EFTA00587742.pdf

.2.Shimon Post .07'w 17 March, 2011 Article 1. Presidential News Bulletin Article 2. Article 3. The Wall Street Journal The Collapse of Internationalism Daniel Henninger Guardian Germany can show reborn Arab nations the art of overcoming a difficult past Timothy Garton Ash Guardian The fate of the Arabs will be settled in Egypt, not Libya Seumas Milne Article 4. Article 5. Foreign Affairs Why the Al Saud Dynasty Will Remain F. Gregory Gause Ill Center for Strategic and International Studies The Revolution Will Not Be Televised Jon Alterman Article 6. Time Silent No More: The Women of the Arab Revolutions Carla Power EFTA00587742 The Wall Street Journal The Collapse of Internationalism Daniel Henninger March 17, 2011 - Not the 28 members of NATO, not the 15-member M. Security Council, not the 22 nations of the Arab League could save Libya's rebels from being obliterated by the mad and murderous Moammar Gadhafi. The world has just watched the collapse of internationalism. The world's self-professed keepers of international order, from Brussels to Turtle Bay, huffed and puffed, talked and threatened. And they failed. Utterly. But what we've watched is not merely the failure of the gauzy notion of "internationalism." It's more specific than that. What has collapsed here is the modern Democratic Party's new foreign-policy establishment. Barack Obama is the first Democratic president to assemble a foreign-policy team made up entirely of intellectuals who for years have developed a counter-thesis to the policies of presidents extending back to John F. Kennedy. We are in a "post-American world," they have argued, in which the U.S. is obliged to pursue its interests in concert with the rest of the world's powers, never alone. The uprisings against autocracies in 10 separate Middle Eastern countries, a crisis inherited from no one, was their real-world test. In Egypt, they fumbled. In Libya, they have failed. The poster boy for this internationalist view is White House deputy Ben Rhodes, who told a reporter last week: "This is the Obama conception of the U.S. role in the world—to work through multilateral organizations and bilateral relationships to make sure that the steps we are taking are amplified." EFTA00587743 3 Days later, bemused Libyan rebel spokesman Essam Gheriani remarked in Benghazi: "Everyone here is puzzled as to how many casualties the international community judges to be enough for them to help. Maybe we should start committing suicide to reach the required number." Mr. Rhodes' view isn't just briefingspeak. The new Democratic theory of the proper U.S. role in the world was articulated in a July 2008 document, "Strategic Leadership: Framework for a 21st Century National Security Strategy." It described itself as "an intellectual and policy blueprint for the next administration." Its authors included James B. Steinberg, who is now Mr. Obama's deputy secretary of state; No Daalder, now U.S. ambassador to NATO; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, until a month ago the State Department's director of policy planning. Susan Rice, who is now our ambassador to the United Nations, wrote the preface. Their blueprint, a tour of the world's regions, counsels constant multilateral cooperation, institution-building and consultation. While it admits U.S. preeminence, it is largely a meditation on the limits of American power and authority. This is the document's final, summarizing sentence: "And such [U.S.] leadership recognizes that in a world in which power has diffused, our interests are best protected and advanced when others step up and at times lead alongside or even ahead of us." In the Middle East, no one has stepped up, no one is leading alongside and our allies are in the rear, accomplishing nothing while they wait for . . . America. This was a test case, and what we have seen is that a world in which the U.S. doesn't unmistakably lead is a world that spins its wheels, and eventually the wheels start to come off. When the U.S. instructs the Saudis not to intervene in Bahrain, and the Saudi army does precisely the opposite, the wheels are coming off the international EFTA00587744 4 order. In an op-ed piece for the New York Times this week, "Fiddling While Libya Burns," the recently departed State Department planner Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a cri de coeur on behalf of doing something for Libya. "The United States and Europe are temporizing on a no-flight zone," she wrote. It was a remarkable call to action— until the final two paragraphs. She concludes that the U.S. "should ask the Security Council to authorize a no-flight zone," (by asking Russia and China to abstain). If that works, then with the Arab League, we "should assemble an international coalition to impose the no-flight zone." Finally, failing all that, we should work with the Arab League to give the Libyan opposition "any assistance it requests." But Benghazi will be dead by the time this calibration grinds down to Ms. Slaughter's bottom line. After Mr. Obama met with his national security team Tuesday, with Gadhafi one demolished town from Benghazi, the White House said, "The President instructed his team to continue to fully engage in the discussions at the United Nations, NATO and with