And here’s a shocker for modern progressives and conservatives alike: The first pursuers of American communists were Democrats Woodrow Wilson and his attorney general, Alexander Mitchell Palmer. For all his faults, Wilson understood the dangers of Bolshevism. ~Paul Kengor

The Palmer Raids were among one of the more shameful episodes of hysterical, authoritarian overreach in modern American history. It is awful to see them implicitly praised as if they were admirable or desirable. Yes, they pursued American communists and anarchists, and they also baselessly harassed Russian immigrants who had done nothing criminal, just as the Wilson administration harassed and arrested critics of entry into WWI. The post-1917 Wilson administration is a disgraceful period, and the fact that Wilson happened to count communists among his domestic foes doesn’t make it any better. If popular anticommunism during the Cold War was overwrought and prone to excess, as Kennan believed and Lukacs has argued for decades, the Red Scare of the early ’20s and Wilson’s intervention in the Russian Civil War were simply lunatic. The dangers of Bolshevism in 1919-1920 were dangers to Russia and the peoples of the collapsing Russian Empire and its environs. In terms of international power, the early Bolsheviks were very weak and couldn’t have seriously threatened the interests of any of the major Western powers of that time, to say nothing of the United States. Never mind that Wilson’s commitment of the U.S. into WWI helped knock the Germans out of the war in the east and allowed the Bolsheviks to secure their position. For some reason, we’re supposed to give Wilson credit for deploying Americans to Vladivostok in a no-hope fight after the Bolsheviks had largely already won.

Well, no, not really, but Michael Lind (via Andrew) seems to think so:

If there was a moment when the culture of enlightened modernity in the United States gave way to the sickly culture of romantic primitivism, it was when the movie “Star Wars” premiered in 1977. A child of the 1960s, I had grown up with the optimistic vision symbolized by “Star Trek,” according to which planets, as they developed technologically and politically, graduated to membership in the United Federation of Planets, a sort of galactic League of Nations or UN. When I first watched “Star Wars,” I was deeply shocked. The representatives of the advanced, scientific, galaxy-spanning organization were now the bad guys, and the heroes were positively medieval — hereditary princes and princesses, wizards and ape-men. Aristocracy and tribalism were superior to bureaucracy. Technology was bad. Magic was good.

One of the things that Lind’s preferred states all have in common is that they are expansive, bureaucratic, centralized states ruled by autocrats or unaccountable overseers, and they are capable of extracting far larger revenues out of their economies than their successors. Obviously, Lind finds most of these traits desirable, and he seems not terribly bothered by the autocracy. In the case of the UFP, one simply has a technocrat’s utopian post-political fantasy run riot. Indeed, the political organization of the Federation has always struck me as stunningly implausible and unrealistic even by the standards of science fiction. It was supposed to be a galactic alliance with a massive military whose primary purposes were exploration and peacekeeping, and which had overcome all social problems by dint of technological progress. If ever there were a vision to appeal to a certain type of romantic idealists with no grasp of the corrupting nature of power or the limits of human nature, this would have to be it.

Lind’s article is not very persuasive, not least since his treatment of the change from antiquity to the middle ages is seriously flawed. Lind writes:

But few would disagree that the Europe of Charlemagne was more backward in its mindset, at least at the elite level, than the Rome of Augustus or the Alexandria of the Ptolemies.

Nor are the great gains of decolonization and personal liberation in recent decades necessarily incompatible with an intellectual and cultural Dark Age. After all, the fall of the Roman empire led to the emergence of many new kingdoms, nations and city-states, and slavery withered away by the end of the Middle Ages in Europe.

