Why the violence?

Violence isn’t new to the wave of Tunisian flu that is sweeping through the Arab world, but it seems to be getting worse, hitting Bahrain, Libya and Yemen during more or less the past 24 hours.

Why?

The short answer:  this is the regime response to seeing the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt taken down.  While some accounts are not clear, it is certain that the violence in Bahrain this morning was initiated by the police, who attacked a peaceful (and mostly sleeping) encampment in Pearl Square unprovoked.  Police and allied thugs seem to have been initiating violence in Yemen as well.  The accounts of events in Libya are sketchy, but I would bet that there too the police are rioting.  Kings and presidents are concluding that Ben Ali’s mistake was to flee without a fight and Mubarak’s was to step down without cracking down.

How should peaceful protesters deal with this development?  They are unlikely to beat the police and thugs in a street fight.  What they need to do is mass greater numbers, stay particularly attentive at night, befriend the security forces, beef up their connectedness to foreign and domestic journalists, and make sure their own cadres include people from across the social, ethnic, sectarian and other divides.  If they can’t do these things, they need to stay away from confrontation until they can.

You can also hope that the Americans will be telling the regimes in Sanaa and Manama that crackdowns of the sort they are pursuing are counterproductive and likely to spawn more violence.  But I doubt Washington has all that much sway in either place at the moment, and they surely don’t want one of those regimes to fall without a safety net in place.

President Saleh is no doubt declaring himself indispensable to the war on Al Qaeda, but there really isn’t much time before the “use by” date on that bag of potatoes.  One way or another, he is finished within the next few years (if not the next few months).  Time to get some sort of safety net in place, preferably a more democratic one with some prospect of holding north and south together by sharing power between them.

Qadhafi is of no concern in Washington–they would just as soon he take his tent to the desert.

But the Khalifa monarchy in Bahrain is a real dilemma for the Americans.  You know:  5th fleet vs. the possibility of a Shia (some presume Iranian-dominated) regime.  But the question for the Americans (and for the regime) is whether the kind of police riot the monarchy indulged in this morning will make things better or worse.  My bet is worse, maybe much worse if it turns what has been a mild-mannered expression of dissent into a sectarian war that the Sunnis are likely to lose. It is not enough for the monarchy to have allowed municipal and legislative elections last fall.  And the 5th fleet is more in danger from getting behind the curve than getting out in front of it.  Mr. Obama needs to remember what he said about universal rights–they won’t stop at Manama.

Nor should they if they are going to make it all the way to Tehran, where in many respects the violence and crackdown is at its worst.  That is the good news:  the theocracy is feeling threatened by Tunisian flu.  It dreads the fate of Mubarak, as well it should.