partners and organizations in the region." Barack Obama is following their blueprint to a tee. In a better world, James Steinberg, No Daalder and Susan Rice would join Ms. Slaughter in resigning and calling for action to save Benghazi from outside the government. Being inside is manifestly useless. They are defaulting the U.S. into a dangerous irrelevance. Libyan rebel commander Mohammed Abdallah, in bombed-out Ajdabiya, put the spike into them Tuesday: "The hands of the international community are covered in blood." But the "international community" was never much more than a academic abstraction, and blood, as always, can be washed off. Daniel Henninger is Deputy Editorial Page Director of the Wall Street Journal and a Fox News contributor. EFTA00587745 Anicic 2. Guardian Germany can show reborn Arab nations the art of overcoming a difficult past Timothy Garton Ash 16 March 2011 - Like it or not, Germany still provides the global benchmark for political evil. Hitler is the devil of a secularised Europe. Nazism and the Holocaust are comparisons people reach for everywhere. Godwin's Law, named after the American free speech lawyer Mike Godwin, famously states that "as an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or to Nazis approaches 1". That is something today's Germans have to live with. But there is a brighter side to this coin. For out of the experience of dealing with two dictatorships — one fascist, one communist — contemporary Germany offers the gold standard for dealing with a difficult past. Modern German has characteristically long words such as Geschichtsaufarbeitung and Vergangenheitsbewaltigung to describe this complex process of dealing with, working through and even (the latter implies) "overcoming" the past. Using skills and methods developed to deal with the Nazi legacy, and honed on the Stasi one, no one has done it better. Just as there are the famous DIN standards — German industrial norms for many manufactured products — so there are DIN standards for past-beating. Arab nations, struggling to emerge from years of darkness under their own dictators, can therefore learn from Germany. Besides the important business of restitution and compensation to victims, past- beating usually takes three main forms: trials, purges and history lessons. EFTA00587746 6 Our contemporary ideas about putting leaders on trial for "crimes against humanity" can be traced back to the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders. While Nuremberg set an important precedent, it had two big flaws: the "crimes against humanity" for which people were being tried had not explicitly been offences in international law at the time they were committed; and the judges included representatives of the Soviet Union — itself guilty of crimes against humanity in the same period. So Nuremberg could be accused of being retrospective, and imposing selective, victors' justice. Fortunately, today's international criminal court, before which Arab leaders may come if they commit crimes against humanity, largely avoids those flaws. The international laws are firmly in place, and this is a properly established international court — though still, shamefully, without the participation of the US, China and Russia. Lebanon's special tribunal on the assassination of prime minister Rafik Hariri is an interesting application of the general principle, with all the accompanying political difficulties. If international trials are tricky, those conducted under national laws and jurisdictions can be even trickier. This is one area in which Germany has not done better than anyone else. The trials of former east German leaders such as Erich Honecker, on contorted criminal charges relating to killings at the Berlin Wall were deeply unsatisfactory and often ended in fiasco. Since most totalitarian or authoritarian regimes involve large numbers of people being complicit to different degrees, you are almost sure to be inconsistent. Either you punish some of the little fish, but let the big ones swim free, or you make an example of a few big fish, but let others, and the smaller sharks, go free. Last month, three henchmen of the Mubarak regime — the steel tycoon Ahmed Ezz and the former housing and tourism ministers — arrived at a Cairo court in police cars, which were pelted with stones, EFTA00587747 7 to face trial on corruption charges. Dressed in white jail uniforms, they were forced to stand in a metal cage. These men may be very corrupt; but how much more so than some of the Egyptian generals now tossing them as sacrificial offerings to an angry populace? In such circumstances, a rapid administrative purge can be more effective, and even in some ways fairer, than selective show trials. A country emerging from a dictatorship simply says: there are some people so closely implicated in the evils of the old regime that to have them still active in senior positions in public life will utterly compromise the new political order. Such measures, too, have German precedents — and a chequered history. "De-Baathification" in Iraq and "de-communisation" in post-1989 eastern Europe built on the precedent of "de-nazification" in post-1945 Germany. But de- nazification was also selective, and stopped abruptly soon after West Germany became a largely