Revolution dominoes

The dust is still really well suspended in much of the Middle East (like some constitutions in the area), but I've gone long enough without updating the blog. Waiting for results is always fraught, as it's often difficult to recognize them except in hindsight.

Since my last post, Mubarak has been eased out, and the Egyptian Army will probably make sure he's allowed to live out his days in his country. The Army is in charge there for the foreseeable future and short of "less political repression" I won't make many predictions as to what will happen there.

Yemen, Djibouti, Algeria, Morocco and Bahrain are all in various states of insurrection, the latter for reasons that rather escape me. The rest of them range from manageable (Morocco) to basket case (Yemen), and have less-than-ideal governments, at least as far as you can measure that sort of thing empirically. Iran is hotting up again, and people in Lebanon are not universally pleased by Hezbollah's coup d'etat. This will not happen in Syria any time soon, for the same reasons as are being demonstrated in Libya at the time of writing.

Gaddafi has no plans to retire and has for the moment the backing of enough of the security forces to hang on, at least in the west of the country. His control of the armed forces however is unravelling rapidly and many are predicting a civil war. When he's referring to Tianamen Square you know that this will more likely turn out like Saddam Hussein than Hosni Mubarak.

Libya needs a change of management but it's already bloodied getting it, and it will be worse before it gets better. This however is not what I try to write about; I'm looking for the big picture which is separate from the breaking news. So let's try this: what do all of these revolutions expect to accomplish? Sure, regime change, but to what?

Tunisia went first, but bugger all has really happened since then, and the same can be said for the next domino, Egypt. The chronic problems are:

• Corruption: endemic, but susceptible to amelioration with a change of personnel;


• Repression: see above, and;


• Unemployment/economy/poverty

The last one is the real kicker, as it is barely tractable in more advanced economies. Most of these places have one thing in common: too many people. This snippet from Wikipedia says it all for Egypt: "The great majority of its estimated 79 million people^[3] live near the banks of the Nile River, in an area of about 40,000 square kilometers (15,000 sq mi), where the only arable land is found."

A lot of the world's problems would be solved if there were a lot less of us, but this isn't an apocalyptic Malthusian blog, so I won't get into that. Suffice it to say that there are certain fundamental problems (mainly frustrated young men) that no mere change of government will solve. I'll end with that thought for now, since this situation is very fluid and I can't pretend to tie it off just yet. I'll be back in a few days when I've discerned any sort of trajectory to all of this.