Women Writers and the War on Terrorism after 9/11

Review of Kim Barker, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Doubleday, 2011); Anna Ciezadlo, Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War (Free Press, 2011); and Megan K. Stack, Every Man in this Village is a Liar: An Education in War (Doubleday, 2010)

One of the ironic benefits of the 9/11 attacks was that we ended up learning a great deal about the Middle East. Responding to the shocking explosions, American interest in the Middle East and South Asia also exploded. Suddenly, everyone was curious to know about the region, and media outlets scrambled to report the news from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and the Arab world. In the process, they turned to young American women like Kim Barker, Anna Ciezadlo, and Megan Stack to travel to war zones as reporters.

Reading these women's personal accounts together tells us something about the state of American journalism and the state of the so-called War on Terrorism. What we learn is often troubling, but also revealing. American naivete is the first thing we learn about.

Naive Americans Abroad
Each woman's story moves along a similar arc: from young, naive American unconcerned with foreign affairs, to eager and curious reporter after 9/11, to veteran war correspondent who has seen death up close too many times. None of them had a particular passion for the region and none of them spoke any regional languages when 9/11 occurred. But all of them ended up seeing the worst of what the world had to offer in war zones.

Kim Barker, having landed a job at the Chicago Tribune by age 30, was sent to Afghanistan as a self-confessed "unilingual green reporter" (p. 302). After the Iraq War flared up, she returned to the region and reported extensively from Afghanistan and Pakistan--until the Tribune went into bankruptcy and she chose to quit rather than be reassigned to metro Chicago area reporting. The many moments of humor sprinkled throughout the book make it a pleasant read.

Los Angeles Times reporter Megan Stack, age 25 in 2001, was also sent to Afghanistan, where she was harassed by an Afghan warlord in the early days of the war. Unlike the other two authors, she remained in the region and went on to report from several other countries, including Egypt during its 2005 elections, where she witnessed brutal military violence against voters--an eerie echo of the present. Her book is clearly an attempt to make sense of her sense of shock but resists tidy lessons. Instead of a coherent narrative, she offers fragments of reporting from countries across the region (most memorably Yemen and Lebanon in 2006). This is the most writerly book, serious and a bit ponderous at times.

When 9/11 happened, Annia Ciezadlo was 31, living in New York and dating Mohamad, a Shiite Muslim from Lebanon who was a fellow reporter. (She says that they both loved discussing, of all things, urban transportation policy!) After a five-month courtship, they got married in 2002. By 2003, Newsday made Mohamad its Middle East bureau chief and Ciezadlo joined her husband in the region. "I went to the Middle East like most Americans," she writes, "relatively naive about both Arab culture and American foreign policy" (p. 9). She became a free-lance reporter, contributing a number of pieces to the Christian Science Monitor from Baghdad and Beirut. She, like Stack, reports on the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon with some memorably disturbing images.

Responding to regional cultures

Ciezado, like Stack and Barker, learned a great deal about the region. In her case, she had the added benefit of building on her husband's insider knowledge, which she furthered by learning Arabic. Her book is the most sensitive to regional sensibilities, notably in her praise of local foods in Iraq and Lebanon. She writes of sharing a meal with her husband's family right after the funeral of her father-in-law Abu Hassane: "Food unlocked memories, connecting the family to people and places no longer with us, to the dead. Like tradition, the repetition of familiar foods created the illusion that the past was still alive: we eat this food because we ate it before when Abu Hassane was still with us" (p. 208). 

By immersing herself into daily life in the culture, using food as a lens, she was able to see the universality within the particularity. She begins to see a common humanity that eludes the other two writers. Her otherwise-forgettable title refers to an Arabic saying, "youm 'asil, youm bassil"--day of honey, day of onions--which captures her deeper theme: life is bittersweet.

Barker, the author of Taliban Shuffle, is mostly clueless about the cultures in which she reports, and she gravitates toward fellow expatriate reporters in both Pakistan and Afghanistan rather than local friends. She even likens the social scene in Kabul, the Afghan capital, to high school, and we hear a bit too much about her dating life. At the same time, her light-hearted, self-deprecating humor offers a refreshing contrast from Stack's ultra-seriousness. But she also comes across as a bit demeaning toward Muslims.

Stack's Every Man, while sprinkled with autobiographical fragments, is closer to the norm of traditional, straight political reporting. To the extent that culture affects the stories, she touches on it, but she's neither as deeply embedded as Ciezadlo nor as tone-deaf as Barker. She simply navigates enough to get the stories.

Observing war up close

All three books see death up close. After reading about Barker washing the blood and guts off her shoes after a Pakistan suicide bombing, we get the gross-out reality. Both Ciezadlo and Stack tell harrowing tales about traveling into the war zone while Israel was bombarding Southern Lebanon, making me realize how little I had thought about the Lebanese side of the 2006 conflict. This humanizing of ordinary people in the midst of war zones--provoking us to start hearing the voiceless--is the central contribution of these engaging books.

None of these books attempts to teach us anything comprehensive about the so-called war on terrorism; but they do teach us something about humanity in wartime.

