It nearly makes me laugh when Americans warn of the “Islamic state” Egypt is destined at least for a while to become.

Admittedly, many of these warnings and concerns are from our far right, like the one cited above. More studied observers have recognized Egypt’s direction for a long time, and we aren’t suggesting nuclear rearmament.

David Schenker from one of Washington’s most respected think tanks on Arab events said in July “Egypt is an Islamic state.”

Numerous other scholars realized it even earlier. But University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne leads an aggressive faction of Bolshevik Revisionists the press is sucking up. In June Coyne said “Egypt is doomed” when Morsi was elected, then pitifully asked, “Is this what it’s about?”

Yes, as a matter of fact. It’s called democracy. Put in a way Coyne and others might well understand: It’s called The Right To Make The Wrong Decision.

It doesn’t take a history scholar to know that revolutions aren’t a simple few moments of bad guys being replaced by good guys. Every revolution of note, including our own, took lots of time to settle down.

Whether it was the Bolsheviks being ousted by the Leninists or Maximilien de Robespierre parsed by the guillotine, most revolutions are started by people who don’t get their way … at least for a very long time. Consider how long Chairman Mao was in power.

Yet night after night we get breathless reporting from our celebrity newspeople standing over Tahrir Square waiting to document Egypt’s inevitable situation just like the so-called reporters standing on Jersey’s sand beaches waiting to be slammed by Sandy.

We know already.

Or even my sanity retreats like the New York Times yelling, “The revolution in Egypt is in danger of being lost..”

Are we so steeped in our own rightness that we don’t even have the patience for a major social revolution to play itself out?

Egypt’s revolution isn’t going to be lost. It’s just going to take a while to reach any viable fruition and even longer to achieve the social graces we expect of our own mature democracy.

America should be proud of the restraint we maintain from spanking Iran, for example, or of the slow nudges we’ve been giving Burma. We dearly believe in our country and its liberal society, but we can’t drag the playground brat into our Christmas choir and expect her to sing lovely harmony.

It takes time.

Let it be.

Today and tomorrow in Dakar, African intellectuals gather with African media moguls to continue work on a continent-wide framework for developing media. This is the 5th annual “Africa Leaders Media Forum” and they know that they control much of Africa’s destiny.

Last year’s conference closing declaration said, “as demonstrated by the Arab Spring…, media have a profound role to play in social transformation, giving voice to people, and promoting freedom.”

Just like CNN, MSNBC, Rush Limbaugh and the NBC Nightly News. The difference is that we Americans staunchly refuse to accept the obvious brashly insisting a good journalist can be “objective.” Africans know better.

That doesn’t mean that objectivity isn’t a plausible tenant of news reporting; it just means that it’s unattainable. With that realization a reporter is able to temper his own bias better, while clearly accepting and admitting it. There is then much less suspicion between her and her readers.

Today’s agenda began with an open public forum at a nearby university that was covered by Forbes contributor, Elise Knutsen, writing for AllAfrica.

“Panelists at the meeting spoke with manifest passion as they discussed issues related to media, governance and inclusive citizenship,” she reports. Again and again the electrified forum affirmed how powerful the media is: Whether to “promote citizenship” or “empower women” the media had a critical responsibility to frame itself correctly, otherwise it would do so intrinsically, out of control.

Is that what’s happening in America?

This is communist stuff to many Americans, despite the fact that Marshall McLuhan’s the-medium-in-the-message theory was widely accepted with his first publications in 1964.

Tomorrow’s opening session acknowledges the massive revolutions, new constitutions and increased turbulence in much of Africa. “How is the media exploiting citizens’ new wave of awareness?” the session narrative asks.

Because the media alone is the thermostat for so many public events. You dial up the enthusiasm or you dial it down. The media does this more than government organizations, schools or dining room table conversations over dinner. It’s the media, stupid!

