Revolutions in the Middle East

[KanadaHye]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

I recommend y'all tune in to the live feed on Al-Jazeera, pro- and anti-government protestors are fighting street battles. Tahrir square is a warzone! Pro-government thugs have appeared on the rooftops of buildings and they are throwing ANYTHING on the people... chairs, rocks etc.

The army is still neutral and just standing and watching the huge fights.

Coming soon to a country near you.... as of 2008, a U.S. Army Brigade Combat Team has been stationed permanently in the United States. A major part of its dedicated assignment is to be "called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control.” Many people seem to be unaware that Americans, together with this Brigade, have lived since 2002 under a U.S. Army Command called NORTHCOM.

Similarly, Canada Command was established on Feb. 1, 2006, to focus on domestic operations and to offer a single point of contact for all domestic and continental defense and security partners.

The two domestic commands established strong bilateral ties well before the signing of the Civil Assistance Plan. The two commanders and their staffs meet regularly, collaborate on contingency planning and participate in related annual exercises.

[Federate]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

I recommend y'all tune in to the live feed on Al-Jazeera, pro- and anti-government protestors are fighting street battles. Tahrir square is a warzone! Pro-government thugs have appeared on the rooftops of buildings and they are throwing ANYTHING on the people... chairs, rocks etc.

The army is still neutral and just standing and watching the huge fights.

[KanadaHye]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

I'm thinking all this is all distraction. Some sort of decoy while plans for world domination are going on behind the scenes.

[retro]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

Mubarak is a idiot and you have to wonder why he's hanging on at this point.

A group of pro-government supporters riding horses and camels has charged anti-Mubarak protesters. it comes as hundreds of pro-government supporters and protesters demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak clashed in Cairo's main square on Wednesday. Mubarak supporters break through a human chain of anti-government protesters trying to defend those gathered in Tahrir Square. They tore down banners denouncing the president and fistfights broke out as they advanced across the massive square in the heart of the capital.

The other kooky, despotic Arab regimes thoughout the region are freaking out.

"Yesterday, Yemeni leader Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is also facing demands that he quit, said he would freeze constitutional changes that would allow him to be president for life."

Wow such a big concession!

[Davo88]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

An interesting take on the issue:


The Arab freedom epic

LONDON—What a supreme irony it was for me to be in London and Paris between Saturday and Tuesday this week, as the popular revolt against the Hosni Mubarak regime reached its peak in Cairo, Alexandria and other Egyptian cities.

To appreciate what is taking place in the Arab world today you have to grasp the historical significance of the events that have started changing rulers and regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, with others sure to follow.

What we are witnessing is the unravelling of the post-colonial order that the British and French created in the Arab world in the 1920s and ’30s and then sustained — with American and Soviet assistance — for most of the last half century.

It is fascinating but quite provincial to focus attention — as much of the Western media is doing — on whether Facebook drove these revolts or what will happen if Muslim Brothers play a role in the governments to be formed. The Arabs are like a bride emerging on her wedding day and many people are commenting on whether her shoes match her gloves, when the real issue is how beautiful and happy she is.

The events unfolding before our eyes are the third most important historical development in the Arab region in the past century, and to miss that point is to perpetuate a tradition of Western Orientalist romanticism and racism that has been a large cause of our pain for all these years. This is the most important of the three major historical markers because it is the first one that marks a process of genuine self-determination by Arab citizens who can speak and act for themselves for the first time in their modern history.

The two other pivotal historical markers were: first, the creation of the modern Arab state system around 1920 at the hands of retreating European colonial powers. Some of them were intoxicated with both imperial power and, on occasion, with cognac, when they created most of the Arab countries that have limped into the 21st century as wrecks of statehood.

Then, second, the period around 1970-80 when the Euro-manufactured modern Arab state system turned into a collection of security and police states that treated their citizens as serfs without human rights and relied on massive foreign support to maintain the rickety Arab order for decades more.

Now, we witness the third and most significant Arab historical development, which is the spontaneous drive by millions of ordinary Arabs to finally assert their humanity, demand their rights, and take command of their own national condition and destiny.

Never before have we had entire Arab populations stand up and insist on naming their rulers, shaping their governance system, and defining the values that drive their domestic and foreign policies. Never before have we had self-determinant and free Arab citizenries. Never before have we had grassroots political, social and religious movements force leaders to change their cabinets and reorder the role of the armed forces and police.

This is a revolt against specific Arab leaders and governing elites who implemented policies that have seen the majority of Arabs dehumanized, pauperized, victimized and marginalized by their own power structure; but it is also a revolt against the tradition of major Western powers that created the modern Arab states and then fortified and maintained them as security states after the 1970s.

The process at hand now in Tunisia and Egypt will continue to ripple throughout the entire Arab world, as ordinary citizens realize that they must seize and protect their birthrights of freedom and dignity.

It is a monumental task to transform from autocracy and serfdom to democracy and human rights; the Europeans needed 500 years to make the transition from the Magna Carta to the French Revolution. The Americans needed 300 years to transition from slavery to civil rights and women’s rights.

Self-determination is a slow process that needs time. The Arab world is only now starting to engage in this exhilarating process, a full century after the false and rickety statehood that drunken retreating European colonialists left behind as they fled back to their imperial heartlands.

It takes time and energy to relegitimize an entire national governance system and power structure that have been criminalized, privatized, monopolized and militarized by small groups of petty autocrats and thieving families. Tunisia and Egypt are the first to embark on this historic journey, and other Arabs will soon follow, because most Arab countries suffer the same deficiencies that have been exposed for all to see in Egypt.

Make no mistake about it, we are witnessing an epic, historic moment of the birth of concepts that have long been denied to ordinary Arabs: the right to define ourselves and our governments, to assert our national values, to shape our governance systems, and to engage with each other and the rest of the world as free human beings, with rights that will not be denied forever.