The role of autobiography

In contrast to many excellent books by young male reporters on the Iraq War (including Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Dexter Filkins' The Forever War, David Finkel's The Good Soldiers, George Packer's Assassin's Gate;  and Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near; with Oliver Poole's overlooked Red Zone: Five Bloody Years in Baghdad being the exception), these women generally tell us more about their day-to-day struggles with living in war zones. 

This may have something to do with their gender and their location. As liberated, educated American women in pervasively conservative, patriarchal, and gender-conscious societies, they struggled to navigate daily life. It was hard for them to travel safely to and from interviews, for example, without suffering from petty harassment--or worse.

As a result, they take a larger role in their own stories than their male colleagues do in their books. And for this we can be thankful, since we learn more about daily life--shopping, eating, drinking, traveling, dating, and writing--in a war zone. I learned a lot more about what it really meant to live in Kabul, Baghdad, or Beirut while war raged all around.

I'd recommend all three books, depending on what you're hoping to learn about. For excellent coverage of both Iraq and Lebanon between 2003 and 2006, and for mouth-watering descriptions of Middle Eastern food, go with Day of Honey. For thoughtful, serious coverage of multiple stories across entire region, All the Men in This Village would be a good start. And for a funny glimpse into how messed-up Afghanistan and Pakistan were by 2009, The Taliban Shuffle is hard to beat.

Updates: The Occupy Movement and the J-1 Visa Program

Globalization continues to breed contention. Two recent examples:

The Occupy Wall Street protests mushroomed over the weekend to the point that even my little town of Canton, OH saw a protest downtown, with at least 70 protestors. It looks like we are seeing the growth of a social movement that may rival the Tea Party in its energy. As with that earlier wave, new media are a key part of mobilizing and energizing participants. All in all, it's a fascinating development, worth watching closely.

The New York Times reported today on the foreign student cultural exchange visa program that contributed to a work stoppage at Hershey's Chocolate company earlier this year. (For details see earlier posts.) The subcontractor that brought students over, the Council for Educational Travel USA, comes out looking pretty bad. All in all, it looks like the kind of program that was open to abuse, subjecting some of the young people from overseas to some rough treatment. All along, though everyone agrees that they got an all-too-accurate picture of American culture in the process. As one participant was told,

“You wanted a cultural exchange . . . . This is America and this is the way we do things here.” 

Indeed. Subcontracting and exploiting workers? Guess it's just part of our culture.

Funky Globalization in Hershey, PA

Americans love Hershey chocolate bars and think of them as all-American. But some funky globalization-related things happened recently at the packaging facility that ships Hershey candies in Pennsylvania. And these happenings were definitely not all-American.

It turns out that Hershey, Inc. has been subcontracting with subcontractors who partner with another subcontractor to bring over groups of foreign university students to work in packaging facilities in the summers. The students coming over this year under the State Department's J-1 visa program were expecting to see the USA, earn a little money, and participate in cultural exchanges.

Instead, the only American culture these poor students were immersed in was our corporate culture. The 400 or so students were surprised to find themselves working physically demanding jobs at a packaging facility for Hershey, wrapping up Kit-Kat bars, Reese's candies, and Almond Joys. Many of them were forced to work on the night shift, and all of them were forced to work eight hour shifts under pressure and surveillance. Still, it wasn't the jobs that put the students over the edge. According to the New York Times, "the students said they decided to protest when they learned that neighbors in the apartments and houses where they were staying were paying significantly less rent."

Fed up, then, the students went on strike. While their immediate frustrations with their jobs caused them to walk out, their larger frustrations were with the brokers who promised them visions of cultural exchange, who forced them to pay up to $4,000 to come to the U.S., and who then over-charged them for rent. Many of the students were expecting to make a little money but now expect to return home having lost money on the deal. And all they got to see was Hershey Chocolate World! : (

How is globalization demonstrated here? For one thing, America's sales culture has been exported abroad: These foreign students learned all too well that you should never trust strangers who make big promises. Meanwhile, the students' desire to visit America is an interesting case study of international migration, as is the State Department's J-1 visa program. A cynic might say that the U.S. government is allowing the temporary migration of cheap guest workers for corporate interests, but the State Department classifies the J-1 visa as an Exchange Visa, which suggests an original intent to promote those exchanges. Students expecting to work in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory were expecting to participate in some global cultural exchange (Hersheys Chocolate World doesn't count).

And the most interesting globalization aspect in this story is the use of multiple subcontractors, a classic corporate and government tactic for outsourcing ultimate responsibility. After the story was published, the followup story pointed out how four different companies all blamed each other. This is what makes globalization so frustrating to people: no one is taking responsibility! This passage was especially telling:

The Hershey Company said it had contracted day-to-day operations at the packing plant to Exel, a logistics company. “The Hershey Company expects all its vendors, including Exel, to treat employees fairly and equitably,” said Kirk Saville, a spokesman.

Exel contracted with a local labor supplier, SHS Staffing Solutions, to provide temporary workers, including the J-1 students, for the summer months when work is at a peak, said Lynn Anderson, a spokeswoman for Exel.

SHS Staffing said its main function was to handle payroll and schedules for the students.