Well, count me among the “few” that would disagree. For one thing, the “Europe of Charlemagne” was also the Europe of the Byzantines, and under both the Carolingians and the Macedonians later in the ninth century there was extensive cultivation of literary and artistic production that significantly undermines claims that this was an “intellectual and cultural Dark Age.” This was an era of substantial manuscript production, and one marked by the learning of Eriugena and Photios. The Carolingian period was actually one of the more significant moments of political reunification in Europe prior to the later middle ages, but it is true that Charlemagne and his successors did not have a large administrative state apparatus at their disposal. The Iconoclastic emperors in the east were hostile to religious images, but in many other respects they cultivated learning and drew on the mathematical and scientific thought that was flourishing at that time among the ‘Abbasids. Obviously, we are speaking of the elite, but it is the elites of different eras that Lind is comparing. The point is not to reverse the old prejudice against medieval Europe and direct it against classical antiquity, nor we do have to engage in Romantic idealization of medieval societies, but we should acknowledge that this approach to history that Lind offers here abuses those periods and cultures that do not flatter the assumptions or values of modern Westerners. For that matter, it distorts and misrepresents the periods and cultures moderns adopt as their precursors, because it causes them to value those periods and cultures because of how they seem to anticipate some aspect of modernity rather than on their own terms.

There are very real trade-offs in opting for political and economic decentralization, just as there are significant costs in opting for centralization. Under a decentralized arrangement, efficiency and utility are going to be sacrificed for the sake of other goods (e.g., preserving local traditions and communities, sustainability, social solidarity, cultural identity, greater political autonomy, etc.) that Lind either ignores or simply declares backwards. Lind prefers one tendency that leads towards empire, concentrations of power and wealth, and technocratic government, and he is dismayed that anyone would object to the costs that these things impose. He would prefer instead that we pretend that those costs don’t exist, and he wants us to accept that resistance to the advance of Progress is futile. It is telling that his concluding proposal sounds a great deal like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Marion Smith at Heritage’s Foundry blog has written a long post on South Sudan and refers to two of my posts. It seems pretty clear that he didn’t read this post very carefully. That post mentioned South Sudan in passing. It was mainly a response to Parag Khanna’s article arguing for a new wave of self-determination all over the world. This was what I was describing as folly.

A newly-independent South Sudan will have the problems of a failed state right away, which means that it will be heavily dependent on neighboring countries, the U.S. and other major powers for some time. This aspect of South Sudanese independence is notably missing from Smith’s post. I do question the wisdom of a policy that leads to the creation of an “independent” country that will not function very well without substantial outside support. That said, South Sudan will become a formally independent state and the U.S. has committed to support it, and I wouldn’t say that Washington should give up on it now. The time to determine whether it was in the interests of the U.S. or regional stability to facilitate the partition of Sudan was years ago.

Smith typically mistakes 19th-century American sympathy with liberal revolutions and wars of independence in Europe and Latin America for evidence that the U.S. government has a “long-held tradition of providing moral and diplomatic support to a people seeking independence and self-government.” Apart from the Monroe Doctrine, which declared that restoration attempts to overthrow republican governments in Latin America would be seen as a threat to U.S. interests, American diplomacy had nothing to do with “providing moral and diplomatic support” for independence movements until WWI and after. The most significant U.S. policy reaction to an independence movement in the 19th century was the effort to strangle the Haitian revolution in its crib. Agree with that policy or not, that is how the early republic responded to a people seeking independence and self-government. Even the Monroe Doctrine was a statement Monroe made after the independence of Latin American republics had already been secured. There was no question of officially lending aid to Latin American rebellions while they were still going on.

As it was, the U.S. could not have enforced the Monroe Doctrine had the occasion presented itself. The one time that the U.S. did seriously intervene in a dispute between a European power and a Latin American republic in the Venezuelan border controversy, it proved to be a quarrel over nothing that nonetheless brought the U.S. dangerously close to conflict with Britain when America had nothing at stake. Sympathy for Spanish, Italian and Greek liberals never translated into any formal policy of support, and the same held true for the 1848 revolutions. There was enormous public sympathy for the Afrikaner republics in their fight against British aggression, but the U.S. government was simply not involved, and it would have been strange if it had been.

