cc >> I'm now going to introduce our speaker today. Professor Jon Pevehouse is the
department of Political Science at UW-Madison, where he's been since 2000. He had a brief time away, but we
got him back. He's both a scholar in the area of international relations, but also he's is a pretty highly
acclaimed teacher, having won the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2005. And one of our colleagues,
before I came up here, is a former student of his and described him as "amazing," so a lot to live up to there.
I hear that over and over again having never gotten to take one of his classes, but he's done some speaking before, and I
think you'll really enjoy what he has to say. His research area is in the topic of international
relations. He has co-authored the leading textbook that undergraduates use on the topic, and specializes in
the study of looking at political or governmental organizations, and economic and socio-political impacts
of those. I'm not quite sure what that means. It sounds fancy.
I'm sure he'll explain it within the context of today. But Professor Pevehouse had his bachelor's at University of
Kansas, and his PhD at The Ohio State University. We're awfully glad he's ours now, on our campus.
I am very pleased to introduce Professor Jon Pevehouse. ( applause ) >> Jon Pevehouse: Thanks a lot,
Sarah. My work is cut out for me now. The first thing we're going to do is lower expectations.
I debated and did speaking events in high school, and my debate coach in high school always said get the audience on
your side right away. So I'm going to do that in the cheapest, easiest way possible and say, go, Badgers!
( laughter ) If you noticed the schools I've been, all three of my teams are still in the tournament, so
that's good. I'm pretty excited. Today, obviously, a lot to talk about.
I'm going to get my watch out now, my phone/watch, so I don't talk too long, because I want to leave a lot of time for
questions and answers about what's been going on in the Middle East. It's funny, I was looking at my
notes. I'm going to talk a little, obviously, about Egypt. But what my note for Egypt says,
I'm not going to review the details, you know, that was so six weeks ago. Things have just moved
so quickly. I think it has left everyone's head spinning. I can tell you for a fact, it's
left academics' heads spinning. It's left the pundits' heads spinning. And having a number of phone
conversations with people in Washington, it's left heads spinning in the State Department and elsewhere, as well.
Everyone is still trying to make sense of what's going on. Part of that is also a caveat to say, any prediction I make may
well be wrong, you know, five hours from now. With that said, what I want to talk to you about today is the
transitions in the Middle East, and what's been going on. I want to tell you a little bit about, kind of say none of this
had happened, and I was asked to give a talk about political transitions, how do they happen, I'm going to tell you what
political scientists and international relations scholars have thought in a very general way about how transitions
happen, what are the important factors. Secondly, what I'll do is kind of go through and talk to you a
little bit about, kind of what of these were present in some of these cases, in the ongoing case of Libya, in Egypt, in Tunisia,
in Bahrain, in Yemen, etc. Then what I want to talk about is the potential of the democratic revolution to
succeed, both in the Libyan case, will the revolution get rid of Gaddafi, but also in cases like Egypt and Tunisia.
Will we, five years from now, be talking about a democratic government in those countries? That is still a very open
question. I want to emphasize that. Yes, there has been a transition away from authoritarianism in
many of these countries. We do not yet know what we're transitioning to. We're in the middle of it,
as we speak. We can talk about, again, my off the cuff predictions, and where that might go, but it's a
prediction. It's just that. Then finally, I want to conclude with sort of some of the lessons
of these transitions and what I think it means for American foreign policy, and talking about Libya and the situation
that's going on as we speak. So to start out with, what do we know about the democratization process, about political
transitions and government? There are about five things that I think are important findings, that are particularly relevant
to thinking about what's going on in the Middle East. This is true writ large, and this is somewhat surprising and
counterintuitive to people. We think of democratization, well, "demo", rule by the people, popular uprising.
The truth of the matter is, historically, popular uprisings almost never succeed on their own, I mean literally almost
never. The key condition, that political scientists anyway, have identified are splits
within the elite. When an authoritarian, or single party system in a dictatorship, it can't just be that there are
people in the street. It has to be that there are some people within the power structure, within the power
elite, who decide that they're going to ally, or that they empathize with the people in the street.
Or, that they can get something better out of a future government if they transition away from the dictatorship.
It seems a little cynical. But again, if you look historically, people in the street, you have the power of
the democratic revolution. Yes, it's found in the people. It's often a necessary condition, although in a handful
of cases it's not been. For example, in the late 1980s, Paraguay moved from a military dictatorship to a democracy with
no street protests, just the general leading the country decided we should have elections.
And they had elections and became a democracy. You know, history, unfortunately is littered with many other
examples of the opposite, right, when people have been in the streets. They've been repressed.
You've seen no democratic transition. What's the difference between those that succeed and fail?
It's when some part of the dictatorship, whether it's the business elites or the military, whether it's somewhere in the
government coalition decides they're going to ally with the people, and they're going to create a split, which creates a
political opening. This happened in Egypt, and I'll come back to this more than once.
The minute the military said we are not going to shoot the protesters, those of us who were watching Egypt at the time,
about four days into the protests, the Egyptian military said they were not going to turn on the people, it was over.
Yes, it took longer and there was still uncertainty. But for those of us watching that, we knew Egypt was done at
that point, and the revolution was going to succeed. Because when the military will not protect the dictatorship,
something's bound to change. Something's going to happen. So that's one. Two, you've probably read a lot
or heard a lot about income, economic difficulties. That's important. I'll come back to that in a
minute. The one finding we thought we had, the one research finding we thought was very strong until
the last five or six years was that if you look through history, there had never been a country with a per capita GDP of
over 7500, a country where the average person makes over $7500 a year, that was a democracy and moved away, right, so we've used
this to think about well, what kind of income levels do states need to be at on a per capita basis.
