The role of labor was crucial in Egyptians’ popular efforts to oust Hosni Mubarak, perhaps the bale of straw that broke the U.S.-supported dictator’s back. Naturally, organizers and activists are glowing. But will [...]]]>
The role of labor was crucial in Egyptians’ popular efforts to oust Hosni Mubarak, perhaps the bale of straw that broke the U.S.-supported dictator’s back. Naturally, organizers and activists are glowing. But will it last?
With continued military rule in Egypt, at least until elections in the fall, the recent kingbreakers find themselves at odds with the newly-elevated junta, who have asked them to calm things down.
Here’s an excerpt of Mekay’s report from Egypt’s textile hub El Mahalla, home to a long-oppressed labor movement:
]]>[Organizer Hamdi] Hussein was all smiles as he announced that he was heading to Cairo to attend a meeting to chart out future labor demands after the stunning success of the Egyptian revolution.
“Yesterday, this meeting would have been secret and I would have been forced to sneak in and out of El Mahalla,” Mr. Hussein said during an interview.
“Now, the labor movement that helped topple Mubarak will take its rightful place in protecting the revolution.”
But will it? This newfound labor empowerment has startled the interim government, which was originally appointed by Mr. Mubarak, and challenges the efforts by the military, which is effectively in charge, to protect Egypt’s existing institutions and return the country to a more normal life.
“All ministers here are displeased with the strikes,” Magdy Radi, the cabinet’s spokesman, said by telephone. “It is hampering our work as a caretaker government. But it is an issue for the supreme council to take care of, not us.”
The military council, despite initial reports that it would move to ban strikes altogether, has so far taken a more measured approach. On Tuesday, it issued a communiqué urging Egyptians to tone down their labor protests, citing the consequences for the economy and the supply of everyday needs.
The new government and the military may have a more profound reason to be worried about a new wave of strikes, which played a critical role in bringing down the Mubarak regime.
Earlier this month, as the world was riveted by the young “Internet generation” demonstrating in huge numbers in Tahrir Square, Mr. Hussein and 20 other labor leaders were busy using their mobile phones to plan a nationwide series of strikes and sit-ins.
Takeyh starts with a little armchair psychology on the Islamic Republic’s enforcers — the mid-level officials as well as the foot [...]]]>
Takeyh starts with a little armchair psychology on the Islamic Republic’s enforcers — the mid-level officials as well as the foot soldiers of the regime — “all require an overweening ideological cover to justify their brutalities to themselves.”
Yet the crackdown against Iran’s nascent Green Movement after the June 2009 elections is calling these justifications into question:
The subtle and subversive victory of the Green movement is to hollow out the state and demonstrate to its loyalists that they are not defending a transcendent orthodoxy but craven and cruel men addicted to power at all cost. In the words of the reformist cleric, the late Ayatollah Hossein Montazeri, in the violent crackdown following the elections in June 2009, the Islamic Republic ceased to be either Islamic or a republic.
In his seminal study of revolutions, Crane Brinton observed that a ruling class becomes imperiled when “numerous and influential members of such a class begin to believe that they hold power unjustly, [and] that the beliefs they were brought up on are silly.”
Takeyh points to a string of high level defections of some former defenders of the regime to the opposition. He says the “accomplishments of the Green movement are impressive,” but stressed the future of Iran is still very much uncertain. In his estimation, it’s not a matter of if the regime collapses, but when.
Here’s the rub for U.S. policy:
The series of decisions that the United States and its allies make today will help condition the contours of power in tomorrow’s Iran.
This is not to suggest that the United States should cease negotiating with Iran. Ronald Reagan continued to sign arms control compacts with a Soviet Union whose demise he perceived as certain. The pursuit of important security objectives did not derail Reagan from embracing Solidarity in Poland or comparable opposition groups throughout Eastern Europe. The important point is that the Iran conundrum is not limited to compelling Tehran to spew out some of its accumulated uranium. Our choices speak as much to our values as they do to our interests. In the long run, America has never gone astray by standing with those who hope for a more decent future.
The “anti-appeasement” hawks may have a tough time with that last graf. Takeyh cites Ronald Reagan (!!! — might as well be pro-appeasement right-wing idol Winston Churchill!). He also implies a fuel-swap confidence building measure is in U.S. interests, although U.S. interests should “not be limited” to this goal.
]]>This time, the sky is surely falling. At the very least, the world is at a “tipping point” in the direction of a nuclear armed crowd with far more countries actively pursuing and acquiring nuclear weapons. On this point, Hillary Clinton, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ban Ki-moon and John McCain all agree.
This proliferation pessimism often finds expression in metaphors about nuclear dominoes, chains, cascades and waves. In most cases the gloomy scenario anticipates a reactive process in which Iran’s “going nuclear” leads to decisions by other states in the region and possibly elsewhere to follow suit in quick succession.
Such prognoses are often cited in support of arguments for urgent action to stop Iran’s nuclear program. And yet, as was the case with the “domino theory” of the spread of Communism, little evidence is marshaled to support assertions about reactive proliferation.
A review of declassified U.S. national intelligence estimates (NIEs), as well as scholarly prognoses, shows that nuclear alarmism has been a feature of U.S. threat assessments throughout most of the nuclear age.
A new NIE on Iran is expected soon, and its findings are already being questioned before its publication. As covered in Wednesday’s Talking Points, Stuart Eizenstat and Mark Brzezinski have an opinion piece in Politico where they deem the 2007 NIE on Iran insufficiently damning and insist the intelligence agents who compose the upcoming NIE “answer the right questions and get the analysis straight.”
]]>I’m still plowing through the Foreign Affairs article from which the Cohen and Miller’s IHT op-ed is drawn (I’ll report on the FA article later), but this little piece from the shorter version is worth taking note of with regards to the ongoing debate over Israel’s stance on the Iranian nuclear program:
]]>Israel needs to recognize, moreover, that the Middle East peace process is linked to the issue of nuclear weapons in the region. International support for Israel and its opaque bomb is being increasingly eroded by its continued occupation of Palestinian territory and the policies that support that occupation. Such criticism of these policies might well spill over into the nuclear domain, making Israel vulnerable to the charge that it is a nuclear-armed pariah state, and thus associating it to an uncomfortable degree with today’s rogue Iranian regime.
Indeed, while almost all states publicly oppose the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran, there is also growing support for dealing with this problem in an “evenhanded” manner, namely, by establishing a nuclear weapons free zone across the entire region.
However, if Israel takes seriously the need to modify its own nuclear posture and its approach to the peace process, there will likely be stronger international support for measures designed to stop Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold and to contain a nuclear-armed Iran if those efforts fail.