Once Again It's Escalation Time In Bahrain

When the Saudi troops and armor moved down the causeway to Bahrain, any observer well oriented in time and place would have concluded that the countdown to a crackdown had commenced.  The observer might also have mused that the number of hours on the clock was not great.

The troops have moved.  The protest encampment in Pearl Square has been cleared.  People have been wounded.  Some have been killed.  The ante in this particular game of bluff has been raised.  So have the stakes for all players: the royal family and its Sunni minority supporters, the Shiite majority protesters, the backroom crowd from Tehran and, not least, the US for whom Bahrain is an important strategic outpost.

The Obama folks responded to the most recent clearing operation as they did the previous one.  All the right boilerplate phrases have been pulled out of the word processors, "urge restraint," "deplore violence," "need for dialogue" and all the other routine yabba, yabba, dabba, dabba, yadda, yadda.

On the other side of the hill, the side occupied by the royal family of Bahrain, matters are seen differently.  The Bahraini royals and their supporters see a strong probability that Obama is going to pull the plug on them as they believe was the case with Hosni Mubarak.  There is a strong perception not only in Bahrain but also in Saudi Arabia and the other states of the Gulf Coordination Council to the effect that President Obama either though inertia and indifference or under the pressure of personal ideology allowed the overthrow of Mubarak and is likely to do the same with the assorted royals of the Gulf states.

The same perception, or one so close as to be operationally identical, must run through the minds of the Mullahs and their frontmen in Iran, Syria, and within Hezbollah.  The vacillating stances of Obama and his secretary of state during the "Lotus Revolution" were seen not only in Egypt but elsewhere as the product of a weak person with no political will.  This would embolden the adversaries of the status quo (including Iran) and force the current governments under threat to take more robust actions more rapidly than might otherwise be necessary, let alone desirable.

This analytical stance must lead to the conclusion that the Obama administration and the president himself bear a direct responsibility for the deaths in Bahrain.  It also means the same applies with respect to the inevitable deterioration of political stability in Bahrain.

It doesn't matter that the authoritarian regimes have lasted so long in the region in largest measure due to American support.  The reasons for that support matter even less.  The reality that the US policy of supporting dictators and semi-dictators regardless of the rhetoric favoring democracy was fully justified considering American national and strategic interests as well as the threats presented to them matters least of all.

In Bahrain currently as in Egypt a couple of weeks ago, the US was caught between the two primary pillars of its foreign policy: the idealistic long term commitment to democracy and other political, social, and cultural values and norms on the one hand and the pragmatically sanctioned realistic need to defend and advance certain short term national and strategic interests against clear threats.  This dynamic of contradictory policy imperatives both hamstrings and brands as hypocritical whatever the US seeks to do when confronted by a sudden political change as rapid and devastating of the old order as a tsunami.

Worsening the situation has been the chronic administration focus upon splitting the difference and postponing decision making under the transparent cover of appearing to be deliberate and prudent.  A nice show which may play in Peoria, but one which falls on its flabby rear end in the streets and squares where the political battles are fought.

As a result no ruler in the Mideast can be sure the US will support him when doing such might require actions running contrary to the myth of constant American upholding of truth, democracy, and the American Way.  King Hamid cannot trust Obama to remain a consistent supporter even if the current regime does enter into legitimate negotiations with the dissident Shiites.  The same applies to King Abdullah next door in Saudi Arabia.  Ditto for all the other feudal rulers of the GCC states.

Can you blame them for concluding they are on their own?  Can they be blamed for taking robust action in the hope (perhaps forlorn) that by doing such enough order to allow minimal concessions might be achieved?  And, can anyone blame these endangered rulers facing not only domestic threats but the machinations of Iran for ignoring the fine words of the Obama folks?

The answer to each and all these questions is simple: Of course not.

The sorry record of the Obama administration compels the local rulers to ignore Washington completely.  The indecisive nature of the administration, its reliance on speeches and verbal lines in the sand never backed by actions which might be effective in the short term, the inability of Mr Obama and his "team" even to come to terms with the realities in Libya, all of these combine to reduce American influence in the region to zero.  Even if the local kings and sheiks had been so tone deaf as to miss the significance of Obama reversing decades of US policy toward Israel, they could scarcely overlook the lack of resolute or even visible policy in Egypt.

The King of Bahrain and his peers throughout the Gulf region have no one to look to except each other and themselves.  The US is worse than a mere nonentity.  It has become a distrusted player, a potential enemy who claims to be a friend.  So they act reflexively, violently, coercively in the hopes it might bring a time out during which some sort of internal deal might be brokered.

The reliance on coercion may well be misplaced, fatally so.  But in that event at the least the current governments will have been stabbed in the chest.  That, the rulers must believe, is better by far than waiting for Mr Obama to plunge the deadly knife into their backs.

Mr Obama and his adherents may convince themselves that the President is a perfect model of statesmanship: cool, deliberative, refusing to act precipitously.  This is an illusion.  In sharpest point of fact, the Obama "team" is assuring more unrest, longer unrest, and an ever growing mound of corpses.  In the final analysis the blood must be seen as staining the hands of the Deep Thinkers of Washington far more than it does the hands of the locals.

