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| Join Daniel Pipes on a Fact Finding Expedition to Israel (For full details click here) Please take a moment to visit and log in at the subscriber area, and submit your city & country location. We will use this information in future to invite you to any events that we organize in your area. Dear Reader: Zuhdi Jasser and I exchange views here concerning the blog I sent out yesterday, "Syria: Arguing for U.S. Inaction." The sound quality is not great but my talk for the American Freedom Alliance conference, "What Is the Future of the Arab Middle East?" is available here. Yours sincerely, Daniel Pipes Related Articles · The Pipes Rule of Arab Elections · Caught on Tape: The Middle East's Culture of Cruelty · Is Prince Charles a Convert to Islam? Four Down: Saleh No Longer Yemen's President?by Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2012/02/four-down-saleh-no-longer-yemen-president
Three Arab dictators-for-life lost power in 2011: Ben Ali of Tunisia on January 14, Mubarak of Egypt on February 11, and Qaddafi of Libya on October 20. Now, the first Arab dictator of 2012 seems to be down: Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen.
Seems because his has been a protracted and contorted process that included Saleh's resignation on November 23, elections on February 21, and the festive swearing in today of his successor, Abed Rabu Mansour Hadi. Following the "Pipes rule of Arab elections" (namely: If you know the result ahead of time, you are voting for the real powerbroker; if you don't know the result in advance, then you are voting for a position that hardly matters), that Hadi was the only candidate for president suggests he has real power. By the way, he was the country's vice president since 1994 and is field marshal of the Yemeni armed forces. But, as Laura Kasinof of the New York Times puts it, Saleh "still wields considerable influence. His relatives control most of the military and government security agencies, and it remains to be seen how independent Mr. Hadi, a longtime Saleh loyalist, will be." So, Hadi's installation might be a gambit for Saleh to retain control. We shall see. Who's number five? Bashar al-Assad of Syria. After that, it's unclear who's number six, but I bet on a newly-wobbly King Abdullah II of Jordan, thanks to his incompetence in dealing with the growing Islamism of his Bedouin political base. (February 25, 2012) Related Topics: Persian Gulf & Yemen This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL. | |||||
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