In America we’re so afraid of power. We’re certain that power of any kind has a preeminent evil, and that any corralling of it is generally for greed and misuse which will right away curtail our own free will.

That’s really laughable, because power is power and if it isn’t corralled there’s at least an equal chance with anything else that it will curtail our own free will, and that’s the point!

Combine these notions with the false hopes that objectivity can be followed and you’ve a formula for master disaster.

What the African media understands it lacks is the technological know-how of America. Later sessions will explore the new technologies, and that will be followed by a session that then asks, “Are the African media fit to report on these multiple challenges?”

As with so much in Africa’s rapidly progressing institutions, today, there is a concern there isn’t enough money (resources) to properly develop. But the question is broader than getting enough video cameras. It includes, too, the moral and temporal fitness of the people who will be using those cameras.

Ooooh. Once again, socialism, communism whatever you want to call it, right? Yes, actually, that’s right. Media is community of-the-people and by-the-people more than many other institutions in society, certainly more than the elected assemblies and officials whose paths to power are wrought with obligation.

Media is much more dynamic. It reflects the moments of truth, and it’s those aggregate moments that we need to display, analyze and preserve.

Following Dakar’s stellar example, I intend to invite Brian Williams, Rush Limbaugh, Robert Murdoch, David Brooks and Maureen Dowd to our own American conference on how the media needs to become morally fit and responsible to the will of the people.

I’m going to call it, “The How To Do Everything” conference to attract a broad audience.

… Although I might have to run for President, first.

Every four years America holds its largest election. This includes for the president; all House of Representatives; most state, county and city representatives including elected judges. It excludes officials whose terms are scattered including two-thirds of the Senate, half of the state governors and a few other positions.

But by far and wide, this four year cycle is “The Big Election.” The first Big Election I voted in was in 1968. I’ve voted in every election since then; this will be my 11th Big Election.

Who gets to vote, when and how, have been issues that America has addressed and redressed for centuries, and we still don’t have it right. In America’s earlier days – in fact for the country’s first 150 years if not longer – there really was no “One man, one vote.”

Most election regulations have always been left to the individual States to decide, and historically voting laws have disenfranchised many citizens in many States. For our entire history, individual states have tried and often succeeded in suppressing the vote of people traditionally unable to secure power, like Afro-Americans.

Voting suppression was effected by requiring special taxes or demonstrations of income, by proof of secure employment and other means. The suppression always effected the least powerful and tended to keep those in power for longer.

My first Big Election in 1968 was the first election in the nation governed by the Voting Rights Act (VRA), federal legislation that for the first time regulated and tried to homogenize the various States’ laws.

The VRA helped enormously to stop voter suppression, and freer voting occurred right until this very election. This time, though, a barrage of Republican state legislatures changed state laws again suppressing the vote of the poor, disenfranchised, disabled and elderly. These are all constituencies that normally support Democrats.

Successful court challenges have been made against most of these, but not all of them. Last-minute rules, such as that promulgated Friday by the Secretary of State of Ohio, may not allow for enough time for a court challenge before today’s voting.

So it remains to be seen what effect this incredible reversal of nearly a half century of improved voter enfranchisement will do. If the election is close for any of the races in the states with these voting regulation controversies in play, then the results could be delayed for some time until the court challenges are complete.

And in many cases – the Pennsylvania “billboard controversy” is a good example – illegal regulations that the court ultimately vacated were in place for a long enough time to still effect the outcome.

No political party or power can impede the growing transparency of our elections. The free access of the internet and the explosion of media outlets, more journalists and infinitely more blogs, has assured that very little if anything can be kept secret. If someone is cheating, it will be revealed.

But that radical freedom is not without its own disadvantage. It means that the sometimes truly infuriating right of anyone to lie in a political campaign and promulgate that lie without legal redress is guaranteed. Any politician can say anything, can make the most outrageous and mendacious charges against her opponent without fear of any retribution.

