Tag Archives: egypt

Iran, Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, Libya, Somalia, Somaliland, Sudan, Syria, United States, Yemen

A country-by-country look at Trump’s immigration executive order

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Yazidi women in both Syria and Iraq have suffered greatly at the hands of ISIS — but they will be caught up in Trump-era restrictions on refugees all the same. (Reuters)

There’s a neighborhood in Los Angeles, commonly known as Tehrangeles, that is home to up to a half-million Persian Americans, most of whom fled Iran after the 1979 Islamic republic or who are their second-generation children and third-generation grandchildren, all of them American citizens. 

The neighborhood runs along Westwood Boulevard, and it is home to some of the wealthiest Angelinos. But under the executive action that US president Donald Trump signed Friday afternoon, their relatives in Iran will have a much more difficult time visiting them in Los Angeles (or elsewhere in the United States). The impact of the order, over the weekend, proved far deeper than originally imagined last week when drafts of the order circulated widely in the media.

The ban attempts to accomplish at least five different actions, all of which began to take effect immediately on Friday:

  • First, the order institutes a ban for 90 days on immigrants from seven countries — Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Libya.
  • Secondly, the ban initially seemed to include even US permanent residents with valid green cards with citizenship from those seven countries (though the Department of Homeland Security was walking that back on Sunday, after reports that presidential adviser and former Breitbart editor Steve Bannon initially overruled DHS objections Friday). But it also includes citizens of third countries with dual citizenship (which presents its own problems and which the White House does not seem to be walking back).
  • Third, it institutes a 120-day freeze on all refugees into the United States from anywhere across the globe and an indefinite ban for all refugees from Syria.
  • Fourth, it places a cap of 50,000 on all refugees for 2017 — that’s far less than nearly 85,000 refugees who were admitted to the United States in 2016, though it’s not markedly less than the nearly 55,000 refugees admitted in 2011 (the lowest point of the Obama administration) and it’s more than the roughly 25,000 to 30,000 refugees admitted in 2002 and 2003 during the Bush administration.
  • Fifth, and finally, when the United States once again permits refugees, it purports to prioritize admitting those refugees ‘when the person is a religious minority in his country of nationality facing religious persecution.’ It’s widely assumed that this is a back-door approach to prioritizing Christian refugees. More on that below.

In practice, it’s already incredibly difficult to get a visa of any variety if you are coming from one of those countries, with a few exceptions. But formalizing the list is both overbroad (it captures mostly innocent travelers and refugees) and underbroad (it doesn’t include potential terrorists from other countries), and experts believe it will hurt US citizens, US businesses and bona fide refugees who otherwise might have expected asylum in the United States. On Sunday, many Republican leaders, including Arizona senator John McCain admitted as such:

Ultimately, we fear this executive order will become a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism. At this very moment, American troops are fighting side-by-side with our Iraqi partners to defeat ISIL. But this executive order bans Iraqi pilots from coming to military bases in Arizona to fight our common enemies. Our most important allies in the fight against ISIL are the vast majority of Muslims who reject its apocalyptic ideology of hatred. This executive order sends a signal, intended or not, that America does not want Muslims coming into our country. That is why we fear this executive order may do more to help terrorist recruitment than improve our security.

On the campaign trail, Trump initially called for a ban on all Muslims from entering the country; when experts responded that such a broad-based religious test would be unconstitutional, Trump said he would instead extend the ban on the basis of nationality.

Friday’s executive action looks like the first step of institutionalizing the de facto Muslim ban that Trump originally promised (thought it would on its face be blatantly unconstitutional).

Of course, as many commentators have noted, the list doesn’t contain the countries that match the nationalities of the September 2001 hijackers — mostly Saudi Arabia. But it doesn’t contain Lebanon, though Hezbollah fighters have aligned with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in that country’s civil war. It doesn’t include Egypt, which is the most populous Muslim country in north Africa and home to one of the Sept. 2001 terrorists. Nor does it include Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country. Nor Pakistan nor Afghanistan, where US troops fought to eradicate forms of hardline Taliban government and where US troops ultimately tracked and killed Osama bin Laden.

This isn’t a call to add more countries to the list, of course, which would be even more self-defeating as US policy. But it wouldn’t surprise me if Bannon and Trump, anticipating this criticism, will use it to justify a second round of countries.

In the meanwhile, the diplomatic fallout is only just beginning (and certainly will intensify — Monday is the first full business day after we’ve read the actual text of Friday’s executive order). Already, Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel, citing the obligations of international law under the Geneva Conventions, disavowed the ban. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau used it as an opportunity to showcase his country’s openness to immigration and welcomed the refugees to Canada. Even Theresa May, the British prime minister who shared a stage with Trump in Washington on Friday afternoon, distanced herself from the ban, and British foreign minister Boris Johnson called it ‘divisive.’

But the most direct impact will be felt in relations with the seven countries directly affected by the ban, and there are already indications that the United States will suffer a strategic, diplomatic and possible economic price for Trump’s hasty unilateral executive order.  Continue reading A country-by-country look at Trump’s immigration executive order →

Turkey

What we learned about Turkey from Saturday’s coup attempt

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Turkish soldiers stand guard in Taksim Square Saturday night. (Sedat Suna / EPA)
Turkish soldiers stand guard in Taksim Square Saturday night. (Sedat Suna / EPA)

Something like tense calm seems to be settling on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara after an attempted military coup in Turkey early Saturday morning. Turkey

But the reverberations of the failed ouster will be felt for months and possibly years to come. Though the coup didn’t enjoy the full support of the Turkish military, it was something of a shock — and a throwback — to see tanks rolling through major Turkish cities. Amid the chaos, there’s still much that we don’t and, perhaps, cannot know about the fallout of the July 16 coup.

