(Tunisian beach-goer. Photo courtesy Tusisian Tourism Board.)

It is cold here, and I would infinitely prefer to be walking by the azure water of the central Mediterranean Sea. The sparkling sands of the Tunisian coast are pleasant this time of year, and heavily policed to make them ultra safe for European visitors.

Five million of them come to frolic by the sea, and the states of the European Union rewarded president Ben Ali for the stability he provides in the region by making him the largest recipient of EU aid in the Maghreb- the southwest littoral of the Med.

I have not been back to the neighborhood in a while, but participated in exercises with the Tunisian military in 1990, when President Ben Ali was just crushing the Islamic movement who had helped him cement power.

This is a bit of a change in focus this morning, since I was going to get to the dupe who contributed so mightily to this mess, PFC Bradley Manning, since he is part of the Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll aspect of this story that makes it sparkle with punkish energy.

History is inconvenient when you are surfing it in near real time. It is complex, and since the first reports are fraught with error and uncertainty, the story is complex and subject to revision.

(Logo of the TuniLeaks project exploiting American diplomatic cables.)

The teaching point in this is clear enough, and we can get to how a 23-year old punk from Crescent, Oklahoma, combined with a punk Australian to circulate stolen classified diplomatic cables detailing corruption and avaricious behavior by the family of a former hairdresser, who climbed into the bed of the President of Tunisia.

So, there is enough sex in this part of the story for today and we will get back to Oklahoma tomorrow, and concentrate on why we should care about punks of all stripes, who applied the modern skills of the Internet, social media and Tweets to bring down an autocrat.

The fall-out from this out to have others of Ben Ali’s ilk across the Arab world looking over their shoulders, from Amman to Damascus and Cairo. The consequences may not at all be what Julian Assange intends.

The truth may not set anyone free, any more than the ouster of the Shah brought liberty to Iran.

But let us quickly recount the bidding in this strange story, in relative chronological order.
 

(Deposed Autocrat Ben Ali, deposed by Wikileaks, Twitter and the Internet.)

The Autocrat Ben Ali was born in 1936, a charmed year for future heroes of liberation, since he was twenty years old and filled with vim and vigor when the French pulled out. He picked the right side in the turmoil that surrounded the transition from colony to nation, and joined the Army.

He was rewarded with educational opportunities at two schools in France, once of them the legendary Saint-Cyr, and two schools in the U.S. including the Senior Intelligence School at Fort Meade, Maryland.

He parlayed his time in military service into a position of power, establishing the Tunisian Military Security Department, which he directed or a decade. After attaché tours in Morocco and Spain, he returned home to become the Director of National Security in 1977.

Along the way, he acquired a wife, Naima Kefi, who presented him with three daughters, and unsatisfactory way to ensure a dynastic succession.

In 1980, he was appointed Ambassador to Poland just as the Soldiarity Union was founded by Lech Walensa. Ben Ali was a keen observer of the intricate dance of resistance by the Polish workers to the State, and its Soviet minders. After Warsaw, he was Interior Minister back home, eventually becoming Prime Minister to Tunisia’s first President, Habib Bourguiba.

Bad career move for Bourguiba. Ben Ali had an outstanding base of support in the security forces and a working arrangement with the growing Islamic movement in the country. He removed the President in a bloodless coup in November 1987, and declared himself the second President.

Analysts suggest there were three periods in his relentless drive to consolidate power, punctuated by elections in which he consistently brought home majorities in the high ninety percentages:

In the first, ’87-90, he was conciliatory to the an-Nahda Islamic Party, and brought religion back to civil life.
In the second, ’90-’92, he turned on his erstwhile religious base and ran a strikingly efficient police action against the Islamists, crushing the movement and sending its leaders into exile. I suspect they will be back.

In 1992, he ditched his first wife and married his mistress, a career move that eventually brought him a son, but also proved to be his undoing. His politics, up to last December, were externally pragmatic and internally draconian. The West viewed him as a bulwark against extremism, particularly after 9/11, but the Queen of Carthage was weak on self-control.