The argument that prevails against interdicting such behavior is the argument of transparency. As with someone cheating – if someone is lying – it will be revealed.

The problem is that the revealing takes energy, intellect and time. And a large portion of the American electorate doesn’t have any of that. A large portion of the electorate is easily fooled, even as we work tirelessly for them to be able to cast their ill-advised ballot. That’s one critical curse of democracy: that many people will vote against their best own self-interest.

Egypt, Tunisia, Kenya and likely Tanzania are all crafting new societies based on democratic elections. Lacking America’s long history of democracy can be a benefit in this modern age. Learn from our mistakes, and perhaps we can learn from your accomplishments.

Yesterday tear gas filled Stone Town as mostly young radicals protested the indictment of a popular extremist sheik who was then held without bail.

The unrest in Zanzibar began last week. There was also significant violence in mainland Tanzania’s largest city, Dar-es-Salaam. Many media reports claimed this was Zanzibar’s “Arab Spring.”

It’s not. Unlike in northern Africa these demonstrations will not succeed in toppling the Tanzanian government. Also unlike in northern Africa, the vast majority of Tanzanians are critical of the Islamic violence.

Mainland Tanzania has shackled Zanzibar ever since the federation in 1964 and most Tanzanians look down on Zanzibaris. This has not been a helpful attitude, in the past and especially now as unrest grows on the island. Be that as it may, the significant point is that mainland Tanzanians are in the vast majority.

But there could be a period now measured in months of unrest not significant enough to stop tourists coming to see lions but enough to seriously effect the beach business. This is because the trouble that’s brewing is on the coast.

And that’s because the coast is where East Africa’s Muslim population is, and much of it has been highly radicalized over just the last few years.

Americans who think of East Africa as big game country don’t understand that more than half of the tourists to East Africa never see an animal larger than a monkey. The extraordinarily beautiful coral coast which extends virtually all the way south of Somalia through Mozambique is East Africa’s real tourist treasure, not wild animals.

Europeans especially use East Africa the same way Americans use the Caribbean, for sun ‘n sand vacations, usually of a week long, and usually transported by charter aircraft that practically land next to your beach view hotel room. There you stay, vegging out on margaritas and reggae bands.

Trouble on the coast is not new. In November, 2002, the Israeli Paradise Beach Hotel was mostly destroyed by a terrorist bomb and a ground-to-air missile narrowly missed an El Al jumbo jet taking off from Mombasa, Kenya.

There has been nothing as dramatic until this year. There had been numerous incidents of small grenade bombs in local bars and several incidents of tourist harassment in the last decade. But none of these critically dissuaded tourists from flooding to Kenya’s beaches almost exclusively from Europe.

But all that changed with the successful Kenyan invasion of Somali just to the north of Kenya. As Kenyan soldiers routed Somali terrorists, the coast began to heat up in much more generic ways that has seriously effected tourism. Tourists were kidnaped and publicly ransomed by terrorists, and virtually all the main beach hotels began to institute extremely strict security procedures.

Then last month, just as the Kenyan forces were about to oust al-Shabaab (al-Qaeda in Somali) from its last great stronghold of Kismayo, all sorts of political turbulence erupted in both Mombasa in Kenya and Zanzibar in Tanzania.

It struck me as an obvious consequence of the successful military action in Somalia. Rebels were running for cover, and the East Africa coast with its radical Muslims provides that, and what assets and hardware they could run with began funneling through East Africa.

Kenya is in the thralls of the last legislation implementing its new constitution before March elections. Suddenly there was a newly reborn political movement in Mombasa that called itself the Mombasa Republican Congress. Its agenda was nothing less than independence from Kenya.

The independent movement in Zanzibar which has been a perennial cause every since federation with the mainland in 1964, suddenly blossomed with new and fancy leaflets, new cars for its leaders and new megaphones for its Friday prayers.