When I was remarking on the general irrelevance of American advocacy for democracy, I was discussing the example of the Tunisian uprising and the Post’s criticism of the administration’s supposedly lacking democracy promotion efforts. Tunisians have toppled a dictator that Washington and Paris backed and provided with substantial aid while largely overlooking or minimizing the extent of Ben Ali’s repressiveness. Many of our politicians praised Ben Ali for his commitment to the same values that we had, which they had to know was nonsense, and U.S. advocacy for political reform elsewhere never really applied to Tunisia. Nonetheless, it was in Tunisia where the people overthrew their dictator, and it is Tunisia that has the best chance in that part of the world to establish a more representative and less repressive government. If American public opinion and diplomatic support have such “profound consequences for the cause of liberty everywhere,” why is it that the one place where Arabs have overthrown their dictator on their own is the one place that Americans embraced the dictator and largely ignored the political grievances of the people?

It would be healthy if we could acknowledge that what our government officials say and do regarding these issues doesn’t matter nearly as much as we like to think it does. The Green movement failed because of the Iranian regime’s repression and the movement’s own limitations. American officials could not have changed that outcome. When our support could be harmful to the cause of protesters, we should be willing to hold our peace and stay out of other nations’ affairs. The Tunisian uprising may produce a functioning representative government, or it may give way to military rule and renewed authoritarianism, but it is arrogance on our part to believe that what our government does or does not do will have decisive or “profound” effects on the outcome. If our government did have a decisive impact on the outcome, it would probably not be to the benefit of the people of Tunisia. It would be refreshing if we could acknowledge that political protests and revolutions in other countries will usually succeed or fail no matter what we in the U.S. want to happen.

Despite our earlier disagreement about whether or not the U.S. should side with the Tunisian protesters, Claire Berlinski makes a good point here:

Are the Tunisian people really so mindless and childlike that absent a sign that the West is interested in promoting democracy in Tunisia, they’ll just lose their enthusiasm for democracy and hand their country to the Islamists? If so, I doubt democracy has much of a chance in the first place.

Likewise, independence movements that have much chance of enduring success don’t need endorsement by Americans. To pretend otherwise exaggerates the importance of our involvement and underestimates the capabilities of the people struggling for their independence.

The damage caused by the WikiLeaks controversy has caused little real and lasting damage to American diplomacy, senior state department officials have concluded.

It emerged in private briefings to Congress by top diplomats that the fallout from the release of thousands of private diplomatic cables from all over the globe has not been especially bad. ~The Guardian

Via Andrew

Put another way, Wikileaks doesn’t matter very much, which is a pretty damning thing to say about the operation that was supposedly going to usher in a new era of anti-imperialist transparency. After dire warnings of subversion from hawks and misguided enthusiasm for the same subversion from critics of U.S. hegemony, Wikileaks has proved to be little more than a minor irritant. I was among those who overestimated its significance. This makes the government’s vendetta against Assange and his allies that much more pathetic and indefensible. Not only has Wikileaks broken no laws, but it hasn’t even done much to inconvenience the government. At most, it has embarrassed the government a little, and that’s it.

Remarking on the news of Lieberman’s retirement, Jonathan Chait wonders why Lieberman endorsed McCain in 2008:

The most interesting question may be why Lieberman took this suicidal path. My guess would be that he didn’t consider it suicide. Lieberman is a true believing New Democrat who is influenced by the neoconservatives. One common thread uniting these two strands of thought is an overly-developed fear of McGovernism. George McGovern, the very liberal Democratic nominee in 1972, lost in a landslide, and his defeat ever since has been held up as evidence that middle America rejects and always will reject unvarnished liberalism. I think there’s some truth to that but it’s an oversimplified view.

The point, though, is that Lieberman is almost certainly a true believer in the legend. And you have to remember that, when Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination, a lot of centrists and neoconservatives viewed him as the heir to McGovern and a likely loser. In Lieberman’s mind, I would submit, Obama was the heir to McGovern, and after he went down to defeat at the hands of popular maverick John McCain, Lieberman would be well-positioned to say “I told you so.” He could then tell Democrats that only his brand of moderate Democratic politics could truly prevail, and the sadder but wiser party base would trudge back to his column.

