US foreign policy – Page 2

Green revolution or greenback revolution?

Published on June 22, 2009

Are the Iranian protests just another colour revolution:

You see, it looks very much like a “color revolution” scenario: the US-favored candidate contests election results, claims victory, and his supporters riot till the government caves in. But then, couldn’t the incumbent actually steal the election knowing full well that he can paint the resulting opposition protests as a CIA/NED coup attempt, whether that is actually true or not?

Only a fool would rule out US meddling in Iran, but that does not remove the genuine grievances of the protestors. These protests would not have as much support as they do if there weren’t hundreds of thousands or even millions of people feeling that the elections were stolen, whether or not they were. Iranian elections may have been reasonably fair in the past, but there has been a history of government meddling in the past, through e.g. pre-election selection of “acceptable” candidates, that the idea of a much more blatant vote rigging is clearly not absurd to a large part of the Iranian electorate. That still doesn’t mean vote rigging has happened, no matter what Juan Cole believes, but it is a distinct possibility.

A colour revolution is a mock revolution, where the genuine wish for change on part of a given country’s population is channeled into a safe, US and EU approved direction. It works best against an autocratic but not dictatorial regime, which may be comfortable with busting heads and the occasional disappearance of an opposition member, but which still seeks the apparant approval of the population and which isn’t too bright or media savy. In contrast the opposition will be young and media friendly, aiming their campaign as much at western journalists as at their own people. They will have American money and American advisers to help the campaign and it will be put in media friendly terms, presented as a fight between reformists and conservatives, young vs old, Coke vs Pepsi. It’s fake, but driven by a genuine desire and although leftists should not be fooled by them, there’s still the need to engage that underlying wish. (In as far as we can do something, of course.)

On the one hand, you can’t just uncritically support the opposition as many liberals and conservatives are doing, as exchanging Ahmadinajad for Mousavi is like driving the devil out with Beelzebub. This is not a case of freedom versus oppression and anybody who believes it is will be disappointed, both in and outside Iran.

On the other hand, ignoring the situation won’t make it go away. A large part of the Iranian population wants more personal freedom, wants to have at least some of the things we take for granted in America or the EU, how horribly consumerist they and how horribly middleclass the protestors might be. We need to make sure that when we are critical of how our media reports about these events or about how liberal Mousavi actually is, that we don’t throw away the baby with the bathwater. Iran is an oppresive regime and that needs changing and it’s the Iranian people that need to do it. We can only stand on the sidelines and argue our own (imperfect) understanding of the situation; we shouldn’t presume too much that we can actually give any meaningful advice.

But what we can do is push back against too triumphalistic a view of this revolution, the idea that this is a vindication for truth, justice and the American way, as long as we do it without denigrating the genuine desires of the Iranians themselves.

Chickens coming home

Published on June 14, 2009

Can we treat the Republicans as a normal political party, a party that went off the rails during the last eight (actually sixteen) years but which can still be rescued from its more self destructive, hard right tendencies through engaging its more moderate elements. Is it possible to remake it, as Paul Krugman and other liberal commentators still seem to believe, into something on the level of the Tories or the various Christian Democratic parties in Europe; rightwing but nor reactionary? Not according to the Stiftung Leo Strauss, who explains just what the Republicans have turned into in the past three decades:

It wasn’t always like this, of course. The Republican Party as an independent actor and entity was able to keep the Movement within bounds. But after Reagan, and especially the Bush debacle in ‘92, the Movement learned to seize power on its own within and without the Republican Party. As a sign of their increased power, the Movement’s rage, paranoia, and conspiracy fever in 1993 seemed novel. By 1994 and certainly 2000. the Movement had completed its subversion of the Republican Party.

Wonder why after Obama the ferocity is turned up to 11? The answer is intrinsic to the Movement as functional social, cultural and political creature. It governed for 6 years and hung on for 2 more. Its Counter-Enlightenment, racial, authoritarian /hierarchical impulse was the official American government. With Obama’s victory its rejection is not only personal but for the first time, in 2006 and 2008, it as dominant political force (not as a minor coalition partner within the Republican Party) was rejected.

The Movement Is Not Playing For Liberal Democracy

For the Movement, as we said, politics is existential. And when survival is on the line, pluralistic compromise is for chumps. Democrats still are playing for political advantage within the confines of traditional two party politics. How to give a concrete example? When the other side’s world view is existential, then the stakes are higher than something so trite as the Constitution, etc. We saw this in part through Addington, Cheney et al. with their view on the Unitary Executive. As I wrote a while ago, during a lunch with John Ashcroft after his tenure as AG, he quite blithely said the President is entitled to ignore Congress and its laws — the only thing that matters is the plebiscite on a president because it is national. He then added if the president is re-elected that by definition means the country ratified everything he has done, even secret stuff the nation doesn’t know about.

Existential combat in ideological struggle for survival with a natural affinity for hierarchical organizations and militarized speech and thought patterns. Do you see now why to the Movement any criticism of Bush as Warlord was akin to treason? It’s not only mere warfare for any given news cycle, but deeply rooted in the non-liberal democratic, pre-Enlightenment agenda.