While ostensibly completely separate political movements, the timing of both the emergence of the MRC and the makeover of the Zanzibar autonomy movement struck me as anything but coincidental. Money, methods and Islamic madness was coming from the north.

And then the tinderbox exploded in both Kenya and Zanzibar. Last month the principal radical cleric was killed in a car drive-by gangster-like shooting. And last week, Tanzanian police started rounding up radical clerics. Each incident, though separated by nearly a month, resulted in violent protests.

As I write this blog today Mombasa is calm following the Kenyan government’s very tough actions which involved dozens of arrests and the closing of theoretically unregistered Muslim organizations. The Kenyan President charged Mombasa radicals to “surrender or face arrest.”

But Zanzibar is not calm, today, and depending very much upon what the Tanzanian government now does with its radical Muslims, it may not be calm for a long while. And now what happens in one place is likely to effect the other.

As far as I can see, which is all along the exquisitely beautiful coral coast from Somali to the Mozambique border, this outstanding Indian Ocean venue won’t be a place to vegge out for some time.

When and will all of this calm down?

It depends upon how quickly the Somali mop-up occurs, how peacefully and completely the March Kenyan elections go, and how placated Zanzibari successionists will feel as Tanzania flirts with the idea of a new constitution.

March is the key date. After the March 4 Kenyan elections we’ll have a much clearer picture on which to predict what the coast will look like over the next year.

Until then. Leave your flippers at home. Concentrate on the binocs.

After yesterday’s palace shakeup Mohamed Morsi is Egypt’s most powerful man. Yesterday, he emasculated the two most powerful military men who have ruled Egypt since Mubarak stepped down. He replaced them with young Islamists in the military clearly now beholden to him. And he has eliminated at least for the time being any legislature that could challenge him.

What’s left?

Time. The progressives who started the revolution long ago fizzled out in the face of overwhelming Islamic democratic sentiment among voters. Rather than force issues of womens’ rights, habeus corpus, free speech and such, they chose to wait and see how oppressive Morsi and team would be to their progressive ideas.

So far there’s been no chance to rate him; the Big Boys have been fighting for the crown. We don’t know what jewels may have spilled out. But one thing is clear: Morsi is scaring to death Egyptian democrats.

Now that the crown is clearly upon Morsi’s head the world may soon know how draconian or — on the completely other hand — how Islamically permissive Morsi will be. Analysts have been delving into Morsi’s past for a clue.

His many years as a college professor in California give progressives hope. Yet I see a remarkable similarity to the young Muammar Gaddafi who carefully and systematically removed opponents as he patiently came to power in 1966-69.

Morsi, however, is no Gaddafi. The Libyan leader for all his narcissism and greed was for all practical purposes a moderate Islamist perhaps because he was a permissive and pretty immoral individual. Morsi is anything but: his Islamic purity is almost terrifyingly strong.

Morsi’s final blow to his opposition was to effectively sack the military strongman Hussein Tantawi yesterday. He did this by manipulating an effective military coup led by the younger, Islamist officers clearly allied to him. And he did it on the 23rd day of Ramadan, which the Koran labels as the “Night of Power.”

The respected Egyptian analyst, Issandr El Amrani, said immediately afterwards, “It is hard to believe [this] purely coincidental.”

Each night of Ramadan Morsi breaks his own highly publicized fast by a 5-minute radio broadcast that answers what are supposedly random call-in questions by everyday Egyptians. But the highly scripted and professionally edited segments are anything but random.

What progressive Egyptians fear most is that two popular ideologies, democracy and Islam, are in critical ways diametrically opposed. But the questions Morsi allows – quite contrary to the flattering NPR report cited above — are about how many bakeries exist and which potholes will be repaired first.

There is no mention of Egypt’s escalating crime, crumbling military in the troubled Sinai, increasing power outages, escalating unemployment or self-imploding stock exchange.

What seems clear to me is that these big, critical issues have been intentionally ignored while the fog slowly lifted from the palace.