So very poor countries, yes, there are some very poor democracies. Bangladesh, for example.
There are wealthy, high per capita dictatorships. Kuwait, right, $35,000-$39,000 a year per capita.
Far exceeds the United States. A dictatorship, right, monarchy. But nonetheless, if you become a democracy, and you have high
income, you usually stay a democracy. None of these regimes have that high of a per capita income.
Some of them are quite low. Although, this finding itself has had some doubt cast on it with the events of Thailand
three summers ago, when a military coup took place there. They clearly were above that threshold of per capita income,
and transitioned away from democracy. So income matters, and I'll come back to exactly it probably
mattered in Egypt. Third, I've already hinted at this, the role of the military. You have to understand who the
military is going to side with. What do we know about militaries and dictatorships? They're very cozy, obviously,
usually, with the regime, because they're used not for external protection only, they're for internal protection
as well. They're not just used to protect the borders. They're used to put down
revolts. So, the government needs to be able to rely on the militaries in dictatorships or single-party
states to put down the people if they rise up. That said, some militaries are more happy to do this, some are
less happy to do this. And a lot of things within that matter, right, what are their relationships?
What are the ethnic breakdowns within the military? What are the income breakdowns within the military?
How old is the officer corps? Initially, people were saying about Egypt, well, you know, what do the generals think?
What are the generals thinking about Mubarak and what's going to happen? That's the wrong question.
The question is, what are the midlevel officers in the military thinking. The generals are always going to
be bought in, right, the generals have been in the military their whole life. They're going to be pals with
the powers that be. Every military coup that happens, it's always the colonels.
It's the midlevel officers, right, that always undertake these things, for the most part. So, what's the odds that the
military keeps democratization going in Egypt? If you can tell me what the colonels are thinking right now,
I can make a pretty good prediction about that. But we don't know. I think that's what's
interesting about the situation. Fourth, ethnic division. This is one thing that really differentiates, say, Libya from
Egypt. Egypt, for the most part, is a largely homogenous society. Everyone speaks the same
language. Yes, there are Coptic Christians, especially in the south, that make up a percentage
of the population. But for the most part, Egyptians view themselves as Egyptians. Nasser's nationalist project,
Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of Egypt for many years, undertook a nationalist project to build the national pride in
being Egyptian. Not in being Muslim, not in being from a particular tribe, but in being Egyptian.
Gaddafi in Libya had done the exact opposite, anyway. He tried a national project. And from the outside, it
appeared he was trying to make everyone be Libyan. But in practice, what he had been doing for decades is paying
off different tribes, right, and sort of reinforcing these tribal rivalries in a way, to keep them worried about one another so no
one would challenge him. So if you don't trust the people in the village next to you because they're from a different
tribe, and Gaddafi says he'll protect you, right, you're not going to then go try to bite the hand that feeds you, right,
because he's protecting you from these bad people. And of course, then he goes over to the other village and says,
these are bad people over there, you need me to protect you. So he furthered these ethnic-- They weren't really ethnic, they
were more tribal differences within Libya in some ways. He used those strategically to stay in power.
Again, those divisions did not exist in the same way in Egypt, for example as they did in Libya.
But again, ethnic divisions matter. In highly ethnically divided societies, democracy is more
difficult. It's not impossible. Clear cases, like India, where you have deep divisions
ethnically and religiously in that country. Nonetheless, they're a successful democracy.
But on the whole, you just look across time and across space, across the map, ethnic divisions do not bode well for democracy
and democratization. Finally, something called the resource curse. This is sort of a fancy phrase
that political scientists have come up with, and a lot of research done on this in the last decade.
It turns out that states with a lot of oil, states with a lot of diamonds, states with a lot of natural gas, tend to have two
problems. Ironically, they have low economic growth usually, which is surprising.
You'd think that all this money is going into Saudi Arabia and Libya, but they oftentimes have very low economic growth.
They're also rarely democracies. I mean, think about the states that have a lot of petroleum resources.
For the most part they're dictatorships. With the exception of Norway, with the exception of Mexico,
although that's a recent change in the last decade. Most states are either dictatorships, single-party
states, or they're what I would call pseudo democracies, not very well institutionalized democracies, like Venezuela.
Why is this the case? Well, I won't bore you with the details, but a lot of economists and political scientists have
thought this through. The two things we know are that the oil money coming in, right, it doesn't get distributed
evenly. This is going into the pockets of the few, which leads to corruptions.
It's easier to keep corruption high if you're in a dictatorship. Corruption works better under
dictatorships than democracies. If you're from Illinois-- ( laughter ) Fair enough.
That may be news. So you tend to have authoritarianism, single-party states, again, kind of
reinforced by this oil. The other thing it does, is the reason it stops growth, again, not to get into the economics,
is as all this money comes in, you now have all this money to spend, think petrodollars in the '70s, or the Euro dollars that
went to Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. This actually exerts an upward pressure on your exchange rate.
