And another 600 today?

"No, Egypt Won’t Actually Execute 500 Muslim Brotherhood Members,"

Fabrication and the Counterrevolution

"Egypt opens another mass trial of Islamists"

Conspiracy Theories in the Middle East and the Midwest

One article in the New York Times and a related blogpost (admittedly by the same author) note how both Al Ahram in Egypt and Fox News in the USA appear to share the idea that the Obama presidency conspired with the Muslim Brotherhood, a plan "which involved helping 300 armed fighters enter the country from Gaza." (“Conspiring Against the Truth,” The Arabist, Ursula Lindsey, August 29, 2013) Likewise, another blogpost, notes four related misconceptions widely shared in Egypt:

1. There is a strong held belief in Egypt that the US is against the June 30^th alliance and government, and is waging war against it for the sake of MB....
2. There really isn’t a global conspiracy against us....That being said, Turkey and Qatar are truly against us..., so you are not being completely paranoid here.... 
3. The perception that international opinion provides excessive support for the MB, which develops at times to the belief that the international media is in the MB’s pockets....
4. [The idea that this is a war on terror.] What is your counter idea to Islamism/MB ideology? Whoever does not agree with you is a traitor and should be killed? ("4 common Misconceptions Egyptians have," August 18, 2013, The Sandmonkey)

From the latter post, the key point for me is: "in order for the international media to showcase your side of the story, you actually have to have a side of the story." That is, the MB = terrorists doesn't hold water. They might have allied with those that did harbor terrorists or even were so. And they might be violent now. But the numbers dead before 30 June pale before those afterwards.

But if the explanatory power of the story coming out of Cairo is weak, that coming from The Washington Post is equally so.  Note only is this chart missing a number of obvious links, it suggests that any time one is not sending tanks or bullets, one doesn't have a clue.

(Max Fisher, “The Middle East, Explained in One (sort of Terrifying) Chart,” Washington Post, August 26, 2013). Of course, if we are discussing "no clue" in terms of the American public and not the American government, we are on somewhat safer ground: half of ["the American public"] could not find Syria on a map, as surveyed by the Pew Research Centre." ("These 'Syria for idiots' pieces are getting a bit much: Where will it end?," Oliver Williams, New Statesman, 04 September 2013)

Mapping the Middle East

While the surveys included in the set “40 Maps That Explain the World” (Max Fisher, August 12 2013, Washington Post) have not been delivered to many of the countries in the Middle East, the comparative information is useful for future research design. For example, has Egypt's belief in democracy over a strong leader changed in the last month?

More local mapping can be found of the protests and backlash in Egypt in August ("Mapping Egypt’s Week of Chaos," Joshua Keating, Slate, Aug. 20, 2013) Using some of the same technology as "Mapped: Every Protest on the Planet Since 1979," J. DANA STUSTER, Foreign Policy, AUGUST 22, 2013, the dark circles of Cairo are noteworthy, but it is probably those outliers where these will continue longest.

Ci Devant Encore: Revolutionary Language for Remnants

First off, a thanks and a tip of the hat to Juan Cole. I have been reading a lot of Chicken Little reportage regarding Libya. The Libyans couldn't handle the truth, or freedom, or some such. It would balkanize into pre-1934 regions (not that I necessarily think that a bad thing, with my moniker and all). But I never heard that from Mr. Cole. No pie-in-the-sky, but his recent reports since the fall of the old regime have been consistently convincing, suggesting that one could walk the streets, do business, etc. ("Despite Airport Incident, Henry Kissinger is Wrong about Libya," by Juan Cole, Informed Comment, 6/05/2012). To be fair Zintan doesn't trust Tripoli and wants to keep their guns.  But I live in the Midwest, so what is new? Well, the reports so far suggest that these recent elections have been relatively peaceful. Relative to whom? Well a lot of places. Jamaica in the 1970s and 1980s comes to mind.

