Redstate

By Moe Lane Posted in Foreign Affairs — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Because the planet isn't waiting on us, and God knows that if we want to see a subject covered properly we have to do it ourselves.

Oh, yes, for the record: I'm unamused by plagiarism - and even more unamused by the increasingly-public face of my former party. Particularly when they go into full Arthur Miller's The Crucible mode - and not as the good guys.

Moving on to real problems, 'President' Lukashenko has decided to shut down some pesky protestors:

MINSK, Belarus - Police stormed the opposition tent camp in the Belarusian capital Minsk early Friday morning, detaining hundreds of demonstrators who had spent a fourth night protesting President Alexander Lukashenko's victory in a disputed election.

Read on.

The arrests came after a half dozen large police trucks and around 100 helmeted riot police with clubs pulled up to Oktyabrskaya Square in central Minsk about 3 a.m.

The police stood around for a few minutes and then barged into the tent camp filled with protesters.

More here, and of course Publius Pundit (H/T) will undoubtedly come up with more links to what happened. (meta-H/T Glenn). Although it's fairly clear what happened. Lukashenko looked over the situation, decided that the rest of the planet was either distracted and/or indifferent not to care about what happens in Belarus, and then sent in the troops.

What makes this distressing, and a little worrisome, is that it was not as ham-fisted as we've come to expect (and, perhaps, rely on) from your standard tin-pot dictator with delusions of grandeur. They went in fast, cordoned off the media, mostly avoided public beatings and sent out a cleanup crew post-haste to remove the physical signs. Somebody sat down and planned this, and it worked, the [expletive noun deleted].

Will he get away with it? Probably. I hate writing that, but I don't see how I can. Those poor people didn't have time to get world opinion on their side, which is turning out to be a critical component to these sorts of revolutions. I suspect that Lukashenko will not give them time in the future - and I also suspect that he's bright enough not have them all shot out of hand.

Which does not mean that Belarus is going to stay stuck in its present mess; it merely means that it's not going to be so easy this time.