Along with the non-profit organization that recruited the students to come to the U.S., the Council for Educational Travel U.S.A., we have four organizations with a hand in this. Of those four, who is responsible? Hershey? Exel? SHS Staffing Solutions? The Council for Educational Travel? The students? All of the above? It isn't clear.

In any case, we know about this story because the students and the labor union friends decided to create some noise. Whether or not their complaints are justified, this is a fascinating dimension of globalization. How many of these J-1 visas are granted every year? And how many of these foreign students come over expecting cultural exchange only to get stuck working in miserable summer jobs? And how many of those jobs could be filled by young American citizens? In a time of high unemployment, it makes you wonder.

Do readers out there have any experiences with foreign young people in summer jobs on these J-1 visas?

Media Convergence or Confusion?

Watching Al Jazeera English today on their live Internet feed, I discovered their new program, The Stream, which they tout as 

a social media community that just happens to have a television programme on Al Jazeera English.

Being rather old-school, and not knowing what a "social media community" is, I was watching the television program. 

But here I was watching this television program on an Arab network based in Qatar that broadcasts in English, over the Internet. During the show, the hosts cued up Internet videos on their laptops, live. While conducting interviews with two guests, they also took comments from Facebook and Twitter and interviewed a Yemeni and a Chinese blogger via Skype. 

So . . . just to keep all the media straight:

1. I'm watching TV on my computer over the Internet.
2. They are broadcasting the show from a studio inside the Newseum in Washington, DC.
3. The headquarters of the television network, however, is based in Doha, Qatar.
4. The hosts interview their guests live in the studio about the role of social media.
5. They also interrupt occasionally to check their Twitter feed for comments or stories that are trending.
6. They pull video of a car accident in China off the Internet, click play, and maximize it to full screen, live. So now I am watching via TV cameras filming them watching a video hosted on the Internet. (Wouldn't it be more efficient to have the studio run it firsthand?)
7. They also interview the Yemeni and Chinese bloggers live, via Skype video chat. So I'm watching TV on the Internet, watching TV cameras filming them chatting via video on the Internet. (Wouldn't it be better quality if they could have TV cameras film each side of the conversation?)
8. Once their time us up, they continue the filmed conversation on their website, separate from the network's live feed. (I kept watching the network news feed.)

Lost in all my confusion over the media of transmission was much of a sense of message. While we can now connect and micro-blog instantaneously across multiple media technologies, I wonder if we are losing coherent narratives. If the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan said, then what is being communicated here?

Don't get me wrong: this is fascinating stuff, but the fascination is focused upon the novelty of means of communication rather than the substance of the stories. These technologies haven't changed the fact that powerful state authorities retain the upper hand to repress their populations in Bahrain, China, Syria, Yemen, and many other places.

The Nonviolent Wave?

Nearly every morning lately, I wake up thinking that I'll blog about stories related directly to themes of my book. Today was no different. For the third consecutive day, I sat down hoping to review a book on the decline of the U.S. car industry. Then I checked the news from the Arab world, which is stunning again, as it has been every day for the past few months.

And now I need to say something else. 2011 will be known as a decisive year in world history for its dramatic upheavals: the year of the Arab Wave. But the question is whether it will remain a nonviolent wave.

The king of Morocco and the president of Yemen both announced yesterday that they will advance political reforms that partially meet protestors' demands. In Morocco, King Mohammed VI announced that the country would go through "comprehensive constitutional reform" (for full text of the speech click here). In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been facing daily protests against his regime, said in an address carried on national TV that he wanted to introduce a new constitution to make Yemen's government a parliamentary system. Nonviolent protestors have pushed these regimes to do something that was unthinkable a few months ago. 

Dramatic changes are sweeping across the Arab world in a wave of mostly peaceful unrest (Libya excepted). I see at least two forces pushing this wave.

First is globalization:

• Economic globalization contributed to uneven living standards. On the one hand, it improved health and sanitation standards, causing the population to boom. On the other hand, it didn't do enough to get Arab economies moving to create enough jobs for young people.
• Political globalization--specifically, the global institution of the sovereign state as the authoritative political structure--leads the protestors to demand specific changes within their own countries, rather than pan-Arab or pan-Islamic changes. Because the structures of authority are now unchallenged, there is little possibility of linking protest movements across national boundaries (a version of this argument about the impossibility of transnationalism was made by the French scholar Olivier Roy way back in the 1990s). Instead, we have seen distinctly different movements within each country, tied to their unique political histories.
• Cultural globalization--the exploding awareness of global trends within the region, driven by the Internet and satellite television--has led to a speedy spread of stories, ideas, and images. People see what their neighbors in other Arab countries are doing. Demonstrations and people power toppled the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, while it continues to generate revolutionary fervor in every Arab country but Syria. Globalized media breed intense awareness, the possibility of networking, the desire to imitate others, and the consciousness of regional and global solidarity. During the Egypt crisis, I found it amazing that pro-democracy demonstrations were organized outside Egyptian embassies around the world within a few days. People abroad felt connected to Egyptian protestors and felt compelled to support them.