So it turns out it makes your currency more expensive on markets, which makes your exports expensive, which means
the only part of your country that grows is the oil sector. No other manufacturing can help. Economists call this Dutch
Disease, because the Dutch, when they were selling so much oil from the Indies in the 1940s and '50s, were constantly in
recession, even though they had all this oil money coming in, because no one wanted to hold the Dutch currency and no one
could buy anything with Dutch currency, because things had become so expensive. So the bottom line is, believe
it or not, oil rentier states as we call them have bad experience with growth and they have bad experience with democracy.
So again, look at the countries we're talking about. Egypt, not heavily dependent on oil, and moving along.
Tunisia, not heavily dependent on oil, moving along. Libya kind of stuck. Bahrain, stuck.
Yemen, not much oil. Who knows where's that's going to go. Saudi Arabia, clearly not
moving anywhere at this point. I don't want to make too much of that, because I think there's so many other factors going on.
But I think at first blush, the amount of oil you have seems to be a pretty good predictor of how these revolutions have gone
so far. Okay, so how did this happen? Let's piece together a few of these events.
Where all of this really began was when a YouTube clip surfaced in Tunisia from a merchant, a very middle class merchant, who
had been denied a state job. So a piece of background here. In Tunisia and Egypt, in particular, those two countries,
if you have a college degree, and the only way you go to college is if you're middle to upper class in these societies,
you are pretty much guaranteed a job with the state. But the global recession of the last two years have put huge
pressures on the budgets of these governments so they couldn't hire people anymore. They didn't want to run a
deficit. They couldn't run a deficit. The IMF and the World Bank have told them they couldn't run
deficits to hire these college graduates anymore. So the college graduates were having to take menial jobs.
They were going into jobs that they felt were beneath them. So the street vendor decided to make the ultimate sacrifice.
He committed suicide by burning himself alive when he could not get a job, and felt like he did not have the standard of living
that he deserved. This is not the first instance this had happened. This had happened a couple of
times earlier in the year in Tunisia. But this is the first one that was caught on a cell phone
camera. It was immediately posted to YouTube. It went viral within Tunisia.
Tunisians started watching this. If this would've been someone incredibly poor, if this would've been an ethic minority,
this might have just been sort of well, you know, they're in a bad way, so of course we understand.
But this wasn't. This was someone very middle class, who should've had a good life ahead of them, you know,
who was well-educated. This really shook the Tunisians. Something else had really begun to come to light and had gone
viral in Tunisia at the same time. That was WikiLeaks. So how is WikiLeaks relevant
here? If you remember this massive release of diplomatic cables from the United States, one
thing that was contained in these was a lot of private communication between the ambassadors in some of these
countries, especially Tunisia, and Washington, DC. I was lucky enough to get a lot of these before they were taken
off, and they're fascinating reading. One of my colleagues said a lot of these FSOs are just, you
know, English majors from Yale, so they write very well. So, they're these fascinating narratives about what life was
like in Tunisia. What life is like in Tunisia, according to these WikiLeaks, was that if you were a member of
the government elite, you were very well off. You had cars. You had access to goods that
otherwise the average person didn't have, not the poor, the middle class. These governing elites
had access to a lifestyle that no one else had. It portrayed corruption as being absolutely rampant in Tunisia.
So, this was the context. So you have the WikiLeaks of, wait a minute, our government is incredibly corrupt.
This was kind of real, hard evidence about how corrupt they were, from someone else's perspective, from an American
perspective. Then you had this suicide. This was too much, right. This was when sort of the first
large-scale rioting began in Tunisia. The government at first didn't take it very seriously.
Then they went from not taking it seriously to way over reacting. This is a common thing you see
in almost all of these. They go from sort of patting on the head, okay, well we'll reform, fine, to we're going to
shoot everyone. That kind of whipsaw only angered people more, right, because it showed they weren't
serious in the first place about the reform. You got the uprising in Tunisia and Ben Ali is run out.
About the same time, obviously, next door in Egypt, you get the same thing. Corruption.
High corruption. High unemployment of the middle class, and a relatively educated population.
So here are the economic difficulties coming in. And this demonstration effect of well, they did it, why can't we?
Again, the other thing we tend to know about democratic revolutions is they often have a demonstration effect.
There have been two within our recent memories, right, there have been two of these. Eastern Europe in 1989, where
you had one country after the other shift. But also in the early 1970s, Portugal,
the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974, over King Salazar. Then next comes Spain, right?
Then next comes Greece. Then it spreads to Latin America and you get Brazil and Argentina, so you get this
series in the '70s. Samuel Huntington labeled it the beginning of the third wave of democracy.
So you get these demonstration effects, not uncommon. So that's Egypt. Then Bahrain, same thing.
Yemen, same thing. These have all had different outcomes, but the demonstration effect is clearly there.
That's what's been going on. In terms of the other underlying issues that have been kind of driving these, in Yemen, and
I'll talk about Yemen in a minute. And in Bahrain, it's also a Shia Sunni split within Islam.
The vast majority of these populations in all these countries are Islamic. They are Muslims.
But they are from different sects, they are either Shia, they are Sunni. In Syria, they are Aleoui, which
is kind of a partial sect of the Shia Islam. So, there also are underlying tensions, economic, social,
religious tensions between these groups as well. It's clearly the case in Bahrain.
Less so in Egypt. Less so in Tunisia. More so in Bahrain. More so in Yemen as well.
So you have this information about corruption. You have the demonstration effect.
You had these class cleavages. And again, to re-emphasize this, over reaction. Again, in almost all of these
states, you had an initial, right, remember Bahrain. Or you may not remember this, because it got lost.
