Larison has once again let his hyper-realism get the best of him, in arguing that the military has just been playing a clever game and will get behind the exceedingly craven to America and Israel Omar Suleiman as Mubarak’s successor.  The military may have some conflicting interests in the turmoil in Egypt, but one can be “a part of the regime” and also be the neutral power within that regime.  Larison clearly has not been watching if he thinks the protesters are going anywhere, knowing that if they go home and accept Mubarak’s non-concession that they risk reprisals and give plenty of time for the September election to be rigged.  Even the White House now calls for an “immediate transition”!  The military doesn’t need to run the country if it can remain the neutral power, and none of the major forces in the opposition, not least, El Baradei and the Muslim Brotherhood, have indicated that they would deny the military their prerogatives.

1 Comment »

Lies and diversions always pollute official explanations of state policy, and Obama’s talk on Egypt in the past few days is no different. For decades, U.S. policy toward Egypt has consistently supported dictatorship and hasn’t changed with the recent popular uprisings — despite rhetoric to the contrary.

The New York Times, in its usual fashion of regurgitating official lines, considers the reasons behind Obama’s ambiguity on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s fate:

President Obama’s decision to stop short, at least for now, of calling for Hosni Mubarak’s resignation was driven by the administration’s concern that it could lose all leverage over the Egyptian president, and because it feared creating a power vacuum inside the country, according to administration officials involved in the debate.

In recounting Saturday’s deliberations, they said Mr. Obama was acutely conscious of avoiding any perception that the United States was once again quietly engineering the ouster of a major Middle East leader.

First, the administration’s leverage over Mubarak relates primarily to his foreign policy towards Israel and other regional concerns, and not so much to how he treats the Egyptian people and responds to their demands for reform. The Obama administration is playing politics with this excuse, making it seem like their continued support of the Egyptian dictator is out of concern for the people.

Further, the administration’s fear of a “power vacuum” is code for anxiety that new leadership, which does not simply take its marching orders from Washington, might replace an obedient Mubarak. Since the end of the World War II, U.S. policy towards the Middle East has generally kept in power corruptible despots, who can be controlled and will do as we say. More democratic regimes carry the daunting prospect of actually putting the interests of their people before the interests of Washington.

That people in the Middle East may view a call from Washington for Mubarak to step down as yet another regime change in the region (as in Iraq) seems fallacious to me. If Obama didn’t want to be perceived as meddling in the affairs of Egypt, he would have cut off the billions of dollars we send to Mubarak annually. Yet he has been as staunch a supporter of the Mubarak dictatorship as his predecessor, and sent the last package of military aid to Egypt in late 2010. The Egyptian people know full well that the rubber bullets and tear gas being used against them in the streets were paid for by the American taxpayer, and a hypothetical call from Obama for Mubarak to step down would only serve to convince Egyptians that the U.S. cares about the rights of ordinary Egyptians.

The Obama administration has been cleverly ambiguous, at least rhetorically, about whether or not they support the cause of the Egyptian people or Mubarak’s continued tyranny, and it is possible that events will dictate an eventual concession to the reform movement (which is probably in our interest). But Americans should put this new approach in context and remember what U.S. policy on Egypt has been for over three decades.

2 Comments »

Reviewing The King’s Speech, Nick Greenslade writes:

In the United States, [Churchill’s] wartime leadership was regularly cited as an inspiration and example by those leading “The War on Terror”. George Bush, we were informed after 9/11, kept a bust of him in the Oval Office. It’s almost as if the film-makers have ticked off all the usual stuff the Yanks like to see in a film of this genre – the pageantry, the stiff upper lip, the picturesque shots of Thirties London and royal estates – and then thought: How can we push the envelope that bit more? Hey, let’s give them a bit of Churchillian bombast!

In the 1930s, there were two British threats to constitutionality and, via Britain’s role in the world, to international stability. One came from an unreliable, opportunistic, highly affected and contrived, anti-Semitic, white supremacist, Eurofederalist demagogue who admired Mussolini, heaped praise on Hitler, had no need to work for a living, had an overwhelming sense of his own entitlement, profoundly hated democracy, and had a callous disregard for the lives of the lower orders and the lesser breeds. So did the other one. Far more than background united Churchill and Mosley, originator in English of the currently modish concept of a Union of the Mediterranean.

