Stephen Walt

Okay, somebody who knows Walt offline really needs to make fun of him at this point. Man actually wrote "Why the Tunisian Revolution Won't Spread" in January. Yep.

Goes to show that you have to be very, very careful about the predictions of International Relations experts, and ESPECIALLY of the Realists. They talk a good game, but the end of the Cold War showed that they can get it majorly, majorly wrong. Considering this is a similar case study, well...

Edit: Also, it shows that you need to be incredibly careful about pundits' track records. They don't exactly admit their mistakes much.

Re-Edit: Don't get me wrong. I like a lot of what Walt has written. I think that, when he gets away from wearing the "Realist" hat, he has a lot of good points to make.

But it's becoming harder and harder to conclude that Realism is anything but a creaky, decrepit doctrine—and that the only reason that it perseveres is because of the paucity of decent alternatives.

Bahrain is Getting Bad

Or, perhaps, "getting worse", after the government suppressed peaceful protests with deadly force. In either case, NPR:

Reporting from Bahrain — where, before dawn, riot police armed with clubs and shotguns charged into the protesters' camp in the capital's main square — NPR's Peter Kenyon tells Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep that Bahrainis' grief is "turning to anger very rapidly."

Four people were reported killed, and dozens more were seriously wounded in the raid in Manama's Pearl Square.

Peter, where are you now and what are you seeing?

Steve, I'm at the Salmaniya hospital, where many of the wounded and dead were brought initially. I have to say, uh, I have just seen one of the more gruesome sites in 10 years of covering the Middle East. I was in the mortuary. I saw a man lying on a gurney. The top of his head was literally blown off.

The injuries have been widespread — clubbing and some shot and rubber-bullet injuries. Paramedics who were trying to get to the scene told me they were pulled from their ambulances and dragged to the ground and beaten.

It's ... it's been a scene, kind of. It's a bit quiet at the moment, I have to say, but just moments ago, this compound in the hospital was filled with screaming people. The grief is turning to anger very rapidly here.

And the situation is changing very rapidly. I recall, Peter, just yesterday you were telling us how the protesters had occupied the square and the police were nowhere to be seen, at least not in the areas where the protesters were. That seems to have changed very, very quickly.

It was a dramatic change and a bit hard to understand at the moment, I have to say. I mean, only Tuesday the king, Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa, had said he was sorry for the deaths that had happened earlier, the two people who were killed [during protests Monday], and he had vowed that there would be peaceful responses to peaceful protests.

The crowds had swelled over 36 hours in Pearl Circle there, which is what they had hoped would be their Tahrir Square. Many people had camped out for the night, mostly, I should say, young men but also some families, women and children there in family tents. I would say a percentage of the people go home after midnight to their own homes to sleep. But there is a corps that stays there every night, and they bore the brunt of this attack.

They said it started about 3 a.m. with tear gas being fired from above, where there's a bridge that overlooks the square. And then the police moved in, clubbing people out of their tents, according to witnesses, and then the wounded and the damage ensued.

As best you can determine, who ended up in possession of the square?

The police and the military are in charge of the square. There was a military convoy that moved in. It sealed off the square, and access to that area is now sealed off by police, armed police.

In fact, the man whose body I saw, I spoke with his son and he said they were trying to walk back into the square to help the wounded when the man was killed.

So we do not have the same situation as in Cairo, Egypt, where the protesters took over a central square, a symbolically important square, and managed through everything to stay there for days. The protesters have cleared out. Do you have any sense of what the protesters are going to do next or are attempting to do now?

You're right. Unlike Tunisia and Egypt, it was not a call for regime change immediately, except for a few isolated pockets. It was a call for political reform and economic reform.

The regimes in the region are getting more and more scared as the calls for reform and change grow. Egypt may have been relatively peaceful, barring the thuggery of the goons that Mubarak sent out, but I wonder how long that will remain the case. As the repression gets more and more violent, how long until the the protesters respond in kind? And, honestly, could you even blame them for doing so?

Nicholas Kristof brings up an important point, too: Bahrain is a critical American client state. It isn't just an ally that protects Israel's southern flank—it is the home of the Fifth Fleet. But as Kristof says, "If we favor “people power” in Iran, we should favor it in Bahrain as well."

It was so much easier back in '89, wasn't it? When it was the other guy's client states falling like dominoes, instead of your own? Good times, good times. Still, it makes me wonder if this is the final, TRUE end of the Cold War. Both sides ended up losing their clients and tributaries—it just took the one an extra 20 years to have it happen. And, like Eastern Europe, I can't help but wonder if the Middle East will ultimately be better off for it.