The minute the revolution started happening in Tunisia and Egypt, the government of Bahrain comes out and says we're going
to cut, I forget the exact amount, but it was basically like a $5,000 check, right, the government of Bahrain says we're
going to give everyone $5,000. Stay in your homes. And they did. They gave everyone $5,000 to
stay in their homes, and it didn't work. But they were going to bribe their way into surviving and
trying to get through this. So they saw the handwriting on the wall. It just didn't work.
The final point. So this over reaction, and then they go from we're going to pay you $5,000 to we're going to
shoot you if you leave your home. Again, it's this whipsaw of well, you really weren't serious
in the first place, which makes us all the more angry at you, and is more likely to get us out in the street.
The final thing to emphasize, and I'm happy to talk about more in Q&A, these are not Islamic revolutions, right, this was the
great concern about Egypt. It was oh, it's the brotherhood, the Muslim Brotherhood is behind this.
They're going to create a new Iran. It's going to be terrible. They're going to spread, you
know, Islamic fundamentalism throughout the region. And rather than being an American ally, they're going to
be at Israel's doorstep tomorrow, tearing up the Camp David accords, and all hell's going to break loose.
That's not what this is about. The Muslim Brotherhood is just as clueless about this as most American observers were, as it
was going on. They were not behind this. This has been a middle class, largely liberal, largely
educated revolution. Yes, they brought more, and more people have sort of globbed on at this point, but this was not
an Islamic revolution. I'll make this point now, which is, you know, people have asked, kind of, why Obama so quickly
shifted to push Egypt, to push Tunisia, and why we're doing what we're doing in Libya. Do not underestimate the
importance of Al Qaeda in this, in the following sense. The narrative of Al Qaeda, the way Al Qaeda gets people to come
into the organization, is they have a narrative. Their narrative is as follows. The United States just wants oil
out of the region. That's all they want. They just want oil. And they're willing to kill you,
and keep you down, and keep these dictators in power, to keep pumping the oil out of the ground.
And look at what we've done in the past, right, as an organization. We helped get the Soviets out of
Afghanistan. And what happened right after the Soviets left Afghanistan? The Soviet Union fell apart.
And look, the United States comes into Iraq. We get active Iraq, they leave Iraq.
We're active in Afghanistan, now they're talking about leaving Afghanistan. So what's going to happen next?
The United States is going to fall as a super power. It's all, right, it's not accurate, right?
But it's a narrative. It's a narrative that actually hangs together a little bit. But it's that part about
supporting the dictatorships, right, the reason you are miserable is the United States is running around supporting
these dictatorships, because they want your oil, and they want to support Israel. So if you join us, we'll create
an Islamic revolution which will be the only way that we can get rid of these dictatorships, right?
So why haven't you heard from Al Qaeda in the last two months? Because what's happened on the ground has shown the Arab street
that this narrative that they developed for a decade is false. The United States has been supporting the democratic
revolutions. We've accepted the fact that this is going to create uncertainty, and frankly, could
come back to bite us ten years from now. Egypt could become a fundamentalist state.
It's probably not going to happen, but it's not out of the question. We're turning against some of
our allies and letting them go, and saying, look, you need to reform. These governments are falling
without Islamic revolutions. Islam has very little to do with some of these revolutions. So it's all just sort of, kind
of eating into this narrative that they have. The Obama administration, not to give them any particular credit
here, but you know, they saw this. They saw this as an opportunity to sort of undercut the social
currency of Al Qaeda in the region. Whether it works, we don't know. But I want to make that point
about the Islamic issue, because I think, don't underestimate that, at least in the minds of decision makers in Washington,
because they've thought about this as really a way to kind of stick it to Al Qaeda and stop that dimension of what's been
happening in the region. Okay, will these revolutions succeed? So now I'm going to go country
by country and talk a little bit about a couple of these. Will other countries follow, will these succeed?
Egypt. Again, this is where I say, I'm not going to review the history of what happened starting at
about January 25, but to my mind the important thing that's happened in Egypt in the last week was the election on Sunday.
If you noticed that in the news, there was a major election on Sunday. It had very high turn out.
The election was a referendum. It was a referendum on whether or not there would be constitutional changes in Egypt
to move the elections forward, to have elections on a much quicker pace. The elections were going to
happen in the fall. Now, they're talking much earlier elections. They also made changes to the
constitution. For example, putting term limits on the president, so you wouldn't get another Mubarak,
who could get term after term after term. They also made changes to some of the courts, etc.
This was approved, widely approved. It wasn't even close. That said, there was some
opposition to this. It's interesting to think about where the opposition to this came from.
The opposition to this movement came from the small liberal, small democratic movements. The Muslim Brotherhood supported
this. The National Democratic Party, which is Mubarak's old party, supported this.
Why? Because they're already formed as political parties. They already have campaign
wings. They already have infrastructure in the field to go campaign. None of these other groups who
led this revolution have parties yet. They haven't even been registered as political parties.
How are they going to compete in an election in a month? They're not, is the bottom line, they're not.
So this is why things like Mohamed ElBaradei, the person we saw get a lot of attention, as being one of the focal points
of this revolution, is heavily against this. In fact, he was stoned when he came out of the voting booth in
Cairo because he was against this. This was a very unpopular position because he says you're
not giving the opposition a true chance to join. This is just going to be, right, the National Democratic Party,
which he perceives as the military party, and the Brotherhood, are going to be the only competitive political
parties now. And the other person who is heavily against this is Amar Moussa, who we'll come back to.