In other ways, the failed coup gave us quite a glimpse — in at least four ways — into the state of Turkish politics, culture and democracy.  Continue reading What we learned about Turkey from Saturday’s coup attempt →

United States

Four foreign policy arguments Sanders could still deploy against Clinton

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Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, fresh off a win in Michigan's Democratic presidential primary, debated last night in Miami. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, fresh off a win in Michigan’s Democratic presidential primary, debated last night in Miami. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

If there’s one thing we know about Bernie Sanders, he sure doesn’t like Henry Kissinger.USflag

And if there’s one fact that he likes to deploy in his foreign policy case against Hillary Clinton, it’s her vote authorizing the Iraq War 14 years ago, when Clinton was just in her second year as a senator from New York.

But aside from the Kissinger snark and some minor back-and-forth over US policy in Cuba, foreign policy played only a little role in Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate, and it’s played an equally minor role throughout the entire contest. On one hand, that’s because the Sanders insurgency has zeroed in on income inequality, the growing wealth gap and the role of wealthy donors in campaign finance. But it’s also because Clinton, whether or not you trust her judgment, is the most qualified non-incumbent candidate in decades when it comes to international affairs. In addition to her service in the US senate, she also served for four years as secretary of state and eight years as first lady. It’s truly formidable.

Yet, given Clinton-Sanders dynamic, there’s still a lot of space for Sanders to make a strong foreign policy case against Clinton, and time after time, Sanders just hasn’t made that case. Maybe that’s politically wise; shifting his emphasis from Wall Street and income inequality would dilute his message with an attack based on issues that seem far less salient to Democratic primary voters.

But it’s true that Clinton’s foreign-policy instincts have always been more hawkish than those in her own party and, often, those of president Barack Obama and vice president Joe Biden (who, according to Jeffrey Goldberg’s amazing piece in The Atlantic about Obama’s world view, said Clinton ‘just wants to be Golda Meir’).

To some degree, the problem with challenging Clinton on foreign policy is that Sanders would largely be challenging the Obama administration, and that’s tricky when you’re trying to win the votes of an electorate that still adores Obama. But Sanders certainly hasn’t shied away from stating clear differences with the Obama administration’s approach to domestic policy.

Moreover, to the extent that Sanders made a clear and cogent case on international affairs, he could claim that his more dovish approach represents true continuity with the Obama administration (and that Clinton’s more hawkish approach shares more in common with a  potential Republican administration). There’s no doubt that Sanders is a talented politician; in one fell swoop, he could use foreign policy to drive a wedge between Clinton and the Obama legacy. That’s a very powerful tool, and it’s one that Sanders, so far, hasn’t been interested in wielding.

Fairly or unfairly, Sanders is tagged as a one-issue protest candidate, and he suffers from the perception that his candidacy’s purpose is to nudge Clinton further to the left, not to win the Oval Office. By adding a foreign policy element to his critique of the Democratic frontrunner, Sanders could bend a more skeptical media into taking him more seriously and show voters that he really can fill out what Americans expect from a president. In the 21st century, like it or not, the president is the chief policymaking official when it comes to foreign policy.

Given the stakes involved, it’s not too late for Sanders to make this case as the Democratic contest turns to larger states like Ohio, Illinois and Florida next week and, after that, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and California. If he wanted to do so, there’s a long list of areas from which Sanders could choose.

Here are four of the most salient. Continue reading Four foreign policy arguments Sanders could still deploy against Clinton →

Belarus, Tunisia

Literature and Peace prizes both send potent political messages

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Svetlana Alexievich, a Belorussian and nonfiction writer, won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.
Svetlana Alexievich, a Belorussian and nonfiction writer, won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.

Everyone expects the Nobel Peace Prize to have a political meaning.tunisia flagbelarus flagnobel-peace-prize

By the very nature of the prize, it’s not surprising when the Oslo-based awarding committee makes a decision that is affected by — or that subsequently affects — international politics. That follows almost directly from the very words that Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel used to describe the prize’s qualifications:

The most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.

That was true earlier this morning, when Tunisia’s National Dialogue Quartet received the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize. The decision highlights Tunisia’s peaceful transition to democracy and the crucial role that the quarter played in late 2013 to salvage Tunisia’s fragile transition. With an economy that’s still struggling, Tunisia nevertheless remains the only Arab Spring country to depose its leader that is also still working to enshrine a democratic system of government. Libya, Syria and Yemen are locked in anarchy or civil war, and Egypt’s democratically elected president, Islamist Mohammed Morsi, was deposed in a 2013 coup by the Egyptian military. The award is a reminder that the Arab Spring really did bring forth some good in one of the most difficult regions of the world. As the awarding committee itself noted, the prize is essentially a nod to the Tunisian people themselves:

More than anything, the prize is intended as an encouragement to the Tunisian people, who despite major challenges have laid the groundwork for a national fraternity which the Committee hopes will serve as an example to be followed by other countries.

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RELATED: How Tunisia became the success story of the Arab Spring

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But it was arguably Thursday’s prize to Svetlana Alexievich for literature that makes the bolder and more timely political statement, even though it was awarded by the Swedish Academy (and not by the Norwegian Peace Prize selection committee).

The award would have been edgy enough solely because the Swedish Academy awarded the prize to a nonfiction writer and a journalist. As Philip Gourevitch wrote in The New Yorker in October 2014, the Prize has historically favored fiction over nonfiction, and most especially over contemporary journalism.

