My big new theme is, Let the political imagination of the north African Arabs come and ravish the United States. Open up the crusted channels of our thinking. When all that Richard Haas of the Council on Foreign Relations can talk about is stability, i.e., protect Israel at any cost. Here is Russ Douthat in the NYT, serving as a realist listening post (I've eliminated the on-the-other-hand dithering, you can find that at the link):
As the world ponders the fate of Egypt after Hosni Mubarak, Americans should ponder this: It’s quite possible that if Mubarak had not ruled Egypt as a dictator for the last 30 years, the World Trade Center would still be standing....
The memory of Nasser is a reminder that even if post-Mubarak Egypt doesn’t descend into religious dictatorship, it’s still likely to lurch in a more anti-American direction. The long-term consequences of a more populist and nationalistic Egypt might be better for the United States than the stasis of the Mubarak era, and the terrorism that it helped inspire.
One consequence of your fixation on Israel and American power, is that in doing so you deny the local, the conflicts and aspirations that exist in the Arab world independant of Israel and the US.
Keep it vague, Richy. You wouldn’t want to delve into details and examples or make a cogent argument. Doing so could threaten your false assertions, which at the moment are hanging by a thread.
“One consequence of your fixation on Israel and American power, is that in doing so you deny the local..”
Phil hasn’t denied anything. Arabs need to toss out their dictators and establish democracies. Hopefully we are seeing the beginning of that process now.
And if Egypt becomes a secular democracy, Israel is going to feel peaceful pressure like it never has before.
…and we all know how Israel reacts to peaceful pressure.
I guess I don’t see it as a denial either. It just points out the false assumption that 9/11 happened because odf a lack of democracy as opposed to blowback from U.S. policies.
The real denial is after Al Qaeda declares war on us and gives specific reasons, people claim to know why they attacked us based on the same flawed neocon ideology.
Phil points out that they are STILL misdiagnosing the problem both us and Israel are having with the ME to fit a false narrative hammering a square peg into a round hole.
One more point. It’s hard to not talk about us and Israel when discussing the Arab world’s problems. We pumped a billion a year into Mubarak. We pump 3 billion into Israel. You know the rest. Maybe this is a tiny part of the catalyst?
Richard Witty – Are you ashamed of Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy, openly lobbying the US to deny Egyptians the right to vote in free and fair elections ?
‘My big new theme is, Let the political imagination of the north African Arabs come and ravish the United States.’
YES! Our universally-held axiom is that the US is the global standard of open democratic governance — a model for others to aspire to.
Serious US electoral problems in 2000 and 2004; nullification of the Palestinian elections in 2006; ruinous bailouts of US corporate insiders in 2008/9; extension of Abbas’s mandate beyond its Jan. 2009 expiration; instinctive siding with Mubarak-enforced ‘stability’ over Egypt’s popular mandate for regime change in 2011; above all, a 150-year-old political duopoly united in its support for Israel and undemocratic Arab regimes — these are dire symptoms of a senile, Potemkin democracy, retaining democratic forms but having lost the substance; having lost touch with its founding ideals of radical liberty.
Kudos to Mondoweiss for sending observers to Egypt to educate Americans about the lost art of popular democracy. We’ve got a lot to learn.
And let us recall that the USA installed the Shah in Iran, leading to, first, an end of democracy in Iran under the Shah and later under the Ayatollahs, and now to the Israel/Iran problem with threats of nuclear war.
And the USA did all this for the world, protecting a British corporation — BP — from confiscation by a democratic country (as Mossadegh’s Iran then was), and using USA tax dollars in the process.
We (and Egyptians) should listen closely to the Iranians to learn their thoughts on the mistakes they made in their own revolution, for revolution it surely was.
And we should contemplate a revolution in the USA to end the power of the system that was responsible for the CIA’s intervention in Iran in 1953 and for so much else.
I don’t know what to make of Phil’s response to Douthat–perhaps I shouldn’t take it too seriously. Nevertheless, Douthat’s article is classic American denial–”poor us, always trying to do the right thing, for ourselves and others, but the world is so complicated and difficult.” What Douthat won’t admit, with all his back and forth about different “theories,” is that our foreign policy is quite consistent in its pursuit of economic interests. “Isolationism” has never been a serious option. There is no difference between “liberal internationalism” and “realism” in practice. 9/11 was certainly a price that our leaders WERE willing to pay–in order to hire the Saudis to battle the Soviets in Afghanistan; to use Israel to remove Egypt as a force for Arab nationalism; to support the Shah; Mubarak’s “stability,” etc. I’m not quite sure why any reader of this blog would be anything other than appalled by Douthat’s ignorance and faux innocence. The snippet from the column, out of context, doesn’t get at this.
Let me clarify; Douthat begins his column be asserting that our support for Mubarak may have led to 9/11; the central argument of the column is that our support has been worth it.
Yes, to me the article was full of an ugly form of self-pity and fundamental contempt for the lesser nations. Anyone who can say ‘we promote democracy’ with a straight face, when he’s just a few seconds before saying we have been promoting a murderous, torture-using tyrant, is suffering from some form of academic mental disorder. Something to do with habitual use of bland language to conceal a troubled spirit, I think. There’s no one so unrealistic as these realists, is there?