Amar Moussa is an Egyptian who is the head of the Arab League right now, and would be the odds-on favorite, if you were to
hold an election for president in Egypt today. Most people think he would be the odds-on favorite to win that
election. He's an interesting figure. We're going to come back to him about Libya.
So, that's where it's at. There's going to be elections. There's still constitutional reform going on.
My prediction on Egypt is that in the end, at least in the short term, short to medium term, it will look a lot like
Turkey, right, where you have elections, you have competitive elections. You have, for the most part, a
democratic society, but you have the military. You have the military sitting there.
And you know, the history of Turkey is, since the time of Ataturk, it's been a secular, democratic society, one in which
the military has intervened, 1960, 1971, 1980, ostensibly 1991. They didn't call it a coup, but
it was. About every ten years, the military comes in, they arrest everyone in parliament.
They take the Islamists out. They say, you can't serve anymore, and they hold elections a year later.
Then they're back to a democracy again. They clean house about every ten years.
So something like that would not surprise me in Egypt, where you get the military just sort of watching over things to make
sure the Brotherhood doesn't get too strong, to make sure the Islamist parties don't come to power, etc.
That's Egypt. Again, if you have questions about any of these countries, we'll talk about them more
in depth. Bahrain. Bahrain is a fascinating case. It's very unclear to me that
much of anything is going to change in Bahrain. You know, the demands of the Bahrainians were not so much
that the monarch leave, that the king leave, they just wanted more free elections. They wanted reform.
What's feeding the dissent in Bahrain is that you've got an enormous ethnic split. The king in Bahrain is a Sunni,
and his family, kind of the power elite in Bahrain are Sunni. But the majority of the country
are Shia. The interesting thing here, you talk about social media and the power of WikiLeaks, etc.,
Tom Friedman pointed out, in a real interesting column about a month ago, that one thing that has fed the dissatisfaction in
Bahrain and really brought this to a head was Google Maps. That Bahrain allowed Google Maps to be viewed in Bahrain, what
difference does that make? What you can see on Google Maps, if you get on a low enough resolution, right, is who owns
what land, and where fences are drawn on land. What the Shia quickly figured out in Bahrain was that they
didn't own any of the good land on Google Maps. Like, all the terrible land they noticed were the Shia
neighborhoods. All the valuable land, they noticed, were the Sunni neighborhoods.
They had never sort of put all of that together before. This was a very kind of in your face way for them to see.
Like, whenever new land was parceled out, whenever new land was given a transfer or sold by the state, it always ended up in
Sunni hands. This caused a tremendous amount of dissatisfaction in the Shia community, who has always felt
sort of under the thumb of the Sunni minority government there. So you know, again, this is one of these issues where a week and
a half ago, I'd have said 50-50, right, the Bahrain does something. The son of the king is, I would
argue, moderately reformist. So if you recall Bahrain, they tried to pay them off. It didn't work.
They started shooting them, and then they backed off, and they allowed them to occupy Pearl Square.
That was at the behest of the son. He said, look, just let them there.
Don't shoot them. Give them a chance, and then we'll see. Because again, his perception,
they didn't want the fall of the monarchy, they just wanted some reform. They wanted more voting.
So what then happens is the demanders keep upping their demands. They up their demands.
They stay in the street. The government tries to give them a little bit. Then the government, the king,
starts getting a little bit nervous that maybe he's opened a can of worms, or that he can't get back together.
What you had last week was the joint intervention of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia into Bahrain.
This was a fascinating event. This did not get much attention. This did not get a lot of attention in the media, because
Japan and the terrible humanitarian disaster in Japan was taking place at the exact same time.
But what happens, right, is the decision by Bahrainians asked the Saudis to intervene on their behalf.
Now, the Saudis weren't doing much shooting. At least from what I could tell, the Saudis weren't doing a lot
of the shooting, but they were there on backup in case things got ugly. So the Bahrainian military goes
in, they clear out Pearl Square. They arrest people. They knock down the monument, right, which was built by the
government. They knocked down the monument to try to remove it as this place for people to rally
around. So in that regard, you know, that has kind of undercut the revolution at this point, which
is why I say now I'd put it at much lower odds that it will succeed. Maybe there will be some reform
in Bahrain, but at this point, it looks as it would have to become violent for it to succeed.
And of course, what are the two interesting factors about Bahrain? One, there's an enormously large
American Airbase there, which we value as a huge listening post and operating forward deployment station in the Middle East,
which we value, which has led to less, I would argue less criticism of the Bahrainian government than you would
otherwise see. And two, the Saudi intervention. It's clear now whose side the Bahrainians are going to take.
It's going to be the Saudis. It's going to be the Sunnis. So, my somewhat bold and crazy prediction on this--
This angered Iran. This angered Iran immensely, because Iran, which is Shia, views the Bahrainian Shia
population as being under the thumb of the Sunnis, as being under a minority government. In the last few days, Bahrain
expelled the Iranian diplomats, Iran has expelled the Bahrainian diplomats. I don't think this is going to
go anywhere, but I will tell you, I can almost promise you that within the next six months to a year, there will be a major
terrorist attack, probably on Saudi soil, and it will be able to be directly tied back to the Iranians.