independent state in 1949. A better example may be the systematic vetting of people for connections to the Stasi, the East German secret police. Following German unification in 1990 this was done by an extraordinary ministry set up to oversee the Stasi files. It came to be known as "the Gauck authority", after its first head, Joachim Gauck. Colloquially, people described being vetted for Stasi connections as "being Gaucked". In my view, the vetting net was cast far too wide. Did every postman really have to be checked for secret police connections? But the vetting procedure itself was rigorous, fair and appealable. Germany excels in what I call history lessons. Following a period of hushing-up and repressing the Nazi past in the 1950s and early 1960s, west Germany scrupulously researched, documented and taught this difficult history. Learning from the mistakes of the 1950s, united Germany did even better with the legacy of communist East EFTA00587748 8 Germany. There was a kind of truth commission, called the Enquete Kommission. Archives were opened; studies made; lessons learned. Also central to this master class in past-beating was the "Gauck authority", which enabled everyone adversely affected by the evils of the Stasi, as well as scholars and journalists, to have access to the files. At the last count it had received a staggering 2.7m applications from private individuals to read or get information from Stasi files. This week the authority got its third head, Roland Jahn — another former East German dissident. So it is now "the Jahn authority". There is talk of its work continuing beyond the planned closure in 2019. It is, of course, unlikely that any Arab post-dictatorship will do anything of this scale and quality. Quite apart from the highly developed legal, scholarly, journalistic and administrative cultures needed to sustain a German-style ministry of the files, it is also very expensive. Unemployed young Arabs, with no homes of their own, may feel their governments have more urgent things to spend their money on. But having decided to close down its own dreaded state security service, Egypt could do worse than fly in Joachim Gauck to advise on how best to open its files. We should be careful here. Many times over the last few weeks I have heard well-intentioned but slightly self-congratulatory Europeans say: "We have all this rich experience of transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and should offer it to our Arab friends." We must start by listening to the people on the ground in North Africa and the Middle East. Their priorities and needs may be different. And one lesson of Europe's own transitions from communism after 1989 is that you cannot simply apply a western template. That mistake was also made in the often inflexible west German incorporation of east Germany. EFTA00587749 9 So what we should offer our friends across the Mediterranean is not a template, but a toolbox. They can then choose which implements to use, when, where and how. In that toolbox for transition, there should certainly be a set of shiny DIN-standard past-beating wrenches. And those wrenches, like so many other European exports, will be stamped "Made in Germany". Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. EFTA00587750 Ill Anicic 3. Guardian The fate of the Arabs will be settled in Egypt, not Libya Seumas Milne 16 March 2011 - Barely two months since the triumphant overthrow of the Tunisian dictator that detonated the Arab revolution, a western view is taking hold that it's already gone horribly wrong. In January and February, TV screens across the world were filled with exhilarating images of hundreds of thousands of peaceful demonstrators, women and men, braving Hosni Mubarak's goons in Cairo's Tahrir square while Muslims and Christians stood guard over each other as they prayed. A few weeks on and reports from the region are dominated by the relentless advance of Colonel Gaddafi's forces across Libya, as one rebel stronghold after another is crushed. Meanwhile Arab dictators are falling over each other to beat and shoot protesters, while Saudi troops have occupied Bahrain to break the popular pressure for an elected government. In Egypt itself, 11 people were killed in sectarian clashes between Christians and Muslims last week and women protesters were assaulted by misogynist thugs in Tahrir Square. Increasingly, US and European politicians and media hawks are insisting it's all because the west has shamefully failed to intervene militarily in support of the Libyan opposition. The Times on Wednesday blamed Barack Obama for snuffing out a "dawn of hope" by havering over whether to impose a no-fly zone in Libya. But Saudi Arabia's dangerous quasi-invasion of Bahrain is a reminder that Libya is very far from being the only place where hopes are EFTA00587751 II being stifled. The west's closest Arab ally, which has declared protest un-Islamic, bans political parties and holds an estimated 8,000 political prisoners, has sent troops to bolster the Bahraini autocracy's bloody resistance to democratic reform. Underlying the Saudi provocation is a combustible cocktail of sectarian and strategic calculations. Bahrain's secular opposition to the Sunni ruling family is mainly supported by the island's Shia