No doubt you’ve seen the footage from Tunisia and Egypt. Tunisians toppled their government; their government folded like a house of cards. Egypt has more experience and employs experts for exactly this sort of situation; they’ve encountered such situations before. Whether or not Mubarak changes things for real remains to be seen, all he’s promised is to name a new government. I’m not sure if that will change anything for the better for the Egyptian people, most likely it will be some ‘bare minimum’ requirement he’ll be implementing to stave off serious reform and keep his position. Or maybe Mubarak might actually concede defeat and try to avoid the ‘running scared’ exit of Ben Ali.
What I’m waiting for is for Julian Assange to hire Carol King to play for the White House, I’m assuming this is why he’s writing a book to raise money. After she arrives, she’ll sing to the US government:
For all the ‘secrets’ Wikileaks released, most of the ones involving the US ended up being a bit weak. Oh, the war in Iraq didn’t go so well, I couldn’t tell that from us having lost a couple pallets’ (four feet squared shipping boxes) worth of $100 bills. Yeah, and we say bad things about some of the people we deal with. Who would’ve guessed we would call North Korea’s leader ‘erratic’. Hell, when Kim Jong Il saw “Team America” he stated he would have liked the movie more if his puppet had its own sex scene. So he’s a total freak.
The juicy tidbits didn’t come from America. Conspiracy theorists think that there’s a great deal of stuff going on in the shadows in the US government. By this point, leaks have become so frequent from the White House itself, just due to the sheer amount of people working there that we tend to know most of the nasty stuff fairly quickly. Nearly a million people have ‘Top Secret’ clearance or higher, when that many people know, it’s not really a secret anymore.
Rather, most of the fascinating material came from countries that really excel at suppressing information. Levels of corruption we can barely fathom grew into virtual state institutions in Tunisia. Wikileaks provided the exact details of this in near-painful detail. Though those leaks came out a few months ago, the sheer quantity of details makes it impossible for it to be immediately consumed. Helping their cause was the military ultimately backing the protesters in Tunisia.
I’m not sure if the same thing can happen in Egypt since the protests there take inspiration from Tunisia’s success. Mubarak came from the military, and bestowed gifts upon them. Unlike Tunisia, Egypt worries more heavily about the groups it has kept out of the government, like the Muslim Brotherhood. So while we had no problem with Tunisia, a relatively secular nation of negligible diplomatic clout or strategic importance, Egypt offers a great deal more in terms of sheer population and location. Location alone, it has the potential to create serious issues with the large amount of goods that go through the Suez Canal.
Besides having the uncanny ability of convincing the US to bankroll it of about $1.5 billion a year, the Egyptian government has done an excellent job of playing up US fears about extremism. Remember the Cold War when any half-assed dictator could claim his enemies were Communists? Then presto, they received instant funding to go after their enemies. Perhaps the Muslim Brotherhood offers a greater threat, maybe even a legitimate one to the stability in the region. Most information about the riots implies the Muslim Brotherhood arrived late at the riots and hasn’t effectively capitalized on the distaste for the government. So Egypt’s been doing a wonderful job at claiming it is holding extremists at bay, but without any independent verification, it is hard to tell how much of a threat they might pose if any. Right now it looks like if the government falls, it may end up in a similar situation as Tunisia, with the military (revered as the most powerful and respected secular institution) rules in interim until elections can be held.
Jordan and Yemen face similar large scale actions. However, they are not on the same scale as Egypt, which went as far as to shut off all internet access, nearly unprecedented in protests (happened before in Myanmar). Sadly, this seems to be the thing people outside Egypt have gotten the most upset about, instead of the widespread abuses in terms of physical violence and repression of groups considered dangerous to the regime which has gone on for decades. Besides, this shutoff of the internet is far more benign than the tactics used by security forces elsewhere, such as Iran or Belarus. In those countries, security forces use the internet as a way of tracking dissidents. So the internet really does work both ways, by freeing up information it allows protesters to organize just as easily as the defense forces.
Right now (and I keep on revising this article) Mohamed ElBaradei seems to be the one who will fill in the void. Everyone agrees that ElBaradei would work on the level of enjoying international support (he was a Nobel laureate and former diplomat, so he has solid credentials). Apparently the Muslim Brotherhood even appreciates his even-handed approach, stating due to the West’s take on Islam, they’d prefer a non-partisan member lead the transitional government. Perhaps these protests will lead to a more democratic country, it is very possible. All that I know is for a country in its location with its population; it has been punching below its weight for far too many years. That’s what makes the protests so interesting: the young are now aware of exactly how repressed they are and have seen how others live, while their parents are old enough to remember an Egypt more assertive culturally, politically and economically. So their chances of seeing the protests bear fruit is greater than those in Iran, due to this broad support and the thankful ineptitude of the security forces in using communication technology effectively (shutting stuff off isn’t exactly smart).
The information available has made much of this possible. While plenty do detest Al Jazeera for its obvious anti-US/anti-Israel bias, it does offer the best source of information for its viewers. Having a level of journalistic independence (it is self-funded) allows to report accurately on these protests in Egypt, in Jordan and in Yemen. Most state-sponsored broadcast would not be given this amount of leeway, for fear they might be next. So Al Jazeera does actual journalism, and their attention to these protests only makes more realize exactly what in their own environment demands improvement. The sad fact that guards of state buildings in multiple Arab nations have fire extinguishers to prevent another Mohamed Bouazizi (self-immolation) rather than consider reforms shows how absolutely how out of touch the leaders are with their people. It also shows something which would have been kept quiet locally now has global impact. Organizations exist too which help amplify this sort of information, organizations beyond what could be offered by news organizations, like Wikileaks.
Wikileaks is an international collaboration. Certainly there’s no love between them versus the United States (Collateral Murder being a prime example) but it is intended to release information in order to make governments more transparent. The most it did to us was embarrass us a bit along with most Western nations. Berlusconi (allegedly perverted Prime Minister of Italy) claims it was “the 9/11 of diplomacy” but nothing could be further from the truth. What it did was apply pressure to ossified regimes, who stay in power under the auspices of “hey, you wouldn’t like who’d come in next. We’re the secular savior for you.” Sure, there is validity to this in varying degrees and depending on the country, but in general the worry is overblown. Institutions outside of religion do exist and possess enough clout, respect, and infrastructure needed to make a transition from autocracy to democracy if they choose to do so.
Overall then, the US is a surprisingly minor figure in all that’s going on. With a minuscule budget and a strange Australian (who, according to the New York Times, smells bad) Wikileaks has managed to have a greater impact than any amount of backroom coaxing and money might have hoped to achieve. Even regular journalism usually reports after an event, avoiding outright provocation. Sure, Wikileaks method is far from elegant and often a blunt instrument (if at times reckless), but as we continue to see protests against such repressive regimes multiply, we might begin to realize what the real ‘information revolution’ is.