Nato disaster in Libya

I haven't updated this blog in more than a month, yet so much has happened since Mubarak stepped down. Protests have sprung up almost all over the Arab world, most notably in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, and of course Libya. Although the people in Benghazi went on the street thanking Obama and the UN when the Security Council decided to sanction foreign intervention, I strongly wonder if they'll still have the same euphoric attitude towards Nato after the events in the past two days. Nato has seemed increasingly incompetent ever since the US relinquished command, and the accidental airstrike and killing of the "rebels" (I strongly disagree with this moniker, since it seems to convey that the uprising in eastern Libya is illegitimate) has only shown the lack of coherence even within the organization, not to mention communication with the civilian command in Benghazi. In a rapid sequence of contradictions, Nato's Russell Harding first denied the opposition commander Abdelfatah Yunis' claims that Nato had already apologized for the accident, and less than a day later was again contradicted by an apology from another Nato commander. Okay, so maybe Nato is really choosing its targets carefully, but if they really aren't doing everything they can in Misrata, this very public PR mishap will only sow the seeds for future resentment against the West – and considering that the EU and US have already been accused of choosing targets for intervention (yes in Libya, no in Bahrain and Syria, and plainly ignorant of events in Côte d'Ivoire), the West is simply finding itself dragged in a losing battle for a good reputation in the Middle East.

2011 = 1989

At least this seems to be the case. After the toppling of long-standing regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, in the past few days international news has also been abuzz with unrest and sometimes violent protests in Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Algeria, if not even more countries. Egypt has of course been the biggest prize so far; although Tunisia was the one that started it all, news of the latest political developments have largely been overshadowed by the events in Egypt, and the only Tunisian event that has seemed to warrant significant international attention was the sudden influx of refugees into Italian territory. Further developments demand just as much attention as Egypt, however: Jordan is a crucial player in Arab-Israeli peace, just as Egypt has long been (the Mubarak regime was tolerated by the West and Israel precisely because it held an at the time seemingly tentative peace deal with Egypt); stability in Yemen has consequences in the fight against al-Qaeda extremism, as does the American-shattered Iraq which has only just formed a new government and has long been struggling to get on its feet. Libya's Gaddafi has been in power more than 40 years, longer than any autocratic leader in the Middle East, and like Algeria's Bouteflika has been running the country as a police state under the false pretense of popular representation. Whether protests in these countries can bear fruit remains to be seen: the images of Iran's brutal crackdown of the 2009 protests still loom fresh, and the same heavy-handed tactics have appeared once again under Ahmadinejad, and also in Libya and Algeria. Moreover, rich Gulf countries have been able to stifle dissent by buying out their people with large subsidies, as Kuwait and Bahrain have. But if the power of Twitter and Facebook is to be believed, things are far from reaching their boiling point.