While I agree with the tin-foil hat argument I have to disagree that these groups are as disparate as the old Soviet Bloc countries. These countries are all Arab nations, all Isalmic nations and the only real disparity is the borders drawn on a map, unlike the old SovBloc where the peoples were different; Slavs, Caucasian, with differing religions; Christianity and Islam. The Arab countries are so alike that the other leaders such as Ghaddafi and Co must be sweating.
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True, they are not as diverse as the people of the fringes of the Soviet empire but it's a bit sweeping to see arabs as one monolithic block. They've never been that not even in the days of the first arab Caliphate, it was always a aspiration that failed at societal boundaries. To be an arab is to wear an old imperial identity that is shared by distinct peoples, being British is a similar construction. Spoken arabic is riven by dialects some of which are mutually unintelligible, only the written language is uniform.
Pan-arabism was in a way an attempt to blur these boundaries, nationalist institutions like the military just proved to strong. The arab world is hardly as cohesive as Europe and they have just as bloody a history of fighting each other. National identity has become an important marker for them, the Cario mobs patriotic respect for their military is an obvious and rather perverse manifestation of this.
Algerians are a hard-nosed, resilient and gloomy bunch like the Scots, they are also heavily influenced by France. The now flabby Saudis are still at heart Bedu, a Wahhabi world away, Cossack or pirates by nature and sternly puritan by confession.
Egypt has a large Christian minority and a fairly moderate strain of Islam, it has in living memory held free and even fair elections. It developed from ancient sedentary society that spent a millennia dominated by Greeks, but maybe a better comparison is the easy going often sophisticated but chaotic Italians.
What Egypt and the Maghreb countries do share is economies going south, a very youthful population clustered in slums, a legacy of colonialism, authoritarian rule vigorously supported by us until the point of failure, deliberately fragmented secular oppositions and narrow but deep Islamist movements. It's the first two that are most salient.
Unlike Tunisia with its tiny army Algeria has l
Le Pouvoir, a deep state apparatus much like the one Turkey finally threw off nearly a decade ago after eighty years. It's not at all clear if Egypt has made that advance and I think its very unlikely in Algeria. The brutal civil war that followed the democratic elections of a Islamist party that had gained broad middle class support and subsequent military coup.
It's just struck me with all this giddy talk of it being 89 all over again if there's a pivotal moment here it might not be the current events in Tunisia or Egypt. It's Turkey in 2002 and the AKP's boringly democratic landslide that history may look back on.
Only Iran of the three powers mentioned above may gain from this and that's by no means certain. The Saudis are terrified that the democratic virus will spread and Beijing like DC wants uninterrupted access to cheap Kingship oil. While there's perhaps some astroturf going on in Egypt I think it's no more serious than what the Saudis got up to during the Cedar revolution, probably domestic and run out of parts of the army. There's no conspiracy here, this has been building for decades.
It hasn't helped that two American administrations have done a good deal of banging on about freedom in the ME while propping up the usual despots, raising the spectre of the Shia Crescent and casually letting the Israeli pitbull worry the life stock. Barry is now looking very worried about the eyes and so he should.