Literature prize a shot against Lukashenko — and Putin

But Alexievich’s award — for ‘her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time’ — came just three days before a sham election in Belarus.

Continue reading Literature and Peace prizes both send potent political messages →

Iran, United States

One chart that explains Obama era Middle East policy

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BoA ChartChart credit to Bank of America.

Within a half-century, the most important fact of the Obama administration might well be that it presided over an energy boom that de-linked, for the first time in many decades, US dependence on Middle Eastern oil and foreign policy.USflagIran Flag Icon

No other fact more explains the deal, inked with the Islamic Republic of Iran, that brings Iran ever closer into the international community — and no other fact brings together so neatly the often contradictory aspects of US president Barack Obama’s policy in the Middle East today.

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RELATED: Winners and losers in the Iran nuclear deal

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With the exception of a small peak in the mid-1980s, when prices tanked after the oil shocks of the 1970s, US imports of foreign oil are lower than ever — and that’s a critical component to understanding Tuesday’s deal between the P5+1 and Iran. Thanks, in part, to the shale oil and fracking revolutions, US oil reserves are at their highest levels than at any point since 1975. Bank of America’s chart (pictured above) shows that US dependence on foreign oil — net imports as a percentage of consumption — dropped to 26.5% by the end of 2014.

Making sense of the Obama administration’s Mideast contradictions

One of the sharpest criticisms of the Obama administration is that it has no overweening strategy for the region. On the surface, the contradictions are legion. To take just three examples: Continue reading One chart that explains Obama era Middle East policy →

Tunisia

Essebsi must now deliver on Tunisia’s economy

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essebsi

Longtime secular political figure Beji Caid Essebsi won Tunisia’s presidency in Sunday’s landmark elections, representing in many ways the culmination of the country’s progress from the Arab Spring protests that ended with the ouster of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011.tunisia flag

Despite the optimism that marked Ben Ali’s fall and the promulgation of a new constitution in January 2014, Essebsi (pictured above), a figure with ties to the old Ben Ali regime —  will face the same fundamental problem that both Ben Ali and the interim governments of the past four years faced in bringing about greater economic growth and creating new jobs for an underemployed youth population.

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RELATED: Tunisian election results: the (secular) empire strikes back

RELATED: How Tunisia became the success story of the Arab Spring

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By any stretch, Tunisia is clearly the success story of the Arab Spring  — though it faces its own set of struggles in the years ahead, it hasn’t fallen into Libya’s chaos, reverted to Egypt’s military-backed authoritarian rule or fallen into a Syria-style civil war. When Tunisia held its first parliamentary elections under its new constitution in October, and when the Essebsi’s secular Nidaa Tounes (حركة نداء تونس‎, Call of Tunisia) narrowly defeated Tunisia’s Islamist party Ennahda (حركة النهضة‎), Tunisia’s Islamists gracefully conceded. Unlike in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood broke its pledge not to run a presidential candidate in the 2012 election, Ennadha wisely chose not to contest the presidential fight, which culminated in a runoff between Essebsi and Moncef Marzouki, a human rights activist and secular liberal who has served as Tunisia’s interim president since 2011.

Marzouki

Marzouki (pictured above), who lost by a double-digit margin  of 55.68% to 44.32%, according to official results released Monday, congratulated Essebsi earlier Tuesday, clearing the way for a peaceful transfer of power. Though Marzouki still commands significant respect within the country, he has struggled to tamp down increasing disenchantment with the economy and sporadic episodes of violence. Though not an Islamist himself, Marzouki won the presidency through Ennahda‘s support, and many of its voters preferred Marzouki over Essebsi, given the latter’s ties to prior regimes that often repressed religious expression.

While Tunisia can take some pride in the strides that it has made, the best way for its political elite to secure the political gains of the past four years is to boost economic growth and pull Tunisia firmly into the class of rising middle-income countries through economic reform, public sector modernization and closer ties with the European Union. In that regard, Essebsi’s task is not incredibly different than any number of new leaders in post-revolutionary countries on the European periphery, from the democratic (Ukraine’s Petro Poroshenko) to the autocratic (Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sisi). But with GDP growth of barely 3% last year, a 15% unemployment rate and a jobless rate of around 30% for young Tunisians, the relative success or failure of the Essebsi administration will lie in its ability to foster growth, and that was always going to be true of the next  government — liberal, Islamist or otherwise.

The lack of economic opportunity has already caused at least 3,000 young Tunisians to join the jihadist Islamic State group (الدولة الإسلامية‎)  in Syria and Iraq, allegedly a larger foreign contingent of fighters than from any other country. The continued failure of Tunisia’s post-revolution government to address its lackluster economy could similarly cause many of the country’s youth to turn away from democratic politics and toward more radical solutions at home — a huge problem for a country whose median age is 29.7 years old. The inflection point for Tunisia’s protests in December 2010 came with Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation, itself as much a statement against a lack of economic opportunities as against the Ben Ali’s autocratic regime.

Marzouki lost Sunday’s election in large part due to his inability to effect that kind of economic turnaround. There’s some doubt that Essebsi, at age 88, and with links to the elite that ran the country for decades even before Ben Ali, is the man for the job. Essebsi once served as an adviser to Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s president for 30 years after independence and Ben Ali’s mentor until Ben Ali ousted him in the 1987 coup.  Continue reading Essebsi must now deliver on Tunisia’s economy →

Egypt

Re-Mubarakization watch: Mubarak released

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mubarakPhoto credit to AFP.