Well, the sky is crystal clear today. There is one man in power. He controls the military. And despite earlier popular attempts to recreate a legislature, he has said that Parliament will not reconvene. Since Egypt’s judiciary is essentially a military creation, this means today that Morsi is president, lawmaker and judge.

Some kings are good. Some kings are bad.

I still believe that next year’s March 4 Kenyan election will pass into history as one of the most impressive maturations ever of a young African society into a peaceful world. There has been so much work in Kenya these last five years on a new constitution and public policy that literally tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of Kenyan citizens have all been deeply and individually vested.

But last week the ugly anemone of ethnicity waved its poisonous tentacles, again. And yesterday as the police tried to stop what they believed was a ratcheting up of ethnic violence their overly violent reaction veered into newly unconstitutional territory that almost perforce thrusts the leading presidential candidate into a death match with his adversary.

Nothing in African politics is simple. You’ve got to be a fan of Shakespeare to be motivated to mine the details for a real understanding.

But after you work through the puzzle, the picture is always the same: ethnic conflict.

Political turbulence and actual coups in Mali and Guinea-Bissau, following potentially as violent events that cooled down in Mauritania and Senegal, are equally complex to what is playing out now in Kenya. But personally I think the stakes in Kenya are much higher.

Kenya’s 2007 political violence set the stage for the rest of Africa’s so-called “spring” or “awakening.” Not just the social mores, the actual software used to organize the rallies in Tahrir Square was written and first used in Kenya in 2007. It’s why I call all this rapid, mostly positive political change in Africa “twevolution” (twitter + revolution).

If Kenya can emerge from this transition new and beautiful, it’s a model for the rest of Africa.

In all the troubled cases in Africa, Kenya in particular, the various ethnic groups are linked to radically different social theories: Raila Odinga, the current prime minister and leading presidential candidate, is a bigger government socialist. His main opponent in public polling, Uhuru Kenyatta, is a smaller government capitalist.

Odinga is Luo. Kenyatta is Kikuyu. That ethnic divide has plagued Kenya since colonial days, and in the same way the Hutus and Watutsis are divided in Rwanda. Raila’s father, Kenya’s first Vice-President, was jailed and tortured by Uhuru’s father, Kenya’s first President.

Ethnic divides around the world throughout history are all the same. Over long periods of time they become wrapped in different religions and political ideologies – which become the tools of their debate in a modern context – but it is the hate the Hatfields have for the McCoys which drives violence.

Less than 20 miles from Nairobi political rallies began several weeks ago, ostensibly for one or another candidate. Several of these were not strictly ethnic, they really were multi-ethnic but highly politically charged. Most were for Raila Odinga. He is the leading candidate and very widely respected throughout the country. He probably commands three-quarters or more of the support of educated Kenyans.

So there was nothing immediately suspicious that some of these rallies were held in a place that 20 years ago was not the multi-ethnic suburb of Nairobi it is, today. It was the heart of Kikuyuland, the home of Jomo Kenyatta, the favorite Kikuyu of the British colonial powers and Kenya’s first dictatorial if beneficent “president for life.”

So on Tuesday when the opposition announced it was going to stage a counter rally in the same place, alarms went off in the public psyche from the desert to the sea.

For one thing the demonstration was announced by a mafia leader, Maina Njenga, who barely escaped jail earlier this year. Njenga is a rabid criminal who is widely considered to have had a major part in the 2007 violence and its lingering aftermaths.

What makes matters more complex is that Uhuru Kenyatta is on trial in The Hague for instigating the violence in 2007.

Even the fact I can say that, “he’s on trial in The Hague,” is absolutely remarkable if unbelievable. Kenyatta and three others have so far submitted to the International Criminal Court’s indictments against them. They are the first accused in the history of the World Court to voluntarily travel back and forth to The Netherlands for a trial that could imprison them for most of their remaining lives.

