danalwyn

Going, going, gone!

18 days of protests, and he's gone. Mubarak has apparently handed over authority of the office of the President to the armed forces.

Jubilation now; figuring out what that actually means later. Possibly expect the world's softest and most polite coup. Hopefully the crowd will be able to keep their momentum up.

Everyone is now leaking the news that Mubarak is expected to step down this evening. This is both good in general (the only person who seems to genuinely like Mubarak these days is the bold, charismatic, suave, smartest man in the world, the fashion trend-setting Kim Jong-Il of North Korea), but a bit troubling in particular.

The troubling aspect comes from who is making the leaks. The hints come from the heads of the Egyptian military, who seem to have been in conference over this matter. Also from Hossam Badrawi, the secretary-general of Mubarak's National Democratic Party. In the United States, the message has been leaked by Panetta, Director of the CIA (who has since said he was only quoting news reports). People who spend their time reading tea leaves are a bit nervous because the message that seems to be spread here is that the real power-brokers have gotten together and decided to do away with Mubarak. The message is then that there will be change in leadership, but continuity in the people actually running things behind the scene. In that case the protesters may find the new boss to be much the same as the old boss.

In the long run this is just pissing into the wind; they can't keep the people out forever. But in the short run it's making the cynics, who have been worried that the protests in Egypt have been rather carefully managed so as not to threaten the powers-that-be, look increasingly justified in their gloomy analysis of Egypt's future.

But still, if Mubarak goes, no matter who replaces him, it's a victory for the people, so I'll try not to rain on their parade.

Hosni Mubarak has made his speech in response to the Tuesday "Million Man March". He claims that he will not run in the next election, but he will not leave now, and he will not abandon his post.

The response of the crowds is everywhere. You can hear it in the background of every newscast, of every broadcast like a distant storm beating against the shore. It does not sound frightened, or satisfied, it sounds hungry.

Mubarak claimed that he wanted to "Die on the soil of Egypt". If he stays much longer, he may be given his chance.

Whatever happens tomorrow in Egypt, however it comes about, I hope people all over the world remember that what happened there was Egyptian. It is not about the United States, it is not about whether we support Mubarak or not, it is not about the Europeans, it is not about the Arab governments, about Israel, about Islam, about al-Qaeda or the War on Terror, or the War on Drugs, or the New York Times Review of Books, or who is voting for whom in the Iowa State Farm Pageant. It's not about what happened to the Iranians, to the Americans, to the Indians, or to the Parisians. It's not about what happened in Iraq in 2003, what happened in Iran in 1979, or what happened to Europe in 1848.

It's about what's happening in Egypt, to Egyptians, in 2011.

The US contributed in many ways to what happened there. The EU contributed, the Arab world contributed, the entire world contributed. Everyone, everywhere is somehow connected to what is happening there. But it is simply a contribution, a root, not the trunk, not the main. What is happening in Egypt has always been an Egyptian story; they have paid in blood and sweat and tears to unroll the canvas and write the letters on it. It is their story, and no matter how the climax is written, no matter how the story ends, theirs it remains. We can at least give them that.

What's the word that you use when the country whose low cost labor you exploited through immigration to build your state's first major railway project makes a bid to bankroll and operate your latest high-tech railroad?

Oh yeah, that's right, irony.

(Things were looking ironic enough for California before the article had to mention that the Chinese may be the world's foremost experts in high-speed rail, yet another field in transportation where the geographically large and transport-intensive United States has fallen behind foreign expertise and innovation.)

Hat tip to Foreign Policy's Passport.

Coup count for 2010: +2

Well, we haven't had one since February, so I thought we might be safe, but there now appears to be a serious coup in progress in Madagascar. This should hardly be unexpected, since Madagascar has been in the throes of a political and economic mess for some time, and the referendum probably didn't help. Nobody knows whether the coup is successful or not; the military appears to have some disagreement as to whose side they're on. Possibly this will just blow over, which would make everyone happy (except for possibly the people in Madagascar, and Greenpeace, but really, who cares about them? We're only in this for the lemurs).

Well, we almost got through the year with only one. Maybe 2011 will go more smoothly.

Microsoft may be a monster when it comes to shady business practices, but I think Google is the first of the big American software companies to be blamed for creating an incident that could be considered an act of war. Granted, it was most probably an accident, but getting Nicaragua to invade Costa Rica has to put them pretty high up on the corporate mojo scale.

(Thanks to Foreign Policy for this one)

Morning Briefing Rule #14:

The answer to the question "Can things in Israel and Palestine somehow get worse?" is always yes.

So, if you haven't been following, the internet kerfluffle over 1MillionShirts is continuing to gather steam. Here's a summary in a nutshell.

( If you don't want it, Africa probably doesn't want it either )

Sometimes I do research for my own edification and my amateur attempts at writing. Recently I've been trying to learn about riot control tactics and techniques for large-scale protests.

This is surprisingly difficult. The United States has changed a lot of its crowd control doctrine since the Battle for Seattle to focus on either riots or demonstration protests, and in both cases the doctrine is mostly defensive. If a riot gets too large to be dispersed, contain it, and let it burn itself out. If a demonstration protest becomes large, you intercept its march route, or you contain it, preventing it from entering the area where a meeting is being held for instance. In either case it's the police who stand on the defensive, mostly utilizing the power of barricades to defend themselves, confining the crowd to a restricted area until the event is over and people disperse. The concept of having to disperse a crowd that is itself on the defensive, having barred itself into a large area of the city and showing no sign of dispersing, similar to the "Revolution" protests that swept the world, doesn't appear to have engendered serious thought in the US. The implication is that solving that problem is a political job, and the police shouldn't be coming up with specialized plans for dealing with it.

This is probably good for the US, because it indicates that people are finding easier ways to solve problems then starting urban civil wars. But it's bad for me, because I can't find anything to indicate what they would do when confronted with such a situation.

So now that both Kyrgyzstan and Thailand are swamped with protests, I'll be watching how the police there respond. Although given the possibility of brutality, I doubt that they'll be letting many people take pictures. And it just feels weird (not to mention immoral) conducting research by watching what could be an atrocity in progress.