World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

The situation in Egypt continues to deteriorate.  Max Fisher has a great background on the turmoil in Egypt that is relatively succinct and accurate (nothing is ever fully accurate if one relies on a single source), and it’s a good place to start if you’re just catching up on the violence there.   As the country falls deeper into violence, the US has to take a large measure of responsibility for the crisis.  It is important to remember that President Morsi was democratically elected, and the fact that he was not a true “democrat” or that he was messing up the economy is not a reason to support his ouster or to deny that there was a “coup.”  [There were many times during the administration of George W. Bush that I had wished that someone else were President, but I would never had supported a military intervention.]  The US has great leverage over the Egyptian military, and if President Obama had told it to sit tight until the next scheduled election, I am certain that the military would not have intervened.  If a state professes to believe in democracy, then it has to take the good with the bad.  Not coincidentally, this year marks the 60th anniversary of the US-supported overthrow of President Mossadegh in Iran, a similar intervention in democratic politics that continues to haunt the US.

In the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, the fear of the anti-war movement was that the war would be “brought home,” something which did happen in the shootings of protesters at Kent and Jackson State by the National Guard in May of 1970.  We have a similar fear of the “war on terror” launched by the Bush Administration after the violence of 11 September 2001.  Domestic police forces are more and more closely resembling armed forces, with SWAT teams being the most obvious manifestation of the militarized approach to domestic crime.  The figures about the use of SWAT teams in the US are rather chilling.   Here is a video of a former Marine who served in Iraq about his city’s (Concord, NH) decision to buy a heavily armed vehicle for their domestic policing.  His views are something to consider seriously as the war on terror is “brought home.”

Somalia is one of the most fragile states in the world, and the violence in that country has been unremitting for years.  The clearest evidence for that assessment is the decision by Doctors Without Borders to leave the country.  Doctors Without Borders is one of the most heroic non-governmental organizations in the world and it has sent medical personnel into some of the most dangerous places in the world.  The decision leaves thousands of innocents without any medical help at all.