In any case, I return to my interest in the Ci devants, the remnants, the feloul, of the old regime after a revolution. Since everyone did something to survive under the old regime, all revolutions could use a little Truth and Reconciliation. What did you do in the Resistance, Daddy? That was a difficult question in France in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  So, via Cole's Informed Comment we learn the following:

• In Libya, the remnants of the old regime are called ‘seaweed’ or ‘algae’ (tahallub), i.e. the flotsam left behind when the tide recedes. As in Tunisia and Egypt, there has been a lot of debate around what to do with them. They often have a lot of money, and are regrouping to succeed in the new system. Since a lot of prominent Libyan technocrats had been lured back to the country in the past decade..., leaders like Mahmoud Jibril (al-Warfalli) are considered by some to be leftovers, while others see him as someone who went over to the revolution and served as its first transitional prime minister. ("Top Ten Surprises on Libya’s Election Day," by Juan Cole, Informed Comment, 7/08/2012)

So now we have Ci devants, feloul, and tahallub. As the films of Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène - Xala, Mandabi - showed us, the new boss can look decidedly like the old boss post-colonial or post-revolution. But the Kampuchean Revolution shows what a "pure" changeover looks like with no use of the technocrats, etc. from the old regime. In Libya, as in Egypt it is a question of using those without too much of Les Mains Sales, not to say blood on their hands.

Read Any Good Revolutions Lately?

[In the run-up to the run-off, I had been reviewing the past year's events in print and online. But, as I wrote the following, the Egyptian judges overturned the parliamentary elections (well some of them). What follows is not my comment on the current situation (counter-revolution?, coup?, just the messiness of transitioning from revolution to democracy?).  That will come later, if it is not beyond my abilities.]

As protests begin to achieve a critical mass again (albeit much lower than last year) in Tahrir ("Tahrir Protests Continue," June 6, 2012, by Hossam El-Hamalawy, Jadaliyya), I have returned to a few books written after the first flush of enthusiasm about the Egyptian Spring (there is a movie Tahrir - Liberation Square, which looks interesting, but I have only seen the trailers). Three books focusing on events of 2011.  For an outsider, not simply trying to understand what happened/is happening in Egypt, but how to understand the modern world, I found Ashraf Khalil, Liberation Square: Inside the Egyptian Revolution and the Rebirth of a Nation (St. Martin’s Press, 2012) to be most revelatory. Wael Ghonim, Revolution 2.0 (2012) is mainly the story of the politicization of one person (albeit a very interesting and thought-provoking story).  Marwan Bishara, The Invisible Arab (2012) wants to jump straight to the commentary without enough grounding in the narrative (Bishara might have the grounding, but he doesn't provide the reader with it). Khalil, as a Cairo-based reporter for European news services, is both in the revolution and reporting on it. Intriguing chapters on Tahrir days reveal how the street protests actually created community (communities) more once the government shut down phone/internet communication, forcing everyone to speak to everyone else to find out what was going on on the next block. More than Ghonim and Bishara, Khalil roots the revolution in the past decade of Egyptian history.  As such, it appeals most to the mere historian in me.  See also, now a new collection of essays on this context ("The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest, and Social Change in Egypt," reviewed by Arang Keshavarzian, in mobilizingideas, June 13, 2012), which I suppose is my next port of call to read.

Finally, a very detailed reconstruction of the life and death of Khaled Saeed has been written by Amro Ali in Jadaliyya ("Saeeds of Revolution: De-Mythologizing Khaled Saeed," June 5, 2012 by Amro Ali, Jadaliyya)