The other factor here is non-violence, which is sorely lacking only in Libya. In a piece in today's New York Times, Erica Chenoweth of Wesleyan University argues that non-violent protests are actually more successful in bringing about transitions to democracy. As she puts it,

Although the change is not immediate, our data show that from 1900 to 2006, 35 percent to 40 percent of authoritarian regimes that faced major nonviolent uprisings had become democracies five years after the campaign ended, even if the campaigns failed to cause immediate regime change. For the nonviolent campaigns that succeeded, the figure increases to well over 50 percent.

The good guys don’t always win, but their chances increase greatly when they play their cards well. Nonviolent resistance is about finding and exploiting points of leverage in one’s own society. Every dictatorship has vulnerabilities, and every society can find them.

Alas, the rebellion in Libya failed to stay non-violent (not that one can blame the rebels, who were facing violent crackdowns by the Qaddafi regime). But the details in Chenoweth's forthcoming co-authored book, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011), suggest that non-violence may be a more successful strategy than violent resistance.*

If the protestors stay non-violent across the region, we may see a number of new democracies emerge. Or if they take the Libyan route, we could see lots of bloodshed and a possible triumph of tyranny.

I know which route I'm praying for, and it ain't Libya's.
_________________
* The same day I wrote this, Sojourners published a blog post on Chenoweth's work.

Another Helpful Take on Bahrain

Jean-Francois Seznec of Georgetown University has just published an interesting analysis of the Bahrain crisis on a site affiliated with the Arab Studies Journal.

He focuses on the combination of four volatile factors:

• The split between the reformist crown prince, Salman bin Hamad al Khalifa, and his great-uncle the (corrupt but powerful) prime minister, Khalifa bin Salman al Khalifa.
• An opposition divided between the reformist al-Wefaq group, which had elected eighteen members to the gerrymandered and weakly empowered lower house of parliament, and the more radical al-Haq group, led by Hassan Mushaima.
• The younger, Facebook generation which emphasizes being Bahraini over religious sectarianism.
• The large regional neighbors, Saudi Arabia (population 20 million) and Iran (population 65 million). The Saudis back the royal family hardliners (the prime minister), while Iran backs the mostly Shia protestors.

No matter what, he argues, the royal family will have to lose power, either to the Saudis (in the case of a crackdown) or to the population (in the case of a negotiated transition toward constitutional monarchy).

If the U.S. State Department is wise, it should be supporting negotiations toward real power-sharing. I think the appointment of a Shiite prime minister out of a freely, fairly, and democratically elected parliament would end this crisis. 

For now, the U.S. embassy in Bahrain was sharing donuts with protestors who were asking the U.S. for help the other day (see video).

It'll take more than sugar to satisfy the opposition. We need our government to push for a democratic transition in Bahrain, or else this crisis will only continue.

Saudi Sticks, Bahraini Carrots, Secular Demands

Protests continue to roil the Arab world. Citizens in Egypt and Tunisia keep pressing their regimes toward reform. Libya is collapsing into civil war. But keep your eyes on the Gulf region, on both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

After Friday's protest marches in Saudi Arabia's Eastern (al-Hasa) Province, the Saudi Ministry of the Interior issued a statement reminding "some people" that "the applicable laws in the Kingdom strictly prohibit all forms of demonstrations, marches and sit-ins." A not-so-subtle hint to those who were marching on Friday.

Will this law be enforced strictly on this coming Friday, the "Day of Rage" announced on Facebook? If not, expect protests to swell. If so, we may see violence. Either way, Friday, March 11 could be a decisive day in Saudi and Arab history.

Over in Bahrain, the Al Khalifa family is sticking with the carrot strategy. Their interior ministry pledged to hire 20,000 people, edging partway toward the demands of protestors, who complain that Sunni foreigners are naturalized as citizens and then hired as security and military forces. (The interior ministry is considered second-rate compared to the defense forces anyway.) But as I've been arguing on this blog, buying off the opposition will no longer work. At this point, it's just insulting.

As Bahraini opposition politician Ebrahim Sharif told the New York Times, 

"This is about dignity and freedom — it’s not about filling our stomachs." 

This is the message that the tottering regimes of the Arab world need to hear. What ordinary, young citizens want is an end to corruption, an end to repression, and an end to politics as usual. They want their voices to be heard. They want the rule of law. They want term limits for prime ministers or presidents. They want better governance. They want a growing economy and the prospect of good jobs.

Note what they are not saying. They are making modest, incremental, tangible, secular demands. These are not the demands of crazy religious fanatics. The protestors are not railing against the United States or Israel or chanting "Islam is the solution"--the vague, utopian slogan of the Islamic movements. They are asking for real reforms in the structures of power. (A demonstration today outside the U.S. embassy in Bahrain was not attacking the US, but asking for its help.) Democratization, not revolution, is their goal.

One observer of the Bahrain protests describes a sign with pictures of all the British prime ministers that have served since 1970: all eight of them. Below that is a picture of all the Bahraini prime ministers since then: one (Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman al Khalifa, right). After 41 years in power, he's gotten a little corrupt and out of touch. Hence, it's no surprise that the the protestors in Bahrain marched to the Prime Minister's office yesterday and demanded that he resign. 