They are not going to let this go. They are angry as hell that Saudi helped the Bahrainians do
this. They're not going to do it overtly. But as long as Ahmadinejad is in
power, and we'll talk about whether Iran could be on the list of revolutions, they will do something to take their pound
of flesh out of the Saudis. I fear it's going to be sort of a major terrorist attack in that country.
Okay, Yemen. Yemen is a mess. I tell my students, Yemen is a basket case country.
It's one of these countries that probably shouldn't even be a country. It should be multiple countries.
And it was multiple countries for quite some time. It was North and South Yemen. North Yemen was a Marxist Soviet
ally throughout the Cold War. South Yemen was a slightly more pro-Western ally. There have been proxy wars
fought in Yemen. The Saudis fought the Egyptians in Yemen for several years. Nasser fought the Saud family
within Yemen. There is a big Al Qaeda presence in Yemen. And again, WikiLeaks plays a
role here, right, the president of Yemen had been telling the people, the Yemenese military are going out and attacking Al
Qaeda, right, then what was revealed in the WikiLeaks? It wasn't them, it was the CIA that's been doing it the whole
time. He out and out said there are these cables that he says, oh, I've just been lying to my
public the whole time, telling them it was us, but really it's been the CIA. This comes to light and then the
Yemeni people realize this, and they are not happy about it. You still have a southern separatist movement.
You have a separatist movement to try to create another country again. You have a movement in the
north. There are Shia that live in the north on the Saudi border. Saudi Arabia intervened two
years ago militarily. Saudi, about every three months, will bomb the hell out of North Yemen, because these Shia carry
out cross border attacks into Saudi Arabia, and they've killed, probably about 200-300 Saudi troops in the last decade,
just sort or carrying out these bombing raids. So then Saudi Arabia will bomb Yemen.
The Yemenese government has tried to put this down. They've been unable to. It's called the Houthi Rebellion
after the Shia leader of the group, al-Houthi. So, you've got the Houthi rebellion, you've got Al Qaeda,
you've got separatist movements, right, and so it's just how much more could you put on the plate of a country.
Then of course, you've got the US coming in saying, do something about Al Qaeda. As you know, in the last week,
there was a major crackdown. At least 40 Yemenis were killed in a public square. They were shot by the military.
The Yemeni president has dismissed his government. He's asked them to leave. He wants elections.
He's promised to leave, but not for some time. He wants to make sure there's an orderly transition.
And we'll see if he remains. We'll see if actually he can last for a long enough time. Saleh fired the cabinet.
We'll see if there are going to be new elections. He may decide not to hold elections at all.
You know, this is a guy who's been in control for 30 years. Now, after Mubarak is gone, he's been one of the longest running
leaders in the Arab world. But Yemen, I think, has a much higher likelihood to succeed. What it looks like after that,
I don't know. Quickly, a couple other cases. Then I want to talk about Libya and give you guys a chance to
ask some questions. I'll skip Jordan and Morocco. If you want know about Jordan and Morocco, we can talk.
But not much of a chance, in my opinion. Syria. So, Syria.
If you followed the news in the last 48-72 hours, there have been increasing uprisings in Syria in Daraa, which is a city
that is on the Jordan border in the south of Syria. This is an area within that is heavily tribal.
That is, sort of the main allegiances are not to the Syrian state, but rather to different tribes in the area.
Tribes that the Assad regime, both the current Assad regime and his father previous, had bought off and had sort of
co-opted into the government. Again, the background you need to know about Saudi Arabia is that it is ruled by a minority,
the Aleoui, who are largely based in the north around --, are a Shia minority. They're even a minority within
the Shia community, who have run the country since Assad came to power in 1970, so again, a minority government ruling over
majorities of Sunni. Hafez al-Assad, the father of the current President Assad, was incredibly brutal.
He was an incredibly brutal dictator. He came to power in 1970 in what was called the National
Correction. They didn't call it a coup, they called it the National Correction.
After there had been many coups. Syria, in the '60s, was infamous for about every two or three years having a military coup.
Lots of uncertainty between the Ba'athists there, the Shia, the Aleoui, the Sunni. You had this fight between sort
of the nationalist state building camp of the Ba'athists, you know, some Islamic fundamentalism, although not
much at that point. You know, between the late '50s and early '60s, Syria did not exist as a country.
If you remember this, Syria actually turned its sovereignty over to Egypt for three years. Syria was part of Egypt for
three years when Nasser was in power. They lost their UN vote, they were a province of Egypt.
You get a revolt in '63 that undoes this. So tremendous instability. Assad comes in, puts it down.
Puts people down. Incredibly brutal suppression. The biggest instance of this, and I'm telling you this because
there's this current sense in the media that oh, well, there are lots of people protesting in Syria.
This is probably going to go somewhere. If history is any guide, unfortunately, incredibly sad to
say, most of these people are going to end up dead. In 1982, in Hama, if you've read Tom Friedman's book "From Beirut
to Jerusalem," he's got a whole chapter on Hama. This was a massive uprising led by the Islam Brotherhood
in Hama. They killed about a thousand Syrian Army officers, Ba'athist party figures in this town.
And in response, Hafez al-Assad just essentially bombed it to rubble, the whole thing, and then encircled it and starved
the rest of them to death. It's estimated that anywhere between 10,000-25,000 civilians died in about a one-month period
in Hama, in 1982. This is a regime that is not at all shy about using incredible amounts of military force and
killing indiscriminately, leveling entire villages, essentially, if need be. His son may be more enlightened,
may be different, but so far it's not clear why that would be the case to me. So I'm not hopeful about Syria.
