Michael J. Totten's Blog, page 57

Sudan on the Brink

My colleague and sometimes traveling companion Armin Rosen has an interesting essay right here in World Affairs that everyone interested in the Arab Spring, Africa, or both ought to check out. He argues that the bloodthirsty Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir may well be on his way out.

Sudan is a bit wide of my regular beat and I profess no expertise whatsoever in what’s going on there, but Armin pays more attention to it than anybody I know and, unlike me, he has been there, and he has been th...

Chasing Demons from the Middle East to the Balkans

The Middle East is always unstable, but it’s more volatile now than it has been in years. Syria’s civil war threatens to spill over its borders into Lebanon. Egyptian voters sent the radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi to the presidential palace in Cairo. The Israelis are publicly mulling the option of a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities. Tehran is threatening a massive retaliation against American military bases in the Persian Gulf region. T...

Is Mali the Next Afghanistan?

The Islamists who recently took over the northern portion of Mali are systematically destroying a Sufi Muslim World Heritage Site because it’s “idolatrous.”

Philistines who behave this way are the kinds who start wars. Let’s not forget that 9/11 happened shortly after the Taliban destroyed the Buddha statues at Bamiyan for the same reason.

Lest you think I’m blowing this out of proportion, the group responsible for this—Ansar Dine—is an Al Qaeda franchise. They’re flying the black Salafist flag...

So Much for the Water Wars of the Future

If you’re a geek about foreign policy or environmentalism, you’ve almost certainly read or at least heard about ominous warnings that wars in the future will be fought over water.

That’s not at all likely to happen if this pans out:

Graphene. It can be stronger than steel and thinner than paper. It can generate electricity when struck by light. It can be used in thin, flexible supercapacitors that are up to 20 times more powerful than the ones we use right now and can be made in a DVD burner. I...

The Islamization of the Syrian Uprising

This wasn’t hard to see coming:

According to secular Syrian rebels interviewed in Istanbul, even though the insurgency to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is increasing in size and sophistication, Gulf Arab states—chiefly Saudi Arabia—are empowering Islamists at the expense of majoritarian secularists. Rebels from the Idlib and Hama provinces fear that religious extremists will be harder to control or contain in a post-Assad state, a consequence they see as leading directl...

Second Thoughts on Morsi's Victory

Robert Satloff, the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says “it would be a grave error…to fixate on the obstacles the [Egyptian] army has put in the way of the Islamists without appreciating the latter's remarkable ability to fill any political vacuum they are permitted to fill.” After thinking about this for a day or so, I think he’s right. My initial reaction to Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi’s victory two days ago was a little too flip.

I’ve bee...

A Victory of Sorts for the Muslim Brotherhood

Egypt has a Muslim Brotherhood president now. His name is Mohamed Morsi. It wasn’t hard to see that one coming, but it’s worth pointing out that it did, in fact, happen.

The question now is: does it even matter? The army is still in the saddle. It may turn out that what Egypt actually has is a Muslim Brotherhood figurehead. We’ll see.

Galloway on Syria

If you know who George Galloway is, I don’t have to tell you that his opinion of what’s happening right now in Syria is rank and appalling. You might get a kick out of watching him say it, however. Not even the most ardent Arab Nationalist propagandist I’ve ever met knows how to push all the emotional buttons quite this effectively.

The Last Jews of Tunisia

Jews lived all over the Middle East and North Africa for thousands of years, and they lived among Arab Muslims for more than 1,000 years, but they’re almost extinct now in the Arab world. Arabs and Jews didn’t live well together, exactly, but they co-existed five times longer than the United States has existed. They weren’t always token minorities, either. Baghdad was almost a third Jewish during the first half of the 20th century. Morocco and Tunisia are the last holdouts. In Tunisia, only 1...

Hosni Mubarak "Clinically Dead"

Former Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak reportedly had a stroke and is on life support. Doctor's say he's "clinically dead."

The wrenching changes Egypt has been going through during the past year and a half may well have come to pass even if Tunisia hadn't kicked off the Arab Spring. Mubarak is old. His era wasn't long for this world either way.