interdependencies have proven difficult to unravel, and have produced serious imbalances. During the Soviet era, the countries were obliged to work together. Now they no longer have to get along, and usually do not, especially as far as energy is concerned. The quality of education and healthcare has plummeted with the end of the social safety net. In some countries, notably Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, these sectors have almost ceased to exist.

This is fertile soil for radicalism, particularly  fundamentalist Islamism.  The Crisis Group goes on to note that the only effective solutions are unacceptable to Central Asia's ruling elites.

...These amount to nothing less than a total repudiation of regional leaders’ values and behaviour. They would need to purge their governments of top-to-bottom systemic corruption; cease using their countries’ resources as a source of fabulous wealth for themselves and their families; and create a meritocracy with decent pay that would free officials from the need to depend on corruption to make ends meet. All these changes are so far from current realities that foreign governments and donors may dismiss them as hopelessly idealistic. Yet without organised change from above, there is a growing risk of chaotic change from below. 

If this description sounds eerily apt to a place like Afghanistan, that's because it is.   Every one of these obstacles that undermine progress and lead to a return to Dark Age brutality and poverty continue to spread through Afghanistan and we've had a decade to prove there isn't much that we can or are willing to do to change any of it.

Algeria To End 19-Year Old State of Emergency

The wave of unrest sweeping the Arab states has unnerved Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.   Obviously trying to forestall a democratic uprising in his land, Bouteflika has announced he'll be ending his 19-year old state of emergency and extend more political freedoms.

Bouteflika said the government should adopt new measures to promote job creation, a nod to the problem of unemployment which is particularly acute among young Algerians and helped trigger the uprising that ousted the president in neighbouring Tunisia.

The Algerian president also instructed that national television and radio stations -- which are controlled by the state and broadcast almost no voices of dissent -- give airtime to all political parties.

"  It is a step in the right direction,"  Algerian political analyst Mohamed Lagab said of the proposed changes. "  (It) shows that Bouteflika has understood how fragile the situation is."

 ...The state of emergency was introduced in 1992, soon after the authorities annulled a parliamentary election which a radical Islamist party was poised to win.

That led to nearly two decades of armed conflict between Islamist insurgents and security forces which killed an estimated 200,000 people and from which the country, a major oil and gas producer, is still emerging.

Just in case you were wondering, Bouteflika is indeed a geezer, 73-years old, and he's on his third term in what was supposed to be an indefinite run as Algeria's strongman president.

It's Official - UN FAO Food Price Index Shatters Record

Food, food, food - we're finally waking up to how critical the food supply is to global stability.

As predicted, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization food price index for January set an all time record and the future looks worse:

Global food prices hit a record high in January, the U.N Food and Agriculture Organisation said on Thursday, adding that prices, already above the 2008 levels which sparked riots, were likely to rise further.
   
Up for the seventh month in a row, the closely watched FAO Food Price Index touched its highest since records began in 1990, in nominal terms, and topped the high of 224.1 in June 2008, during the food crisis of 2007/08.
  
The index, which measures monthly price changes for a food basket composed of cereals, oilseeds, dairy, meat and sugar, averaged 230.7 points in January, up from 223.1 points in December.
  
Surging food prices have come back into the spotlight after they helped fuelled protests that toppled Tunisia's president in January. Food inflation has also been among the root causes of protests in Egypt and Jordan, raising speculation other nations in the region would secure grain stocks to reassure their populations.
  
Severe drought in the Black Sea last year, heavy rains in Australia and dry weather in Argentina and anticipation of a spike in demand after unrest in north Africa and the Middle East has helped power grain prices to multi-year highs.

We need to get it through our heads that this is a serious problem, with serious and wide-reaching consequences and it's not going away anytime soon, if at all.

This video report from Reuters gives an idea of what we can expect to face in the coming decade.  

Beck's Not The Only Rightwing Lunatic

Glenn Beck's FOX News colleague, former Arkansas governor, and expected contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Mike Huckabee, has fallen neck deep in the rightwing looney zone.

