Former Assistant Secretary of State James P. Rubin and New York Times Chief Washington Correspondent David E. Sanger discuss the recent overthrow of Middle East dictators.
Since January, countries in the Middle East have been buffeted by massive protests. These have led to the toppling of two Middle East leaders, and extensive use of violence. What does it mean? Where will it lead?
Bio
Bryan Daves
Bryan Daves is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yeshiva University.
Professor Daves' interests lie in the political economy of development, Middle East politics, and globalization.
He is a senior associate member of St. Antony's College, Oxford, was a Fulbright Fellow in Jordan, and has received USIA fellowships to the American Institute of Maghribi Studies and the American Center for Oriental Research.
James P. Rubin
James Rubin is executive editor of The Bloomberg View, president of the Atlantic Partnership U.S. and a commentator and lecturer on U.S. foreign policy and world affairs. He served as assistant secretary of state for public affairs under President Clinton and as chief spokesman for the State Department from 1997 to 2000. In 1998 Mr. Rubin was the recipient of Columbia University's John Jay Award for Distinguished Professional Achievement and in 2000, he received the Distinguished Service Award, the State Department's highest honor.
David E. Sanger
David E. Sanger is the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times and is one of the newspaper's senior writers. In a 24-year career at the paper, he has reported from New York, Tokyo, and Washington, covering a wide variety of issues surrounding foreign policy, globalization, nuclear proliferation, Asian affairs, and, for the past five years, the arc of the Bush presidency. Twice he has been a member of Times reporting teams that won the Pulitzer Prize.
His most recent book is The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power (Harmony, 2009), a Times best-seller that explores the national security challenges facing President Barack Obama.
Form of government in which one person or an oligarchy possesses absolute power without effective constitutional checks. With constitutional democracy, it is one of the two chief forms of government in use today. Modern dictators usually use force or fraud to gain power and then keep it through intimidation, terror, suppression of civil liberties, and control of the mass media. In 20th-century Latin America, nationalist leaders often achieved power through the military and attempted either to maintain the privileged elite or to institute far-reaching social reform, depending on their class sympathies. In Europe's communist and fascist dictatorships, a charismatic leader of a mass party used an official ideology to maintain his regime, and terror and propaganda to suppress opposition. In postcolonial Africa and Asia, dictators have often retained power by establishing one-party rule after a military takeover.
Geographic region where Europe, Africa, and Asia meet. It is an unofficial and imprecise term that now generally encompasses the lands around the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea—notably Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria—as well as Iran, Iraq, and the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. Afghanistan, Libya, Turkey, and The Sudan are sometimes also included. The term was formerly used by Western geographers and historians to describe the region from the Persian Gulf to Southeast Asia; Near East is sometimes used to describe the same area.
James Rubin, for all his education, erudition and experience, commits a fatal error.
He sharply criticizes the Wikileaks exposures as harmful to American diplomacy and international relations by inducing foreign governments not to speak candidly. This will hamper US intelligence assessments. Later he criticizes the Obama Administration for failure to foresee the Arab spring uprising and our backing of discredited autocrats. This is an oxymoron. If with all our candid conversations in the international arena the US was caught flat-footed, how good was all our intelligence? Perhaps the Wikileaks exposures may do much good by exposing to the public the failures of American governance.
CANīT take too much of this poop. Rubin is a public relations corporate mouth Works for GOVīt and Military corporations, also loves secrets govīt secrets the military kind which is WHY RUBIN hates Julian Assange, Rubin is a LIAR HE will never tell you the truth For him the truth is not profitable a good smoke screen to nowhere.
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