Autonomous Revolts in Middle East: Will Future U.S. Intervention There Be Necessary?

Developers of the Internet would have likely tried to speed up the development of the World Wide Web had they been told in the 1990's that it would someday be a tool to reshape nations. Now that Google's Wael Ghonim managed to turn Facebook into a combination of David and Goliath against Middle Eastern dictatorships, the Middle East may have found its new template to a reasonable stability. And for American government still trying to figure out this new cyber paradigm as of this writing, foreign policy may never be the same again.

The only thing that could stop it is our American way of thinking incredulously about groundbreaking ideas and using military response to amend it.

Now that the United States faces a national debt crisis and continuous questioning from both sides of the political camp why money still needs to be spent on the war in Afghanistan, one can only imagine the debates we end up having over the cutting of our military might.

If the revolts in the Middle East remain autonomous through the will of the people there, someone is going to argue that perhaps the spending of money for military involvement in Northern Africa should be scrapped in favor of domestic programs already on the chopping block. Mostly likely, that argument will come from writers like me, the public...and maybe one or two logical thinkers in Congress.

Such an idea might seem dangerous in a time when anything that can go wrong usually does--even with the people seemingly in control. However, as we saw with the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the fury of frustrated people can go beyond the concussion caused by a blast from an army tank. You can argue that such a repressed fury can even overturn a military that's conversely hellbent on upholding the great dictator regime and trying to shut down the public rebellion.

It's the kind of thing that America is starting to ponder happening here if repression of jobs and inability to live decently unleashes into a blaze of revolt by the most vulnerable. If debatable on when it would happen, it's anyone's guess if we'd be restrained and hold out for 30 years as the Egyptian people did.

Ironically, the choice of cutting domestic programs over military spending in our slashing of federal spending may determine whether massive revolts here are fast tracked or not.

But is there any true way of gauging whether the people in the Middle East can take care of their own problems without our intervention? The echoes of history can manage some answers. We also have to look at the differences between military strategy and social strategy.

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When you look at the broad sweep of revolutions in world history, you see that most of them were successful, even if some of them were revolts by a nefarious regime. And you still have the failed ones dotting the historic landscape, such as the Roman slave rebellion by Spartacus, the Celtic Gauls against Julius Caesar, the numerous failed Russian revolutions before 1917, and (more recently) the failed revolution attempts in Burma.

With the ancient theory from Aristotle that a successful revolt has to either change an existing constitution or usurp the existing one with an all new one, it's clear that both theories apply in the Middle East. How that happens, however, when leadership is up in the air or hanging by a string is still up for intellectual discussion as of this writing. When one side wins a revolt and a sideline party usurps that with a whole new set of laws, new theories have to be written.

It's easy to say that if the Muslim Brotherhood takes over Egypt or other parts of the Middle East or if oil pipelines are terrorized, America will have no choice except to use military intervention in the region. Call the hijacking of oil the culprit for war yet again. Yet the Facebook campaign by Wael Ghonim proved that plotting revolts through social networking can be as complex as a war plan by the smartest military minds.

The plotting on the net seems to be going beyond just battle and more into the sheer psychological terror the sight of 100,000 angry people brings. It also utilizes the newest and ultimate weapon in all future revolts: Having a lot of people in different strategic places to throw a regime's army into chaos.

There you have the biggest key in how America could let the people take care of things in the Middle East: The people's social network strategy is now more diffuse than military strategy.

Military strategy has been known for centuries as being more cohesive and taking care of one thing at a time. Cyber-organized revolts now have the people taking care of different things in different places at different times to avoid the potential of massive casualties fighting the military head-on.

Of course, this doesn't apply to Egypt, unless the fear of a military coup there turns the tide of potential Democracy. Bahrain, Libya, Yemen and Iran will have to be the experimental places where their military could potentially be overcome by method of distraction. Naturally, this complicates in Iran where social networking is banned because Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has it marked as his personal anathema.

With a new set of rules in play for revolts, though, proper organization could still be had where Internet is banned. It doesn't seem impossible that some smuggled technology gets into Iran passing on the new battle tactics of Ghonim.

All of this will take years to play out, with Iran quite obviously being the largest hurdle for the people there to overcome. Spending billions on military intervention in the same region would have to take nearly as long with a long fight to the death if not threats of nuclear weapon use. Letting the people in the entire Northern African region work out their own issues would prove a new endemic social order that can even incite sycophantic military from those countries to eventually join in.

Based on what happened in Egypt, we've seen proof that those in allegiance to the dictator will side with the people once the organized intensity becomes impossible to control.

Yes, while the U.S. Congress debates all the federal budget cuts that requires a new set of rules of how we live in America, the Middle East's new rules should also be analyzed to the core and let alone for a long time to act under their own accord.

All of this requires the rare pattern of governmental human will having to be taxed to think outside of the status quo when it's for a greater good.