It should come as a surprise to no one that Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s president between 1981 and 2011, has been released from prison and cleared of all criminal charges stemming from his 30-year reign, including the violence deployed against the protesters who eventually forced Mubarak from power in February 2011 in  what would become the high-water mark of the Arab Spring.egypt_flag_new

There’s no more potent symbol that Egypt’s current government is simply a more military-strong version of Mubarak-era authoritarianism. Egypt’s re-Mubarakization could hardly be more complete:

“This is a political verdict. The judiciary has been procrastinating for four years so they could clear him after hope had been lost,” the father of Ahmed Khaleefa, 19, who was killed in 2011, told Reuters outside the court. “The verdict hit us like bullets. I consider that my son Ahmed died today.”

In the Mubarak era (until the very end), Egypt was governed by a secular autocrat backed by the full force of the Egyptian military.

Today, under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Egypt is governed by a secular autocrat backed by the full force of the Egyptian military.

Looking back today, the central power struggle during the Arab Spring wasn’t between the Mubarak regime and the youthful protestors gathered in Tahrir Square. It wasn’t even between Islamists and secularists.

It was an internal struggle between the Mubarak regime and the Egyptian army over succession. It was a fight between the entrenched conservative interests of the military and the more liberal elements of the Mubarak regime, including Mubarak’s son Gamal, a one-time potential successor, who had launched plans for a vigorous liberalization and economic reform program to address Egypt’s state-heavy, bloated economy. (Gamal, himself on trial for corruption, was released quietly in December 2013.) That, in part, explains why the military set itself as neutral between Mubarak and the protestors in 2012 — and why some protestors initially proclaimed the military as the guarantors of Egypt’s new revolution.

El-Sisi’s government may yet be forced to reform Egypt’s economy, especially if it wants to mollify the millions of unemployed workers among Egypt’s especially young labor force. He’s already started slashing fuel subsidies that suck around one-third of the Egyptian budget. He’ll have to do far more in the months and years ahead if he wants to consolidate his own power, and he’ll have to do it without upsetting the lucrative personal financial interests of the Egyptian ‘deep state.’

Now completely dominant in its power, the el-Sisi regime can afford to take a softer hand with former Mubarak era officials, who might prove useful in the difficult tasks ahead. Cynics will note that the decision to release  Mubarak, with the inevitable street protests it has generated, can also be a helpful exercise in identifying, detaining or imprisoning the government’s remaining liberal and Islamist opponents.

Liberals and revolutionaries who now decry Mubarak’s release largely have themselves to blame for welcoming el-Sisi’s initial move against Egypt’s first (and, for now, only) democratically elected government.

Liberals throughout Egypt, including the globally respected Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, applauded el-Sisi’s July 2013 push to depose Mohammed Morsi, an Islamist who narrowly won Egypt’s July 2012 president runoff. Morsi often exhibited insular thinking in surrounding himself with members of Egypt’s now-banned Muslim Brotherhood (الإخوان المسلمون) instead of the broad-based unity government he promised to build. Morsi also demonstrated hubris and considerable disrespect for the rule of law, notably when he tried to assume temporary dictatorial powers to push through an Islamist constitution for Egypt. But it was clear that, despite the awkward position of the United States, the military’s move amounted to a coup that ended Egypt’s experiment in democratic politics.

El-Sisi brutally dealt with the protesters (and journalists) not already cowed by years of protest, revolution and counterrevolution. Even as allies like ElBaradei withdrew their support, his military government moved with lethal determination to consolidate its control, killing hundreds and jailing many more throughout the rest of 2013 with a level of brutality previously unassociated with the military.

The government pushed through a new constitution, less Islamist than the Morsi-era document and, at face value, a much more liberal constitution, in January 2014 in a referendum that commanded the support of over 98% of voters.

In the aftermath of the referendum, the interim government essentially paved the way for el-Sisi to easily take the reins of permanent government in a carefully orchestrated transition, all presented under the aegis of Egypt’s newly democratic process.

At the end of May, Egypt held a presidential election that was so titled in favor of el-Sisi, who had resigned from the military for the purpose of running for president, won over 96% of the vote, massively defeating the more liberal nationalist candidate Hamdeen Sabahi, who placed a strong third place in Egypt’s contested May 2012 presidential election. El-Sisi’s margin of victory was so strong that it actually surpassed the margin claimed by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in his own presidential ‘election’ and the margins won by Mubarak in his 1999 and 2005 ‘elections.’

By the time el-Sisi came to power, the remnants (‘felool‘) of the old Mubarak regime and the Muslim Brotherhood had both been exhausted as potential political competitors, given military forces a wider berth for abrasive oppression.

For his part, Morsi is still in prison awaiting a trial on charges of inciting deadly violence and murder. Many other leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including one-time presidential candidate Khairat el-Shater, are also imprisoned pending trial. No one expects charges against Morsi and other leading Islamists to be dropped.

Tunisia

Tunisian election results: the (secular) empire strikes back

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nidaa

Behind all the happy headlines ushering in the ‘secular victory’ in Tunisia’s Sunday parliamentary elections, there’s a darker possibility lurking.tunisia flag

Tunisia’s newly constituted secular party, Nidaa Tounes (حركة نداء تونس‎, Call of Tunisia),  narrowly defeated Tunisia’s Islamist party Ennahda (حركة النهضة‎) in the first regular parliamentary elections since the Arab Spring revolution that ousted former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Official results announced hours ago confirmed the victory, which gives Nidaa Tounes a plurality, but  not an outright majority, in Tunisia’s 217-member, unicameral parliament.

Under the new election law, 199 members of the assembly are elected across 33 single-member and multi-member constituencies, with 18 representatives elected from six overseas constituencies.