(“The Queen of Carthage” is the title of an unauthorized biography of Tunisian First Lady Leila Ben Ali (above) and her Trabelsi clan. Banned in Tunisia, the First Lady unsuccessfully sued to ban it in France.)

The Queen of Carthage is Leila Ben Ali. She started out as a hairdresser, but got knocked-up and claimed that she was carrying the son Ben Ali had always wanted. By the time she gave birth, she was married. With her ascent to become First Lady, she brought her extended Trabelsi clan the opportunity to establish a Tunisian kleptocracy.

Ben Ali commenced a campaign of privatization, by which the assets of the state were transferred direct to family members. They took over the automobile importing business, shook down the banks, built chains of hotels to serve the eager tourists on the glittering beaches and paid not a dime of their own in so doing. The family ran the only private radio station, and their control of the economy was absolute.

The antigovernment protests began a month ago, after the fall out from the Euro crisis hurt tourism and the Tunisian economy began to tank. You may have heard of an unemployed college graduate named Mohamed Bouazizi, who established an unregulated vegetable stand to make some money.

Government officials shut his stand down, and slapped him for his arrogance. In response, Bouazizi doused himself in gasoline and burned himself to death in front of the Maison D’otel of the village of Sidi Bouzid.

It is an interesting place in the central part of the country, well away from the beaches. Americans ought to remember it. Nearby, Rommel’s 10th and 21st Panzer Divisions attacked elements of the US 1st Armored Division and 168th Infantry.

What the US Army calls the “Battle of Sidi Bou Zid,” was part of the larger campaign of the Kasserine Pass. By the time Panzers were done with the neophyte Yanks, they had inflicted the loss of 2,546 men, 103 tanks, 280 vehicles, 18 field guns, 3 antitank guns, and an entire AAA battery.

The latest Battle of Sidi Bouzid inspired the well-educated and under-employed youth of Tunisia. It started on economic issues, but morphed quickly via the inspiration of the WikiLeaks stolen American diplomatic cables into something else: a mass protest against the corruption of the Ben Ali machine, and particularly the kelptocracy of the Queen of Carthage.

She bailed last week, headed for Dubai, presumably with an airplane full of cash, and the President was reported to have landed in Saudi Arabia last night.

No one is quite sure who is running things this morning. I remember the Iranian interim Prime Minister Bani al-Sadr, and he lasted a couple minutes before the Mercedes Mullahs took over Iran. I suspect the. an-Nahda Islamic Party will be back.
I was walking out of my office late yesterday, thinking that I might wander over to Willow and have a glass of the Happy Hour white wine or two, and saw a co-worker in the hall.

“Did you hear?” he asked. “Democracy is breaking out in Tunisia!”
“I am not quite sure about that,” I said darkly. “At the moment, Tunisia is largely secular; has no Islamo-fascist movement, or didn’t until now; was OK economically until the country tanked in December; welcomes Western tourists and cash and does not have the burkha at the beach.”

“But this could be the end of the despots all over the Middle East,” he responded. “Isn’t that what we want?”

“Be careful what you wish for,” I said. “Ben Ali was a pragmatist and an  ally in the still-tense neighborhood of the Maghreb. It’s callous of me to not care that much about income disparity there. I just don’t think we need any more problems, particularly if they are caused by the honest assessments of US diplomats who reported honestly back to their own government.”

“So the fall of a despot is a bad thing?” my colleague said.

“No, not necessarily.  But that little punk Manning, and that larger prick Assange, have undermined the US strategic position through the theft of classified information.
 
“So your point is that whether the ruler of Tunisia is a avaricious monster is not the point to all this,” he said slowly.
 
“Let’s go to Willow,” I said. “And screw all of them, starting with Julian Assange. “

Tomorrow: “Oklahoma is OK”

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
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