Michael J. Totten's Blog, page 46

A Botched Hostage Rescue in Algeria

So the Algerian army stormed the Ain Amenas natural gas complex where terrorists held dozens of foreigners, including Americans, hostage. And the prelinary body count is 32 dead terrorists and 23 dead hostages.

Maybe the Algerians went in there and shot everything that moved because they were scared. Perhaps they didn’t particularly care about the well-being of hostages. I seriously doubt the soldiers have been trained in avoiding civilian casualties. (The armies of the Middle East and North A...

The Game of Thrones in North Africa

It feels strange visiting a country like Morocco and listening to people extol the virtues of a political system my country waged a revolution against. Morocco has a king, and he’s a real one too, not some kind of a figurehead. But I went there, I listened, and after almost ten years of visiting Middle Eastern countries wracked by tyranny, terrorism, botched revolutions, and wars, I was perhaps a bit more willing to hear what they had to say than I might have been a decade ago.

A monarchy is a...

War in Mali Heats Up

So much for the so-called “war on terror” being over. (You didn’t really believe it was, did you?) A coalition of Salafist Al Qaeda militias is pouring out of the statelet they broke off in Northern Mali and heading south while French warplanes are bombing their positions in the city of Gao.

While no one really knows much, Andy Morgan seems to have a better idea what’s going on there than the rest of us do. His analysis is worth reading. Here’s a taste.

The UN Security Council met in emergency...

The International Elite Bubble

Robert D. Kaplan is always worth reading. He’s interesting even when I don’t agree with him, and his recent piece in the Wall Street Journal called “The Return of Toxic Nationalism” is right on the money. (It was published over the Christmas holiday, so most of us probably missed it.)

Western elites believe that universal values are trumping the forces of reaction. They wax eloquent about the triumph of human rights, women's liberation, social media, financial markets, international and region...

Finally - I Got My Visa for Libya

It took a while, but the Libyan government has finally approved my journalist visa. I was starting to wonder if I'd get to go there at all, which would be more than a little bit awkward since I already raised travel expenses through Kickstarter, but the problem has been resolved.

The folks at the Libyan Embassy in Washington are responsive and friendly. The bottleneck was in Tripoli.

Morsi in His Own Words

Here is Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi on Al-Quds TV in 2010.

These futile [Israeli-Palestinian] negotiations are a waste of time and opportunities. The Zionists buy time and gain more opportunities, as the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the Muslims lose time and opportunities, and they get nothing out of it. We can see how this dream has dissipated. This dream has always been an illusion. Yet some Palestinians, who erroneously believe that their enemies might give them something... This [Pale...

The Great War of the Eastern Mediterranean

A few years ago Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi said something interesting to me in an interview. “Arabs are not a warring people,” he said. “We are a feuding people.” That’s true at least some of the time. It has certainly been true in Lebanon since the end of the Syrian occupation where brief microwars break out periodically without erupting into anything terribly serious.

But 60,000 people have been killed in Syria since the war to oust Assad was first launched. The UN Commission on Human R...

Egypt Gets a New Constitution

Egyptian voters just approved a new constitution in a popular referendum, so it’s safe to say at this point that the country has undergone a regime change. The military government installed by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s “Free Officers Movement” in 1952, which continued in a crippled form for a while after Hosni Mubarak was removed from power, is now finished.

The new constitution was translated into English and published on the Internet. It’s a mixed bag. Some of it is pretty good. Parts are incoher...

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, everybody!

The Children of Hannibal

Here's a piece I wrote about Tunisia for the print edition of City Journal, which is now available to non-subscribers online.

The Arab Spring began in Sidi Bouzid, a small Tunisian town, at the end of 2010. In a desperate protest against the corrupt and oppressive government that had made it impossible for him to earn a living, food-cart vendor Mohamed Bouazizi stood before City Hall, doused himself with gasoline, and lit a match. His suicide seeded a revolutionary storm that swept the countr...