The other interesting thing about the Bahrain protests, noticeable to anyone who's seen photos of the past two weeks of protests, is that nearly everyone is waving a Bahraini flag. The protestors are playing down their Shiite religious background and pushing their demands in the context of national unity. The discourse is using the terms of secular nationalism rather than of religious grievance.

Although this could change if things get ugly, I think this is another encouraging sign. And although we may be paying more for gas in the next few weeks, the turmoil may give birth to a more stable region for decades to come. Stay tuned. . . 

Another Solid Analysis of Bahrain

Jane Kinnimont of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) published a helpful overview of the history of Bahrain's struggle for a constitutional monarchy on the Foreign Affairs website.

Lots of observers are tracking the situation, which continues to remain tense, but this piece offers some historical perspective. None of us can predict what will happen next. Stay tuned.

Protests in Saudi's Eastern Province

Here's a video of a protest march today in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province. These young men were protesting the recent imprisonment of a Shia cleric named Tawfiq al-Amer, who has advocated openly for the empowerment of Shiites in Eastern Saudi Arabia, where they are a majority.

Hopeful Signs?

The other day at a forum on "Egypt, Social Media, and the Middle East" I praised the Obama Administration's handling of the wave of domestic unrest sweeping across the Arab world. And my colleague Greg Miller stressed that a role for Islam in the politics of these countries does not mean that we are headed for another Iranian Revolution. All of us stressed that the current situation is overall hopeful and not scary. Other than rising oil prices, which will only go up next week, the news is mostly good.

Our message: Let's not lose the good news in the midst of the upheaval. In the long run, in most countries, this process should yield more stable and legitimate governments.

This morning I see more positive signs that our hopeful analysis is holding up so far--and that the Obama foreign policy players have handled a fast-moving crisis pretty well:

• The Washington Post reports that administration officials actually understand the distinction between al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. In fact, they are preparing for the possibility that peaceful Islamist political parties might play roles in the transitions in places like Egypt and Tunisia. (In Tunisia the Islamist al-Nahda party has been legalized.)
• Foreign Affairs, the voice of the foreign policy establishment, published an excellent piece about sectarianism in Bahrain by Kristen Smith Diwan, one of the leading experts on Bahrain alongside Rutgers' Toby Jones. If people are listening to her analysis, which seems highly accurate in light of my experience in Bahrain, they will realize that empowering the Shia opposition in a truly democratic process (as opposed to the faux democracy of the past decade) is safer than repression. So far our government has been on the right side of this. As I told the forum crowd the other day, Obama most likely told the Bahraini government not to shoot their own people anymore. That's a wise policy right now.
• The other foreign policy establishment, ForeignPolicy.com (which is now owned by the Washington Post), ran a piece early in the week on Saudi Arabia by a respected expert on Saudi Arabia that reinforces my concerns that serious protests will emerge next Friday, March 11. The title is ominous: "Yes, It Could Happen Here." Really, if it can happen in Oman, it can happen anywhere. And while large-scale protests next Friday could scare the oil markets, it could also scare the Al-Saud family into a process of dialogue with opposition forces in the country that could yield something like a constitutional monarchy.

Of course, we could all be wrong. The chaos in Libya, which is quickly turning into a civil war, could turn out to be the norm across the region. But for the moment, it seems like level heads are mostly prevailing in the region and in Washington.

Why I Haven't Given Up on Tom Friedman . . . Yet

If you've read my book, you know that I respond critically to Thomas Friedman's views of globalization in every chapter. Lately, though, I've found his columns in the New York Times less and less helpful.

But yesterday, he published a column analyzing the wave of unrest in the Arab world that reminded me why he's still worth reading from time to time. We have to remember that he got his start in the Middle East, after he earned an M.Phil. in Middle East studies from St. Antony's College at Oxford. And his first book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, has some first-rate stories from the region in the 1980s.

In addition to the obvious factors--"tyranny, rising food prices, youth unemployment and social media"--yesterday's column also describes some less obvious ones that contributed to the Arab revolts:

• The Obama factor (a guy with the middle name of "Hussein" becoming president of the US offers hope). 
• Google Earth (where poorer Bahrainis could see with their own eyes the large estates of the Al Khalifa family, while they lived in cramped conditions). 
• Israel (whose top leaders have been arrested lately for corruption, right next door to Egypt).
• China (which hosted the lavish Olympics despite starting from a position of poverty similar to Egypt's in the 1950s)
• The Fayyad factor (the current prime minister of the Palestinian Authority Salam Fayyad, who is running the West Bank by promoting clean, effective, efficient governance).

The only problem with this list is that it mostly assumes that Arabs had to look outside their countries to be galvanized into action. It plays down the role that ordinary people played on their own. Did they really need to look at Israel to think that they wanted their corrupt leaders to be held accountable? Were people just sitting there passively?

Still, this is an interesting picture of a networked Arab world, full of young people who watch Al Jazeera and hear about what's happening all across the globe. Surrounding all these Arab revolts is the process of, yes, globalization.

What I mean is this: Taking Manfred Steger as our guide, we can define globalization as referring to "the expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world-time and world-space" (Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd ed., p. 15). We are seeing in the Arab world the consequences of a whole generation of young people connecting with each other and the outside world, of a whole generation becoming conscious of their power to change the world, and of a whole generation making those changes happen.

