Transition

He finally stepped down. I'd been waiting for the moment he said he'd leave.

But I'll get to Jon Kyl in a moment. Hosni Mubarak has stepped down as the president of Egypt. As I type, I'm watching Egyptians in Tahrir Square in Cairo celebrating the news. The Egyptian people feel that they've accomplished a major victory by protesting Mubarak out of office and demonstrating the power to change their nation and their lives. And they did it with little if any of the violence commonly associated with historically significant revolutions like in France and in Russia. Now let's see how the Egyptians handle things from here on.

I don't know if this will be like the Berlin Wall coming down or if it's the beginning of anarchy in the Middle East. Egypt has a large, educated middle class that can make a solid effort in making g a transition to democracy, but there's still the apparatus of the existing government to deal with, along with how elections there will play out in September. And other Middle Eastern countries with similar unrest are not as stable as Egypt appears to be. We'll see what happens . . ..

As for Arizona senator Jon Kyl, I'm more than glad to see him go. He's a mean, mendacious politician . . . even for Republicans! As the chief deputy to Mitch McConnell, he's played more than a small part in enforcing Republican orthodoxy in the Senate. His opposition to the nuclear treaty with Russia was an embarrassment. With Kyl giving up a Senate seat he could have likely won with ease, his Senate seat in Arizona now becomes a battleground for the two parties in the fight for control of the upper house. Yes, Arizona is more Republican these days, and no, Arizona voters haven't sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1988. But Arizona is more fluid than, say, Texas, where Republican U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson is retiring and which is likely to elect a Republican (possibly a Tea Partier) to replace her. Janet Napolitano, now the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, was elected governor of Arizona twice as a Democrat - and by a huge margin in 2006 - and Kyl faced a tough challenge from real estate developer Jim Pederson that same year in an expensive campaign. The viability of moderate Democrats in Arizona proves that the election in 2012 is not going to be a slam dunk for Republicans, despite the strong conservative movements thriving in the state.

Don't assume that a Democrat can't get elected to the Senate from Arizona. Back in the fall of 2009, we all knew that the idea of a Republican winning Ted Kennedy's Senate seat was preposterous.

Corrections and Clarifications: January 31, 2011

I sometimes jokingly refer to this blog "The Maginnis Post" when discussing it with my friends, but unlike the Huffington Post, this blog is a one-man show. I'm my own copy writer, my own editor, my own managing editor, my own music critic - you name it. It's sort of like the Looney Tunes short where Bugs Bunny plays a baseball team entirely by himself. So mistakes and inaccuracies are bound to occur here, and I periodically have to issue a blog entry correcting and clarifying earlier posts - which is what I'm doing now.

In my post of January 12, 2011, I referred to Representative Ben Quayle (R-AZ) as being "Indiana-bred." While he was born in Indiana, and while his family does come from that state, he was no doubt raised in Maryland and/or Virginia (and was raised right!) until he was sixteen years old, as his father Dan Quayle was elected to the House of Representatives the same month Ben was born (November 1976) and would serve in Washington as a House member, then as a senator, and then as Vice President of the United States from 1977 to 1993, the Quayles moved to Arizona some time in the late nineties. My point in my earlier post was that, Ben's declaration of love for his adopted state of Arizona notwithstanding, he was raised right elsewhere. To be fair, though, his family does have roots in Arizona; his father Dan, ironically, lived there as a boy while James C. Quayle - Dan's father - was in Arizona running a branch of the family's publishing business.

In my post from January 28, 2011, I pointed out that Yemen had been two countries prior to 1990 - an Arab republic in the north and a communist republic in the south - but I originally did not stress that, when Yemen was unified, it was unified under the government in the north. I edited in that point shortly after the post was published, but some readers might have missed that.

I also noted in that same post that Egyptian Nobel laureate Mohammed El-Baradei had been arrested after returning to Egypt. Update: He has since been released. Some telecommunications in Egypt have also been restored intermittently, on a tenuous basis. The Egypt crisis, like so many other stories these days, is changing faster than I can comment on it.

I'll probably be back here early tomorrow, with more miscellaneous musings, but the 36 hours after that are dicey, given a potential ice storm that could literally hit where I live - and knock the electricity out. (I knew I should have done printed broadsides!) So it may be Thursday before I'm on full steam again. Stay tuned.

Pan Arab Revolt

The recent mass uprisings in Tunisia, Yemen, and, more dramatically, Egypt would be exciting if they weren't so scary. The idea of common people rising up against totalitarian governments sounds so wonderful, but the most recent reports out of Egypt depict a country in chaos and turmoil. The demonstrations have been spontaneous, with little leadership in the truest sense of the word, and the Muslim Brotherhood - hardly an organization devoted to expansion of democracy - is in a position to take control of the resistance. This isn't the Berlin Wall coming down; this is order breaking down, and the White House knows it. If Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak were to fall, no one knows who or what would take his place, or how it would influence (likely adversely) the rest of the Middle East - especially Israel.

If Egypt, with its poverty and bad economy, is in a precarious state, then Yemen is far worse off. Yemen is a country once divided by colonialism and then the Cold War. The north achieved independence from Turkey in 1918 and was a monarchy until 1962, and an oligarchic republic after that. A communist republic in the south replaced in 1967 the British protectorate that had been established there in the nineteenth century, centered around the port city of Aden. Dirt poor, with few resources of its own, and an active Islamic movement among its population, Yemen has long been a source of unrest and instability. Al-Qaeda is active here by all accounts, and it was al-Qaeda that was responsible for the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. Yemen's post-Cold War unification in 1990 (under the northern government) was marked with much less fanfare than the reunification of Germany that same year, and alas, the Yemeni government's often futile attempts to integrate the country economically haven't received much attention either. To be fair, some progress has been made in the past twenty years, with some economic development that reduced the national budget deficit's share of the country's gross domestic product. But progress comes very slowly in this part of the world.

Tunisia will likely have the easiest transition from authoritarianism, with the president having been deposed and with the chief of the Tunisian army siding with the protesters with the promise to "defend the revolution." Also, it has a vibrant middle class. Egypt is too unpredictable, and with the arrest of Egyptian Nobel laureate Mohammed El-Baradei after his return to the country and the shutting down of Internet services, the situation is likely reaching a tipping point. Yemen could pose a danger for U.S. naval operations in the Middle East, given its proximity to Mandab Strait separating the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden (and, by extension, the Arabian Sea). And I haven't even mentioned how an Egyptian revolt could produce another Suez Canal crisis that could humble the United States in the same way that the 1956 crisis reduced Great Britain and France to second-rate powers practically overnight.

No, this is not as thrilling as the Cold War's end twenty years ago. But given the violent overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania in 1989, fears of a reunified and renewed Germany, and the Soviet crackdown in Lithuania in January 1991 and the attempted internal overthrow of Gorbachev that August (before the Soviet Union was dissolved that December), there were times when that march to freedom also traveled treacherous terrain.