Author Archives: Douglas Muir

About Douglas Muir

American with an Irish passport. Does development work for a big international donor. Has been living in Eastern Europe for the last six years -- first Serbia, then Romania, and now Armenia. Calls himself a Burkean conservative, which would be a liberal in Germany but an unhappy ex-Republican turned Democrat in the US. Husband of Claudia. Parent of Alan, David, Jacob and Leah. Likes birds. Writes Halfway Down The Danube. Writes Halfway Down The Danube.

I’d rather be wrong, so wrong

Posted on by

about Iran.

via Andrew Sullivan — who, for his work this past week, shall be forgiven much — comes Daniel Larison, fretting about regime collapse and separatist movements in Iran. Those strike me as deeply improbable. Iran is not a failed or even a particularly weak state; if the current incumbents are forced out of power, others will step in. And most of Iran’s minorities are, if not exactly content, uninterested in separatism.

Note that unlike most of its neighbors — Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey — Iran has never had a serious separatist threat. The largest minority, the Azeris, is very well integrated by regional standards; they fought and died in the Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War at the same rate as ethnic Persians, and Supreme leader Khameini is half Azeri. The Bush administration spent several years fishing in the waters of ethnic separatism, without much effect that anyone has been able to see.

But I think it’s going to be moot, because I don’t think Iran’s regime is going down.

Continue reading →

Iran: Double down

Posted on by

Yesterday the Supreme Leader of Iran doubled down, declaring his support for President Ahmedinejad and telling the protestors it would be their own damn fault if anything happened. Today saw riots and more bloodshed.

Well: three days ago I said President Ahmedinejad would not lose. Today I’ll go a step further and add a couple more predictions.

1) The men with guns will stay loyal. This gets complicated, because there are a lot of different men with guns. There are the Teheran cops; the basiji, who are street thugs employed by the government; the Revolutionary Guards; the army.

But at the end of the day, only those last two matter. If the basiji break and run and the cops switch sides, but the army and the Guards stay obedient, the government still wins. It wins ugly, but it wins.

Note that Ahmedinejad is a veteran of the Republican Guards, while Khameini is the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Note further that both have broad popular support — maybe not majority, but broad. Millions of Iranians think that Ahmadinejad is the white knight of the people, while millions more (not necessarily the same people, mind) think that Khameini has a special relationship with God. Note finally that while Ahmadinejad may be obnoxious, he’s nobody’s fool. The Supreme Leader’s speech would not have happened if either man was nervous about the armed forces.

2) There won’t be a civil war. (Or at least, there won’t be because of these protests.) A lot of people may get hurt and killed, and some protestors may take up weapons. But it won’t lead to anything but bloodshed and repression. You can’t have a civil war when one side has all the guns.

— I’m going out on a limb to say what won’t happen. But I’m not brave enough to even guess at what will happen. Who the hell knows? Iran is a very opaque country. In my last post I used various popular protests in other countries for comparison. But there really isn’t a good comparandum for this. The closest would be the protests of late-period Communism: East Germany, Romania, Tienanmen Square. But in East Germany, conflict was avoided because the Politburo deposed Honecker; here it’s as if the Politburo had confirmed him in office, while at least a third of the country still believed fervently in Communism. (That’s a thing to keep in mind in Iran: both sides have a big chunk of the general population firmly behind them.) In Romania, Ceausescu had drifted far out of touch with the nation, and his regime was violently loathed by almost everyone; neither of those things is true of Iran.

The closest comparison seems to be China. But even that’s not very close. The Tienanmen protestors lacked leadership and were relatively mild compared to the Iranians. And while they had plenty of support in Beijing, they didn’t have much in the rest of the country. So while the suppression of Tienanmen was brutal, it was also over quickly; once the government cracked down, it was all over in a couple of days. That might not be the case in Iran.

But, really, who the hell knows. I guess we’ll see.

Why Ahmadinejad will win

Posted on by

We’ve seen a number of regimes fall because of popular protests: Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, yadda yadda. We’ve also seen several that have not fallen: Burma, Armenia, Greece. Which one does Iran more resemble? Or, to put it another way, what are the common factors?

Here’s a first attempt at classification. Political scientists and (especially) people who know more about Iran are encouraged to chime in.

Factors that make a regime vulnerable

In ascending order:

1) The regime is widely hated. Surprisingly, this seems not to be a highly correlated variable. Some of the survivor regimes were almost universally loathed by their people (Burma) while some governments that still enjoyed some popular support managed to collapse anyway (Ukraine).

Relevance to Iran: Low. Many people dislike the current government, but not many actually hate it.
Continue reading →

From Yerevan to Tehran?

Posted on by

Via The Monkey Cage, an interesting article on the lessons hardline regimes may have learned from the Orange Revolution. Here are his four lessons:

1) If you are going to fix the results of an election, give yourself a big margin of victory. Otherwise, a little electoral fraud can credibly be argued to have swung the outcome of the election (as was the case in the Serbian and Ukrainian presidential election)….

2) If you are really going to rig the results of elections, don’t mess around with pretenses of transparency that could end up leaving hard evidence of electoral fraud….

3) Don’t leave any doubt about the willingness of security forces to defend the regime. […]

4) Technology–especially social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, but also more basic technology such as text messaging–is a friend of opposition forces attempting to combat electoral fraud, so do what you can to minimize its impact.

Continue reading →

La Francophonie again

Posted on by

I’m in Senegal for a couple of weeks, on business.