Neither Feloul nor Islamist

Revolutions create their own sense of time and periodization. An article exploring why Hamdeen Sabbahi gained such support with a minimal machine behind him ("Why Did Sabbahi - 'One of Us' - Do So Well?," Jadaliyya [and Ahram Online], May 26 2012, by Ekram Ibrahim), notes that one of his chief attributes was that he was "neither feloul [remnant]...nor Islamist. Another is titled, "In the field of feloul, Shafiq rules" (by Rana Khazbak and Heba Afify, Egypt Independent, 26/05/2012). Another blog groups the votes of Shafiq and Moussa together to map the Feloul votes (which might surprise those leftists who were strategically voting with the latter only to see his candidacy slide into fourth ("Mapping the Egyptian Presidential Election," May 26, 2012, by Eric Schewe). But returning to Sabbahi; he is neither feloul nor Islamist because he is neither the candidate of a return to the Mubarak era (Ahmed Shafiq, currently in 2nd place) nor the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate (Mohamed Mursi, currently in 1st, although official results are not released). But Sabbahi is a self-described Nasserist, obviously a position of an old, very old regime, if not the old regime. In an election in which the 57-year-old Sabbahi can lay claim to the youth vote because he is the youngest candidate, everyone will be tied to the way pre-revolutionary politics were played in one way or another. The key is what politics they stand for going forward.

When French Revolutionaries created the Ancien Régime, post facto as that what they had been rebelling against, they created opponents of the Revolution which they called the Ci-devants (the "so-called").  The ci-devants were so-called because they were former aristocrats, whose privileges and social status were abolished by the Revolution (and the night of 4 August 1789). So there were no more nobles, but the remnant remained, at least in terms of those supporting the policies similar to or even the restoration of the Old Regime.

Which brings us to the Ancien Régime, the Old Order: "isqat al-nizam," was the cry to bring down the old "regime" in Egypt. But it was, by the vagaries of language, also the call to bring down "order." It is not surprising that many voters would seek to avoid demolishing order. The feloul voters, the ci-devants, are not simply those who benefited by the Old Order, but those who fear the absence of nizam.

Egypt: Vox Pop, Vox Populi

(based on al-Ahram polls; see "Reading
the tea-leaves" for the latest)

Yesterday, I posted a shout-out to Egypt on elections (that is, they often look uninspiring until one looks at the alternatives), and hoped they would soon have their own Nate Silver. Well, I found one. Issandr El Amrani today posts a useful analysis of the Egyptian Presidential Candidates and their prospects (based, of course on pre-election polling and positioning). ("My belated take on Egypt's elections," by Issandr El Amrani, The Arabist, May 24, 2012) If Aboul Fotouh or Sabahi would fit the view of those seeking change, that seems unlikely to be the desire of more than a third of the population.

Many posts, at least in English, are similar to vox pop journalism now running on Al Jazeera, etc. (see, for example, "Egypt Votes, At Last," by Wendell Steavenson, New Yorker, May 23, 2012). My own take from one such clip were women in line who stated (through the translation) that whoever won should take care, else they would vote him out next time. The revolution is not synonymous withe the elections. Day 2 of Egypt's first post-Mubarak presidential elections continues today.

Egypt: Vox Dei, Vox Populi?

Greetings, Egyptians. Welcome to the problems and opportunities of mass democracy. The process sometimes produces the debacle of hanging chads and the hung election between Al Gore and George W. Bush; and it sometimes produces the government of Il Popolo della Libertà party led by Silvio Berlusconi. But its value and veracity is never just in one election. May you long have the joy of psephology and may you soon have your own Nate Silver.

Assad and the Schmürz

Growing up in the Seventies became a search for the offbeat, the quirky (which might explain how I can put Lene Lovich, the Mael brothers, and Tristan Tzara in the same parenthetical comment). If the strange had already entered my school days with the plays of  Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Wolfgang Borchert, outside the school walls my friends and I entertained ourselves with the likes of Boris Vian. 

The dark, comic play, The Empire Builders by Boris Vian (Les Bâtisseurs d'Empire ou le Schmürz, 1957, pub. 1959), was described by LA Weekly (commenting on one of its periodic revivals) in this way:

• "A respectable family of father, mother, daughter, and their maid, flee within the confines of their home, from a strange, unknown and terrifying Noise which pursues them as they move upward from floor to floor until they reach the attic. In each room, they find the same creature awaiting them: a dark, bandage-wrapped thing who suffers in silence as the family casually beats, whips, and pummels him." (City Garage Theater, n.d.)

