Protests in the Middle East Part One: In which I kind of quote Rumsfeld

What is happening in the Middle East, and what should Obama do about it? The first question is almost as hard to answer as the second. No one knows. I doubt any foreign intelligence agencies know. The media doesn’t know. But standard questions like: how many people are protesting? How representative are the protesters of the general population? How stable is the regime in power (in the sense that most Middle Eastern nations rely upon the cooperation of fairly autonomous militaries)?


I think a big problem with media and political commentary in the modern era is we expect that intelligence agencies will know everything. Obviously, they don’t – and the things they “know,” they don’t know with any kind of certainty. People criticize the Obama administration for not knowing when and how Mubarak would ultimately step down. No one knew! Many things are unknowable, as Rumsfeld would remind us in what was his most astute formulation.

The few things we can know (we being the intelligence agencies and the public itself) in these dynamic and malleable protests are the underlying demographics of the country at large. Here’s a good example: Egypt has a median age of only 24 years old, a literacy rate of 66%, and a poverty rate of only 17% (according to BBC). Essentially, a young, fairly well-educated population. The povety rate is surprisingly low, but traditionally revolutions are the product of a middle-class uprising. I think it’s clear that’s what we saw there – secular-ish, young Egyptians demanding more economic and political freedoms.

Let’s compare to Yemen, another country apparently undergoing massive protests. Literacy rate is comparable at 61% and average age is only 17.9 (!) with poverty rate over 40%. Will this translate into enough force to overthrow the government? Demographically, the fact that there is such a large young population would strengthen that case, whereas the weak middle . Again, no one will know if the protests there will reach the magnitude to take down the government – but just logically, I’d be much more wary of a group of angry teenagers protesting than say an older population.

Still, this isn’t a science. The median age in Tunisia is one of the oldest in the region – 30. All we should hope for from our intelligence and diplomatic agencies is that they are appropriately weighing the things that we do know – the facts. Everything else is conjecture.