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The risks of Ennahda are well-known to US and European policymakers, who have long doubted that Islamist movements can also be inclusive and democratic. Though Tunisia’s Islam is mild by the standards of the Arabian peninsula, the Levant and even neighboring Libya, secular Tunisians feared that Ennahda would overreach in the same way as the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi in his one year as Egypt’s president, endangering the relatively liberal social climate that Tunisians enjoyed, even under the Ben Ali regime.

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RELATED: How Tunisia became the success story of the Arab Spring

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Those fears, despite a rise in violence from fundamentalist Islamists earlier this summer, were always overwrought. Ennahda, which won the first parliamentary elections to Tunisia’s post-Ben Ali constituent assembly in October 2011, has a much more mixed record in government. Tunisians are still unsatisfied about the state of the economy and, especially, unemployment three years after economic factors played a huge role in the protests that led to Ben Ali’s overthrow and kicked off the ‘Arab spring’ revolutions across the Muslim world.

But Ennahda, despite a political crisis that forced its government to resign in January 2014, nevertheless bridged Tunisia from the authoritarian Ben Ali era to the promulgation of a new constitution. In respect of Tunisia’s new democratic system, Ennahda leadership conceded victory, based on preliminary results released Monday.

Rachid al-Ghannouchi, who founded Ennahda in 1981, was a longtime champion of greater democracy in Tunisia, and he has always been painfully mindful of the political divisions that plunged neighboring Algeria into a civil war in the 1990s and the miscalculations of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the increasingly chaotic anarchy in neighboring Libya.

But in Nidaa Tounes, Tunisians have elected into government a patchwork alliance of liberals, labor unions and technocrats and officials with experience that goes back not just to the Ben Ali era, but to Tunisia’s first post-independence president, the long-serving Habib Bourguiba.

That brings another risk — that the rem ants of the Ben Ali and Bourguiba regimes could develop such a stranglehold on Tunisia’s governmental institutions that the country returns to the kind of de facto soft-authoritarian, if secular, state that preceded the spectacular January 2011 revolution that resulted in Ben Ali’s forced resignation.

Tunisian affairs tend toward moderation, among both the Islamist and secular camps. Even during the Bourguiba regime, Tunisia pushed forward with some of the most progressive rights within North Africa and the Middle East, especially as regards women’s rights. So while the prevailing sentiment after Tunisia’s elections should be relief that the vote took place with virtually no disruption, and that Ennahda quickly admitted defeat and indicated its intent to hand over power to Nidaa Tounes, there’s room for concern about the fragility of Tunisia’s nascent democracy.

essebsi

No one personifies the ties to the old regime more than Beji Caid Essebsi, the Nidaa Tounes leader, who is also the frontrunner in the Tunisian presidential election set for November 23. Essebsi (pictured above), now age 87, was an advisor to Bourguiba from the first moments of Tunisia’s independence, and he served as the head of Bourguiba’s national police, interior minister and foreign minister, and he served in Tunisia’s parliament during the Ben Ali era. Continue reading Tunisian election results: the (secular) empire strikes back →

United States

Six important points from Clinton’s foreign policy interview

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Hillary Clinton Speaks At USAID Launch Of U.S. Global Development

Over the weekend, US president Barack Obama gave a wide-ranging interview on foreign policy with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. USflag

But it’s the interview that The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg conducted with former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton that’s garnered much more attention. With Clinton leading polls for both the Democratic presidential nomination and general election in 2016, her interview was widely viewed as creating space between her own views on US foreign policy and those of the current president, who defeated her in 2008 for the Democratic nomination before appointing her as the top US diplomat in the first term of his presidential administration.

The most controversial comment seems to be Clinton’s criticism that the Obama administration’s mantra of ‘don’t do stupid shit‘ isn’t what Clinton calls an ‘organizing principle’ for the foreign policy of any country, let alone a country as important as the United States.

The headline in the The New York Times? ‘Attacking Obama policy, Hillary Clinton exposes different world views.’

Chris Cillizza at The Washington Post endeavored to explain ‘What Hillary Clinton was doing by slamming President Obama’s foreign policy.’

The Clinton ‘slam,’ though, is somewhat overrated. She admits in virtually the same breath that she believes Obama is thoughtful and incredibly smart, adding that ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is more of a political message than Obama’s worldview. For the record, Clinton claims that her own organizing principles are ‘peace, progress and prosperity,’ which might be even more maddeningly vague than ‘don’t do stupid stuff.’ After all, who’s against peace, progress or prosperity? Even if ‘don’t do stupid shit’ is political shorthand, and even if you don’t believe that the Obama administration’s foreign policy has been particularly successful, it’s political shorthand that  represents a sophisticated worldview about the respective strengths and limits of US foreign policy.

In any event, there’s an awful lot to unpack from the Clinton interview, both on the surface and from reading between the lines. You should read the whole thing, but in the meanwhile, here are six things that struck me from the interview about Clinton and what her presidential administration might mean for US foreign policy. Continue reading Six important points from Clinton’s foreign policy interview →

Libya

Ready or not, Libyan voters will elect a new parliament

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Hiftar

Amid growing political turmoil, during which the interim General National Congress (GNC) has lost even the pretense of control, Libyans will vote for a new ‘permanent’ parliament in elections tomorrow as the country slides into ever greater insecurity.Libya_Flag_Icon

Since the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi in August 2011, repeated attempts to introduce a measure of effective governance have failed, first by the National Transitional Council, and now by the GNC.  

