Michael J. Totten's Blog, page 63

Syria's Regime Not Worth Preserving

Lee Smith argues in The American Interest against Washington Post columnist David Ignatius' endorsement of Kofi Annan's plan for a ceasefire in Syria since it would preserve the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the junior partner in the Iran-led resistance bloc and a destabilizing state sponsor of terrorism.

Ignatius' columns have shown over the years a careful cultivation of sources within the Assad regime, useful insofar as they were able to convey the policies, convictions and paranoid fantasies...

Tunisian Exceptionalism

A few days ago I took a trip south to the small poor Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid where the revolution against Ben Ali began. While I was out, thousands of Salafists descended on Tunis, waved their black flag, demanded an Islamic state, and incited "war" against "the Jews." Roughly 1,500 Jews live in Tunisia. Most are in the capital and on the island of Djerba.

A Tunisian journalist I've been working with was appalled by these people. That doesn't surprise me. He's an educated liberal-minded...

A Victory for Arab Liberals

Tunisia's Islamist party Ennahda has caved to overwhelming pressure from liberal, leftist, and other secular parties and abandoned its push for making Islam the basis of the country's new constitution.

Just a few days ago I spoke to several people here in Tunis who thought a compromise might be reached, that Sharia law would be described in the constitution as a source of legislation rather than the source, but it looks like the Islamists won't even get that much.

US Criticized by Tunisian Secularists for Backing Islamists

TUNIS – Radical Islamists are making inroads in the Arab world's most advanced, liberal, and tolerant country. And the secularists think the United States is helping them do it.

Thousands took to the streets of Tunisia's capital Tunis yesterday to celebrate the end of French colonial rule in 1956. As one might expect on independence day, most were in an anti-imperialist mood. Who are the "imperialists" in the Tunisian imagination today? Not the French. Not anymore. The "imperialists" of today...

The Great Ideological Battleground, Redux

I am currently in Tunisia's semi-Westernized capital after spending a week in the remote and more conservative parts of the country. I always try to get out of the bubble of the capital city whenever I report from a foreign country and this time I thought I'd start outside the bubble so I could get a good overview of the place before getting down to brass tacks in interviews and such.

From what I've seen so far, my initial analysis seems sound. This country is more or less evenly divided...

An American in the Den of Assad

Now that the Syrian army is waging a scorched earth campaign against civilians as well as dissident rebels, Andrew Tabler can count himself lucky. He managed to live and work in Damascus for years and even got to know the Assad family back when that was still possible. And the much-feared Palestine branch of military intelligence ran him out of the country before all this mayhem broke out.

In the meantime he landed himself a job at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and wrote a...

Hezbollah's Relentless Rage

The only reason Israel has been able to survive in the Middle East, and even to flourish there, is because its enemies' armies are incompetent. When asked how and why Israelis win every battle, the celebrated general Moshe Dayan said it's because they fight Arabs. "We're a feuding people, not a warring people," Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi said to me once in Beirut. "We haven't been good at war for hundreds of years." If Arabs could fight as effectively as, say, the Russians, Israel would...

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Why Obama Just Might Fight Iran

Walter Russell Mead argues in the American Interest that President Barack Obama is more likely to go to war with Iran than many conventional observers believe. "In my view," he wrote, "Iran and this president are headed toward a confrontation in which President Obama will either have to give up all hope on the issues [...:]