There Are No Excuses for Our Inability to Predict the Egyptian Revolution
There is really no excuse for our failure to recognize the imminent nature of the Egyptian revolution. No argument can support the delusion that authoritarian repression is a sustainable practice in today’s world. Technological innovation has changed the rules, and the only reason we didn’t recognize that fact is because we didn’t want to accept it.
This is a speech given to the State Department in 2009. The speaker, Clay Shirky, pretty much predicts the revolutions that are now spreading across the Middle East. He gives some foreboding advice to the folks at the State Department:
In a world where the “former audience” are now increasingly full participants…media is less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals. It is more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups. And the choice we face isn’t whether that’s the media environment we want to operate in, because its the one we’ve got. The question is: how can we make best use of this media? Even though it means changing the way we’ve always done it.
I don’t think they listened. The full speech is below.
It’s is 17 minutes long, and it’s well worth a listen. The good stuff starts at the 5:00 minute mark.
There is an argument to be made that we could have done very little even had we been prepared. Perhaps. But, perhaps if we had pushed for democracy sooner, we wouldn’t be facing a possible Islamist takeover or military coup. Maybe we could have controlled the transition to a pro-Western democracy. Instead, we lived in the past because we liked it there, and now we’re facing a reality that we do not like one bit.
They State Department/CIA was well aware of the rising tensions. They just didn’t know exactly when it was going to break. Who can foresee a fruit vendor in Tunisia lighting himself on fire and opening the flood gates of pent up frustrations throughout the Middle East. Now, this is not a defense of U.S. policy itself; our policies in the Middle East were bound to cause this sometime. I just believe that criticisms against the government that they could not see this happening at this moment are short-sighted. Also, as far as intelligence is concerned, research has shown that humans don’t really do better than a coin flip in predicting outcomes. We are very good at analyzing the past and sorting out causal processes, but we are very bad to using this information to predict future behavior.
I am not specifically talking about predicting rising tensions. I am talking about understanding that new technologies combined with oppressive governance produce an unsustainable system. The State Department must have been warned of this reality multiple times over. They made the decision to support an unsustainable method of governance in a new world. Even though that decaying system was under our control, it was easy to see that it would not last much longer. It doesn’t matter that we didn’t know the exact day that the system would crumble, what matters is that we knew it would crumble eventually, and we refused to acknowledge that reality. So, instead of taking action to control the structural change, the United States is now in a position where it has absolutely no control over the outcome.
There is a school of thought which says that while the Tunisian revolt might
have been spontaneous, none of the follow-on revolts have been – and
suspects that the Muslim Brotherhood has been a substantial part of each of
them.
If that school is correct, it was absolutely within our capability to see it
coming. If we are not absolutely on top of the Ikhwan’s activities it’s a
colossal intelligence failure.
The United States of America is but a shadow of its former self. And even its former self failed to predict the Sneak Attack at Pearl Harbor, Hitler’s offensive in the Ardennes in December 1944 (the battle of the Bulge), North Korea’s invasion of the south, which began The Korean War, and the Chinese Communists’ entering the war through a surprise invasion which nearly overwhelmed us and the U.N. Forces. In more modern times, our “intelligence agencies” failed to stop 9 – 11, failed to recognize and stop Major Abu Nidal Hassan and the Fort Hood Massacre, and failed to stop “the shoe bomber” and “the underwear bomber” from getting on airplanes carrying HUNDREDS of innocent passengers. Our intelligence apparatus is BROKEN and needs to be swept clean with a street sweeper. And one other thing: The Israeli intelligence apparatus also failed to predict what recently happened in the Arab Republic of Egypt (which still hasn’t played out, and which may take YEARS to play out – but it ain’t going to good for us, and it ain’t going to be good for Israel). To coin a phrase: We’re in the hands of the Philistines, and may God help us, because our Government is incapable of doing so. Ashton O’Dwyer. Allahu Ahkbar!