In January 2011, a century after some Arabs started agitating for their freedoms from Ottoman and European colonial rule, and after many false starts in recent decades, we finally have a breakthrough to our full humanity.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of Beirut’s Daily Star, and director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/931803--the-arab-freedom-epic

[Federate]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

2 million people in the streets of Cairo today chanting and heckling "Get out! Get out!" as Hosni Mubarak gives a speech (in an unknown location) claiming he will not seek re-election once his term expires in September and amend the constitution to put term limits but exclaims that he will "die on Egyptian soil". Crazy scenes from Cairo... never seen this many people protesting.

In other news, Jordan fired the entire government today after protests. The King is probably sh!tting his pants at the scenes in Egypt.

[KanadaHye]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

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Its really good some democrats really care about Egypt.

Listen when he is asked "Do you beleive in democracy?"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programme...lk/9383436.stm

My mummy told me it's all just a pyramid scheme

[londontsi]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

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Its really good some democrats really care about Egypt.

Listen when he is asked "Do you beleive in democracy?"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/hardtalk/9383436.stm

[KanadaHye]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

In collaboration with our academic partners Prof. Cingranelli at the Political Science Department, SUNY Binghamton University and Profs. Sam Bell and Amanda Murdie at the Department of Political Science, Kansas State University, we developed a Domestic Political Violence Model that forecasts political violence levels five years into the future. The model enables policymakers, particularly in the COCOMs, to proactively plan for instances of increased domestic political violence, with implications for resource allocation and intelligence asset assignment. Our model uses the IDEA dataset for political event coding, plus numerous indicators from the CIRI Human Rights Dataset, Polity IV Dataset, World Bank, OECD, Correlates of War project, and Fearon and Laitin datasets. Here is our model’s forecast for 2010 – 2014 as a ranked list:

1. Iran
2. Sri Lanka
3. Russia
4. Georgia
5. Israel
6. Turkey
7. Burundi
8. Chad
9. Honduras
10. Czech Republic
11. China
12. Italy
13. Colombia
14. Ukraine
15. Indonesia
16. Malaysia
17. Jordan
18. Mexico
19. Kenya
20. South Africa
21. Ireland
22. Peru
23. Chile
24. Armenia
25. Tunisia
26. Democratic Republic of the Congo
27. Belarus
28. Argentina
29. Albania
30. Ecuador
31. Sudan
32. Austria
33. Nigeria
34. Syria
35. Kyrgyz Republic
36. Egypt
37. Belgium

Using a regression model applied to a large number of drivers of conflict variables spanning numerous open source social science datasets, our model uses a novel Negative Residuals technique. Negative Residuals result from the model predicting higher levels of violence than actually experienced, indicating nation states that are pre-disposed to increasing levels of violence based on the presence of environmental conditions and drivers of conflict with demonstrated correlation with measured political violence. The residuals imply that these are states that we expect to observe increases in violence although not necessarily high levels of violence. So Iran and Sri Lanka are not expected to have the same level of violence but are expected to have the same magnitude increase in violence.

There some unexpected countries on our list like Czech Republic and Italy. Time will tell the accuracy of our model’s predictions although recent political violence in Ecuador is an early indicator of the model’s effective performance. The model uses nuanced measures of repression and captures variables that can be manipulated by policy makers. Our project page has further details on the model.

http://radicalism.milcord.com/blog/

Looks like a busy decade for the CIA/SIS and Mossad

[Federate]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

In collaboration with our academic partners Prof. Cingranelli at the Political Science Department, SUNY Binghamton University and Profs. Sam Bell and Amanda Murdie at the Department of Political Science, Kansas State University, we developed a Domestic Political Violence Model that forecasts political violence levels five years into the future. The model enables policymakers, particularly in the COCOMs, to proactively plan for instances of increased domestic political violence, with implications for resource allocation and intelligence asset assignment. Our model uses the IDEA dataset for political event coding, plus numerous indicators from the CIRI Human Rights Dataset, Polity IV Dataset, World Bank, OECD, Correlates of War project, and Fearon and Laitin datasets. Here is our model’s forecast for 2010 – 2014 as a ranked list:

1. Iran
2. Sri Lanka
3. Russia
4. Georgia
5. Israel
6. Turkey
7. Burundi
8. Chad
9. Honduras
10. Czech Republic
11. China
12. Italy
13. Colombia
14. Ukraine
15. Indonesia
16. Malaysia
17. Jordan
18. Mexico
19. Kenya
20. South Africa
21. Ireland
22. Peru
23. Chile
24. Armenia
25. Tunisia
26. Democratic Republic of the Congo
27. Belarus
28. Argentina
29. Albania
30. Ecuador
31. Sudan
32. Austria
33. Nigeria
34. Syria
35. Kyrgyz Republic
36. Egypt
37. Belgium

Using a regression model applied to a large number of drivers of conflict variables spanning numerous open source social science datasets, our model uses a novel Negative Residuals technique. Negative Residuals result from the model predicting higher levels of violence than actually experienced, indicating nation states that are pre-disposed to increasing levels of violence based on the presence of environmental conditions and drivers of conflict with demonstrated correlation with measured political violence. The residuals imply that these are states that we expect to observe increases in violence although not necessarily high levels of violence. So Iran and Sri Lanka are not expected to have the same level of violence but are expected to have the same magnitude increase in violence.

There some unexpected countries on our list like Czech Republic and Italy. Time will tell the accuracy of our model’s predictions although recent political violence in Ecuador is an early indicator of the model’s effective performance. The model uses nuanced measures of repression and captures variables that can be manipulated by policy makers. Our project page has further details on the model.

http://radicalism.milcord.com/blog/