Le Schmürz followed the family from room to smaller room to garret, quietly suffering beatings and various tortures, until the remnant of the family ends the play by self-defenestration, and an army of silent, bandage-wrapped personages appear. As a teenager, I presumably incompletely assumed that (1) Europeans had a lot of unresolved issues after 1945, and (2) Vian was not enamored of the bourgeois family.

Aleppo University, Thurs., 17 May 2012

But today's report that "thousands of people have taken to the streets in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo," suggest a similar shrinking scenario for Pres. Bashar al-Assad's regime.

• Syria's second city has so far not experienced the violence seen in other cities during the uprising and has remained largely loyal to the government...since protests began in March 2011. ( "'Thousands' protest in northern Syrian city of Aleppo," 18 May 2012, BBC)

All is well; Damascus is largely loyal, said the bourgeois father from his attic room.

Friending Revolution

Reading two books which grew out of Arab Spring:

• Wael Ghonim, Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater Than the People in Power: A Memoir (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) and 
• Marwan Bishara, The Invisible Arab: The Promise and Peril of the Arab Revolutions (Nation Books, 2012).

(Amazon has a nice, simple interview with Mr. Ghonim.) Both works appear to be by writers who don't read books a lot. (This might apply more to Ghonim than to Bishara, but the notes from the latter cite mainly websites.) This is an observation, not a criticism. Ghonim's work is as much about social media and the synergy between education in marketing and computing and political science as it is about the Egyptian Revolution. Still, the first-person story makes the swirl of events (see this blog over the past year-plus) accessible; and provides key insights to generational shifts. And hope.

The Balkanization Of The Middle East?

I borrow Andrew Sullivan's article heading, which points to the lack of any deep historical identity for any country between Egypt and Iran.  Sullivan quotes Shlomo Avineri who notes:

• "Most international borders in the Middle East and North Africa were drawn by imperial powers – Britain, France, and Italy – either after World War I and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire (the Sykes-Picot agreements), or, as in Libya and Sudan, earlier. But in no case did these borders correspond with local popular will, or with ethnic or historical boundaries. ("The Balkanization Of The Middle East," Andrew Sullivan, Daily Dish, 27 April 2012)

The latest focus is on the future of a Sunnis-Alawite-Druze-Christian-Kurd Syria. But one could also go back to the subject of the fascinating if a tad over-written and self-referential Churchill's Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq, by Christopher Catherwood (Basic Books, 2004).  [And there is always Michael Zwerin's text from the 70s (see image until I can post a photo of the cover of my personal copy, from which our moniker is derived.]

Just In Case There Was Any Doubt: Torture Does Not Equal Useful Information

Latest leaks (unfortunate metaphor regarding waterboarding) on latest report:

• While a final draft of a report being prepared by Democrat members of the Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to be completed, let alone made public, sources told Reuters the report would give little evidence to demonstrate that the techniques were effective, even in helping to track down and kill Osama bin Laden. It may have instead provided false leads and bogus intelligence.
• One official said the research, which involved going over millions of pages of documents handed over by the CIA, had yielded "no evidence" that waterboarding and other coercive interrogation methods had played "any significant role" in the years-long intelligence operations that eventually led to the killing of Bin Laden in a Pakistan safe-house by an elite team of US Navy Seals nearly a year ago. ("Waterboarding and 'enhanced interrogation' shown to be ineffective," by David Usborne, The Independent, 28 April 2012)

Or as your grandmother would note, you catch more flies with honey.  And you wonder, once intelligence is outsourced to semi-private companies, whether there would be a follow-up report like this to show that "coercive interrogation" produces "false leads and bogus intelligence" would ever be done. Or would the semi-private companies simply suggest that more "coercive interrogation" technology was needed, and continue to siphon off public funds?

Balkanization is Back: Did I Miss Anything?