Again, hopefully I will be proved wrong. And of course, the other link to Syria is of course, they're
heavily allied with Iran, at least politically allied with Iran. You know, who then, so then you
think about well, what about Iran? Would a change of government in Iran happen or have any effect
on the region. Remember, just two summers ago, we were talking about the Green Revolution, and the uprising
that happened in Iran, for actually some of the same reasons. Widespread unemployment amongst
the middle class, widespread unemployment amongst the youth. The other thing you have to know about many of these countries,
Iran is the classic example of this. Well over half of the population of Iran is under 30.
It is a young country. Most of these countries are young. The median age in Yemen,
I think, is something like 27. These are incredibly young countries. In Iran, that's important.
How has the cleric stayed in power? Well, how did the clerics come to power initially?
If you remember the '79 revolution, well, a lot of it was about the Shah, and the unpopularity of the Shah, and
many of the abuses, frankly, that had happened under the Shah's regime. But remember '53, remember
Mohammad Mossodaq in '53, and the fact that the CIA essentially helped keep the Shah in power in 1953, so that's why
the embassy was stormed in '79, if you remember that incident in US history. The embassy was held for 444
days, because in 1953, the embassy had been the nerve center for a coup, a military coup, that got rid of a civilian
president and brought the Shah back to power. They weren't going to let that happen again.
Khomeini says we're not going to let that happen again. The students take over the embassy to make sure America is
not up to any funny business. So that's been. But the '79 revolution has been this revolution that has sort of
advanced, you know, people power in Iran. But remember, if half your population is under 30, they
don't remember this. They weren't alive then. They sure the heck don't remember Mohammad Mossodaq.
They also don't remember the Ayatollah. They don't remember the Shah. Right, they don't have any of
these historical memories. That has been a large part of the basis of the power. Some of the basis of power of
this regime has been well, if you don't have us, you're going to get some western puppet regime.
Well, you've got a lot of young people in Iran now saying we wouldn't mind a western puppet regime, right, maybe they'd give
us jobs. Or that we'd trade with them, we could buy Levi's. There's an island off the coast
of Iran that Iran actually lets some of the wealthy folks go to and shop in Ikea. There's an Ikea there.
It's like the busiest Ikea in the world, right, because when these folks get out of Iran, it's like we've got to got to
Ikea, we've got to get stuff. So you know, this is a society that, you know, despite what you read, death to America, etc.,
this is a society that the average person, especially under 30, they have no hatred of the United States.
They may not want to be a US ally, they may still want to develop nuclear weapons, but they have no desire to run out
and burn the American flag, that's just not something. So, is there a chance that this regime will fall?
In '09, it obviously cracked down heavily on protesters. There have been sort of fits and starts of protests over the last
two months in Iran haven't really gone anywhere. We'll see. I don't think it's going to go
anywhere in the short term. In the medium term, and this is a prediction I always make to my students, I think, you know, I
tell my students within the next ten to 15 years, I think you will see change. I don't know if it will be
democratic change, but you will see regime change in Iran. The clerics, if you remember from 2009, the repression,
right, it was young people in the streets, and it was sort of the Secret Service and the neighborhood gangs that the
clerics had set up. These were all people who remember '79. These were 50+.
And eventually, the clerics, who are all, you know, more advanced in age, they've got to bring in new blood, right, so the
Khatamis, you know, the reformers, right, in the clerical ranks are all younger. Eventually, they're going to
take over unless they sort of invent new clerics and surpass them in the pecking order, or are just incredibly careful
about who they let move up the pecking order to become the next grand Ayatollah. You know, the rise to Ayatollah
is eventually going to be all the people in those mid to lower ranks. It's just like the military.
Who are the officers, right, who are the colonels. Who are the mid-level clerics in Iran?
Well, a lot of them are the reformers. Now, again, who knows what could happen to them.
The military is important in Iran, too, and they're largely in bed with Ahmadinejad at this point.
That could change. But I'm actually in medium term, hopeful for Iran. Not in the short term, but
certainly in the medium term. Okay, so let's come back to Libya. We'll end with Libya.
So, let me say a bit about, well, I talked a little bit about Gaddafi's government strategy.
Let's fast forward and give you my impression of what's been happening in the last month in Libya.
This Libyan rebellion broke out and very much surprised both Gaddafi and the west, as to the speed with which it quickly
undermined the Gaddafi regime. You got a lot of very early defections from the Libyan military, from the Libyan elite,
especially in ethnic groups or kinship groups that were not tied to Gaddafi. They quickly said, Gaddafi never
was one of us. We hate him. Let's move on. That took everyone by surprise.
Gaddafi so much so that he was just unable to defend against it. What does Gaddafi have?
Of course, he has money. So he used a lot of this money to do a couple of things. He essentially bribed, continue
to bribe some of the tribes that were sort of on the fence. Then he also used a bunch of money to go out to places like
Mali, and recruit ethnic groups who were disaffected, the Tuaregs, for example, which he has a long history with, funding
their rebellion in Mali or Niger. I'm being very careful. I see Professor Young in the
audience, who is probably the most foundational scholar of African politics in the country, so I have to be careful.
So, I'm going to keep looking at him to make sure he's nodding. So, the Tuaregs, right, so, let me give you an example.