Thanks to Friedman, we can embed this global process in localized Middle Eastern contexts.

Footnote to earlier posts: Now it looks like the United Arab Emirates' rulers are trying the old pre-emptive carrot strategy of buying off opposition in advance. They have promised $1.5 billion in infrastructure projects to the poorer of the seven emirates that make up the federation (in addition to the wealthy ones of Dubai,  Abu Dhabi, and Sharjah, that would be Ajman, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, and Umm al-Quwai). That may be a sign of more danger to come.

Oman: Another Carrot After the Stick, Another Danger Sign for Saudi

Protests have erupted in city of Suhar in the Gulf state of Oman, tucked on the southeast corner of the Arabian Peninsula. The ruler there, Sultan Qaboos, (now in his 41st year of power) cracked down hard with riot police, killing at least three young protestors.


On Sunday, though, Sultan Qaboos pulled out the carrot and offered a $390 monthly stipend for job seekers and opened up 50,000 new government positions. He recognizes that unemployed, frustrated, and idealistic young people want change. They also want a representative government, something that Sultan Qaboos has resisted.

But few experts would have predicted that peaceful Oman would have erupted into violence. It's one of the last places that I, like most observers of the Gulf region, would have expected to see unrest. Everything seemed so placid there, and there is no history of political mobilization (unlike Bahrain's highly politicized society).

Which is why we should all be watching Saudi Arabia in the next two weeks. I am hearing from Saudi sources that we could surprised by what happens next. The young people there also want a representative government and an economic future. And they are already planning a "day of rage" for Friday, March 11 (after midday prayers). The BBC reported that, yes, a Facebook group dedicated to the event mushroomed from having 400 followers to 12,000 in the past few days.

This may be bigger than the wave of revolutions across Europe in 1848. And, because of globalization, we are all connected to it. Just ask anyone who drives a vehicle that runs on petroleum products. We are paying for the uncertainty at the gas pump.

The Carrot After the Stick?

Lester Pearson, a former Canadian prime minister, once described politics as the "skilled use of blunt instruments." And two of those instruments, for all politicians, are the carrot of positive incentives and the stick of coercion.

Even the madman of Libya, Muammar Qaddafi, understands this (in his own twisted way). Today's Washington Post reports  that he announced that his government will pay $400 to each family, basically bribing them to stay loyal. He also promised state employees up to 150 percent raises. Will it work? Umm . . . that's doubtful (to put it mildly).

Interestingly, though, Qaddafi continues a pattern that we've seen across the Arab world:

• The day before a "Day of Rage" scheduled for February 14, Bahrain's King Hamad promised to pay every citizen of Bahrain $2650 as a "sign of appreciation."  
• During the last gasps of the Mubarak regime, his government announced that it would give state employees a 15 percent raise. 
• King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia jumped on the bandwagon this week, mandating a 15 percent raise for Saudi state employees--and billions of interest-free loans to help young Saudis get married, start a business, or build a house. 

Based on the reaction of Bahrainis, I think the carrot approach will actually backfire. Young people might well feel insulted by such blatant attempts to buy their loyalty. They are sick of this kind of politics of purchased loyalty. It obviously failed in Egypt.

And it's too late in Libya. There is already an armed revolt that is taking control of much of the rest of the country, isolating Qaddafi's control to the capital city of Tripoli. He's already slaughtered his own people; why would they be motivated by cash?

All eyes are on Saudi now. Even members of the royal family admit that political change is necessary. Can that happen peacefully or will there be conflict? Will the tried-and-tested politics of the rentier-oil-welfare state work? Will young people allow their loyalty to be purchased?

Or will they assert their dignity?

After the last few weeks of surprises, I'm betting on the latter. Watch Saudi Arabia in the next few weeks.

Bahrain Situation

Today, Rutgers historian (and family friend) Toby Jones and a colleague posted a helpful overview of the Bahrain situation up to the present on Middle East Report Online, just a day after a massive crowd of protestors marched along the most prominent section of highway in the country, from Bahrain Mall to the Pearl Roundabout. The day before, on February 21, the government rallied a large crowd of supporters, showing that it wasn't going to give up easily. Who's going to blink first?

The standoff is in stark contrast to the bloody crackdown in the Libyan capital, Tripoli. Qadafi is not going to give up power, and he's not afraid to do whatever it takes to stay in power. It's ugly. 

Let's hope the Bahrain situation stays non-violent and that all sides can work out a deal. Who knows how this will end?

Libya in Chaos, Bahrain in Stasis

Although no reporters are in Libya, Al Jazeera English is covering the chaos unfolding there right now, mostly by interviewing foreigners and exiled Libyans who have some knowledge of the country. The leader of Libya, Muammar Qadafi, has apparently ordered his military to fire on his own people with live ammunition. He is rumored to have ordered tanks and air force jets to bomb protestors. Several Libyan diplomats have resigned their posts in protest, and many observers expect Qadafi's government to fall: another casualty in the Arab Revolutions of 2011 (along with the several hundred protesters killed there).