Annan's six-point peace plan

Homs, Syria

1. Syrian-led political process to address the aspirations and concerns of the Syrian people 
2. UN-supervised cessation of armed violence in all its forms by all parties to protect civilians 
3. All parties to ensure provision of humanitarian assistance to all areas affected by the fighting, and implement a daily two-hour humanitarian pause 
4. Authorities to intensify the pace and scale of release of arbitrarily detained persons 
5. Authorities to ensure freedom of movement throughout the country for journalists 
6. Authorities to respect freedom of association and the right to demonstrate peacefully (21 April 2012, "UN votes to boost Syria mission," BBC)

Agreed  (however unlikely this is to be in practice: 17 April 2012, "Syria troops bombard Homs and other rebel areas," BBC). And this should be applied to: Syria, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Texas.  Where else?

Revolution as Model or Metaphor?

In May, Der Spiegel interviewed Emmanuel Todd, who "sees himself as an 'empirical Hegelian' who recognizes a universal course of history," about the emergent Arab Spring. Both Der Spiegel and Todd ransacked European history for the appropriate comparative model. For Der Spiegel it was "a breathtaking acceleration of history, similar to the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989." For Todd it was the cycle of phases, or, more darkly, that a revolution eats its young:

• "Revolutions often end up as something different from what their supporters proclaim at the beginning.... It took almost a century from the time of the French Revolution in 1789 until the democratic form of government, in the form of the Third Republic, finally took shape after France had lost a war against the Germans in 1871. In the interim, there was Napoleon, the royalist restoration and the Second Empire under Napoleon III, the 'little one,' as Victor Hugo said derisively." (05/20/2011, "Rising Literacy and a Shrinking Birth Rate: A Look at the Root Causes of the Arab Revolution," Der Spiegel)

That last comment is a conscious echo of Marx's observation that history repeats itself, "the first as tragedy, then as farce" (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852).  If France, 1789-1871, seems a bit broad, in the third part of the interview Todd expands to all of Europe in 1848.

• The Arab Spring resembles the European Spring of 1848 more closely than the fall of 1989, when communism collapsed. The initial spark in France triggered unrest in Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, Austria, Italy, Spain and Romania -- a classic chain reaction, despite major regional differences. 

More recently, the Syrian Protests, which most viewed at best as a "revolutionary situation," has now become viewed as entering a second radical phase.  At least that is the claim of "The Age of the Guillotine!" (Syrian Revolution Digest, September 18, 2011): "Ideologies will soon flourish, and compromises will be harder to reach, even between the revolutionaries, pragmatism is now more necessary and harder to attain."  2011 as 1793?

Comparative Revolutions: Part Deux

How do we interpret "revolutionary situations" and "revolutionary outcomes" (to use the Charles Tilly's language, "Conflict, Revolt and Revolution,"  European Revolutions, 1492-1992 (Oxford, 1993), ch. 1) of recent and current rebellions? Avishai Margalit, in a piece analyzing current pundits on the Arab Spring, notes that we often do so by choosing the wrong historical revolution.  Margalit asks, "Why were the Arab revolutions, especially in Egypt, such a shocking surprise to almost all who care?"  His answer is often because we have only one, or only one main, historical example of a "revolution":

• "We are in the grip of an idea about revolutions. The idea is the Bolshevik model (or the Jacobin one, if we go back in time), according to which a revolution worth its salt is the outcome of a centralized organization that acts under a unified command.... This idea is dubious when applied to Russia in 1917, let alone to other revolutions. It holds true for Russia’s October Revolution, but it does not hold true for Russia’s February Revolution. The latter, like those in Egypt and Tunisia this year, lacked a central organization. ("From Ground Zero to Tahrir Square," by Avishai Margalit, Democracy, Issue #21, Summer 2011)

Not only is his point worth considering, surely choosing any of the "sloppy" early modern revolutions before 1789 would also allow use to make more informed comparisons about those not lead by a centralized cadre (and castigating Libya, or Syria, or Egypt for not having the thing that we pretended they needed to have in the first place).

