The Arab Winter

The events we have seen in Egypt and a swatch of other countries that is popularly called the Arab Spring is viewed as a disappointment by those who embrace the Liberal Democratic (or Neoliberal democratic) perspective across the world. My friend Mohamed Zeeshan, such a person from India, on his blog commented about the fate of the Arab Spring:

There are reasons why the Arab Spring didn't quite work out as well as it should have. The foremost reason is the goal of the Spring itself. In the Information Age where people from all parts of the world are connected with each other merely by the click of a button, ideas spread fast. Democracy was one such idea that traveled to places it had never been to. What makes democracy so attractive to the millennium youth is the fact that it is the only political system under which one has the power to script his own destiny, no matter who his father is or how much gold he possesses. It delivers power to the people and denies unilateral control to the hands of any individual, thereby making society a more level playfield and creating a whole world of untold opportunities. Well, that's in the ideal.

I Respect Mohamed as a young aspiring scholar but his youthful observance mistook the Arab Spring for something new, and mistook it as a sea change in the broader Dar Al Islam for a positive political change. He is hardly alone in this but the Arab Spring is not a spring but is in fact a fall, and we are coming onto the dawn of an Arab Winter.

One begins to see it as a winter when we began to follow the Breadcrumbs of the conflict between those who seek a broad coalition democracy (which ends up becoming pluralistic and free) and those countries like Iran and the Patron of many of these countries Russia which has pioneered small coalition democracies (where outcomes are democratically achieved but they are achieved by focusing on a smaller subset of the population)

You can look back at Ahmadinejad and his two elections: The monitors show no irregularities but you have areas where 90 percent of the population turns out for one candidate. This irregularities show a potamkin sort of democracy. We look at the Hamas electoral victory in 2006, the Iraqi Elections where Pro-Iran and Pro-Islamist candidates became players in the system, We look at Putin's Presidential Terms ending so he moves all the powers to the Prime Minister's office and when the laws are changed he moves all the powers back to the Presidency. We look at the actions of Hugo Chavez as well as his knock offs in Latin America who are following the same trend.

These Autocrats learned what Democracy really means:

The term originates from the Greek δημοκρατία (dēmokratía) "rule of the people", which was coined from δῆμος (dêmos) "people" and κράτος (kratos) "power" or "rule" in the 5th century BCE to denote the political systems then existing in Greek city-states, notably Athens; the term is an antonym to ἀριστοκρατία (aristocratie) "rule of an elite".

The greeks refer to who rules, and not who governs. As governance and rule are very different things as some of the latest issues with the IRS in the united States shows us. The civil society and those features of it that touch the state are how we are governed. The Code Inspector besets the businessman and homeowner with the Governance of the State. The City Councilman rarely meddles in how the building code is set up unless their are extreme issues (Such as Hurricanes or Tornados). This rule in turn is developed into governance. Or the Rule of Law vs the Law of Rules.

In the middle east a civil society is mostly non existent. So those at the top of the political order are not constrained by the needs of shop keepers to keep their business orderly. And what elements of a civil society DO exist are those that are advocating the excesses of the Arab Spring from the power of the state now.

The Arab Spring didn't fail: It did what the people pushing for it on the ground (who are not the Middle Eastern and other Neo-Liberals) wanted. It gave them the state where they had the political power to achieve their dreams

The Russian Standoff in Damascus

In this chess game The Russians are playing Chicken.

If it does nothing else, the recent Syria summit arranged by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry formally marked the re-emergence of Russia as a power in the Middle East, after a hiatus of more than 20 years. Yet Moscow’s objectives today are vastly different. Russia is out to raise the stakes for U.S. military intervention, which it sees as destabilizing for the world order; to minimize the impact of Islamist radicalism and extremism born out of the Arab Spring; and to try to find political solutions to a host of issues, from the civil war in Syria to Iran’s nuclear issue to post-American Afghanistan.

Dear Tablet Magazine: Your ideas are terrible and you should stop forming them into words.

The Russians have not played as large a roll int he middle east as they have during the cold war in the last 20 years, which is true, because Russians over the last 20 years have had bigger fish to fry. They have had their attempt to use oil and gas diplomacy to try to push their will on the good folks of the EU.

But where they see the play in Syria as a play of power, it is a play that comes from Weakness.

During the George W Bush Years The Moscow-Bejing Axis (called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization) began to form an alternative to the Washington Consensus on Foreign policy. The Washington Consensus didn't just form because the US was the cock of the walk after World War II (But that helped) it formed because a lot of the global interests of the NATO Powers and later the Asian Developed powers were very similar. Only during the 80s did we see Authoritarian Capitalist regimes crop up did we begin to see some friction against the Hypothesis.