The genial, softspoken Huckabee attended the opening ceremony of a new Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank this week.   This comes straight from the horse's ...er, mouth:

“I think there probably should be [a Palestinian state], but it doesn’t necessarily have to be on the tiny postage-stamp-size piece of land that is Israel,” he said. “I’m not against a Palestinian state. I am against, and not really against, but I’m just being realistic – I don’t see how it works to put two people and two governments right on top of each other.”

 Huckabee went on to blast the Arab position – which has been adopted by the rest of the world – that the Jews must stop building in Judea and Samaria, lands claimed by the Palestinians, in order for peace to be achieved.

“To tell Jewish people, ‘You cannot live here, you cannot raise your children here,’ this is the true racism, this is apartheid,” said Huckabee. “I cannot imagine as an American being told that I could not live in certain places in America because I was Christian, or because I was white, or because I spoke English.”

Huck, the only people who are on top of another are the Israeli people illegally occupying Palestinian territory.   The folks on the bottom are the Palestinians.  But you're right.  It doesn't work to put Israelis on top of the Palestinians who rightly belong there.

What an asshole.  A total sphincter.

They Flout the Geneva Conventions at Every Turn. Now They Want One on CyberWar.

This really is laughable.  Pathetic, but laughable.   The United States and Russia, such devout adherents to the existing Geneva Conventions, are now proposing a new one to cope with potentially devastating cyber weapons.

The cyber proposal, seen exclusively by [BBC]  Newsnight, comes from the influential EastWest Institute in New York.


It describes "  rendering the Geneva and Hague conventions in cyberspace". 

The logic behind the move is that in the intermingled world of cyberspace, we may need to protect zones that run facilities such as hospitals or schools.

The draft document also calls for a fresh definition of "  nation state",  with new "  territories"   and players in cyberspace beyond government - such as multinationals, NGOs and citizens.


The proposal also says that ambiguity about what constitutes cyber conflict is delaying international policy to deal with it, and that perhaps the idea of "  peace"   or "  war"   is too simple in the internet age when the world could find itself in a third, "  other than war",  mode.

This could actually be a good idea, once they get all the considerable ambiguities sorted out, but I'd be content if these clown states simply observed the existing Conventions first.

Our "Global Suicide Pact"

Kofi Annan had a certain 'Morgan Freeman' charisma that endeared us to the man.  Unfortunately his successor, Ban Ki-moon hasn't really caught our attention the same way.   That's 'unfortunate' because Ban has been making some pretty candid statements, warnings if you will, that seem to be going unheeded.

With all the turmoil spreading through the Middle East it's understandable that Ban didn't get much attention for his remarks last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.  Ban didn't pull any punches.   He told the wealthy, powerful and influential in attendance that the world's current economic model is nothing short of a "global suicide pact" that will end in disaster without prompt and radical reform.

Not surprisingly, it seems a number of the prominent voices at Davos didn't get it.  They still see a future anchored in continual growth, greened up as "sustainable growth."   These are people who would trust the future of our grandchildren to alchemy.

Hints That Egypt's Military Has Nearly Had Enough of Mubarak

Al Jazeera has aired video of Egyptian army vehicles and soldiers deployed to force pro-Mubarak "protesters" away from anti-Mubarak demonstrators.  The army could be seen forcing them back beyond rock-throwing range.  The Guardian reports that Egyptian army units have also been clearing Mubarak's thugs from a bridge at Tahrir Square they'd been using to pelt the demonstrators.

The British newspaper says the BBC has interviewed a retired Egyptian general who claimed the army has about had enough of the president.

The intervention came as a retired Egyptian army general told the BBC the military was losing patience with the embattled Mubarak, and would open fire at regime loyalists if there were fresh attacks on protesters.

The general, who said he had spoken with tank crews in Tahrir Square, said he believed the military would move very soon against the president, possibly as soon as tomorrow.

The Egyptian military is at a crossroads.   It has to choose whether to use its power on behalf of the Egyptian public and force Mubarak out or prop up a thug who supposedly intends to leave in half a year and lose the respect and support of the Egyptian people.