majority. The Saudi regime fears both the influence of Iran in a Shia- dominated Bahrain and the infection of its own repressed Shia minority — concentrated in the eastern region, centre of the largest oil reserves in the world. Considering that both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, home to the United States fifth fleet, depend on American support, the crushing of the Bahraini democracy movement or the underground Saudi opposition should be a good deal easier for the west to fix than the Libyan maelstrom. But neither the US nor its intervention-hungry allies show the slightest sign of using their leverage to help the people of either country decide their own future. Instead, as Bahrain's security forces tear-gassed and terrorised protesters, the White House merely repeated the mealy-mouthed call it made in the first weeks of the Egyptian revolution for "restraint on all sides". It's more than understandable that the Libyan opposition now being ground down by superior firepower should be desperate for outside help. Sympathy for their plight runs deep in the Arab world and beyond. But western military intervention — whether in the form of arms supplies or Britain and France's favoured no-fly zone — would, as the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan argues, be "totally counter-productive" and "deepen the problem". Experience in Iraq and elsewhere suggests it would prolong the war, increase the death toll, lead to demands for escalation and risk EFTA00587752 12 dividing the country. It would also be a knife at the heart of the Arab revolution, depriving Libyans and the people of the region of ownership of their own political renaissance. Arab League support for a no-fly zone has little credibility, dominated as it still is by despots anxious to draw the US yet more deeply into the region; while the three Arab countries lined up to join the military effort — Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the UAE — are themselves among the main barriers to the process of democratisation that intervention would be supposed to strengthen. Genuinely independent regional backing from, say, Egypt would be another matter, as would Erdogan's proposal of some sort of negotiated solution: whatever the outcome of the conflict there will be no return of the status quo ante for the Gaddafi regime. In any case, the upheaval now sweeping the Arab world is far bigger than the struggle in Libya — and that process has only just begun. Any idea that all the despots would throw in the towel as quickly as Zin al-Abidine Ben Ali and Mubarak was always a pipedream. They may well be strengthened in their determination to use force by events in Libya. And the divisions of ethnicity, sect and tribe in each society will be ruthlessly exploited by the regimes and their foreign sponsors to try to hold back the tide of change. But across the region people insist they have lost their fear. There is a widespread expectation that the Yemeni dictator, Ali Abdallah Saleh, will be the next to fall — where violently suppressed street protests have been led by a woman, the charismatic human rights campaigner Tawakul Karman, in what is a deeply conservative society. And where regimes make cosmetic concessions, such as in Jordan, they find they are only fuelling further demands. As the Jordanian Islamist opposition leader, Rohile Gharaibeh, puts it: "Either we achieve democracy under a constitutional monarchy or there will be no monarchy at all". EFTA00587753 13 The key to the future of the region, however, remains Egypt. It is scarcely surprising if elements of the old regime try to provoke social division, or attempts are made to co-opt and infiltrate the youth movements that played the central role in the uprising, or that the army leadership wants to put a lid on street protests and strikes. But the process of change continues. In the past fortnight demonstrators have occupied and closed secret police headquarters, and the Mubarak-appointed prime minister has been dumped — and Egyptians are now preparing to vote on constitutional amendments that would replace army rule with an elected parliament and president within six months. There is a fear among some activists that the revolution may only put a democratic face on the old system. But the political momentum remains powerful. A popular democratic regime in Cairo would have a profound impact on the entire region. Nothing is guaranteed, but all the signs are that sooner or later, the dominoes will fall. Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor. EFTA00587754 14 AniCIC 4. Foreign Affairs Why the Al Saud Dynasty Will Remain F. Gregory Gause III March 16, 2011 -- Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia's opposition bloggers and Facebook users called for a "day of rage" to be held on Friday, March 11, modeled after those in neighboring Bahrain, Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen. There was no reason to think that Saudi Arabia would be immune to the protest contagion. After all, the problems facing Saudi Arabia are similar in kind (if not extent) to those of the other Arab states. Saudi Arabia has a demographic youth bulge. Like other Arab nations, it has a serious youth unemployment problem. It has an autocratic government that prevents serious political participation. It is a rich country but with low per capita income compared to its smaller Gulf neighbors. Even Bahrain, wracked with protests, has a higher per capita GDP, $40,400 compared to Saudi Arabia's $24,200. And the positive response of thousands of Saudis to online petitions for political reform, especially on Dawlaty.info and , indicates that plenty of people in the country want some kind of change. But the calls for a "day of rage" met with almost no response except for a few relatively small protests in Shiite-majority areas of the Eastern Province. The Saudi media, which had studiously ignored the online calls, crowed on Saturday about the protests' failure, mocking the "day of rage" as a "day of calm" and a "day of reassurance." Perhaps we should not have been so surprised. In late January, all of the elements for popular mobilization against the regime appeared to be in place. In Saudi Arabia's second-largest city, Jeddah, there was devastating flooding, during which at least ten people died, many more were injured, and millions of dollars in property was damaged. This EFTA00587755 15 followed even more damaging flooding in late 2009. This manifest government failure occurred just as the rest of the Arab world was exploding: protesters in Tunisia had just driven their president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, from power (to exile in Jeddah, of all places), and Egyptians were mobilizing by the hundreds of thousands in Tahrir Square. But very little happened in Jeddah. There were a few protests, about 50 people arrested, and no ripple effects elsewhere in the country. So what makes the Saudi case different from the others? First, the Saudi government has plenty of ready cash and has shown itself willing to spend it to deflect political mobilization. No other Arab regime has been able to throw money at its problems quite like the Saudi one. Three weeks ago, for example, the government announced a set of salary increases, unemployment benefits, loan forgiveness, consumer subsidies, and other measures totaling $36 billion. This package will not solve Saudi Arabia's long-term economic problems, of course, but it certainly cushions the blow of rising inflation, a housing shortage, and youth unemployment. Second, Saudi Arabia's security forces are a strong deterrent. There are a number of Saudi security agencies tasked with maintaining order, but the National Guard ultimately guarantees domestic security and regime stability. Exclusively Sunni, it is largely comprised of recruits from the tribes of central and western Arabia and of nontribal recruits from the central Arabian heartland, the base of Al Saud power. There is no doubt that members of the guard would obey the regime's orders to suppress demonstrations in the Shia towns of the Eastern Province (as they did in 1979 and 1980) and in the cities of western Saudi Arabia (Jeddah, Mecca, and Medina). Unlike the Egyptian and Tunisian armies, which felt kinship with the demonstrators in their capitals and refused to fire on them, Saudi security forces would likely view demonstrators anywhere outside of Riyadh and central Saudi Arabia as strangers. Whether they would be EFTA00587756 16 as reliable against protesters in Riyadh or central Arabia is an open question and not one that the regime has had to answer yet. Still, its security apparatuses were out in force on March 11, including in Riyadh, and they did not hesitate to use violence against small demonstrations in Shia towns the day before. Third, the opposition is still too divided to offer a real threat. This stands in contrast to Tunisia and Egypt, where people from across classes, sects, and ideologies mobilized to oust Ben Ali and former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. At the topmost level, Saudi political activists are beginning to bridge differences in sect, region, and ideology. Since 9/11, there has been more cross-sectarian and cross-ideological dialogue than in the past, some of it even sponsored by the government through its national dialogue initiative. But this is not the case throughout the population. It is instructive that there have been two major online petition movements rather than a single one representing the broad range of political currents. The two petitions share a number of points -- most notably their calls to give the elected legislature real oversight of government ministries -- but one was more reflective of the Wahhabi intellectual current, and the other of a more liberal (in the Saudi context) current. Wahhabi sheikhs might occasionally visit Shia discussion groups, but the chance that a single street protest could bring together large numbers of both groups is slim. Finally, the Saudi regime has had weeks to digest the reasons for and consequences of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, something that Ben Ali entirely lacked and Mubarak was too set in his ways to appreciate. Despite the advanced age and infirmity of their top leaders, members of the Saudi elite have proved fairly nimble. They threatened punishment for any opposition (but not so much as to excite protesters), and they balanced their threats with promises of rewards for cooperation. They were also deft at