Any presumptive notion of their public goodness, though, likely belies a much more clever strategy. If Kenyatta actually becomes a candidate (he hasn’t, yet), it would be absurd to think he would continue to succomb to jurisprudence in The Netherlands. Then, what?

The Tuesday gathering that was stopped violently by police was scheduled to have been attended by a number of leaders of several different ethnic groups. It was certainly mostly Kikuyu, but not entirely, and that “not entirely” is what gave it legitimacy.

But the police didn’t see it that way and so banned the meeting, which of course fueled the fire. Tear gas and then ultimately live ammunition were used to stop the rally.

Odinga immediately reacted with indignation, taking the high road. He denounced the police and he has the powers to fire the police leaders if he so chooses.

“Kenyans were yesterday (Wednesday) treated to a spectacle that they thought had been banished from their lives with their new Constitution,” Odinga said in his statement.

“The sight of police officers putting up roadblocks on a major thoroughfare and repeatedly firing rounds of tear gas at hundreds of perfectly peaceful people caused intense alarm,” he added.

Good. Even at his own peril, Odinga is defending the constitution.

Now let’s hope enough other Kenyans do the same. I believe they will.

"Hiphop is freedom of expression" from streetball.com

Like so much in Africa today where economies and cultures are developing faster than anyone could have imagined, traditional news reporting is dying and being replaced by faster information facilitated by today’s hi tech.

Excellent news sources like Kenya’s Nation Media and South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, are being eclipsed in Real Time. Can you imagine the most important, accurate news from Twitter, and not from the New York Times?

Yet that’s exactly what’s happening from Somalia, where the commander of the Kenyan invasion forces is tweeting constantly. Long before the BBC, Reuters, the Times or even local media embedded with his troops file a story, Kenyans have it wholesale.

Yesterday the Kenyan forces inched their way further towards Kismayo and routed a major al-Shabaab base killing one of the main militant leaders in Somalia. Here was the real time twitter feed from the commander of the operation, Major Emmanuel Chirchir, @MajorEChirchir:

#OperationLindaNchi During the attack, 13 Al Shabaab militants were killed while others escaped with serious injuries.
#OperationLindaNchi Abu Yahya, an Al Shabaab’s field Commander in the Southern sector, is suspected to hv been gunned down during the ambush

And when battles aren’t occurring, the Major answers everyone he can. Kenyan Victor Kurutu characterizes himself as a “dairy farmer, foodie and nature lover” and became distressed when he listened to radio reports on February 4 that more than 20 of the Major’s troops had been gunned down. He tweeted the commander.

@MajorEChirchir
@VicKurutu Nothing of the sort happened…propaganda

As I’m writing this early Thursday morning my time, South Africans are preparing to hear President Zuma’s State of the Nation annual address. Earlier today in South Africa the twitter hashtag, #SONA, was created for the event and most of the address has already leaked into that feed.

Right now as I’m writing as fast as I can, two or three tweets a second are coming over #SONA!

Eyewitness News @ewnupdates
If you’re in & around parliament tweet us pics of what you see. You can also send them to iwn@ewn.co.za. Remember the hashtag #SONA

Oftentimes English-speakers won’t benefit from this real time world. Although much of the tweeting that came out of Tahrir Square was in English, most was in Arabic. Similarly, today, major trouble spots in Africa are in Angola and Senegal.

Angola’s language is Portugese and Senegal’s is French. But English is a global language, and in these cases it’s HipHop websites that are consolidating and translating the news!

Today’s www.africanhiphop.com site features the trouble in both Angola and France. The site was founded 15 years ago in Senegal, so it’s particularly sensitive to what’s going on, there.

African hiphop – very much like hiphop and rap most everywhere – is driven by issues of poverty, abuse, oppression and has released what I considered not too long ago a much too timid African psyche.

