Unrest in Middle East continues — Poliquicks
The ill informed U.S. news media, headline grabbing political pundits and many in Congress know not what they do in calling for “democracy” in the Middle East.
So how does the run up to “democracy” in the Middle look today?
Violent demonstrations have erupted in the initiator of the so called “Arab Spring” in Tunisia’s impoverished central region which had to be dispersed with tear gas. Demonstrations continue in the town of Kasserine made famous with the first American defeat in World War II.
In Cairo, on Friday, the President came out on the side of the Arab street, issuing a call for the Egyptian military to quickly hand over power to a civilian, democratically elected government. The president now has big risks, opening a fault line between the United States and the Egyptian military which, perhaps more than any other country in the region, has for 30 years served the U.S. protecting critical American concerns in the Middle East mainly the 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.
The president’s strategy is high-risk, because the ones who benefit most from it are the people who don¹t have our best interests in mind, the Islamist radical like the Muslim Brotherhood, who most certainly will not support the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty as the Egyptian military.
Now protests are growing in Jordon in intensity and geographic reach, degrading the royal stature with every event. Statements against the King, his family and queen have become a serious repudiation of the King. In September, demonstrators chanted S-S-S, a deliberately ambiguous call for both the regime’sislah, Arabic for reform, and overthrow the King. The crude one-liners with which Egypt’s revolutionaries toppled Hosni Mubarak with Bedouin rhyming couplets: “O Abdullah son of Hussein/Qadaffi’s a goner, whither your reign?”
It should be evident that the longer the fighting continues in any country, the less chance that any stable, order will emerge anytime soon.
These are dangerous times in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Yemen. The U.S. should keep our mouth shut and not play one side against the other. There is only a no-win situation in all these countries if we chose up sides.