getting the religious establishment to come to their aid, by issuing fatwas EFTA00587757 17 declaring street demonstrations to be in violation of Islam. It is unclear how many Saudis still pay attention to state-appointed arbiters of religion, but it certainly does not hurt the Saudi leadership to have them on its side. Meanwhile, local regime officials engaged in fairly active outreach on behalf of their constituents. A government delegation from Qatif, the most important Shia city in the Eastern Province, met with the Saudi king a few days before the scheduled "day of rage," although the purpose of the visit was not made public. Prince Muhammad bin Fand bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, the governor of the Eastern Province, spoke with local Shia leaders earlier last week and made a few gestures of good faith, including releasing a number of prisoners. Similarly, Prince Khalid al-Faisal, the governor of Mecca (who also has jurisdiction over Jeddah), met very publicly with activists and has since rolled out a high-profile campaign to show that the government is serious about fixing Jeddah's water drainage infrastructure. It is possible that the local and national leadership could also announce some small steps on the political front: a cabinet shake-up, municipal council elections, perhaps even elections to the national shura (consultative) council. Yet the Al Saud are certainly not out of the winter of Arab discontent. On March 13, hundreds demonstrated in front of the Interior Ministry in Riyadh to demand the release of prisoners captured during the government's years-long fight against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. There were demonstrations of similar size in Shia towns that day as well. And having just deployed troops to support the monarchy in Bahrain, the Saudis have placed themselves in a tricky situation; as Saudi forces help suppress the Bahraini protesters, the vast majority of whom are Shia, they could provoke serious protests among Saudi Arabia's own Shia population. But, at least so far, Saudi Arabia is among the ranks of Syria and Morocco -- the other major Arab states least affected by the wave of Arab upheaval. EFTA00587758 18 Artick 5. Center for Strategic and International Studies The Revolution Will Not Be Televised Jon Alterman March 16, 2011-- It is tempting to see the political protests sweeping the Middle East as "Facebook Revolutions"; to see the Internet as a force that galvanizes hundreds of thousands of young people into a new political force that breathes life into stolid authoritarian regimes. But the Internet is only part of the story. Good old-fashioned television is probably more important in turning political protests into mass movements. Movements, however, are not revolutions, and whether the political upheavals in the Middle East come to constitute revolutions will be played out in the next six months. For the coming part of the drama, television has little role to play, and the Internet only a limited one. Despite all of the changes afoot, it will be hard to subvert conventional politics. Facebook and Twitter have certainly played a role. In Egypt, groups such as the April 6 Movement and "We Are all Khaled Said" allowed young people to share ideas and for some to emerge as leaders. In societies in which authorities monitored independent thinkers and distrusted intellectual entrepreneurship, Internet technologies allowed the young and techno-savvy to develop ideas and build online constituencies. Young people used the Internet to network and to plan protests. With hundreds of thousands of followers, they were able to draw several hundred into the street. Several hundred does not a revolution make, however. In Egypt, the Kifaya movement was able to draw hundreds to protests for years but ultimately fizzled out. Onlookers stared at what they perceived to be rich kids in t-shirts and jeans, and they felt no stake in their battles. In Bahrain, sectarian protesters had taken to the streets for years, EFTA00587759 19 although they failed to become a mass movement. The protesters were an aberration, not the mainstream. Two things changed. The first is that the leaders of the protests emphasized economic discontent, striking a chord that resonated with the broader public. While many of the protests' organizers were deeply politicized, the public was not. It cared about pocketbook issues more than elections; it cared about improving outcomes more than the method of doing so. Yet, the protesters and the masses agreed on one big thing-the current political leadership was failing and needed to be replaced. That agreement was enough to swell the ranks of protesters from the hundreds to the thousands. But thousands are not millions. To bring millions into the street required a second change: television. Television? It had been around for more than four decades, and it had not provoked political change. While satellite television began to erode states' information monopoly in the late 1990s, almost a decade and a half of al-Jazeera and its imitators did little to bring protesters into the streets. Some even argued that political debates on television depressed political activity because they gave a safe outlet for political speech without actually