Today is Wednesday and my class on international situations…….

Okay class…let’s review…….first Tunisia had an popular uprising…..leader gone.  Egypt was next….popular uprising……Mubarak in prison on trial…..and now it is Libya…..popular uprising and bad guy DEAD!  Not bad for less than a year of political unrest…..but now we need to ask….Who’s next?

Class, if you have been paying attention then you will recall Yemen….their repressive leader is under pressure to quit and go away….even to the point that a blast put his butt in the hospital….but as of yet….he remains.   Then there is Syria…..a popular uprising and a government that has massacred its people and still no interest from the West even though the killing of innocent civilians was a reason for Libyan expedition….and then of course there is the Palestinian/Israeli conflict….but we will pass over that one for no one needs a migraine this early…..

The leaders, the ruling military junta, has an economy based on cronyism….nothing actually works in the economy with the exception of the oil industry….and there is the rub……OIL!  The one thing that the West wants and needs……

Junta has got to be watching and worrying about the future after their neighbors of Tunisia and Libya have gone by way of the do-do………to use a classic line….they are as nervous as a hooker in church…..

So class, what do you think will be the next “problem” that the West will get involved in?

Let me inject my thoughts before you answer.

Syria?  Not a chance?  Why?  The country has NOTHING the West wants or needs….so the people will have to suffer until they are victorious or until they are all dead…..there is NO OIL!

My thought is…….wait for it……(drum roll please)….Algeria!  But professor, there is no evidence that there is a problem in Algeria.

That is not quite accurate….in the West with the corporate media….there are few reports about Algeria but there are problems that are just beneath the surface…..

Yes, Algeria is more westernized than most of the Middle East….but that is not all that democratic….

A former colony of France and profoundly westernized, Algeria was the first major Arab state to flirt with democracy. The military dictatorship — spiritually bankrupt, economically inept and violently challenged on the streets — that had ruled the nation unchallenged since the mid-1960s, decided in 1989 to try elections. Yet after the triumph of the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front in local elections in 1990, the junta canceled the experiment. Civil war followed. In a savage duel between the regime and Islamist guerrillas, entire villages were wiped out.

The Algerian junta held firm in the 1990s partly because the non-Islamist middle and upper classes that detested the regime were repelled by the barbarism of the guerrillas. When jihadists started butchering women and children, the Islamic alternative became too frightful. (Also, the brutality of the government’s forces — the worst of them happily called themselves “les exterminateurs” — inspired abject fear.) If the Tunisian and Egyptian elections bring Islamists to power and the sky doesn’t fall, however, the odds of popular unrest in Algeria will shorten further.  (thanx to Stratrisks for some of the content)………..

My thought is by next year, the Algerians will be looking for some civil disobedience of their own…….