In Great Contemporaries, published in 1937, two years after he had called Hitler’s achievements “among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world”, Churchill wrote that: “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed, functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” That passage was not removed from the book’s reprint in 1941. In May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini.

All sorts of things about Churchill are simply ignored. Gallipoli. The miners. The Suffragettes. The refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. His dishonest and self-serving memoirs. The truth about the catastrophic humiliation at Dunkirk. The other one, at Singapore, which as much as anything else has been an inspiration to the vociferous anti-monarchist minority in Australia ever since: “Why should we bother with them after that?” The Lancastria. The men left behind in France. Both the fact and the sheer scale of his 1945 defeat while the War in the Far East was still going on, when Labour won half of his newly divided seat, and an Independent did very well in the other half after Labour and the Liberals had disgracefully refused to field candidates against him. His removal as a parliamentary candidate by his local Conservative Association just before he died. And not least, his carve-up of Eastern Europe with Stalin, so very reminiscent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

But the electorate was under no illusions while he was still alive. His image was booed and hissed when it appeared on newsreels. He led the Conservative Party into three General Elections, he lost the first two of them – the first, I say again, while the War was still going on – and he only returned to office on the third occasion with the support of the National Liberals, having lost the popular vote. In the course of that Parliament, he had to be removed by his own party. It went on to win comfortably the subsequent General Election, just as it was to do in 1992 after it had removed Thatcher.

And we have not forgotten the truth about him in the old mining areas. Nor have they in the places that he signed away to Stalin, including the country for whose freedom the War was fought, making it a failure in its own terms. We condemn genocidal terrorism against Slavs and Balts no less than genocidal terrorism against Arabs, or the blowing up of British Jews going about their business as civil servants, or the photographed hanging of teenage British conscripts with barbed wire.

2 Comments »

Many readers no doubt saw my contribution to the TAC symposium on the State of the Union, which included this Daily Show dialogue on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall that cannot be repeated often enough:

Jon Stewart: Could something like this happen again?

John Oliver: No Jon, this was a completely unique set of circumstances, a perfect storm unlikely to be repeated.  Their economy was in tatters, looking abroad they had very few real friends left in the world. But even those would have amounted to very little were it not for their disastrous decision to invade and occupy Afghanistan.

Stewart: But the Soviet Union at that time had an inexperienced, charismatic leader, who promised change and reform . . .

Oliver: He even won the Nobel Peace Prize.

I have always been highly critical of the notion, all his failings aside, that Barack Obama is “Bush-lite” or even worse than Bush.  A particularly severe judgment in this connection came in an otherwise excellent roundup of the revolutionary wave in the Middle East by Helena Cobban:

I mean, how unfair is it that he gets to be the president who has to preside over a retraction of US power spurred to a large degree by the decision his predecessor made in 2002-03 to launch a war that Obama himself clearly opposed at that time?  On the other hand, Obama did not have to continue and indeed intensify the clear pro-Zionist partisanship that GWB (and before him, Clinton) had manifested– which is what he did. That was a choice Obama made.  He could have made different– and much, much wiser– choices on the core issues regarding the Palestine Question.  He could have reframed the issue from the beginning as one of fairness, decency, human rights, and international law– and he could have spoken seriously and directly to the American people, using the unique “bully pulpit” that the presidency provides, about the need for our country to pursue a policy based on these important values.  But no.

I have said previously that intentionally or not, Obama is giving Israel the rope to hang itself, and if, as I believe to be more likely than not, it is intentional, it is because it was simply the least bad of the options before Obama when he came into office.  What would getting serious about the two-state solution have accomplished in the immediate aftermath of the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto Gaza?  Abbas had already lost whatever legitimacy he ever had with the Palestinians long before.  An earnest effort by the US to strengthen the hand of the Palestinian Authority vis-a-vis Israel in negotiating a genuine two-state solution, in the year 2009, would have led to just as much blowback for the US as the alternative.

The larger issue here is that the effort by pro-Palestinian activists to frame this as a question of “human rights and international law” is both counterproductive and counterintuitive.  After all, we are talking about the same international law by which Israel justifies its very existence, by which Bush justified the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and by which all manner of dangerous nonsense is presently justified toward Iran.