On the eve of Libya’s elections, international observers say the voting was organized much too hastily and without adequate preparation. The risk is that, following the July 2012 elections for the GNC and the February 2014 constituent assembly elections to appoint a body to write Libya’s new constitution, a third set of botched elections could further undermine democracy. That’s especially true if voters in the eastern Libya of Cyrenaica don’t particularly bother to turn out. Just 1.5 million voters have registered to participate in the elections, down from the 2.865 million voters that registered for the 2012 vote. If those numbers hold up, turnout tomorrow will be much lower than the 1.76 million that participated in July 2012.

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RELATED: Libya hits new security low as interim prime minister resigns

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Rather than wait for a new constitution to come into effect, the GNC hastily renamed itself the ‘House of Representatives,’ and late last month announced elections for June 25 to elect 200 members to the newly formed parliament. The GNC acted under considerable pressure from militia forces loyal to former Libyan general Khalifa Hifter (pictured above), who is waging an increasingly effective campaign, chiefly in Benghazi, to eliminate Islamists and Islamist-sympathetic militias throughout the country.

Since the collapse of former prime minister Ali Zeidan’s government in March, Libyan governance has essentially crumbled. Zeidan, a liberal human rights attorney who lived in Geneva before returning to Libya after the 2011 civil war, was first elected prime minister in November 2012 after a contentious vote within a body that, from the outset, was severely divided between liberals and Islamists. Though elected with the support of liberals, Zeidan only narrowly defeated Mohammed Al-Harari, the candidate of the Islamist Justice and Construction Party (حزب العدالة والبناء‎), the political wing of Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood. 

Over the course of his premiership, Zeidan presiding over an increasingly fractious interim government that gradually lost control of much of the country outside Tripoli. In fairness to Zeidan, it’s not clear if any government could have effectively asserted control over Libya over the past two years. As security increasingly faltered, Zeidan himself was kidnapped from a Tripoli hotel in October 2013 and held for hours in an aborted coup attempt.

The final straw for Zeidan came earlier this year when, after growing tensions with conservative militias in Benghazi, eastern rebels commandeered an oil tanker, the Morning Glory, and sailed it halfway across the Mediterranean Sea before US Navy SEALS apprehended it. Though Zeidan initially fled Libya, he returned earlier this week, claiming that he is still legally Libya’s prime minister.

His successor, former defense minister Abdullah al-Thinni, tried to step down nearly a week later as interim prime minister after an attempt on his life. The GNC’s replacement candidate, Ahmed Maiteeq, a Misrata native and businessman, was disputed, and Libya essentially had two competing potential prime ministers until the Libyan supreme court ruled on June 9 that Maiteeq’s election was invalid, thereby restoring the reluctant al-Thinni as interim prime minister.

Hifter’s rise has coincided with the political and security tumult. With significant support in western Libya, militia forces loyal to Hifter effective shut down the GNC earlier this spring, accelerating the decision to hold what amounts to snap elections for the new parliament. Today, Hifter’s leading the most notable anti-militia effort in Benghazi, after declaring himself the leader of ‘Operation Dignity’ in mid-May. Though Hifter’s offensive isn’t sanctioned by the GNC (nor by al-Thnni nor Zeidan nor Maiteeq), his efforts haven’t necessarily been unwelcome by some members of the Libyan government, notably within the interior ministry, which has struggled to implement law and order on a nationwide basis.

Critics worry, however, that Hifter has aims to become a new Gaddafi-like dictator. Hifter has expressed high regard for Egypt’s newly elected president, former army chief Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, especially regarding el-Sisi’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood within Egypt. Critics worry that Hifter is launching a military offensive to win the same kind of quasi-authoritarian power that El-Sisi now enjoys in Egypt.

Intriguingly, Hifter is actually a US citizen. Once a Gaddafi partisan,  Hifter led a disastrous military campaign in the 1980s in Chad. After his defeat and his subsequent capture by Chadian forces, Hifter joined forces with the anti-Gaddafi opposition and fled to exile, living in northern Virginia between 1990 and 2011, when he returned to Libya to help lead the anti-Gaddafi rebel forces. He was initially mistrusted by other leading rebel generals, however, and he’s the subject of significant speculation that he once worked with US military or other clandestine government officials.

That means, as national voting takes place, Hifter’s forces are engaged in a dangerous showdown in Libya’s second-largest city against Ansar al-Sharia (كتيبة أنصار الشريعة), an Islamist militia that wants to adopt harsh shari’a law across Cyrenaica, the oil-rich region that’s home to Benghazi, if not the entire country.

But it’s not the only place where violence is marring the election campaign. In Sabha, the historical capital of the southern Fezzan region,  largely desert and sparsely populated, a parliamentary candidate was killed by gunmen on Tuesday.

Libya Regions

Ibrahim al-Jathran, another militia leader, who also fought to topple Gaddafi in the 2011 civil war, last summer took control of four eastern ports, thereby shutting down much of the Zeidan government’s ability to export oil. In a deal with Libya’s interim government soon after Zeidan’s ouster, Jathran permitted two of the ports to reopen, but oil production is still just around 12.5% of Gaddafi-era levels, gas stations in Tripoli are closed, and Libya remains subject to recurring power outages.

Despite some temporary progress, Jathran still advocates a much more autonomous Cyrenaica, if not outright independence. Though Cyrenaica is home to 1.6 million people (the bulk of Libya’s 5.7 million people live in Tripolitania, along Libya’s northwestern coast), much of Libya’s oil wealth is located in the eastern region.

As if that weren’t enough, US special forces last week arrested Ahmed Abu Khattala, a Benghazi-based militia leader believed to be responsible for the September 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi. Though Khattala’s arrest was widely hailed in the United States, Libyans have largely decried what they call the US’s violation of Libya’s national sovereignty. 

