Edward Snowden’s privacy versus security debate will continue in the New Year, just as the conflicts in Africa and the war in Syria will rage well into 2014
It's always dangerous to declare “mission accomplished”. Former US President George W Bush did it weeks after he invaded Iraq, and it will be quoted in history books a century hence as proof of his arrogance and his ignorance. British Prime Minister David Cameron did it a couple of weeks ago in Afghanistan, and you didn't know whether to laugh or cry. But when NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden said it this week: “In terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished”, and nobody laughed. Unless you just want a list of events, a year-end piece should be a first draft of history that tries to identify where the flow of events is really taking us. By that standard, Mr Snowden comes first. The former NSA contractor, once an unremarkable man, saw where the combination of new technologies and institutional empire-building was taking us, and stepped in front of the juggernaut to stop it.
“You recognise that you're going in blind...”, Mr Snowden told the Washington Post. “But when you weigh that against the alternative, which is not to act, you realise that some analysis is better than no analysis.” So he fled his country taking a huge cache of secret documents with him, and started a global debate about the acceptability of mass surveillance techniques that the vast majority of people did not even know existed. This is not just an American issue, though the protagonists in the debate that Mr Snowden has unleashed are inevitably American. These techniques are available to every Government, or soon will be. The tyrannies will naturally use them to control their citizens, but other countries have a choice. The future health of liberal democratic societies depends on the restrictions we place on these techniques in this decade.
In Africa, wars have exploded across the continent this year like a string of firecrackers. In January, France sent troops to Mali after Islamist rebels who had already captured the sparsely populated north of the country threatened to overrun the rest of it as well. The north was more or less reconquered by mid-year, but the situation remains highly fraught. The good news is that there are no major wars anywhere else in the world — except Syria, of course. But there are already 1,20,000 dead in Syria, and more than a quarter of the population is living as refugees either inside Syria or in the neighbouring countries. Siege warfare conditions prevail across much of the country, now a patchwork quilt of Government and opposition-controlled areas.
The US went to the brink of bombing the regime's key centres after poison gas was used in Damascus in August, but it managed to avoid war after the Russians persuaded President Bashar al-Assad to surrender all his chemical weapons. And by now there is nobody left for the US to back in the Syrian war even if it wanted to, because the larger rebel groups are rapidly falling under the influence of extreme Islamist organisations including the Al Qaeda.
So the war can go on indefinitely, and it has become a proxy Sunni-Shia war. The arms pour in from Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia to the rebel groups, and from Iran and Iraq to the Syrian regime, because the former are all Sunni Muslims and the latter are all Shia Muslims.
What elseIJ Oh, yes, a list! Right, then. Iran sent a monkey into space in January, North Korea carried out its third underground nuclear test in February, and the Catholic Church got a new head when Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina became Pope Francis I in March.
In April, Nicolas Maduro was narrowly elected President of Venezuela a month after Hugo Chavez's death. In May, Silvio Berlusconi, three times Prime Minister of Italy, was sentenced to four years in prison for fraud. In June, Russia's President Vladimir Putin announced his divorce. In November, Typhoon Haiyan devastated the central Philippines. And in December, the Chinese spacecraft Chang'e landed the Jade Rabbit rover on the Moon. It was the first soft landing on the Moon since 1976. So you see, there is progress.