Steven A. Cook has a fascinating piece on why the Tunisian military sided with the people rather than the secular, autocratic government once headed by former President Zine Abidine Ben Ali:
Although the armed forces intervention defied expectations of Middle Eastern militaries, the fact that officers sided with the Tunisian people actually makes perfect sense. The Tunisian military — made up of about 36,000 officers and conscripts across the army, navy, and air force — is not the oversized military common throughout the Middle East that is short on war fighting capabilities but long on prestige and maintaining domestic stability. Defense spending in Tunisia under Ben Ali was a relatively low 1.4 percent of GDP, which reflects not only the fact that the country has no external threats, but also part of a Ben Ali strategy to ensure that the armed forces could not threaten his rule. This was clearly a mistake. Had Ben Ali followed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has always taken great care to make sure that the Egyptian armed forces were well-resourced, General Ammar and his fellow officers may have thought twice about tossing their sugar daddy overboard.
If you’re looking for at least a partial explanation as to why Iran’s green revolution did not succeed in overturning the regime, but the Tunisian uprising did, it’s right here in the decision of the security forces to defect. Jonathan Chait wrote as much last year. As Cook observes, the military’s intervention on behalf of the protesters was a deciding factor–and it’s still not clear whether they’ll ultimately facilitate or prevent Tunisia from emerging as the stable, secular democracy everyone is hoping for.
A peripheral point–this illustrates the folly of the idea that Americans are going to resist tyranny through widespread ownership of handguns. Under the far-fetched survivalist doomsday scenario, the outcome would rely on similar defection by armed American authorities, not on a citizenry armed to the teeth. Longstanding democratic traditions, social ties between the military and the civilian population, and yes, even the pen–all of these would prove mightier than the extended ammo clip. A handgun might help you protect your home or family from a burglar, it’s not going to stand up well against the might of the American military.
