Al Jazeera conducted a poll among young people in Libya, Egypt, Yemen, and Tunisia and found that the vast majority of youth felt disenfranchised from the political process in their countries. That the alienation would be so deep after the dramatic effects of the “Arab Spring” suggests that those effects seem to have been short lived. One dimension of the poll is intriguing: the youth of Tunisia, Yemen, and Libya identify themselves more as Muslims than as citizens of their state. Only in Egypt did the respondents identify themselves as Egyptians before they identified themselves as Muslims.
The Council on Foreign Relations has published a fascinating study of US military spending. The US is by far the largest military spender in the world, but its military spending as a percentage of its GDP has slowly declined over the years.
President Obama’s recent budget proposal would reduce military spending to about 2.4% of the US GDP, the lowest level since World War II.
Bradley Manning, who plead guilty to the violation of espionage laws, was found not guilty of the more serious charge of aiding the enemy. Manning released more than 700,000 documents to the website, Wikileaks, that revealed a great deal about the conduct of the US military in Iraq. The military court found that Manning did not deliberately leak the material in order to aid al Qaeda. Some regard Manning as a whistleblower who simply revealed misconduct and not national security secrets. There is little question, however, that he did violate the terms of secrecy that governed the documents he released.
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