This play came out in one of my best moments on twitter: Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter said that Susan Rice was going to get the UN Security Council to come down hard on Syria. I guffawed and bet her that would not happen (and I was right). Allowing Syria to deal with an internal issue was within the Conservative Westphalian wheelhouse of the SCO.

But China and Russia underestimated the Paradox of the Security Council. When the Communist Interests were united against western interests in a regional conflict it didn't stop the conflict: It just kept the major players out of the conflict until things begun to get out of hand (Bosnia and Vietnam are great examples, Korea happened because of the chaos involving China). The Western Powers have a domestic political interest that is influenced by the world they see on their cable news and on their Internets ( which is a series of tubes). This Pressure even in times of Austerity brings rise to the Western Consensus. Russia is not talking with John Kerry because they are a power in the Syria mess: They are at the table with John Kerry because this situation is getting out of control.

Russia and China are both Status Quo powers. They ally with those countries that promote their internal political status quos and allow them to move the ball a few yards forward. Unfortunately for Russia and China some times you end up on 3rd and 9 and your opposition forms a prevent defense. The only way for Russia and China to move the ball forward is either war, or to give up this drive and let Assad get what he deserves.

But the problem is if Assad gets what he deserves, what will happen in Iran if their regime gets whats coming to it? Its the same Paradox the US is in with Israel and Taiwan. If we let those countries fall it changes the expectations across the board with our allies. so we both get backed into a corner: and that's how wars start.

And if the Islamist "Rebels" win in Syria after winning in the Palestinian Territories, Tunisia, Egypt, and other places: Will these same elements within Russia become animated and think they can have their own Arab Spring?

The War on the First Amendment Continues

So our President and his administration continues their assault on our constitution and on the relationship between the state and the citizen.

Special speakers for the event will be Bill Killian, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, and Kenneth Moore, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Knoxville Division.

Sponsor of the event is the American Muslim Advisory Council of Tennessee — a 15-member board formed two years ago when the General Assembly was considering passing legislation that would restrict those who worship Sharia Law, which is followed by Muslims.

Killian and Moore will provide input on how civil rights can be violated by those who post inflammatory documents targeted at Muslims on social media.

This is how policies change. Small little interpretations are spoken by US Attorneys and people in a place of political power, and they become part of the background discussion of the living constitution. As speech takes on a new form speech is not respected as the right of all free men (who are the sovereigns of the country) but a right doled out by the state that identifies it as the new sovereign. Eventually these ideas form a doctrine that everyone accepts.

But just as with the famous broccoli doctrine question we are faced with a parallel on the most fundamental of all constitutional rights. If what some weirdo in his pajama's can post on the internet so long as it does not promote -criminal- conduct, what speech can the state not stop online or offline?

Their was a line drawn in the sand (called the Brandenburg test)

The Brandenburg test (also known as the imminent lawless action test)

The three distinct elements of this test (intent, imminence, and likelihood) have distinct precedential lineages.

Judge Learned Hand was possibly the first judge to advocate the intent standard, in Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, 244 F. 535 (S.D.N.Y. 1917), reasoning that "[i]f one stops short of urging upon others that it is their duty or their interest to resist the law, it seems to me one should not be held to have attempted to cause its violation." The Brandenburg intent standard is more speech-protective than Hand's formulation, which contained no temporal element.

The imminence element was a departure from earlier rulings. Brandenburg did not explicitly overrule the bad tendency test, but it appears that after "Brandenburg", the test is de facto overruled. The "Brandenburg" test effectively made the time element of the clear and present danger test more defined and more rigorous.

If a post on facebook that is rude, crude, inappropriate, and wrong: Does it meet this clear standard of law to cross the line into violence. Short of the sort of conduct that people only commit in isolated and hidden parts of the internet there is no speech on the internet that meets this standard of law.

Killian referred to a Facebook posting made by Coffee County Commissioner Barry West that showed a picture of a man pointing a double-barreled shotgun at a camera lens with the caption saying, “How to Wink at a Muslim.”

Killian said he and Moore had discussed the issue.

“If a Muslim had posted ‘How to Wink at a Christian,’ could you imagine what would have happened?” he said. “We need to educate people about Muslims and their civil rights, and as long as we’re here, they’re going to be protected.”

Except their are innumerable posts of that sort of nature by Muslims on Facebook and other places on the internet. And when confronted with such conduct in the past we have British law enforcement officers saying that they can't monitor every crazy post by a Muslim Imam on the internet.

So instead of monitoring the law abiding, we should monitor the law breaking