All of these issues — the standoff between Hifter and Ansar al-Sharia, Khattala’s arrest, the blockage of the country’s dwindling oil exports — threaten to dwarf this week’s election. The February elections to appoint the constitutional constituency assembly attracted just 500,000 voters. If the June 25 parliamentary elections feature similarly low turnout, it will be hard to argue that any party or group will have won much of a mandate for anything.

That’s especially true if Islamists, which have typically been the most organized forces in elections held across North Africa since the Arab Spring revolts of early 2011, win the largest share of seats in tomorrow’s vote. That could empower Islamist militias in Cyrenaica and beyond, setting the scene for a long war of attrition between Hifter’s supporters and Islamist militias.

Even before Zaidan took power, Libya has struggled in the post-Gaddafi era to form a coherent government, in no small part due to the failure of the Gaddafi regime to establish truly national institutions in Libya, where he came to power in a 1969 military coup, just 18 years after the country won full independence from British and French oversight.  Under both Ottoman rule, beginning in 1510, and Italian rule, between 1912 and 1947, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were governed as discrete provinces, with modern ‘Libya’ taking shape chiefly as a political construct in 1951. Up until independence, when the British relinquished full sovereignty over Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, the French were administering Fezzan separately.

Mahmoud Jibril, a secular liberal, served as Libya’s first interim leader, between March 2011 and October 2011 when he chaired the executive board of the National Transitional Council. He stepped down just three days after Gaddafi was captured and killed by a mob in Gaddafi’s own hometown of Sirte. Jibril leads the National Forces Alliance (تحالف القوى الوطنية‎), a very mildly Islamist, liberal group that won the largest group of seats in the GNC in the July 2012 elections. At the time, however, Jibril’s influence was at its peak, and no one expects his group to repeat the successes of the 2012 election.

Abdurrahim El-Keib was elected by the National Transitional Council in November 2011, and he guided Libya through the September 2012 election of the interim GNC.

Photo credit to Reuters / Esam Omran Al-Fetori.

Qatar

2022 World Cup scrutiny poses major test for Sheikh Tamim

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Even as a global audience cheers on the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, things are looking increasingly dicey for Qatar, which is struggling to hold onto its successful bid four years ago to host the 2022 World Cup.qatar

Amid complaints about everything from soaring Gulf temperatures to its LGBT laws to the abuses of Qatar’s kafala system, the resource-wealthy emirate now faces losing the 2022 World Cup altogether following allegations that Qatari businessmen bribed members of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA).

Needless to say, it’s not been an incredibly smooth first year for Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who assumed power as the eighth emir of Qatar when his father, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, abdicated in June 2013 at the age of 61. Though the British-educated Tamim had been the Qatari heir apparent for a decade, at age 34, he is the world’s youngest monarch. Though Shiekh Hamad and other members of the Al Thani family (most notably Tamim’s mother, Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned) continue to wield significant influence, Sheikh Tamim’s rise to power reflects a more seamless transition for Qatar. Sheikh Hamad kicked his own father, Khalifa, out of power in a bloodless coup in 1995.

Though he wasn’t Qatar’s emir at the time, the controversy surrounding the decision to award the World Cup to Qatar has become a major leadership test for Sheikh Tamim (pictured above), who led the Qatari committee that made the bid for the 2022 World Cup. Arguably, Tamim’s most important role before assuming the emirship last year was his influence in building Qatar’s growing sponsorship of regional and global sports events. 

Facing a humiliating retreat with respect to Qatar’s regional political agenda, and facing enhanced global scrutiny on all fronts due to the World Cup bid, losing the 2022 tournament would be a massive setback for Qatar’s two-decade push to become an influential regional and global actor.    Continue reading 2022 World Cup scrutiny poses major test for Sheikh Tamim →

Syria

Was the Syrian election more successful than Egypt’s?

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A month ago, I scoffed at the idea of holding a presidential election in Syria at a time of civil war, with a pre-determined outcome, while millions of Syrians are living outside the country as refugees, and when fighting is still raging throughout much of Syria.Syria Flag Icon

But a quick look at the turnout indicates that it may have been hasty to discount the election as an exercise in futility — especially coming so soon after a flawed Egyptian presidential election where apathy reigned.

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RELATED: Why is Syria holding a presidential election in the middle of a civil war?

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There’s no doubt that the Syrian vote fails by any standard of a free and fair election — by American terms, by European terms, by Indian terms, by Indonesian terms. There was no question that Bashar al-Assad (pictured above), who has been Syria’s president since 2000, would win the vote, just like his father, Hafez al-Assad, remained in power since 1971, typically with somewhat predictable support:

syriaelections

Still, it’s incredible that Syria, where parts of the country still remain under rebel control, the race officially commanded turnout of 73.42%. If those numbers are to be trusted, and that’s a huge question, it means that Syrian turnout, at a time of war, was around 25% higher than turnout in Egypt’s presidential election last week. Stunningly, there are reports of thousands of Syrian refugees living across the border in Lebanon streaming back into Syria earlier this week to take part in the elections. Now, there are also reports that Syrian workers have been essentially forced en masse onto buses to vote:

“Of course I’m voting for Assad. First of all, I can’t not go vote because at work we’re all taken by bus to the polling booth. Second, I don’t know these other candidates. And also, I live here and have no options to leave – I don’t know what would happen if I don’t vote for Assad,” said a teacher in Damascus, contacted on Skype.

But if the point of the election was a show of strength and mobilization among Syrians living within territory that Assad currently controls, the Syrian regime can credibly claim some kind of victory, if not necessarily a democratic mandate.

