 |
|
In the past few weeks, some well and some not so particularly well connected sources have basically told me they are convinced we are set to face more terrorist attacks, before the elections. One person I met with tonight from another country's defense ministry told me, he knows we are going to face another attack. He doesn't wish it, but there it is.
My nerves have sort of gone on vacation, so I can't say I feel it. But at least intellectually at the moment, one does wonder, how things like the elections might be affected. [One also wonders, and hopes, that it is just so much hogwash.] I did find it more than a bit disconcerting the way this official spoke tonight of an Al Qaeda attack as a certainty. So since he made it clear that for his country's government, a Bush reelection would be favorable, for a variety of reasons, I threw back at him the possibility that such an attack would seem to make calling such an elections basically impossible. He literally wrote it down.
I just don't see how one could predict it. Sure there's one possible sociological sentiment of sticking with the leader, but surely as well there could be a well-deserved groundswell of resentment that this administration took some pretty major diversions instead of doing more to protect us from al Qaeda. Daniel Drezner and Matt Yglesias wonder about the same issue in posts today.
While we're being depressing, later on tonight I met with an interesting Iranian American who does work on international issues. And she basically feels that far from headed for some liberalization, the majority of the Middle East is headed for Islamist fundamentalism, of the type Iran saw a quarter century ago in the months after the Khomeini revolution.
Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan -- countries that if they were truly democratized, would become Islamist fundamentalist, she and others she cited as recently speaking at think tanks around town believe.
For what it's worth, the official from this other country said the exact opposite. Imagine, he said, if the regime would change in Iran, what the Middle East would look like: you would have moderate regimes in Iraq, Iran, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Jordan and Egypt, and tremendous pressure on the Syrian regime. When I mentioned Saudi Arabia, he changed the subject. But almost all of the countries on the list above are already problematic to say the least.