Making Political Predictions Is Harder Than Weather Forecasting

The Obama White House and the Republican House can agree on one thing: Our intelligence community failed to predict in acceptable detail the unfolding of political events in Tunisia and Egypt.  Both usually hostile parties also have agreed that each fears a repeat of the perceived "failure" with respect to other Mideastern countries such as Saudi Arabia or Jordan.

As usual, consumers of intelligence seem to think that there is a direct, linear relation between money appropriated for the collection, processing, and dissemination of intelligence and the quality of the final product.  There is a general belief that the vast amount of money spent on the US intelligence community should bring a result of unmatched accuracy and timeliness.  If the real world were only that easy, if the mythic relation between bucks and product actually existed, no one would be happier than the spooks.  Their lives would be so much easier and the rewards so much greater.

The problem comes in that the Mideast has been lurching along the ragged edge of political catastrophe every day for years now.  The basic problems--the absence of faith in the future, the alienation of a large "youth bulge," the existence of illegitimate, ineffectively repressive authoritarian regimes--all have been around for years, even decades.  Along the way, any number of sparks as compelling as the self-immolation of the Tunisian fruit vendor have come and gone without consequence.

What was the difference this time?

Any number of had hoc working groups will or have been convened throughout the intelligence community to consider just that.  Different answers will come back and be fed up the chain of command.  Strong recommendations to follow the social networks more closely will undoubtedly top the list.  Special studies will be commissioned on relevant topics such as the percentage of internet competent youth, the number of citizens in country "X" or "Y" who belong to which social network.  What topics are trending in which direction.  All the usual suspects will be monitored closely.

And, who knows, maybe something useful will come from all the effort.

However intense and broad the after action effort might be, there will be some key factors which cannot be nailed down, cannot be put into a new, improved analytical protocol.  Highest on the list of these is the matter of political will.

What factors, for example, fed into Ben Ali's apparently snap decision to cash in his chips?  Did the choice rest with him alone?  Or was it due to the stance taken by the Tunisian Chief of Staff against allowing the army to be used as the Giant Foot squashing the unrest?  If it was the latter, what were the inputs to his decision?

In Egypt, what forces are at work in the minds of the armed forces supreme command?  To what extent are the assorted generals and field marshals operating in the context of the Young Officers' coup of 1952?  To what extent are they motivated by the sense of the armed forces as the ultimate repository of Egyptian sovereignty?  To what extent are they focused upon the threat presented by the Muslim Brotherhood?  Or, to what extent do they fear the potential unreliability of their own troops if these are ordered into robust action against the demonstrators, which now include the Muslim Brotherhood?

Then, of course, there are the imponderables of personal relationships.  No new effort at collection, no new approach to analysis can or will penetrate the mysteries of the personal.  The web tying Mubarak and the other senior officers of the military together are highly personal, long standing, and quite probably immune to rational understanding.

The same applies to an  even greater extent with the processes at work in the mind of Mubarak himself.  There is no way of knowing in advance when or even if he will hit a personal tipping point, a point where retirement with a couple of billion dollars in hand is an opportunity he is no longer willing to refuse.

We know now--but not at the time--that Ben Ali got on the plane out of Tunisia only with the utmost of regret and only at the whip of his banshee wife's tongue.  The same unknown, perhaps it is an unknowable unknown, applies to Mubarak  When or will he bow to the pressure and surrender power to the military?  No intelligence agency will be able to answer that question other than retrospectively.

No president likes it.  No politician either.  But, the reality is that the world is not predictable in detail.  This governing ground truth has become more potent with the growth of emergent systems, non-linear self-organizing collections of the disaffiliated, the disaffected, the disenchanted.  The capacities of self-organizing systems, self-organizing groups, have been magnified greatly by the explosive development of horizontal communications methods including but not limited to the social networks.

This implies it will be harder for intelligence agencies dealing with inherently orderly but highly unstable political and social systems such as those in Egypt to get ahead of the wave when some event goes viral.  An event which once would have rolled by unnoticed will have the ever greater potential to become the cliched firebell in the dark.  The difficulty will be that of identifying the one critical event among a host of other, seemingly just as compelling ones, which serves as the trigger, which launches the wave.

To maintain that such an identification will be almost impossible is not to admit defeat but rather to accept reality.  It implies that either decision makers must accept a world of teeming false positives or resign themselves to being caught by apparent surprise.  A second implication is that analysts must be willing to run more professional risks by either pointing a finger at an event which proves not be the dread trigger--or, as the alternative, be willing to admit the trigger event which went by unhighlighted.

In short, these are not happy times to work in the intelligence racket.  Even compared to a few years back, the world has become not so much more unstable as it has grown more volatile.  The volatility of self-organizing groups empowered by horizontal communication systems is with us to stay.  It will not admit of mastery by intelligence agencies soon if ever.