With few people paying attention, Tunisia, birth place of Arab Spring, has successful parliament elections this week. The Arab Spring has fizzled out in rest of the Middle East, but is still alive and thriving in Tunisia. The elections in Tunisia have some lessons for other Muslim countries.

In this week’s elections, the main Islamist party, Ennahda, was defeated by the liberal and secular party, Nida Tunis. The Islamist party did not deliver on its promises. especially fight against terrorism, during its 3 year rule. The liberals and secularists in Egypt should have shown some foresight and wait till the next elections to defeat Muslim Brotherhood. Unfortunately they chose the short cut, and now they are facing the most brutal military dictatorship in history. Military rule is never the answer to the problems of a country.

The Islamists in Tunisia were also politically wiser than Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and accommodated Liberal Party’s views during their rule. Before this week’s elections, the Islamist Party announced that they will not field any candidate for President in November elections. It was to accommodate the liberals in ruling the country.

The Islamist party has conceded defeat and promised to work with Nida Tunis to build the country. The supporters of Ennahda Party celebrated outside its headquarters what they called ‘Victory for all Tunisians”. Even in defeat they were happy that Tunisia is on the road to democracy. I hope leaders in Pakistan can learn some lesson also, and show some maturity to accept defeat gracefully and help to build the country as a loyal opposition.  

During the current UN general assembly session, ironically President Obama made sure that he has a meeting with Dictator General Sissi of Egypt, but he did not meet with President of Tunisia, the only success story of Arab Spring. Perhaps Tunisia is lucky in this regard, because anywhere we Americans got involved, the results were not promising.    

Fayyaz

There was some hope that Mr. Modi , after a landslide victory, will be a changed man and will lead India into a great Asian Nation, but early indications are that his rule may not be any different than his rule in Gujrat as a Chief Minister. Some excerpts from article by Pankaj Mishra in NYT;

“Narendra Modi, India’s new prime minister and main ideologue of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, is stoking old Hindu rage-and-shame over what he calls more than a thousand years of slavery under Muslim and British rule. Earlier this month, while India and Pakistan were engaging in their heaviest fighting in over a decade, Mr. Modi claimed that the “enemy” was now “screaming.”

“This is just the kind of retrograde 1920s-style nationalist dogma that is making a big comeback in India, especially since last year, when Mr. Modi, a close ally of Mr. Abe, overcame the taint of various suspected crimes to launch his bid for supreme power. Interestingly, it is not the R.S.S.’s khaki-shorts-wearing volunteers but rather quasi-Westernized Indians in the corporate-owned media and mysteriously well-funded think tanks, magazines and websites who have provided the ambient chorus for Mr. Modi’s ascent to respectability.”

“India’s recent economic travails and diminished international standing have frustrated these rising Indians’ sense of entitlement, provoking them to lash out at such handy scapegoats as “racist” and “Orientalist” Westerners and Indian libtards and sepoys. Typical of their ersatz nativism is a book entitled “The New Clash of Civilizations,” which gleefully heralds India’s hegemony worldwide. It was written by Minhaz Merchant, the Anglicized former editor of a defunct lifestyle magazine called Gentleman and now a self-appointed publicist for the prime minister. Many such “Modi Toadies,” as Salman Rushdie calls them, had Western tails once, like the Harvard-economist-turned-book-burner.”

“Such crude xenophobia, now officially sanctioned in Mr. Modi’s India, seems only slightly less menacing than the previous R.S.S. chief’s wishful thinking about one more Mahabharata against demonic anti-Hindus. Japan’s expansionist gambles in China and the Pacific in the last century and, more recently, Russia’s irredentism in Ukraine show that a mainstreamed rhetoric of national aggrandizement can quickly slide into reckless warmongering. Certainly, the ruling classes of wannabe superpowers have spawned a complex force: the ideology of anti-imperialist imperialism, which, forming an axis with the modern state and media and nuclear technology, can make Islamic fundamentalists seem toothless. One can only hope that India’s democratic institutions are strong enough to constrain yet another wounded elite from breaking out for geopolitical and military manhood.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/opinion/pankaj-mishra-nirandra-modis-idea-of-india.html?ref=opinion

Posted by F. Sheikh

(Forget about oil, Israel and Terrorism)

An interesting point of view by Justin Logan in Politico. Some excerpts;

Nonetheless, three fears have turned this small, poor, weak region into the central focus of U.S. foreign policy: oil, Israel and terrorism. Each of these concerns merits attention, but nowhere near the amount they have received over the last several decades. And certainly, none of them calls for the sort of forward-deployed interventionism both Republicans and Democrats favor.

Oil is a fungible commodity sold on world markets. When the price of oil in one country rises, it rises in all countries—even those that have achieved the Shangri-La of “energy independence.” On the supply side, when supply decreases, price goes up and producers have an incentive to produce more oil to reap the higher profits. Combine the self-interest of producers with financial innovations like sophisticated spot and futures markets that allow consumers to hedge risks and it’s easy to see why, historically, supply disruptions have had limited and ephemeral effects on price.

Even the worst-case energy security nightmares don’t stand up to closer inspection. One scenario in which the U.S. military might come in handy is if a state like Iran tried to conquer and consolidate control over a major oil terminal such as Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia, giving it an uncomfortable, not to say market-making, amount of control over world oil markets. Fortunately, though, Iran doesn’t have anywhere near that kind of power-projection capability and if it did, America’s carrier-based airpower and long-range bombers could handle the threat relatively easily.

nother Middle East fear involves Israel. Here again, the precise problem is rarely spelled out, but people believe that Israel, small and friendly with the United States, lives in a bad neighborhood and benefits from a robust American presence in the region. The problem is that Israel in 2014 fits differently into the region than it did in the dangerous years after its founding. It enjoys an enormous qualitative military edge over any combination of potential regional rivals. It has roughly 200 nuclear weapons deployed on an array of platforms, including submarines, that give it a secure second-strike capability against any state in the region that might dare to threaten its survival. It is hard to see, moreover, how the maelstrom of sectarian conflict that recent U.S. policy has helped unleash across the region has benefited Israel.

Finally, of course, are fears about terrorism. This explanation for why the Middle East supposedly matters is peculiar, in that the basic contours of U.S. policy in the region predate 9/11. It is tough to think that a concern that emerged after a policy began explains the policy. But there is no evidence that terrorism is a threat that warrants an effort to micromanage the Middle East. The chance of an American being killed by terrorism outside a war zone from 1970-2012 was roughly one in 4,000,000. By any conventional risk analysis, this is an extraordinarily low risk. Perhaps this is why, as early as 2002, smart risk analysts were asking questions about counterterrorism policy such as “How much should we be willing to pay for a small reduction in probabilities that are already extremely low?”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/why-the-middle-east-still-doesnt-matter-111747.html#ixzz3GAjjFrDf