Few people outside of Angola realize what a horrible regime is doing there, and how youth are beginning to organize a protest that could rival what happened in Tunisia. You won’t read about this in the BBC or even in South African media, and not because of bad reporting, but because traditional news reporters are banned.

And while there’s plenty to learn from Twitter if you speak Portugese, it’s up to a hiphop website, Central 7311 to let the outside world know what’s happening. The site is prosperous in part because authorities don’t rap! So it was left alone.

And while the site itself is Portugese, consolidator hiphop sites like africanhiphop.com will translate and disseminate.

Dictators don’t tweet.

The pointers in north Africa are swinging towards war: Egypt’s predictable predicament with the West cocks Israel’s war machine. This isn’t good.

Egypt’s prosecution of a number of Western NGOs allegedly for funding “destabilization” is the trigger. What? A revolution isn’t exactly stable. The notion that outside groups promote revolution at the peril of revolution is nonsensical.

Americans especially don’t understand revolution, not even their own distant one. Framing all regime changes in the history of our own relatively simple revolution more than two centuries is a mistake. We tend to think there are very few outcomes of a revolution: the good or the bad.

Only recently did American schoolbooks talk about the loyalists that supported the King. The idea that neighbors and friends and even relatives might have opposed the outcome at some earlier point doesn’t register. Too complicated.

But just reschedule your entertainment to include a few popular musicals like Les Miserables or Evita. A revolution unleashes all sorts of competing forces and until a lasting and dominant one prevails, all sorts of messes occur. Anything can happen.

In Egypt few were talking to the Muslim Brotherhood as it systematically garnered more and more control of the situation. Last year it was only al-Jazeera that early on regularly interviewed and reported on the Brotherhood. Barring any major disruption, the Brotherhood will soon become Egypt’s ruling force.

The 19 NGOs under prosecution are mostly American but also include one important German organization, and they’ve all been in Egypt for years. Some of the higher profile Americans, including the son of one of Obama’s cabinet secretaries, has taken sanctuary inside the American embassy. If their trial proceeds too far I can imagine SEALs attempting a rescue of those currently taking sanctuary in the American embassy in Cairo. Flashbacks to the Iranian revolution.

“The prosecution could hardly have been better designed to provoke an American backlash,” the New York Times writes this morning.

Situations like this are rarely logical, but they are predictable. I’m not suggesting that we should not have aggressively supported the Egyptian revolution, but perhaps this gives you a greater insight into why Russia and China want to try to screw a Syrian genie back into the bottle.

Societies like theirs are poorly prepared for the unprepared. In that competition, America wins the gold. And our unprepared for mistakes rattle the whole planet: CDS, anyone? Gambles sometimes lose.

In brilliantly reporting this morning NPR discovered that the person behind the Egyptian prosecutions is a woman holdover from the Mubarak regime, who apparently always distrusted Americans.

A revolution allows these types of sleeper ideologues to emerge and flourish. Imagine what chaos might ensue if Egypt’s military tries to interfere.

Yet Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy seems poised to stop Egyptian aid if the trials proceed.

Add to this fluid situation a pinch of Iranian nuclear power, an obsessively conservative Israeli regime and an American election and you have all the ingredients for a major war. A century from now, perhaps it will be the most popular musical on Broadway.

The West – and I don’t just mean the U.S., for France is a monster military force in Africa – has ratcheted down its military, pulled back from conflicts around the world, even as I watch Africa heating up. And most of the heat involves al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, Islamic Maghreb and similar loosely affiliated fanatical Muslim jihad movements.

Today is the 100-day anniversary of the Kenyan invasion of Somalia. Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the revolution in Egypt. Neither is completed, both look increasingly fragile. Yet clearly the empirical achievement of both is that they have relieved pressure on The West.

The West’s Muslim adversaries – as divergent as the Taliban and Iran – are at the very least distracted by these revolutionary African events, and in the case of Somalia, have actually led to significant victories for The West.