What the Stiftung is describing is immediately recognisable to anybody familiar with US foreign policy during the Cold War and how anti-communism was used to overrule any considerations of democracy and freedom. The normalisation of torture, election fraud, rightwing militias, political assassinations (what else would you call the murder of doctor Tiller), the mass hysteria whipped up over what Obama is going to do to the country and how this justifies anything that can stop it all of it has been used with great succes in South America and elsewhere to destroy governments and countries Washington does not like. It was only a matter of time before these techniques were re-imported into the US.

Killing Hope – William Blum

Published on May 28, 2009

Cover of Killing Hope

Killing Hope
William Blum
469 pages including index
published in 2003

William Blum is a veteran leftwing journalist, active since the 1960ties, who made his name leaking the name and addresses of 200 CIA employees back in 1969. Since then he has been working in relative obscurity until around the turn of the millennium when he wrote a bestselling book about the US’s foreign police: Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. It came at the right time to find its audience, just as interest in the subject soared due to the September 11 attacks. This succes is probably what got Killing Hope published, as it’s an updated version of one of Blum’s older books, originally published in 1986 as The CIA: A Forgotten History. It certainly has some of the hallmarks of a cash-in book, with the updating only going as far as the mid-nineties and the bulk of the book not noticably updated from the first edition. Many of the earlier chapters do not show much awareness of events and new revelations after 1986, if you see what I mean.

Killing Hope is the history of US military and covert interventions since World War II, with each chapter detailing a specific case. The chapters are in order of chronology, with several countries with a long history of US intervention having multiple chapters devoted to them. As Blum shows again and again in these chapters, the US talks a great deal about democracy and freedom, but the reality of its foreign policy at least since World War II is far different. With the excuse of “fighting communism” (or these days, “terrorism”) again and again the US has interfered on the side of dictatorships, nobbled democracies or fought liberation movements in order to safeguard its interests, be they strategic geopolitical ones or commercial ones. And Killing Hope is far from exhaustive, even in its original timeframe of 1945-1985 with Vietnam e.g. only having one short chapter devoted to it and little attention paid to other Asian countries like Taiwan, Japan or South Korea or even the UK.

Congratulations North Korea

Published on May 25, 20096 Comments

mushroom cloud

…For showing your nuclear arsenal is as powerful as America’s was in 1945… That’ll show them.

But seriously, is it too much to ask that for once, the news coverage of these events does not follow the well worn, wrong paths in which everything is looked at through the point of view of “the west”, anything North Korea does is dangerous and irrational, a threat to world peace and only lip service is paid to the context in which North Korea has decided on building a nuclear arsenal, that this is in fact a rational strategy on their part? And would it kill journalists to every now and then mention the greatest “rogue” nuclear power in the world, Israel, which still does not admit to owning nuclear weapons but is thought to have an arsenal of in the hundreds? I won’t mind if nobody mentions the inconsiderate fact that the sole nuclear power to have ever used the weapon in anger is that bastion of liberty and justice, America itself and that it used the atom bomb largely as a warning against the USSR?

North Korea, even though it is an opressive dictatorship, has valid reasons to arm itself with the sole weapons to command the respect of the world’s sole superpower. It can’t really trust its supposed superiority in conventional weapons (and in any case, they still think the Mig-21 is a frontline fighter and upgunned T-55s a match for modern tanks) to deter South Korea and the US from attacking it, but the prospect of a nuclear battlefield still scares America enough to deter it from doing anything drastic. Again and again in the last two decades the US has shown North Korea it will only take it seriously if it rattles the nuclear sabre. Can we blame it then for doing so?

Juan Cole on Pakistan

Published on May 11, 2009

Juan Cole agrees with me on the American view of Pakistan:

What I see is a Washington that is uncomfortable with anything like democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan; which seems not to realize that the Pakistani Taliban are a small, poorly armed fringe of Pushtuns, who are a minority; and I suspect US policy-makers of secretly desiring to find some pretext for removing Pakistan’s nuclear capacity.

All the talk about the Pakistani government falling within 6 months, or of a Taliban takeover, flies in the face of everything we know about the character of Pakistani politics and institutions during the past two years.

Like I said Saturday, mistrust of democracy has always been a staple of US foreign policy. It’s not surprising that US government sources consistantly overstate the dangers of the Taliban in Pakistan or the importance of the campaign against it; for the US government, the presence of the Taliban in Pakistan is the most important security issue there as it impacts on American operations in Afghanistan.

What is surprising is how far the western news media have internalised this attitude. Not only do they agree with this and present news from Pakistan in the context of the war against the Taliban, but the idea that this war might just be less important to Pakistan itself, that the Taliban is to the Pakistani state as the ETA is to Spain, an important security problem but not a fundamental challenge is almost never mentioned. Pakistan is constantly judged on whether it achieves American goals and nobody thinks this strange. As if we’ve lost the ability to understand any other viewpoint but the American one.