Algeria: "Running Street Battles"

Algeria's Internet has been shut down, Egyptian-style. But that clearly hasn't stopped them from following the Tunisian and Egyptian lead:

Plastic bullets and tear gas were used to try and disperse large crowds in major cities and towns, with 30,000 riot police taking to the streets in Algiers alone.

There were also reports of journalists being targeted by state-sponsored thugs to stop reports of the disturbances being broadcast to the outside world.
But it was the government attack on the internet which was of particular significance to those calling for an end to President Abdelaziz Boutifleka's repressive regime.

Protesters mobilising through the internet were largely credited with bringing about revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia.

"Security forces are armed to the teeth out on the street, and they're also doing everything to crush our uprising on the internet. Journalists, and especially those with cameras, are being taken away by the police." President Hosni Mubarak had tried to shut down internet service providers during 18 days of protest before stepping down as Egyptian leader on Friday.

Mostafa Boshashi, head of the Algerian League for Human Rights, said: "Algerians want their voices to be heard too. They want democratic change.

"At the moment people are being prevented from travelling to demonstrations. The entrances to cities like Algeria have been blocked."

At least five people were killed in similar protests in Algeria in January, when the Interior Ministry said 1000 people were arrested.

On Saturday at least 500 had been arrested by early evening in Algiers alone, with hundreds more in Annaba, Constantine and Oran taking part in the so-called February 12 Revolution.

"The police station cells are overflowing," said Sofiane Hamidouche, a demonstrator in Annaba.

"There are running battles taking place all over the city. It's chaos. As night falls the situation will get worse."

These are astonishing times. I don't know if the "running battles" in Algeria will hand the state the excuse for repression that it couldn't find in Egypt. Different countries require different tactics and strategies. But after Tunisia and Egypt, Algeria's Powers-That-Be must be sweating. If there's a way of stopping this tsunami of demands for freedom, nobody has yet found it.

Anonymous Playing a Role in Egypt/Tunisia?

Well, now, THIS I hadn't expected. But, according to the Guardian, the notorious "hacktivist" group Anonymous are playing a role in the Tunisian/Egyptian/Algerian crises, by providing anonymization tools to in-country protesters and unleashing DDoS attacks on various governmental networks and websites. There's more detail here.

It reminds me a bit of the problem (and promise) of WikiLeaks. The organization is far from perfect, and governments are constantly complaining that the very organizations that demand their transparency are utterly secretive and anonymous themselves. But, honestly, they kind of have to be. Egypt's riots aside, there is still an enormous difference in power between regular people and the state. Anonymity and secrecy may be the only way that any sort of check on state power can possibly function.

Military's in Alexandria and Suez

How does the phrase go? Ah, yes. This shit just got real.

The government's losing control. As they're saying on AJ right now, the government's trying to make concessions, but the demonstrators aren't buying it. They want SERIOUS change. And while one could argue that Tunisia was only a minor regional player, Egypt is about as major as you can get without being either Israel, Iran, or Saudi Arabia.

And, making this more complex, Egypt's an American ally. It's easy to cheer on democratic revolutions in places where you don't like the government. It's far more difficult when it's in countries like Egypt whose leadership is corrupt-but-convenient. Certainly there must be a lot of panicky conversations in Jerusalem right now, too, as they try to sort out what any future Egyptian government might look like and how it'll behave towards the quote-unquote "zionist entity".

Tunisian Protests Spread to Egypt

So apparently Facebook isn't quite as establishment-reinforcing as previously thought. Egyptian radicals, spurred by Tunisia's successful social-media-intermediated uprising, have started using Facebook and Twitter to coordinate their own protests as well.

Not that it's really about social media. I don't think that's fair to the people who are risking their lives on the streets of Tunis and Cairo. I also still maintain that Malcolm Gladwell had a point when he talked about how low-effort e-protesting just isn't going to accomplish much. What's different here is that it's serving as a complement to real, out-in-the-street protest, instead of as a substitute.

There's still no substitute for getting your hands dirty. You still have to get out there and make some noise. You still need to march in the street, carry those signs, wield the megaphone, and everything else that comes with struggling for change. You also still have to  engage in the simple, repetitive, low-key but absolutely vital political work of doorknocking, phone canvassing, leaflet dropping and the like. And, yes, you still need to actually mail your governmental representatives, since that carries far more weight than email does.

But social networking tools do have a place as a means of bringing people together, getting them organized, and channeling their passions in a productive direction. It's not as sexy as supposed "twitter revolutions". Even so, it's still important and necessary.