Pretty much everything I wrote about French in Burundi in this post last year applies to French in Senegal. All educated Senegalese speak French; most speak it really well; they’ve also picked up a lot of distinctly Gallic tics of gesture and conversational patterning. The French fascination with their former colonies is a lot easier to understand once you’ve visited; if you’re French, it must be so pleasant to be someplace where French is the language of learning and prestige, where everyone who matters speaks French, and where there’s never a need to break out the English.

There are some differences. Gallicization seems to run deeper here than in Burundi. No, that’s not exactly right. More like: the European influences seems more assimilated. In Burundi, rich and elite Burundians can seem like wannabe Belgians, cut-and-pasting the culture of the former colonists. Elite Senegalese seem to be more comfortable integrating the different influences. It may just be that Senegal is a much less desperately-screwed-up place than Burundi, and so has less of a cultural cringe… I’m not sure. Continue reading →

History: The Durnovo Memorandum

Posted on by

I just discovered this amazing document recently. (h/t to Mr. David Tenner — thanks, David.)

Durnovo was Russian, and he was the Minister of the Interior for a while under Nicholas II. (His successor was the much more famous Stolypin.) He was a conservative who disliked democracy and was none too fond of capitalism either; his lodestars were Russia’s national interest and the monarchical principle. In early 1914, he was out of office, but still influential… and he was alarmed at the visible drift towards war all around him. So he wrote a 5,000 word memorandum, intended for the Czar’s inner circle, detailing just why this was a Really Bad Idea for Russia. (The text of the memorandum can be found on Google Books here, or as a .pdf over here.)

What’s striking about the memo is how, six months before World War One started, Durnovo absolutely nails it. Nature, conduct, likely outcomes — he’s eerily, astonishingly correct about all of them.

Check it out: Continue reading →

Ten years since the bombs started falling

Posted on by

On Serbia. Or, as it was then, Yugoslavia.

The Kosovo War has been debated, God knows, enough times. Still, a couple of things. One is this interesting article from the always-worth-reading Nenad Pejic. (Favorite line: “the official speeches spend all their time remembering that Serbia was bombed but never mention why Serbia was bombed.”) This bit was particularly interesting IMO:

Mladic remains at large and Serbia remains in denial about the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. Schoolchildren are taught about crimes committed against Serbs, but not about crimes committed by Serbs. This policy of denial has created an alarming situation among young Serbs. A 2007 poll of youths found that more than 30 percent say “there is no need” to be acquainted with ethnic Albanians. Fifty percent think the Cyrillic alphabet should be given preference to the Latin alphabet. Twenty-five percent “cannot imagine” having sex with a member of another ethnic group, and 20 percent expressed a desire to live in an ethnically pure state. It is unlikely these figures have improved since the poll was taken.

To be fair, I should say it is likely the responses would be similar among ethnic-Albanian youths in Kosovo. I shudder to think what these attitudes mean for the region when this generation takes over political power.

Continue reading →

“Macedonia’s Obama”?

Posted on by

Macedonia will hold Presidential elections this weekend. No news there. But here’s the interesting thing: recent polls suggest that an ethnic Albanian candidate, Imer Selmani, has a decent chance of making it past the first round. If so, he’d become the first ethnic Albanian to enter the runoff for Macedonia’s Presidency.

Why is this even possible? Well, to make a long story short, all the other major candidates have managed to make themselves look like idiots. They’ve traded stupid accusations and name-calling, while Selmani has managed to remain above the fray. It doesn’t hurt that he’s young, good-looking, and speaks perfect Macedonian.

Let’s be clear: even if Selmani makes it to the runoff round — unlikely, but possible — he’s not going to become President. That would require between a quarter and a third of Slav Macedonians to vote for an Albanian. This is not going to happen. Continue reading →

Russia’s “Pillars of Strength”

Posted on by

Is Stratfor worth paying attention to? I’ve never been clear on this. Some of their articles seem pretty insightful, but on the other hand some of them seem like something a bright sophomore might come up with after half an hour with google.

This recent article about Russia seems closer to the latter category to me, but maybe I’m missing something. The article discusses six “pillars of Russian strength”:

Geography — Russia is adjacent or close to all the areas that are strategically important to Russia.

Politics — Russia has a stable authoritarian system. The government is securely in power and doesn’t have to worry about what anyone else thinks.

Social System — Russia’s population is docile .

Natural Resources — Lots!

Military — Getting better. Also, nukes.

Intelligence — Best in the world, and still has most of the “Near Abroad” wired for sound.

Well, hum. Continue reading →

“One can lead a column to Prishtina every day”

Posted on by

Interesting when two hobbies cross-connect. One: that odd, isolated episode at the end of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, when a Russian unit based in Bosnia suddenly rushed through Serbia and occupied Prishtina airport just ahead of the advancing NATO troops. — It ended up being an empty gesture, but only just; the Russians were ready to funnel thousands of soldiers into the airport, and would have if Hungary and Romania hadn’t stood firm and kept their airspace closed. And it wasn’t entirely without consequence: it re-established Russia as the Great Power Protector of choice for Serb nationalists, a position it still occupies today.

Two: Russia’s problems in Ingushetia. Ingushetia is a province in the northern Caucasus next to Chechnya, and it’s just a hell of a mess. It’s full of refugees, the economy has collapsed, bombings and shootings are a constant background drumbeat. Nobody pays much attention to the North Caucasus — it’s formally part of Russia; the Chechens are quiescent at the moment; Shamil Basayev is dead, and the Beslan atrocity didn’t seem to lead to anything — but Ingushetia is a bubbling low-intensity conflict with the potential to erupt into something nastier. Continue reading →