Back of the Envelope

This month's most underreported news story has got to be the military coup in Mauritania, a West African country whose president had aligned it with the US in the war on terror. I only know about the coup because a co-worker mentioned both it and its lack of coverage in the media, and I decided to look into it. The coup took place on Wednesday, August 3rd, while President Taya was attending the funeral of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. The former President has since gone into exile in Gambia, while the military and security forces which seized control installed Colonel Ely Ould Mohamed Vall as the new leader.

Now, before we all side with the rightful president, it should be noted that Taya is no great prize. He came to power in a coup in 1984, and was confirmed by seriously flawed elections in 1997 and 2003. He has a history of jailing political opponents, some of whom have been freed since the coup, claiming that they are plotting the overthrow of his government and labelling them as Islamic extremists. While many experts dispute that these opponents are violent extremists, apparently someone in the military Taya tried so hard to purge was plotting his overthrow. His failure to root out his enemies may have something to do with his purges being more about racism than ideology, such as when he emptied his military of black Africans in the nineties.

So, clearly Taya is an unsavory type, going so far as to side with Saddam in the first Gulf War. However, he also knew which way the political winds were blowing, and decided to align himself with the US in the late nineties. He even established diplomatic ties with Israel six years ago, making Mauritania one of only three Arab League nations to do so. Mauritania has assisted the US in the War on Terror, and US troops have trained Mauritanian forces.

Now this military junta, calling itself the Military Council for Justice and Democracy, has taken over, and it promises to hold elections within two years, not only allowing opposition political parties but promising that no member of the 17-man junta will run for office. They have also said that they will honor all international obligations currently in place--although what they may have in mind are the oil contracts for the offshore drilling that has begun there more than anything else.

The spread of democracy is good, and if the military junta can be trusted to keep to its promises, then the removal of Taya isn't in itself a bad thing. However, the leaders of coups don't often make a successful transition to democracy. Equally troubling is that the things which have made Taya so unpopular recently were his attempts to get on our good side, especially his recognition of Israel: some of the leadership in the new government is calling that a mistake. The new leadership seems to be aligning itself with the Islamic political parties, which loudly claim that they are not extremist. This may be true, but if the recently freed political prisoners are the brothers which the terrorist organization Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat claimed to be supporting in their June 4th attack which killed dozens, they're probably not what we would call moderates.

Originally, the US, the UN, and the African Union strongly condemned the coup. Since then, however, the African Union has been thoroughly won over, and the US has begun negotiating with the new government, which says it is still committed to the War on Terror. While I have my qualms about the new government, I think that this is probably the right thing to do. Democracy has a better chance of happening under it than it did under Taya.

Update: Welcome Instapundit readers. When I was looking for information about the coup in my favorite blogs, I discovered that Glenn was one of the few to have noticed it, and he linked to a couple of other blogs with more information, including Gateway Pundit and Publius. Glenn even links to an eyewitness account. Jason Coleman has also been following it. I'm glad it didn't pass the blogosphere by entirely, but it has received so little attention that I had overlooked these posts until after I had written this and gone looking for more information. I would have expected significant debate over whom the US ought to support when there's no one who's clearly aligned with our interests and ideals.