Chomsky Weighs In on Egyptian Uprising

Democracy Now's Amy Goodman interviewed Noam Chomsky to get his take on the Egyptian uprising and what it means to the United States.  Here are a couple of excerpts:

The United States, so far, is essentially following the usual playbook. I mean, there have been many times when some favored dictator has lost control or is in danger of losing control. There’s a kind of a standard routine—Marcos, Duvalier, Ceausescu, strongly supported by the United States and Britain, Suharto: keep supporting them as long as possible; then, when it becomes unsustainable—typically, say, if the army shifts sides—switch 180 degrees, claim to have been on the side of the people all along, erase the past, and then make whatever moves are possible to restore the old system under new names. That succeeds or fails depending on the circumstances.

...Actually, the only leader who has been really forthright and is becoming the most—maybe already is—the most popular figure in the region is the Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan, who’s been very straight and outspoken.

...I mean, it’s sometimes compared with Eastern Europe, but that’s not much of a comparison.  ...In fact, about the only moderately reasonable comparison would be to Romania, where Ceausescu, the most vicious of the dictators of the region, was very strongly supported by the United States right up ’til the end. And then, when he—the last days, when he was overthrown and killed, the first Bush administration followed the usual rules: postured about being on the side of the people, opposed to dictatorship, tried to arrange for a continuation of close relations.


...the problems that the protesters are trying to address are extremely deep-seated, and they’re not going to be solved easily. There is a tremendous poverty, repression, a lack of not just democracy, but serious development. Egypt and other countries of the region have just been through a neoliberal period, which has led to growth on paper, but with the usual consequences: high concentration of extreme wealth and privilege, tremendous impoverishment and dismay for most of the population. And that’s not easily changed.

It's a long but interesting interview.   Follow the link above to read the whole thing.

Mubarak Regime Attacked - By Global Hackers

An online group of Hackers that calls itself Anonymous is going after the Mubarak government.  The New York Times reports they've begun by bringing down Egyptian government web sites.

Anonymous, a loosely defined group of hackers from all over the world, gathered about 500 supporters in online forums and used software tools to bring down the sites of the Ministry of Information and President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, said Gregg Housh, a member of the group who disavows any illegal activity himself. The sites were unavailable Wednesday afternoon. 

...Mr. Housh said that the group had used its technical knowledge to help protesters in Egypt defy a government shutdown of the Internet that began last week. “We want freedom,” he said of the group’s motivation. “It’s as simple as that. We’re sick of oppressive governments encroaching on people.”

Anonymous also mounted strikes late last year, characterized by some of its supporters as a “cyberwar,” against companies like MasterCard, Visa and PayPal that had refused to process donations to the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks.

It's Those Little Things That Say So Much

Yesterday the world watched as anti-Mubarak protesters clashed with what some benignly called pro-Mubarak protesters.   That seemed to be intended to imbue the pro-Mubarak thugs with a certain moral equivalency.   It was simply a difference of opinion.

This morning an Al Jazeera reporter claimed the pro-Mubarak thugs were likely hired goons from the Cairo slums.   She said that was easy enough.   Give them twenty bucks, a week's wages, and a bus ride to the square.   Basically she was making a claim we've heard before.

But.

But she had one little observation that reinforced her point.   She noted that the pro-Mubarak mob cleared out, en masse, at day's end.   They punched their time cards and went home, their day's work done.

Pretty good point.

Anderson Cooper Worked Over, Mubarak Thugs Hunting Down Al Jazeera Journos

CNN's Anderson Cooper was repeatedly punched in the head by pro-Mubarak thugs while his crew was also surrounded, punched and kicked by the mob.

A senior editor at CNN said of the attack on Anderson Cooper's crew, the network's marquee anchor, "  was punched 10 times in the head as pro-Mubarak mob surrounded him and his crew trying to cover demonstration,"   Steve Brusk wrote on Twitter.

Another CNN correspondent, Hala Gorani, told television viewers of being threatened by apparent supporters of the president.

"  Protesters are hunting down Al Jazeera journos,"   wrote Abbas Al Lawati of Gulf News in Dubai.   "  I keep having to clarify that I'm not one of them."

