Arab Spring Scorecard

Tunisia: Ben Ali is exiled in Saudi Arabia with his haul of gold.

Egypt: Hosni Mubarak is currently on trial while also dealing with serious health issues. Until a few days ago, his trial was broadcast on live TV. The ailing former head of state was too ill to sit in a chair, so he laid on a bed inside a cage.

Yemen: President Saleh seems to be under an informal house arrest in Saudi Arabia after being hospitalized there following an attack. Saleh has been out of the hospital for some time and frequently promises to return to Yemen.

Iran: Protests earlier this year were quickly and brutally put down. There has been little in the way of demonstrations since.

Libya: Gaddafi has a million dollar bounty on his head. Rebels are tightening their grip on Tripoli as the opposition Transitional National Council tries to quell fears about its ability to rule and to rule justly.

Syria: Bashir al-Assad recently made promises of reforms and municipal elections while continuing his horrific crackdown on civilians and militants alike. This seems to be another phase in Assad's cycle of empty promises and mass murder.

President Saleh's First Appearance Since the Attack

I apologize for the long layoff between posts. I've been on the road for a while.

Watching Yemeni President Saleh's prerecorded video, I was struck by how drastically different he looks.
Before he was injured in an attack on the presidential compound, he was commonly seen in a suit or military uniform, tidy mustache, dyed hair. After, the wardrobe is significantly different, perhaps to reflect his temporary/new residency in Saudi Arabia, not to mention the white beard in lieu of the black mustache. Also, you can seen signs of his wounds in the skin on the end of his nose, lips, around the ear, and under the chin. He looks to have had some of his eyebrows burned off. CNN reported that he also had a collapsed lung. It remains to be seen if he will truly return to Yemen to continue a presidency that stretches back to 1978. He had previously floated the idea of stepping down in exchange for immunity, but outraged protesters conveyed the idea that immunity was not acceptable. In the video he vaguely mentions reforms, but he also refers to the attack as an "accident" and an "incident." This is not language that indicates he has really come to terms with the end of his reign.

Before

After

Yemen: A Nightmare We Will Never Wake Up From

I was writing about Yemen for a slightly longer piece and I thought I briefly list the elements that make Yemen a perpetual disaster:

• The country has gone through two civil wars. The previous civil war pitted the royalist forces and Saudi military against the republicans and Egypt. The most recent one in 1994 after South Yemen seceded just four years after unification. One of the grievances that was never resolved was that Yemen's oil fields are in South Yemen, yet the region does not benefit from the oil revenue. Unfair distribution of oil wealth by the central government, especially when the oil is extracted outside the home of the capital has been a major source of instability in Sudan, Iraq, and Angola. 
• The national government's control is non-existent outside the capital, there is a strong secessionist movement in the south, and tribal warlords in the north.
• There has been a Zaidi Shiite insurgency, often referred to as Houthis, in the north since 2004. Saudi Arabia launched attacks against the Houthis afraid that trouble in Yemen would spill over the border and into the kingdom.
• Yemen is widely regarded as the most heavily armed population in the world, its water supply is dwindling, and khat use is rampant. 
• Oil reserves make up 75% of government revenues, account for 90% of exports, and will dry up within a decade. 
• It has the same population of its neighbor Saudi Arabia and 25% of the land mass. The average age is 18. When speaking at the University of Minnesota, Fareed Zakaria noted that one of the causes of the Arab Spring was an increase in the percentage of the population that are young men. 
• Yemen is also host to the most active Al-Qaeda franchise. 

These are all elements that do not bode well for the future.

Protests in Damascus

1,500 people protested after a traffic cop beat up a shop keeper's son.


Syria News Wire has a good perspective about why this protest is different from others in the region:

They chant “the Syrian people will not be humiliated”, interspersed with, “shame, shame” and “with our soul, with our blood, we sacrifice for you Bashar”. That’s a very Syrian way of saying they were furious at the police, not the president. Also, note there was no chanting of “the people want the fall of the regime” (the words used in Tunisia and Egypt, and now in Yemen and Bahrain).

 While middle class frustration at the corruption, excessive security forces, and stagnant economy were the driving factors, the twist on Bahrain is that the Monarchy are Sunnis whose ties to the island do not stretch as far back as those of the majority Shiite population. Unhappiness with the discriminatory practices of the Sunni ruling class have been heightened foreseeable end of their oil reserves. Estimates give Bahrain 10 to 15 years before they run out of oil. Yemen is being ripped apart by militant tribes in the north and Marxist separatists in the south.


Syria's economy is mostly centrally planned, but the government has been taking big steps over the last few years to liberalize the economy and open up its market. Like Bahrain, Syria's Alawite community is a minority sectarian/ethnic group controls the vestiges of power. But what distinguishes Syria is that the security forces keep such a tight grip on dissenters that there does not seem to be much of an appetite for people to risk the consequences (physical punishment, professional harm, indefinite detention) to protest the regime. People are so wary of drawing the attention of the secret police, or mukhabarat, that they use "the Germans" to reference the Alawites.


There is also the lingering effects of when the current president's father razed parts of the Syrian city Hama to quash a revolt by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982. Various estimates put the fatalities around 30,000, not to mention the arrest and torture of Brotherhood sympathizers in the aftermath. Tom Friedman has an excellent chapter in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem called "Hama Rules." (The chapter starts on page 76 and the analysis starts on 87.) Basically, there are two kinds of defeats; the first in which the embers for revenge or conflict still burn and the second in which the defeat is so crushing that the will and resources for any future conflict have been completely exhausted.


Syria may tolerate protesters as long as they do not directly challenge the regime, but anyone willing to cross that line will be punished quickly and severely.