Mike Dougherty’s excellent piece on the situation makes the bold claim that El Baradei is another Chalabi waiting to happen.  I expressed my qualified skepticism on the messageboard, in any event I have seen enough reports of Muslim Brotherhood rank-and-filers feeling the same way.  I assume El Baradei is shrewd enough to have calculated that he can succeed as the pleasant face of a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government to the international community, but if he fails it will be because he is too much a creature of that community in which so much of the solidarity movement for Arab freedom is far too deeply invested.

But lest anyone get the idea that Obama has in any meaningful way “intensified” cravenness to Israel, to say nothing of Zionist partisanship, let us remember that John McCain said in the presidential debates that America was duty-bound to prevent another holocaust – that is, obligated to declare war on Iran to prevent or avenge “crimes against the Jewish people”.  He would have surrounded himself with men and women committed to this odious lie.

Anyone who believes Obama would do the same is deluding themself.  If not because of Obama’s inherent goodness, because he is a realist who does not have the pathologies that McCain or Hillary would have brought into the White House.  If Obama would have ideally liked to reform rather than dismantle the imperium like Gorbachev and Dubcek before him, like Gorbachev he knows that even if he wanted to he simply does not have either the military nor financial resources to do so.  That it is difficult to conceive of exactly what a McCain/Palin administration would be doing differently, to say nothing of Brezhnev or someone like him in 1989, only makes the possibilities more ominous.

Undoubtedly, if and when Egypt and Jordan are governed by the Muslim Brotherhood, there will be enormous domestic pressure for Obama to give Israel a war guarantee.  And yes, it is difficult to imagine how Obama could resist this other than by simply fudging the issue.  Yet even under these circumstances facts on the ground may already be such that Israel is forced to begin a South Africa style transition whether the US and AIPAC like it or not.

Let me be clear – for Obama to be in this role is nothing to be proud of.  And yes, for the American empire to be finally getting its comeuppance is a tragedy.  But still, we are so far along at this point that our attitude should only be one of good riddance.

1 Comment »

No sooner do I call it out than both the Weekly Standard and National Review abruptly abandon their democratic revolutionism and go far beyond the old dictatorships-and-double-standards standby, sounding an awful lot like Edmund Burke, if not Joseph de Maistre, in warning ominously about the dangers of the mob.  But the news comes today that Mohammed el Baradei is taking charge, signifying that he will be there to lead the national unity government that the protesters are demanding.  This, in short, is the very Burkean outcome which has been ideal all along.

While we’re on the subject of what Burke would say about the events in the Middle East, we can also take heart in the fact that there is an even greater prospect for a constiutional process in bringing to power the opposition in Yemen.  And nowhere is deference for the existing institutions and mores more visible than Lebanon.  So therefore let me take this opportunity to reiterate some important blunt truths about Lebanon:

1. Lebanon is a democracy, albeit with peculiar features.  Like most Latin American countries historically, it is a democracy rigged against the popular will.  What would please Edmund Burke more than to see this corrected for by peaceful constitutional means, insofar as the inclusion of Hezbollah in the new government serves this purpose?
2. Like Hamas, Hezbollah is not at war with the United States, and it is pernicious in the extreme to suggest that because they are at war with Israel they are ipso facto at war with the United States.
3. Like Hamas, Hezbollah is a rational actor, and as is so often the case with Israel the insistence that its enemies are not rational actors is a bald case of projection.  In both cases, but particularly in the case of Hezbollah, this is vitally important in recognizing that they can be worked with in a peaceful and democratic process.
4. Neither Syria nor Iran is a threat to Lebanese sovereignty.  The real threat to Lebanese sovereignty is the hubristic “international” tribunal that presumes to have the authority of law over the sovereign nation of Lebanon.

So as the momentum seems to ever more clearly build to neoconservatism’s 1989, I shall conclude with the words of that great admirer of Edmund Burke Murray Rothbard:

Our enemies accuse us, in horror and astonishment, of wanting to repeal the 20th century. Heaven forfend! Who would want to repeal the century of horror, the century of collectivism, the century of mass destruction and genocide, who would want to repeal that! Well, we propose to do just that. When I was growing up, the main argument for communism was inevitability – ‘you can’t turn back the clock’ they chanted – but the clock of the once mighty Soviet Union is not only turned back, but lies dead and broken forever. And just as they, over there, broke the clock of Bolshevism, so too we, over here, shall break the clock of Menshevism. We shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the New Deal. We shall break the clock of perpetual war. We shall repeal the 20th century.

All praise is due to Allah for the breaking of the clocks.

1 Comment »