NYT columnist Nicholas Kristoff reports that the pro-Mubarak protests are plainly the work of Mubarak himself:

Today President Mubarak seems to have decided to crack down on the democracy movement, using not police or army troops but rather mobs of hoodlums and thugs. I've been spending hours on Tahrir today, and it is absurd to think of this as simply "  clashes"   between two rival groups. The pro-democracy protesters are unarmed and have been peaceful at every step. But the pro-Mubarak thugs are arriving in buses and are armed - and they're using their weapons.

In my area of Tahrir, the thugs were armed with machetes, straight razors, clubs and stones. And they all had the same chants, the same slogans and the same hostility to journalists. They clearly had been organized and briefed. So the idea that this is some spontaneous outpouring of pro-Mubarak supporters, both in Cairo and in Alexandria, who happen to end up clashing with other side - that is preposterous. It's difficult to know what is happening, and I'm only one observer, but to me these seem to be organized thugs sent in to crack heads, chase out journalists, intimidate the pro-democracy forces and perhaps create a pretext for an even harsher crackdown.

... Various networks are streaming live video from high vantage points above Cairo's Tahrir Square.  Live streams are also available on BBC.comAl Jazeera English YouTube channel. and the  CNN is broadcasting live video of the scene outside the Egyptian Museum as one Molotov cocktail after another is being thrown at the opposition protesters in Tahrir Square.

Debunking the F-35 Refueling Myth

I believe it was an Ottawa newspaper that started the story that the F-35 Canada intends to buy can't be refueled without also buying another type of tanker aircraft.   That was presumably based on the fact that the US Air Force uses its own refueling system, a boom apparatus that plugs into the receiving aircraft.

Pretty much everyone else uses the drogue and boom system.  The tanker unspools a flexible hose with a drogue at the end.   The fighter extends its own, onboard probe and flies it into the drogue basket at which point fuel is transferred.   This is the system used by the US Navy and the US Marine Corps.  As the USN and USMC are intended to be the second and third largest user of the F-35, does anybody in his right mind think Lockheed would leave them with an aircraft they can't refuel.

Just to set the record straight, here is a pic of an actual F-35 successfully refueling with the drogue & probe system.

Yeah, that's right.  It's an F-35, the same airplane that supposedly can't do this.  Better still, in case you suspect that photograph is faked, here's the video:



There is no shortage of deficiencies that make the F-35 unsuitable for Canada.  Refueling isn't one of them.

Why Israel Fears a Democratic Egypt

One thing Hosni Mubarak did accomplish was to relieve Israel of the need to honestly and fairly negotiate a settlement to the Palestinian statehood dilemma.  So long as Egypt was tamed there was no viable military threat to Israel and, ergo, no compelling reason to halt the encroachment of settlements into the West Bank and the takeover of East Jerusalem.   For successive Israeli governments it was time to make hay while the sun shines.

In the West, Mubarak is sometimes praised for being an intermediary between the Israelis and Palestinians.   Judging by the "Palestine Papers" released by al Jazeera, that claim is at least questionable.

An op-ed piece from Yossi Klein Halevi, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and a contributing editor to The New Republic, from today's New York Times,

...The removal of Egypt from the anti-Israeli front left the Arab world without a credible military option; indeed, the last conventional war fought by Arab nations against Israel was the 1973 joint Egyptian-Syrian attack on Yom Kippur.
Since then all of Israel’s military conflicts — from the first Lebanon war in 1982 to the Gaza war of 2009 — have been asymmetrical confrontations against terrorists. While those conflicts have presented Israel with strategic, diplomatic and moral problems, it no longer faced an existential threat from the Arab world.

For Israel, then, peace with Egypt has been not only strategically but also psychologically essential. Israelis understand that the end of their conflict with the Arab world depends in large part on the durability of the peace with Egypt — for all its limitations, it is the only successful model of a land-for-peace agreement. 

...the grim assumption is that it is just a matter of time before the only real opposition group in Egypt, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, takes power. Israelis fear that Egypt will go the way of Iran or Turkey, with Islamists gaining control through violence or gradual co-optation.


Either result would be the end of Israel’s most important relationship in the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood has long stated its opposition to peace with Israel and has pledged to revoke the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty if it comes into power. Given the strengthening of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas’s control of Gaza and the unraveling of the Turkish-Israeli alliance, an Islamist Egypt could produce the ultimate Israeli nightmare: living in a country surrounded by Iran’s allies or proxies.