The Tuaregs in Mali have always been disaffected, largely been disaffected politically. The per capita income of Mali is
$1200 a year. Over the last few weeks, Gaddafi has been sending in emissaries with rolls of $5,000, saying
come fight for me, here's $5,000, right, as a signing bonus. Then we'll pay you a salary
later. That's five times their annual income, so of course. Many of these folks have
training. They fought in rebellions there. In the '60s, he set up what was called the Arab Legion, trying
to recruit fighters, and then he would send them abroad to help in revolutions, whether it was in Chad or Mali, or try to
influence politics in Sudan. His footprint was large in these conflicts in the region. So these are mercenaries.
They get used as mercenaries. So he re-stockpiles with mercenaries. He kind of reconfigures his
forces, and then starts to turn the tide. Meanwhile, the west is debating, do we do a no fly zone, do we
help the rebels? What do we do? We decide Gaddafi's time is over.
He's becoming increasingly intransigent, and we think crazy. And so, we turn against him, but
then, right, he gets the momentum, starts pushing back, and frankly, is within perhaps a week to two weeks of crushing
the revolt, I would say. Then you get the intervention, you get the no fly zone. And now the attempt to reverse
the momentum back against Gaddafi. Let me make a couple points and then I'll stop.
What did the United States and the western allies expect to happen? Their best hope was that the
no fly zone and attacking these targets, attacking these military columns of Gaddafi, would immediately reverse the
momentum, right, that this would inspire the revolution again, that they would counter attack, and that you would get a tipping
point, right, you would get more and more people who were sort of on the fence, we support Gaddafi, we do not, okay, well,
the west clearly doesn't like Gaddafi, so we'll abandon Gaddafi, too. That hasn't happened yet, right,
and in fact, the disappointing thing that's been happening the last 24 hours is the rebels can't seem to get it together to
counter attack very effectively. It will take time. The French Foreign Minister today had a good line, right,
which was that wars are not won and lost in a 24-hour period, right, I mean, like this is going to take days, or weeks,
right, for this to really get fleshed out. The question is does the west, does the UN, does the United
States have the wherewith all to stay involved and bombing for that long? That's an open question.
But that's what they thought would happen, that this would reverse quickly, you'd get the fall of Gaddafi.
Second thing, the Arab League and Amar Moussa, the president of the Arab League, approved this.
That was the switch for the Obama administration, right. Obama had said we're not going to do a no fly zone, and then he
changed his mind. Why did he change his mind? The perception of the White House is we did not want to get
involved in a third war against a Muslim country, right, just period. That is not good, right, just
from a pure public relations perspective. Right, you're going to go bomb the hell out of a third
Muslim country in, you know, seven years, not good. But then the Arab League, over the last weekend, passes this
resolution saying, please do this. We want you to do this. Why did the Arab League do this?
The Arab League and Moussa pushed this, because they all hate Gaddafi, right. What did we just talk about?
Gaddafi has funded revolutions. He's sent mercenaries. He's, you know, undertaken, you know, funding of opposition
parties in many of these countries. None of these guys have any love loss for Gaddafi.
They would like nothing more-- And yes, you see all these pictures of the Arab leaders with him, you know, in his disco
suits and his military suits, right, and it's seeming like this love fest. They hate him.
They don't like him. They'd love to see him gone. He has been a pain in their side for 30 years.
So, --, you did, the non-cynical part, there was this spectacle of the humanitarian disaster, right, I mean, once the--
I think this mattered both for the UN, and for the Arab League, and frankly for the United States, you know, Gaddafi was
moving to encircle Benghazi. He's encircled Misrata, right. And if you truly believe that Gaddafi has sort of lost it,
really lost it at this point, and him saying if you don't surrender, we're going to crush everyone, right, this is another
Hama, right, this is another 25,000 dead in a couple of weeks. What is the international
community always kvetching about over the last decade? Why didn't we do anything in Rwanda?
Why did we take so long to go into Bosnia? Why did we take so long to go into Somalia?
All these mass killings where no one did anything, and then everyone gets criticized for not doing anything.
Well, we're doing something now, right, and that's the counter factual, right, and you have to wrestle with that.
You have to wrestle with that question. Whether you're for or against this, you have to wrestle with
the fact that, would you have been happy letting Gaddafi crush the revolution and going and killing 25,000-50,000 people
in a week, right. That's kind of the decision they made. And yes, this bombing will kill
civilians. And it could lead to huge problems down the road. But that's the opposite
argument, is this had humanitarian disaster, mass killing, genocide, if you want to go that far, written all over
it. And maybe it wouldn't have happened. Maybe Gaddafi would've come to
his senses. Maybe it was just a threat. Maybe he was just rattling his saber.
But you have to think about, that's a possibility. That's a real possibility. Okay, so what's the goal?
Here's the million dollar question. Obama is now under increasing pressure to say what's the goal.
The goal is very straightforward. Get rid of Gaddafi. They can paper it up any way
they want, but they want to undercut Gaddafi's military forces enough so that the revolution will succeed, right,
we want this revolt to happen. There are a lot of reasons why this could be dangerous, a lot of reasons.
I'm happy to talk about those. But I think that is kind of the underlying dynamics of what's going on.
We want to get rid of Gaddafi. I think where you're seeing differences between the EU and the United States is how
aggressive we're going to be in trying to achieve that goal over the next weeks or months. Okay, I've talked way too long.
So, I apologize for that. ( applause )