involving any action by the viewer. Television is, by its nature, passive, and the passivity of television's huge audiences seemed to reinforce the notion of television as inert. Yet, from the early days of the protests in Tunisia, then Egypt, then Bahrain and then Libya, television was transformative. Television brought the actions of thousands to audiences of millions. Censorship of years past would have allowed isolated protests to stay isolated. The rise of regional television stations undermined censorship and now every local protest was potential national-and international- news. EFTA00587760 20 Day in and day out, broadcasts of the protests helped articulate widespread grievances and give a sense of urgency to an entire nation of viewers. Within weeks, in both Tunisia and Egypt, the army stepped in and removed aging political leaders who seemed hopelessly out of touch. Even more important, television helped frame the region's events, describing them early on as revolutions and giving them a historical weight that they had not yet earned. Constantly broadcasting the judgment that revolutions were underway became self-fulfilling, as participants and audiences alike felt a part of a single community that was changing history. Al-Jazeera's English broadcasts helped bring along Western policy communities as well, simultaneously engaging these communities in the struggles and reassuring them that change was compatible with Western interests. For weeks on end, al-Jazeera provided a steady diet of emotional analysis, relying on tight crowd shots and generously judging the size of protests. Western channels raced to catch up. The protests made good television; the good television made good history. This sense of history unfolding spread the protests well beyond where they fed on the interaction between the Internet and television. In countries such as Libya and Yemen, with relatively low Internet access and even less social networking, people took to the streets as well. In these places, the impact of television was even more profound, playing the role of providing the spark and coaxing it into a flame. And still, the Arab world has not yet seen a popular revolution. For these revolts to prove themselves as such, they need not only to displace the status quo, but also to replace it with something fundamentally different. Doing so requires coordinating priorities and integrating agendas. It requires committees and compromises. For all of the difficulty of dislodging authoritarians who ruled for decades, EFTA00587761 21 ensuring the survival of the democratic order that the activists seek is far harder. It is a struggle that is pointedly bad for television. Television is a medium that prefers clear narratives and graphic pictures. It is the perfect medium for taking to the streets, for broadcasting graffiti and placards, for showing the bankruptcy of a system that dispatches thugs on camels to beat back peaceful protesters. Television favors drama. The drama unfolding in the Arab world now, however, is excruciating to watch on television. It is textual, the story lines are muddled, and there are no dramatic pictures. In a world with 700 free-to-air Arab satellite channels, it cannot compete. The irony is that what we are coming upon now is the moment that the media helped enable, and the moment that truly matters. Yet, it will also be the most difficult to track. The Internet can play some role creating a broader debate, but access remains sketchy for large segments of the population. We have not yet entered the era of postmodern politics. Getting support for change requires field operations, committees and compromises. It requires good old-fashioned politics. The revolt was televised, but the revolution cannot be. Mass media can help create the conditions for a revolution, but it cannot accomplish one. Only political leaders can do that. Jon Alterman is Mideast Program Director for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. EFTA00587762 AniCIC 6. Time Silent No More: The Women of the Arab Revolutions Carla Power Mar. 17, 2011 - The uprisings sweeping the Arab world haven't only toppled dictatorships. Gone, too, are the old stereotypes of Arab women as passive, voiceless victims. Over the past few months, the world has seen them marching in Tunisia, shouting slogans in Bahrain and Yemen, braving tear gas in Egypt, and blogging and strategizing in cyberspace. Egyptian activist Asmaa Mahfouz, 26, became known as "The Leader of the Revolution" after she posted an online video call to arms, telling young people to get out onto the streets and demand justice. In Libya, women lawyers were among the earliest anti-Qaddafi organizers in the revolutionary stronghold of Benghazi. Arabs were bemused that the Western media was shocked — shocked! — to find women protesting alongside men. "There was this sense of surprise, that 'Oh, my god, women are actually participating!' notes Egyptian activist Hadil El-Khouly. "But of course women were there, in Tahrir Square. I was there, because Egyptian. Everyone was there. You really felt we were all one." But the bliss of revolutionary dawn never lasts. When Tunisian women's groups held a post-revolution rally to demand equality, thugs disrupted the gathering, yelling "Women at