Mohamed ElBaradei, the icon of the Egyptian protesters, and many Western analysts say that the Egyptian branch of the Brotherhood has forsworn violence in favor of soup kitchens and medical clinics. Even if that is true, it is small comfort to Israelis, who fear that the Brotherhood’s nonviolence has been a tactical maneuver and know that its worldview is rooted in crude anti-Semitism. 

What Halevi conveniently overlooks is that much of the Islamists' hatred of Israel is founded on its decades long occupation of Palestine and often brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people.   It lies within Israel's grasp to disarm this hostility by restoring its 1967 borders.  Israel, however, is not ready to travel that road to peace.


America has urged, cajoled even threatened Israel to stop building settlements in the West Bank, all to no end.  Israel has repeatedly and persistently shown itself utterly intransigent on the Palestine problem.  It can't go on indefinitely and some solution must be found.   An independent, democratic Egypt may just help Israel see that light.

Tom Friedman's column in The New York Times makes essentially the same point.   Israel has arrived at its last, best chance to make peace with the Palestinians.  Friedman writes that the Egyptian uprisings have given birth to a new paradigm - B.E., Before Egypt, and A.E., After Egypt.

I’m meeting a retired Israeli general at a Tel Aviv hotel. As I take my seat, he begins the conversation with: “Well, everything we thought for the last 30 years is no longer relevant.” 

...To put it bluntly, if Israelis tell themselves that Egypt’s unrest proves why Israel cannot make peace with the Palestinian Authority, then they will be talking themselves into becoming an apartheid state — they will be talking themselves into permanently absorbing the West Bank and thereby laying the seeds for an Arab majority ruled by a Jewish minority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

Iraq, The Arab Democracy Success Story - Not

FOX News mouthpiece Sean Hannity recently denounced the Egyptian protesters, rambling on about how made-by-America Iraq was the only democracy in the Arab world.  To Hannity, it seems, no backward Arab people can achieve democracy without first getting a taste of American shock & awe.

We don't hear much about Iraq these days which is why creeps like Hannity are able to get away with lying about it.  However all's not well, not by a country mile, in Mesopotamia.  Democracy is faltering, at least if you measure such a thing by law and order, maintenance of the rule of law, transparency, curbs on corruption and other democratic niceties.

Human Rights Watch has released a report claiming that the Iraqi government is running a string of secret detention centres at which captives are routinely tortured.

One of the sites is at a military base where U.S. forces maintain an advisory team, the U.S. military confirmed.


Former prisoners who were held at another of the facilities, a military base in the Green Zone that was vacated by U.S. troops last summer, have told Human Rights Watch researchers that detainees there were regularly abused, by being hung upside down, beaten and given electric shocks to various body parts, including the genitals.

The Los Angeles Times first reported the existence of the Green Zone prison, which is being operated by the 56th Brigade of the Iraqi army and the Counter-Terrorism Service, both of which are controlled by the prime minister's office. 

Well, unlike Saddam, at least the current Baghdad regime isn't out gassing its own people.   Of course Saddam didn't either at the outset of his reign.

Al Jazeera's CNN Moment

It began in the dark, the opening hours of Operation Desert Storm and the allied air assault on Saddam Hussein's Baghdad.   The Western television networks had pulled out in advance.   One, however, remained to broadcast live coverage of the aerial reduction of Hussein's government and military installations - CNN.  Overnight, staffers like Bernard Shaw, Peter Arnett and, yes, even Wolf Blitzer, went to the top of the journo pile as the major broadcast networks began to air CNN coverage.

Something similar is happening in the Middle East today and this time it's the Arab news service Al Jazeera that stands alone at the top.  AJ has been a thorn in the side to Middle Eastern governments and Western governments alike.  Yet these hurdles were gradually overcome, particularly with the introduction of the AJ English service. 

AJ's first breakthrough came with its release of the Palestine Papers, diplo docs showing that the pro-West Palestinian Authority had circumvented the democratically elected Hamas and, worse, had been willing to throw in the towel on a half-century of Palestinian grievances including the right of return to Israel and Palestinian control of East Jerusalem.