Others continue to focus on the "social revolution" model.  Lawrence Wright notes of "the martyrs of the Arab Spring so far: Some 200...in Tunisia...[;] in Egypt...840...[;] More than a thousand...in Yemen....[;] in Syria, more than 2,200..."

• "The protesters are not just bringing about badly needed social revolutions in their societies. By their moral example, they are redefining Islam and redeeming it from the savage caricature that bin Laden made of his religion" (“Two Questions at the Heart of Bin Laden’s Jihad," by Lawrence Wright, Bloomberg”, Sept. 8, 2011)

Not just, but also.  Time to dust-off the social revolution model or at least make a working definition.

Social Media Revolution or Old-Fashioned Social Revolution?

The events of the Arab Spring (and the wider events of the Summer of 2011) draw analysts to the comparative.  Thus, the editors of the Middle East Report note "the Syrian revolt of 2011...is the nightmarish opposite of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutionary dream." ("Syria's Torment," the Editors, Middle East Report, August 10, 2011, Middle East Research and Information Project) One of these is not like the other. Such comparisons are the bread-and-butter of all those who search for the independent variable, be they historical sociologists or political scientists.  But the comparative is a game that historians must play if they are going to use terms to describe what is going on.  (Is it a revolt, sire?...)  And, indeed, the analysts tend to draw from the ready-made language of historical, even European revolts, to understand the present.  Thus, the same Middle East Report: "No rustic jacquerie, the Syrian revolt has leaped from town to town." ("Syria's Torment,") (Are, then, protest videos posted to Youtube the new urban cahiers de doléances?)

It might seem that recent media-drenched revolts are tailor-made for the linguistic turn - deep cultural analysis of modes of discourse.  And certainly there were claims at the outset that the Medium is the Message:

• "Yet another Facebook revolution: why are we so surprised?," by John Naughton, The Observer, 23 January 2011
• "Faces of the Facebook Revolution," by Lenora Jane Estes, Vanity Fair, 4 April 2011
• "Why not call it a Facebook revolution?," by Chris Taylor, February 24, 2011, CNN
  

Just a partial listing, shows how this quickly devolved to a meer trope.  Naughton revealed the formula:

• "The story is always the same: something unexpected happens in the real world; journalists notice that some of the people involved are users of the web/mobiles/Facebook/Twitter (delete as appropriate); the unexpected is then labelled 'the Facebook/Twitter/smartphone (delete as etc) revolution/protest/demonstration/election'." ("Yet another Facebook revolution")

Instead, what has dominated analysis is state-centered analysis of social revolutions, the type that developed out of the 1960s and 1970s from Barrington Moore, Theda Skocpol, and Charles Tilly. For Skocpol, state situations, not revolutionary ideologies, are most determinative of successful revolutions which she distinguishes as fundamentally different from unsuccessful ones.

•  “Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of society's state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below." Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (1979), 4

And Jeff Goodwin reiterates this definition in his "narrow" revolution definition below:

• "Two definitions of a revolution: a broad one, where revolution is 'any and all instances in which a state or a political regime is overthrown and thereby transformed by a popular movement in an irregular, extraconstitutional and/or violent fashion'; and a narrow one, in which 'revolutions entail not only mass mobilization and regime change, but also more or less rapid and fundamental social, economic and/or cultural change, during or soon after the struggle for state power.'” Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 9, cited in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution.