The killing of bin Laden and the routing of al-Qaeda is directly linked to America and France’s covert involvement in the revolutions of the Arab Spring and the later Kenyan invasion of Somalia. The cost to France and the U.S. for these covert operations has been infinitesimal compared either to their earlier adventures like Algeria or Afghanistan. A few stealth gunships in the Gulf, a few drone airfields in Ethiopia, focused air strikes, Seal 6 mission impossibles – pennies.

But these effective covert operations succeed only under a larger public umbrella of traditional war. The cost to the Libyans for the downfall of Gaddafi, to the Egyptians for their unended revolution, or the cost to Kenyans for invading Somalia has proved enormous and strains those national fabrics in a way The West would never tolerate itself.

Have we exported conflict, because we don’t know how to end the fighting, just how to send it elsewhere?

For us westerners it’s a time for imagining the flowers may soon bloom, again. In Africa, after the adrenalin of liberation, it’s a caffeine downer. The future looks awfully grim.

They include Kenya’s Deputy Prime Minister, Uhuru Kenyatta, and son of the founder of the country. Also included is a former kingmaker and government minister. The president’s Chief of Staff during the troubles of 2007 is also charged, and finally, a nonpolitican altogether, a radio personality who perhaps unwittingly caused rampant violence.

At 130p local Kenyan time, the World Court at The Hague confirmed the charges and announced the trial will begin.

The Hague is 6000 miles from Nairobi. Nevertheless, over the last two years, those accused have traveled back and forth with their teams of lawyers, have submitted to questioning and accepted the jurisdiction of the court to adjudicate their futures.

Can you imagine Carl Rove standing trial in The Hague for fixing the Florida count, or Rumsfield and Cheney for trumping up WMD? Or for that matter, Deng Xiaoping for the massacres in Tiananmen? More exactly, the slavic genocide of Radovan Karadzic was prosecuted by the World Court, but only after years of undercover missions that caught him as he ran from justice.

Can you imagine any of the world’s notorious criminals willingly submitting to The World Court? The U.S. and China even refuse to recognize it!

This historic day is the first time that powerful men in a distant foreign land willingly go to trial to defend themselves against a prosecution by an entity that claims to represent … The World.

For anyone who doesn’t follow Kenyan politics, this seems nothing short of absurd.

The decision by the World Court is about the violence which followed the disputed 2007 presidential elections in which 1300 people were killed, but perhaps a quarter million injured or displaced, and which included some horrific acts of ethnic violence.

The charges claim that these individuals orchestrated the ethnic violence with money, with direct orders and with violence themselves.

For over a year Kenyans debated whether or not to try the accused in Kenya. Parliament was twice deadlocked. There were demonstrations, pro and con. Ultimately, the Kenyan populace deferred the issue to The World Court.

Why on earth would still popular politicians willingly submit themselves to a foreign justice that could incarcerate them for the rest of their lives? Because Kenyans want it that way.

Alright, why on earth do Kenyans want it that way?!

Because Kenyans know – and I dare say even some of the supporters of these accused truly believe that their flawed system of politics is self-destructive, and that only by excising some of its components might … freedom reign.

And there is an absolute analogy with the political situation in many parts of the world, including my America: Try as we might to reform campaign laws, try as we might to impose term limits, try as we might all to restrict lobbying … try as we do to wrest control from an elite of politicians and businessmen and politically appointed justices, time and again we lose.

The only way to move out of this self-perpetuating status quo is to … move out! Is to eliminate the barriers to justice in the same way we so proudly eliminate the barriers to free trade. No preconditions but a simple due diligence that to whomever we submit there will be fairness.

This is nothing short of a pipe dream, I know. To think it might occur in America in my life time is thrilling but probably idiotic. Nevertheless, the new age of the twevolution of Africa and the Mideast is not a flitting moment in history.

It will continue, and years from now if there is peace in the world, this day and the Kenyans who created it will be forever cited as moments of political brilliance.