Barely a week after the Palestine Papers coverage, AJ  began reporting on growing unrest in a little known North African state, Tunisia.   Although banned from Tunisia, AJ used alternative media sources to get around the despotic Ben Ali regime and get live coverage on the air.   Even as the much larger North American networks got onto the story, AJ had by far the best coverage, the best sources, the best analysis.

What AJ achieved in Tunisia, it surpassed in Egypt barely a week later.  As protests turned into an uprising, Mubarak moved quickly to shut down television broadcasting in the country.   Al Jazeera managed to get its own Egyptian newsrooms back on the air and, like CNN two decades earlier, became the West's sole window on the revolution on the streets of Cairo and Alexandria.

Now Al Jazeera wants in - to the United States.   There is but one place where AJ is available on cable and that, predictably, is in Washington.   Outside the capital, no cable provider carries it.   Americans who know to search it out are able to access AJ on the internet but that's hardly the same as getting a spot on the cable listings.

AJ, which seems to have modeled itself on the BBC, is a high quality news service.   I hope it wins its own insurrection to get the place it deserves on American cable systems.

IMF Chief Chimes In - High Prices, Joblessness Lead to "War Within" Nations

IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn warns a world economy beset by the twin scourges of high prices and joblessness could lead to trade protectionism and even war within nations.

Strauss-Kahn noted two "  dangerous"   imbalances that he said could sow the seeds of the next crisis.

The first was the unbalanced recovery across countries, as emerging nations grow much faster than developed economies and possibly overheat. The second was the social strains within countries with high unemployment and widening income gaps.

Over the next decade, 400 million young people would join the global labor force, posing a daunting challenge for governments, Strauss-Kahn added.

"  We face the prospect of a 'lost generation' of young people, destined to suffer their whole lives from worse unemployment and social conditions. Creating jobs must be a top priority not only in the advanced economies, but also in many poorer countries."

When will income inequality ever surface on the radar screens of our own mainstream parties?  Why is a guy who should know this stuff inside out, the Liberals' own Michael Ignatieff, not speaking out on this, not challenging the  prime minister?  We're not likely to see insurrection as witnessed spreading through the Middle East but income inequality is already excessive in Canada and takes a very real, tangible, and costly toll on our country and our future.

Pakistan Seeks More Nukes - On Track to Having 5th Largest Arsenal

In 2007, Pakistan was believed to have somewhere between 30 and 60 nuclear weapons.  By the time Barack Obama was sworn in as US president, that number had climbed to the mid- to high-70s.  Pakistan is today believed to have at least 90 and possibly more than 110-nuclear weapons.  By contrast India is believed to have between 60 and 90 nuclear warheads.

Analysts believe Pakistan has enough weapons grade, fissile material to construct an additional 40 to 100 nuclear weapons, an arsenal that would rival that of France and Britain.


"If not now, Pakistan will soon have the fifth largest nuclear arsenal in the world, surpassing the United Kingdom,"   Pakistan expert and one-time CIA officer Bruce Riedel said.  "  And judging by the new nuclear reactors that are coming online and the pace of production, Pakistan is on a course to be the fourth largest nuclear weapons state in the world, ahead of France."   

Thefts of nuclear materials tend to begin as inside jobs and as Pakistan ramps up production of weapons-grade material concern increases about some of that winding up in the wrong hands.

Turkey's Erdogan Sides With Egyptian People

Turkish prime minister RT Erdogan has come out in support of Egyptian protesters and urged Mubarak to meet their demands.

"  It is our greatest wish to see that both the people and the government act with a similar sense of responsibility and with a dignity that befits the peoples of the region, to shoulder a change that will satisfy all sectors in Egypt, and that will carry the freedoms and democracy to the highest standards,"   Mr. Erdogan said. "  Turkey will continue to remain on the side of the brotherly peoples of Egypt and Tunisia, and to share their sorrow, joy, and hopes."

Washington hasn't called on Mubarak to actually step down.  No Western leader has.   The White House does call for democratic reform, an orderly transition, and today urged Mubarak not to stand for re-election.   The Euros are taking a similar, ambiguous position.  Iran has announced that it supports the protesters, perhaps seeing the uprising as similar to the revolution in which the Shah was toppled.