Meanwhile, the protesters in Bahrain's Pearl Roundabout are settling in for a long wait, making themselves comfortable, as this AJE story shows:



On the other side of the Bahrain issue is the royal family, the Al Khalifa. Providing a nice primer on them and the other royal families of the Gulf states, UAE expert Christopher Davidson published this piece today at Foreign Policy.com.

A Wave of Revolution in the Arab World: Bin Laden's Nightmare

The Arab world is in an uproar. Now that Tunisia and Egypt have settled down a bit, today there were pro-democracy protests in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain--as this AP video shows. (In Libya, as many as 200 people have been killed in a crackdown that makes Bahrain's look mild.)



Americans are programmed to freak out about unrest in the Middle East, but this is actually good news for us and bad news for Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda group.

As Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland argued recently, the news from Egypt was bin Laden's nightmare. He's correct to say that bin Laden and his right-hand Egyptian man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, see democracy as a threat to their cause. Zawahiri worked for years for the violent overthrow of the Egyptian regime, the "near enemy," as he called it, before he worked to attack the "far enemy" that supported Mubarak: the United States. The peaceful toppling of Mubarak is a direct challenge to their violent, revolutionary strategy.

A story in today's Washington Post even suggests that the protests in Yemen, a current center of Al Qaeda activity and a failing state, could be good news for the U.S. As the author puts it,

Yemen's protesters are demanding democratic freedoms, not the Islamic caliphate al-Qaeda seeks to create in this Middle Eastern nation and elsewhere. Such calls for democracy would make it harder for al-Qaeda to claim it has popular sentiments on its side, and would also give the disaffected a peaceful way to air their grievances without fear of persecution.

Zawahiri and other al Qaeda leaders have condemned the pro-democracy movements for being secular and godless, deviating from Islam.

But it's not clear that the young people in all these Arab countries really care. They're too busy trying to construct a more hopeful future within their borders to try and institute a pan-Islamic caliphate by violence.

While democracy could be messy at times--and could certainly yield governments that oppose U.S. interests--we should be celebrating with the Arab young people in the streets.

Don't freak out: peaceful pro-democracy protests are better than al Qaeda's alternative. Indeed, they are a repudiation of that dark, violent scenario. Democratization in the region is a hopeful and encouraging sign.

Most Encouraging Protest Sign I've Seen in Weeks

Taken by Nick Kristof of the New York Times and posted on his Twitter account yesterday at the Pearl Roundabout in Bahrain:

The ball is firmly in the court of the royal family of Bahrain, the Al Khalifa. What happens next? I see a few possibilities:

1. The protestors follow the moderate, peaceful course of this sign and there's a longer stalemate, as the family resists making any concessions to share more political power. Most likely, but also most likely to create a resurgence of turmoil.

2. The protestors stay moderate and real concessions are made to share power with the Shia majority population. The best possibility.

3. The protestors stay moderate and there is another violent crackdown on them. Worst possibility of all.

4. The protestors split, with the young people demanding the overthrow of the monarchy and the older generation negotiating with the regime, which makes a few superficial concessions to keep the peace for the short-term. This is closer to what happened from 2001 to the present, when King Hamad was able to get the Shia al-Wefaq political movement* to run for elections to the lower house of parliament, despite the fact that the parliament is quite toothless and the districts are gerrymandered so that the Shia can only snag about 18 seats (the current strength of al-Wefaq after recent elections). Call this "the return to the status quo" option: young people getting shot and detained in the streets, the older generation negotiating with the power structure. Obviously, this status quo led to the current crisis, so it's not preferable.

Scenarios 1 and 4 seem most likely, but you can pray for all sides to embrace 2 and for the regime to avoid 3.
---------------------------
* For a quick background on the main political movements in Bahrain, see this Reuters story.

Bahrain: When Global and Local Collide

Globalization and the regime in tiny Bahrain are colliding today, keeping this tiny country at the top of international news. The crisis reflects both global trends and very localized political grievances.

The reason Americans should care about Bahrain is that it's located just off the coast of Saudi Arabia and across the gulf from Iran, a volatile neighborhood full of oil. In fact, most Saudi oil exports are loaded onto tankers near Bahrain. If things go pear-shaped in Bahrain, it could easily spill over to Saudi. Gas prices have already gone up in the U.S. because of oil traders' unease over protests.

But what are the global trends driving the Bahrain protests? Information technology, satellite television, and higher education, among other things, are contributing to the growth of an educated, Arab middle class. Some of this growing middle class were my students in Bahrain in 2004-05, and I was impressed by their tech-savvy, their idealism, and their global awareness. The region is full of such bright, earnest, educated young people who are often underemployed and living at home. 

One young man, who had just graduated, became a very good friend. His struggles in finding a meaningful job seem typical of his generation. He's bounced around a bit but feels stifled in Bahrain. Like many young Middle Easterners, he's trying to find a meaningful job that matches his skills (he has a Bachelor's in banking and finance and did some graduate work abroad). And, yes, he spends time on Facebook. 

His experience speaks to this table from a report based on International Labor Organization data and created for a World Economic Forum meeting in Jordan in 2007:

Employment of 15-24 year olds as a percentage of that group is the lowest in the Middle East and North Africa (the lowest of any region in the world). Which is one reason why young Bahrainis like my friend are frustrated.

