Arab Revolution and Television

I know that American military leaders are too stupid and too myopic to read and digest this NYT’s piece about the revolt in Tunisia and the role played by America’s fabricated nemesis, Al Jazeera.

“The protests rocking the Arab world this week have one thread uniting them: Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite channel whose aggressive coverage has helped propel insurgent emotions from one capital to the next.”

Think of the Tunisian revolt as sort of the reverse domino effect that our moronic generals warned about during the cold war to justify unsustainable levels of defense spending.  Think of how many ba-fucking-zillions of tax dollars have been spent to topple Saddam Hussien and the Taliban leaving in their wake a mess that will haunt America for decades to come. Now consider how the Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was forced out of the country with a couple of grainy cell phone videos uploaded on Facebook and then rebroadcast on Al Jazeera. Now we have a similar situation in Egypt. Saudi Arabia should be next on the list.

Instead, our military elite insist that there is a military solution to all of our security and diplomacy problems around the globe. Forget about the fact that invading a sovereign nation and fighting a guerrilla war against the population has never been a great idea unless you are willing to go all the way, and by that I mean genocide (and that’s a fucking terrible idea). To me it seems that America’s military leaders have taken on a similar papal infallibility quality.  American politicians—and certainly not ordinary citizens—are not allowed to question our generals.

The protests in Tunisia were not spurred by Islamic fundamentalism. I think the Arab world is dying for an infusion of liberal ideas and those won’t be offered by Islam. If we think that our idea of humanity in the West is worth exporting the time is ripe to start that process.