The one exception is Israel which has criticized the EU and the US for "dumping an ally."

"For the United States, Egypt is the keystone of its Middle East policy, ” a senior Israeli official told The New York Times. “ For Israel, it’s the whole arch. ”

Mubarak Expected to Go on TV Soon to Announce "A Solution."

Within hours we should know if Hosni Mubarak intends to cling to power to the very end.   Al Jazeera  is reporting that Mubarak intends to take to Egyptian airwaves very soon supposedly to announce "a solution" to the uprising.  This could be very, very interesting.

Watch Al Jazeera live here.

The Jerusalem Post has reported that Mubarak will announce that he will not stand for re-election this year.

Is There Something You're Not Talking About? No, It's Not E.D.

Unfortunately there is no Viagra for flaccid political fortunes.   And, judging by the stories appearing the past two days, that's bad news for the LPC.

Yesterday it was Ipsos-Reid informing us that Canadians would prefer a minority Conservative government rather than an Ignatieff-Layton coalition.   Today the story is that, while they may not agree with all of Harper's policies, a majority of Canadians believe Canada is heading in the right direction.  Left jab, right hook.

Are you Lib supporters in denial?   Is your party just going through the motions, lingering on in hope of finding a Messiah? 

You focus your energies on bitching about Harper, the one thing you can't change, and ignore the glaring deficiencies in your own party, the very thing you can and must change.  If these two latest surveys were inconsistent with the polling results over the last year, you might have an excuse.   But they're not and your leader's numbers are even worse.   When you get to this point, it's not disloyal to the party to be honest in trying to restore its fortunes.   Ignoring the plight of the party under the current management is breaking faith with the Liberal Party.

What Does Global Warming Have to Do with Hosni Mubarak?

Any farmer will agree that rain is a double-edged sword.   Receiving rain is vital to growing crops but only when it arrives at the right times and in the right amounts.  Too much rain at the outset can leave the farmer unable to plant a new crop.   Once the crop is in, too much rain can cause it to rot in the ground.   Even after the crop is grown, too much rain can prevent the farmer from getting onto the field to harvest the crop.   Too little rain during the crop cycle can prevent germination, stunt growth or simply burn out the crop.   Too little rain is the lesser of the problems thanks to the irrigation options made possible by rivers, lakes and aquifers - until they're exhausted.

When it comes to agriculture, global warming is a real bugger.  It's not just that some places get quite a bit warmer.   It's that global warming can sharply alter precipitation patterns, triggering floods and droughts of increasing frequency and severity.   A warmer atmosphere carries more water vapour, itself a greenhouse gas.   That water vapour is liquid water that used to be on the surface, some of it available for irrigation.   Yet what goes up must come down, somewhere.   And when it does come down it's more likely to be in flood-triggering torrents than were experienced before current levels of global warming arrived.   When that's coupled with particular weather events, like the central Pacific La Nina we're currently experiencing, you get massive storms and mega-flooding in places like Australia, Sri Lanka and swathes of South America.

These rains and floods have all but erased from the public consciousness the droughts of last summer.  We tend to forget these things as soon as the next shiny object appears before our eyes.  Yet those droughts did occur and led to widespread crop failures.   And now, thanks to the droughts and floods, we're about to see food shortages and possibly all-time record food prices that, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization warns, could just be here to stay.

So, global warming is already contributing to lasting food shortages and high food prices.   You know what compounds that?   Income inequality compounds that which is why the tyrannical regimes we prop up in the Middle East are right now rushing about to implement food relief programmes fearing they might just be the next Tunisia.  It's a game they've played before.   They learned it from the Pharaohs.   Yet the game has changed in one critical way.   Food shortages and high food prices once were cyclical problems.    They were periodic.   Now the UNFAO predicts they may be turning into the norm in some parts of the world.

The old regimes in these regions aren't equipped to survive such destabilizing stresses.   As I've explained at end before, disparity, inequality is much less of a problem in times of growth and surplus.  It becomes a huge, even dangerous threat to governments and societies in times of protracted, even permanent shortages.