But that's not the whole story. There are also very localized political issues driving the unrest in Bahrain, as I noted in an earlier post. (For a vivid photo essay on Bahrain, check out this Foreign Policy post.) It's only the Shiite community in Bahrain that is out in the streets, because they feel disempowered and discriminated against by the minority Sunni community. Unless their grievances are addressed and they gain some political power in Bahrain, this crisis will not end. One Bahraini Shia friend tells me that the young people are not afraid of the regime and will protest peacefully.

To get a sense of why the Shia are angry about the crackdown on the peaceful, sleeping Pearl Roundabout protestors, check out this disturbing clip from al Jazeera English or this disturbing clip from Nick Kristof of the New York Times. Reports today indicate that five people were killed in the crackdown. The Pearl Roundabout is now abandoned and surrounded by barbed wire. 

Compared to the 365 killed in crackdowns on the Egypt protests, five deaths might seem small in comparison. But consider the populations of each country. There are only 500,000 Bahraini citizens, so the five killed reflect a ratio of 1 death per 100,000 residents. Egypt's population is 80 million, so their ration is 1 death per 219,178 residents. In other words, the Bahrain crackdown had a more lethal impact relative to the total citizenry. 

Thousands of people are marching in funeral processions for slain protestors in Bahrain today. For the peace of our world, for our friends on all sides, let us pray that the death toll goes no higher.

What's Happening in Egypt and Bahrain?

The crowds have hardly dispersed in Cairo, and now this morning Bahrain is on the front page of the New York Times, at the top of National Public Radio's news broadcasts, and near the top of the leading stories on the Daily Beast blog. Two protestors were killed, and peaceful demonstrators now occupy the Pearl Roundabout (left).

What just happened in Egypt? The popular uprising of the younger generation in Egypt was less a "revolution" than a peaceful coup d'etat. A revolution overthrows an entire regime and results in a radically different one. Typically that means a popular uprising ousting a royal family and the rapid replacement of that family with a non-dynastic form (see France 1789, Russia 1917, Iran 1979).

By contrast, a coup (in French, literally a smashing blow) is a rapid change of government at the top, usually by the military. What happened in Egypt was that the military told Mubarak to go, and then they took over. This was more a coup than a revolution.

But could this change at the top lead to serious changes for the people at the bottom (the 40% of the population of Egypt that lives on $2 a day or less)? Will the military really share power with the people?

Their first move is moderately encouraging. According to a story in today's Times, the regime has appointed an eight-member panel of lawyers and judges to revise the Constitution. The chairman of the group, Tarek el-Bishri, was a leading critic of the Mubarak regime and the author of a book that's highly critical of Egypt's direction. Another member is a leading Coptic Christian, and a third, Sobhi Saleh, is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Constitutional changes, even by a representative group like this, won't put bread on the table for Egyptians, but they can provide the political framework for more representative government, which could help.

What's happening in Bahrain? Sadly, al Jazeera English isn't on top of this story as much as NPR's Peter Kenyon was this morning. That's because the Emir of Qatar pays the bills for AJE, and he's a bit worried about his fellow Sunni royal family friends in the Al Khalifa family--the family that rules Bahrain.

Roughly 70% of Bahrain's 500,000 citizens are Shia, while the royal family and its ruling cronies are Sunni. I say "ruling cronies," because the Al Khalifa have given citizenship to Sunni immigrants from South Asia, Yemen, Jordan, Syria, and elsewhere. They recruit these outsiders for the police and military, and they never hire Shia, because they don't trust them. The regime's fear is that these Shia are more loyal to Iran than to Bahrain.

My sense is that the younger Shia opposition forces are seizing on the momentum from Egypt to gain media attention for the their cause. It's not like they were sitting around until the Egypt protests. They've been protesting (the Al Khalifa would say complaining) for years. To try and head off protests, the King of Bahrain announced the other day that he would give every citizen 1,000 Bahraini dinars ($2650) in cash.

The Beatles could have told him that money can't buy you love. It may not even buy you peace. I think the Shia young people are insulted, and they're frustrated with Internet slowdowns. My prediction is that this will escalate by Friday (after midday prayers). Pray for peace on all sides.

People Power in Egypt

So Mubarak resigned today, and the military has taken over the reins of power. Which means that Egypt's uprising will not go down in the history books alongside Hungary in 1956, the Czech Republic in 1968, or Tienanmen Square in 1989. Instead, we can look to the Philippines in 1986, when Ferdinand Marcos was ousted by a People Power movement that took the U.S. government, a close ally of Marcos, by surprise. And the leader of this "yellow revolution," Corazon Aquino, led the transition. (Will there be an Egyptian Corey Aquino? Stay tuned.)

Watching al Jazeera English right now, it's impossible not to be moved. People in Egypt are ecstatic, stunned, exhilarated, screaming, and crying in the streets. They can't believe that a popular movement forced an entire regime out of power. This has never happened before in the Arab world. And just a few weeks ago no one could have imagined it--especially in Egypt. It's unbelievable.