What is intriguing is that the language of the state-centered analysis of social revolutions has returned to center stage. Anne-Marie Slaughter has recently drawn a number of "lessons" from recent events in Libya in the Financial Times. "The first is that, against the sceptics, it clearly can be in the US and the west’s strategic interest to help social revolutions fighting for the values we espouse and proclaim. The strategic interest in helping the Libyan opposition came from supporting democracy and human rights, but also being seen to live up to those values by the 60 per cent majority of Middle Eastern populations who are under 30 and increasingly determined to hold their governments to account. This value-based argument was inextricable from the interest-based argument." (Anne-Marie Slaughter, "Why Libya sceptics were proved badly wrong," Financial Times, August 24, 2011)  And there are many analyses of contemporary Arab "social revolutions": see for example "Social revolution in Tunisia and Egypt" (Steven Adolf and Sadik Harchaoui, Forum Report, 11 February 2011).  Is this another trope or a useful recognition of what is going on on the ground?  Perhaps it is best to note that the link between the state political and the social is a useful metaphor, then and now.

You write Khadafi, I write Qaddafi, Let's Call the Whole Thing....

Perhaps we will only need it for the history books now.  But, for the record: "A much-circulated 2009 ABCNews.com story found 112 different ways to render the Libyan leader's last name in the Latin alphabet, used in English and most other Western European languages. But, according to this passport, and presumably the Libyan man himself, the accurate Latinized spelling is one of the least commonly used of those 112: Gathafi." (Max Fish, The Atlantic, August 24, 2011, "Rebel Discovers Qaddafi Passport, Real Spelling of Leader's Name")

Surely Juan Cole Deserves Some Credit Too

Tripoli, 22 August (see Immoral Minority, etc.)

Great article by Juan Cole ("Top Ten Myths about the Libya War," 08/22/2011, Informed Comment) who surely gets to take a bow for not only supporting Libyan FF, but supporting the limited air support by the US/UK/France/Nato since before its inception.  From my, admittedly circumscribed view, I would only question 2 of his myths:

1. " The United States led the charge to war. There is no evidence for this allegation whatsoever."  Doesn't this go against the Lizza, New Yorker article which stated, some months ago: "Nonetheless, Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the President’s actions in Libya as 'leading from behind'"? ("The Consequentialist: How the Arab Spring remade Obama’s foreign policy," by Ryan Lizza, New Yorker, May 2, 2011)  Lizza's article (and the adviser) might be wrong, but I don't recall Mr. Cole taking them to task earlier.
2. "The Libyan Revolution was a civil war. It was not, if by that is meant a fight between two big groups within the body politic."  This is more a judgement call.  Charles Tilly's definition of a revolution is when two groups of elites appeal to non-elites and the two blocks fight to control state apparatus.  In a revolutionary situation,civil wars often are a stage.  That appears to have happened over the past few months.  I think Cole rightly wants to show that Qaddafi's support among non-elites was not that strong.  I agree.  But, for as long as it lasts, I think we can term this a civil war, because Qaddafi did have some, if limited, support

Those are my caveats to an otherwise outstanding string of great articles on Libya.  Which is why Informed Comment is on My Blog List to the left of this blog.

So What Will Green Square Be Called Next Week? (Update: That was quick, now we know)
From ABC

• Rebel forces are surrounding the Gadhafi compound, Bab al Aziziya, a representative of the rebel government told ABC News.
• Mohamad al Akari, a Transitional National Council advisor, said that if Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi is still in Tripoli, they believe he is in Bab al Aziziya.
• "Tonight it's over," Akari said.
• Libyan rebel forces are now in Green Square in the heart of Tripoli, according to multiple reports, clashing with government forces. ("Libyan Rebels Say They Have Captured Two of Gadhafi's Sons in Tripoli," by OLIVIA KATRANDJIAN and JEFFREY KOFMAN, ABC News, Aug. 21, 2011)

Update: "Libyan rebels: Unit protecting Gadhafi surrenders," by KARIN LAUB, Associated Press, Updated: 6:36 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 21, 2011)

• TRIPOLI, Libya — A senior rebel official says the military unit in charge of protecting Moammar Gadhafi and the capital Tripoli has surrendered.
• Mahmoud Shammam, the rebel minister of information, told the Associated Press on Sunday that the unit commander "has joined the revolution and ordered his soldiers to drop their weapons."

Update 2: It turns out it has now been renamed, at least in the popular mind, from Green to Martyrs' Square!  That was quick.