“Yes, to me the article was full of an ugly form of self-pity and fundamental contempt for the lesser nations. Anyone who can say ‘we promote democracy’ with a straight face, when he’s just a few seconds before saying we have been promoting a murderous, torture-using tyrant, is suffering from some form of academic mental disorder. Something to do with habitual use of bland language to conceal a troubled spirit, I think”
That’s an excellent way to describe 90 percent of what appears in the NYT when it comes to foreign policy. I’m dead serious–the bulk of it is exactly as you say.
There are exceptions–I think there are a few writers in the NYT who are fully aware and ashamed of the US record, but most of them (both reporters and opinion writers) sound like Douthat.
Eric Margolis, a veteran middle east hand and former Toronto Sun columnist who predicted the explosion in Egypt in his book American Raj, offers some fresh insights:
————
As of this writing, Egypt’s 450,000-man US-equipped and financed armed forces are poised for action against that nation’s popular uprising, but its generals are undecided whether to shoot down their own people and earn universal hatred, overthrow President Mubarak’s regime, or openly seize power. Mubarak’s newly named vice president, Gen. Suleiman, controls the hated and feared secret police, or mukhabarat, but is unloved by the army.
Washington is watching this growing intifada in its Mideast Raj with alarm and confusion. Ignore the Obama administration’s hypocritical platitudes urging “democracy.” All of the authoritarian Arab rulers now under siege by their people have been armed, financed and supported for decades by the US. The US has given Egypt $2 billion annually, $1.4 billion of which goes to the military. Almost all the tanks and armored vehicles deployed in Cairo’s streets came from the US.
Egypt’s armed forces were configured to keep Mubarak’s military regime in power, not to defend the nation’s borders. The US keeps Egypt’s armed forces short on munitions and spare parts so it cannot fight a war against Israel for more than a few days.
The US Congress still supplies Egypt with large amounts of wheat and other foodstuffs. Israel thus holds a whip hand over Egypt by being able to get its supporters in Congress to shut off food aid to Egypt, an act that would provoke massive food riots as occurred in the 1970’s. Small wonder Husni Mubarak is Israel’s closet ally in the Arab world.
Further inflaming Arab opinion, the bombshell “Palestinian Papers” leaked to al-Jazeera has exposed Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority as an eager collaborator with Israel and its West Bank occupation. The endless Israeli-Palestinian “peace talks” are shown to be a fraud. Israel’s Mossad and its Palestinian Quislings have worked closely to destroy the militant but democratically elected Hamas government in Gaza.
We also learn from these papers that in 2008, US State Secretary Condoleezza Rice actually proposed shipping millions of Palestinian refugees to Latin America. This after Israel, financed by the US, imported one million Russian settlers, many of them not even Jewish. One is reminded of British proposals in the 1930’s to move Germany’s endangered Jews to Kenya.
link to lewrockwell.com
————
In a microcosm of the purge of Arabists at the US State Department, Margolis was fired by the Toronto Sun last year, despite his encyclopedic knowledge of the middle east. Sort of like Pol Pot’s rustication of the intellectuals (anyone wearing glasses), ain’t it?
Thanks Jim for pointing out this article. Eric Margolis is considered by many as the best Canadian journalist on the Middle East. He often says things people don’t like to hear but are true, hence his firing from the Toronto Sun.
Let me just add these 2 citations from the same article:
1) The Mideast uprisings are poorly understood by most North Americans. The US media frame news of the regional intifada in terms of the faux war on terror, and a false choice between dictatorial “stability” and Islamic political extremism. Much of what’s happening is seen through Israel’s eyes, and is distorted.
2) Platitudes aside, there is little concern in the US about bringing real democracy and modern society in the Arab world. Washington still wants obedience, not pluralism, in its Mideast Raj, and primacy for Israel in the Levant. As with the British Empire, democracy at home is fine – but it’s not right for the nations of the Arab world.
RE: “My big new theme is, Let the political imagination of the north African Arabs come and ravish the United States.” – Weiss
ARTICLE – The Wrong Friends: The Uncomfortable Lesson of the Uprisings in the Middle East, by David Mednicoff, The Boston Globe, News Analysis, 01/30/11
ENTIRE COMMENTARY – link to truth-out.org
RE: “My big new theme is, Let the political imagination of the north African Arabs come and ravish the United States.” – Weiss
FROM PAUL WOODWARD at War in Context, 01/30/11:
ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to warincontext.org
P.S. FROM FIRE DOG LAKE: Please sign our petition to Congress to immediately vote to cut off any American military aid to the Egyptian government. - link to action.firedoglake.com
I wonder which mid-eastern rentafriend israel would like to court and woo next?
oh… wait… wah?… you saying the rentafriend store is outta business?!
Darn!
Iraq! Chalabi is available to talk to Israel 24/7.
And once that is done, let knowledge of North African cartography do the same!! See here: link to zerohedge.com
Priceless.
can you check your link northof49?
Annie,
Will try again. This is the page address (I have checked the link — it works on my browser.)
link to zerohedge.com
Just figured out what the problem was. The webserver’s routine that now “bundles” the links included a period (.) I inserted to end the sentence as part of the page address. That is a glitch someone might want to look into once this Egypt brou-haa gets old. :-)
Whoops — turns out this image is old. The screen capture shows the Dow down 37 points and that did not happen today. Someone on the comment page at Zerohedge says it’s been around since 2009. Well, I gotta chuckle anyway….
We Americans are well aware of what a kleptocracy looks like. Now if only our media would take note.