When planning is based not on growth but on allocation or rationing it shifts the focus from opportunity to inequality. People look for a lot more equality in sacrifice than in prosperity. We can become very egalitarian when we perceive that to be vital to our self-interest.

As reported yesterday in Britain's The Telegraph, these same despotic rulers will soon have to deal not only with chronic food shortages and price problems but also with severe freshwater shortages.   This is a region that the West considers strategic to its interests that is falling to the impacts of climate change that we aren't even interested in trying to arrest.   Yet we know that we could stop all CO2 emissions today and it would not prevent climate change impacts from substantially worsening for the rest of this century.

So there you have it.   The industrialized West has beset the Middle East with the destabilizing impacts of anthropogenic global warming undermining the stability of that region and jeopardizing our strategic interests in it.  It's not just the Middle East that's going to pay the price.    A lot of others, including us, will deal with the blowback from this.

The Muslim Brotherhood - the Anti-Al Qaeda

The only reason the Right will give for propping up Hosni Mubarak is that Islamist radicalism will take over Egypt if their stooge is toppled.

Here they rely on the stupidity of their own gullible supporters not to understand that Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is not the West Nile chapter of al Qaeda.  Yes, sure, the Muslim Brotherhood would be likely to dominate the Egyptian government if free and fair elections were held.   But, as John Feffer writes in Foreign Policy in Focus, the Muslim Brotherhood is in fact the face of  non-violent, democratic Islamism.

The “Muslim Brotherhood” conjures up images of radical Islamists turning Egypt into Iran or Afghanistan. As the ever-predictable John Bolton told Fox News, "The Muslim Brotherhood doesn't care about democracy, if they get into power you're not going to have free and fair elections either." Andrew McCarthy agrees over at The National Review, "our see-no-Islamic-evil foreign-policy establishment blathers on about the Brotherhood's purported renunciation of violence — and never you mind that, with or without violence, its commitment is…to 'conquer America' and ‘conquer Europe.'”

Since it's likely that the Muslim Brotherhood will play a key role in Egypt's post-Mubarak future, it's important to address this hysteria. The Brotherhood has moved on, even if Bolton and McCarthy have not.

The Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna to combine "a Salafiyya message, a Sunni way, a Sufi truth, a political organization, an athletic group, a cultural-educational union, an economic company, and a social idea." The organization did indeed embrace violence in the first part of its history. In fact, the United States was more than happy to encourage the Brotherhood's violent tendencies. As Robert Dreyfuss points out in his book Devil's Game, the Brotherhood was a useful tool to use against those nationalists who threatened U.S. interests, such as Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran. In 1953,Washington even brought over Said Ramadan, al-Banna's son-in-law, for a couple confabs in the United States.

The Brotherhood is probably the most influential Islamist organization, with chapters all over the world. It has renounced its earlier support of violence and now prefers to acquire power politically. "The Brotherhood is a collection of national groups with different outlooks, and the various factions disagree about how best to advance its mission," write Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke in a 2007 Foreign Affairs article. "But all reject global jihad while embracing elections and other features of democracy. There is also a current within the Brotherhood willing to engage with the United States." The French scholar Gilles Kepel has compared the Brotherhood to the Eurocommunists of the 1970s, who broke with Soviet orthodoxy to participate in democratic elections and stake out a more neutral foreign policy.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone in the Muslim world felt warm and fuzzy about the Brotherhood's shift. "Al-Qaeda's leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri, started their political lives affiliated with the Brotherhood, but both have denounced it for decades as too soft and a cat's paw of Mubarak and America," writes former CIA officer Bruce Reidel at The Daily Beast.

That al-Qaeda despises the Brotherhood for precisely this moderation is good enough reason for even some far right-wingers to urge the United States to curry the organization's favor once again. "Many Israelis and their American supporters may rise in horror contemplating replacing peace-treaty-signing dictators with fundamentalists who may partly build a democratic consensus on anti-Zionism," writes the former American Enterprise Institute staffer Reuel Marc Gerecht in his book The Islamic Paradox. "But down this uneasy path lies an end to bin Ladenism and the specter of an American city attacked with weapons of mass destruction.”