Whatever the truth, it’s more than the ‘great big zero’ that US secretary of state John Kerry declared it yesterday in a hasty  trip to Lebanon, which is still stuck in the middle of a presidential crisis that began last month and that has continued since former president Michel Suleiman left office on May 25.   Continue reading Was the Syrian election more successful than Egypt’s? →

Egypt

Egypt election results: Egypt has a new pharaoh

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As the results come in from Egypt’s presidential election, here’s one thing to keep in mind about the extent of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s staggering margin of victory: egypt_flag_new

If his margin holds up in the final official results, el-Sisi will have won the election with a larger share of the vote than Egypt’s longtime strongman, Hosni Mubarak in both 1999 (93.79%) and 2005 (88.6%).

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That’s all you really need to know about whether this was really a fair election — after months of pre-campaigning designed to paint el-Sisi as Egypt’s national savior and the military-led crackdown on journalists and dissent of all stripes, not just among the Muslim Brotherhood (الإخوان المسلمون) and supporters of former president Mohammed Morsi, who was deposed in July 2013 by el-Sisi, then in his capacity as army chief of staff and defense minister.

But if the margin is impressive, the turnout was not. Amid reports that just 7.5% of the electorate bothered to turn out in the two days in which polls were open, Egypt’s presidential election commission decided to allow voting for a third day, and the military government’s threats to fine non-voters helped boost turnout to around 47.3%, according to government reports (that may or may not be entirely accurate).  Continue reading Egypt election results: Egypt has a new pharaoh →

Egypt

Voting will continue until the morale (and turnout) improves

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UPDATE: As it turns out, turnout amounted to just 7.5% in the first two days of voting on Monday and Tuesday. No wonder authorities wanted to keep polls open today — at this rate, they might want to consider opening voting through the whole week. But the high apathy indicates just how uncompetitive this election is — and quite possibly how apathetic Egyptians are about el-Sisi’s soft authoritarianism and his promises to bring austerity economics in a bid to jumpstart Egypt’s private sector.

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Now here’s a measure for increasing voter turnout that I’ll bet the European Union’s leaders never considered:egypt_flag_new

Amid disappointing turnout during the first and second days of the presidential elections, a judicial source has said the High Elections Committee decided to extend the presidential elections for a third day until Wednesday, with voting to last until 9pm on Tuesday.

The High Elections Committee said the elections were extended for another day due to the heat wave, the increasing demand in the evening and the difficulty to extend the voting hours until late at night.

If you don’t like the turnout, just keep the polls open until you do.

Furthermore, Egypt’s military-led government is harassing Egyptians to vote and threatening non-voters with fines of around $72. Interim president Adly Mansour encouraged Egyptians to ‘impress the world’ with a large turnout, and his government proclaimed Tuesday a public holiday, closing banks and other official offices.

If you’re surprised at what seems like a ridiculous aberration for a fair election, don’t be — the ‘election’ is more of a coronation than a truly competitive contest.

The wide frontrunner in the race is Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (pictured above), until late March the army chief of staff and defense minister of the country. It was his decision in July 2013 to overthrow Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first directly elected president in a free and fair election. Though Morsi’s government had tried to pull the country in a more Islamist direction, and though mainstream and secular Egyptians gathered in the millions throughout June and early July 2013 protesting its excesses, el-Sisi’s military regime spent the rest of the year cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood (الإخوان المسلمون), which it designated a ‘terrorist group,’ and just about anyone else who criticized military rule too loudly, including journalists.

In the months leading to el-Sisi’s resignation from the military, he waged an all-but-in-name shadow campaign for the Egyptian presidency, with the apparent backing of the Egyptian military elite.

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RELATED: The official unofficial el-Sisi
presidential candidacy continues in Egypt

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El-Sisi faces secular leftist Hamdeen Sabahi, who narrowly finished in third place in the first round of the May 2012 presidential election. El-Sisi, who has become genuinely popular in his quest to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood and in his efforts to stabilize Egypt, is expected to win by a wide margin. Many of Egypt’s top political movements, including the Tamarod (تـمـرد‎) protest movement that opposed Morsi, former Arab League secretary-general Amr Moussa and his supporters, many of Egypt’s most established secular liberal parties, and even many Salafists, who are technically even more conservative than the Muslim Brotherhood, are backing el-Sisi’s candidacy.

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RELATED: How Egypt’s El-Sisi out-Nassered (and out-Sabahi’ed) Sabahi

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When the military government held a referendum in January (Egypt’s third since the fall of former president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011) on amending the constitution, Egyptian voters approved it by a margin of 98.13% to 1.87%. In that election, the turnout was just 38.6% — still higher than the turnout of 32.9% for the equally forced constitutional referendum Morsi held in December 2012 to introduce a new constitution.  Continue reading Voting will continue until the morale (and turnout) improves →

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The six world elections taking place this weekend — and why they matter

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I can’t remember a time when there have been so many crucial world elections taking place at such a frenetic pace.

The spring voting blitz began with a five-day period in early April that saw Afghanistan’s presidential election, Indonesia’s legislative elections, the beginning of India’s nine-phase, five-week parliamentary elections, Costa Rica’s presidential runoff and Québec’s provincial elections.

Since then, India’s finished its voting and elected a new government led by Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. Macedonia, Algeria, Iraq, Panama, South Africa, and Malawi have held elections, too, over the past seven weeks.

It all comes to a climax with five elections today — and another election that will take place over two days of voting on Monday and Tuesday.

Here’s a short look at each election — and why it matters to global policy. Continue reading The six world elections taking place this weekend — and why they matter →