home, in the kitchen!" And on March 8, a march in Cairo to commemorate International Women's Day ended in violence, with gangs of men groping protestors and telling them to go home. "It was a horrible irony, that on International Women's Day, a march for women's rights could face that kind of egregious harassment in Cairo's Tahrir EFTA00587763 23 Square, a symbol of freedom," says Priyanka Motaparthy, a research fellow in the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch. "It was an incredibly violent way of trying to scare [the women] out of the public space." Women are good for revolutions, but historically, revolutions haven't been good for women. In 1789, French women took to the streets to protest against high bread prices and the excesses at Versailles. They helped topple the monarchy, but within a few years, the revolutionary government had banned all women's political clubs. In Iran, women came out in force to march against the Shah in 1979; Ayatollah Khomeini rewarded them by requiring the veil and curbing their legal rights. And now, as Tunisians and Egyptians hammer out the nature of their nations' futures, women are being required to fight for their rights in a whole new way. "There is no turning back," says Margot Badran, Senior Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington •., and the author of Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences. "The violence [against the March 8 protestors] has only strengthened resolve." The participation of women during Tunisia and Egypt's transitions to democracy remains a crucial litmus test of the revolutions. Exclude women, and the whole concept of sweeping away a privileged political caste crumbles. As Moroccan activist Saida Kouzzi observes: "If these countries continue to neglect the rights of the great majority of their citizens, then what good do these revolutions do?" Already there are subtle — and not-so-subtle — signs that Arab women are being sidelined. Essam Sharaf, Egypt's new prime minister, named just one woman to his cabinet. For some women's rights advocates, his creation of a committee dealing with women's advancement smacks of tokenism. In Tunisia, activists are concerned about the potential rise of political Islam. Sheikh Rashed Ghannouchi, leader of Islamist party El Nandha, who returned from EFTA00587764 24 decades of exile in January, has sought to soften his party's earlier line on women's rights, saying Tunisia's women need equality, and that he's supported the country's progressive Personal Status Code — which bans polygamy and child marriages, and guarantees women reproductive rights and equal pay — for over 20 years. Still, women are worried, says Nadya Khalife, of Human Rights Watch's women's rights division, in an email. "Women activists want to ensure that the gains [they have] made will not be set back by Islamist groups who may call for Shari'a law, or stand in their way to improve the Personal Status Code," she says. "Already, some Islamist groups have started calling for mosques to be established in schools, at the same time that women's groups are calling for the separation of church and state." Egyptian women have been protesting the sexism they see creeping into their nation's transitional structures. The 10-member Constitutional Committee, which was tasked with coming up with constitutional amendments after the fall of president Hosni Mubarak, didn't include a single woman; the civil society group it consulted was called "The Council of Wise Men." Women's groups were further outraged when the Committee came up with Article 75, whose wording effectively limits Egypt's presidency to men. "Egypt's president is born to two Egyptian parents," it reads, "and cannot be married to a non-Egyptian woman." When women's groups protested, the framers argued that Arabic allows masculine nouns to include women. It didn't wash; a coalition of 117 women's groups is now calling for rewording. Some pundits have cautioned a go-slow approach for what they see as special interest groups. But activists fear that later could mean never. "Some people are saying, 'Now is not the time for women's rights, disability rights, children's rights,'" says activist El-Khouly. "They claim: 'Once there's democracy, there will be democracy for EFTA00587765 25 everyone.' But history has told us that women wait, wait, wait — and then our rights never become a priority issue." For women activists in Egypt and across the region, the spirit of the Arab revolutions means women's rights aren't special interests, but are intrinsic to the people's demands for social justice and democracy. "It's important to see women's rights as political rights," says Mozn Hassan, director of the Cairo-based group Nazra for Feminist Studies. "Women's activists have to change their dynamic, and engage with larger political issues. But we don't expect it to be easy. Tahrir Square was a utopia, and society doesn't change in fifteen minutes." Carla Power is a journalist specializing in Muslim societies, global social issues, and culture. A frequent contributor to Time Magazine, she is a former Newsweek correspondent, who in her decade at the magazine produced award-winning stories, reporting from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. EFTA00587766