Chait’s speculation is plausible, but I would add a little more. Lieberman’s decision to back McCain later on was very likely influenced by the debate over the “surge” in early 2007. Along with Lieberman, McCain was one of the most vocal supporters of the new plan, and Obama was one of many to voice skepticism and opposition to it. By the summer of 2008, a fairly conventional, mistaken view on the right and in many mainstream media organizations was that the “surge” had “worked,” and that Obama had judged incorrectly. This gave Lieberman something specific to which he could link his (baseless) fear of a new McGovern.

When Lieberman returned to the Senate in 2007, he had just come out of a general election in which practically the only people in the national media who vocally supported him were McCain’s reliably hawkish supporters in the GOP, including many prominent neoconservatives. These had been the people wailing and gnashing their teeth about the “purge” of Lieberman in the summer of 2006, and they became Lieberman’s cheering section because of their common support for the war in Iraq. Lieberman’s victory was their one consolation in an election that drove the GOP out of power largely because of the war in Iraq. The ideological and political alliance between Lieberman and hawkish interventionists in the GOP became stronger than any residual partisan attachment Lieberman might have had, and so endorsing McCain must have seemed the obvious sequel to his independent run for the Senate. For that reason, my guess is that Lieberman would have backed McCain even if Clinton had been the Democratic nominee, because she had also opposed the “surge,” which was an inexcusable error for people who viewed the war as Lieberman did.

But more seriously, had democracy failed in Iraq, had the country descended into chaos, and had Iraqis laboring for a secular, democratic Muslim country been killed and exiled, do we imagine this would have been good for the prospects of democracy elsewhere? ~Jennifer Rubin

Well, the country did descend into chaos, Iraqis laboring for a secular country were killed and exiled*, and that wasn’t good for the prospects of democracy elsewhere. These also happen to be the effects of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, which involved invading and devastating a country for bogus national security reasons and then trying to dress up the entire debacle as an experiment in democratization. The outward forms of democracy didn’t entirely fail in Iraq, but what those forms did was politicize ethnic and sectarian divisions and fuel years of inter-communal violence. Looking at the chaos unleashed by what war supporters kept insisting on calling “democracy,” nations throughout the region associated “democracy” with foreign occupation, civil strife, and constant violence. For that matter, there has been no “successful emergence of a secular, democratic Iraq.” There is an elected government with increasingly authoritarian and illiberal habits governed by sectarians pretending to be secular nationalists.

Rubin continues:

Recall that it was the left that said that democracy was alien to the Middle East. Bush was right; they were wrong.

No, Bush’s critics understood, usually better than his supporters, that Iran had some measure of constitutional and representative government before the Pahlavis, and Turkey has been gradually developing as a democratic republic since WWII. Opponents of the disastrous war and the “freedom agenda” said that democratic and representative government was alien to almost all Arab countries. Lebanon was and remains the exception. That was true. Maliki’s semi-dictatorship in Baghdad does little to change that assessment. Bush based his conviction that the U.S. should install democratic government in a predominantly Arab country on the general lack of such governments in Arab countries, which democratists concluded was a principal source of jihadism. To the extent that Bush and his allies were serious in wanting to democratize Arab countries, they were taking for granted that democratic government was alien to these countries, which is why the U.S. had to introduce it directly through active promotion. What Bush and his allies also said was that democratic government was part of a “single model of human progress,” and that therefore every society should be governed this way, and furthermore that every society was capable of governing itself this way. That was the far-fetched claim that most of Bush’s critics couldn’t accept, because it is nothing more than an ideological conviction.

She concludes:

And the notion that democratization and rebellion against despotic regimes do not spread regionally after a successful experiment is belied by history (e.g. Central America, Eastern Europe).

For one thing, Central American and Eastern European nations had some of their own traditions of representative government. For most of these nations, this form of government was not an entirely new political experiment, which had something to do with why it was successful. Democratic revolution does not necessarily spread regionally, and the more that it is associated with major warfare and chaos the less attractive revolution appears. After the outbreak of the French Revolution, it took over over thirty years before other revolutions not directly under French guidance took place, and most of these were crushed because of the general hostility to liberal and democratic politics after 1815. Bush may have done for liberal and democratic politics in the region what Napoleon did for them in Europe: associate them with foreign invasion and humiliation, link them with violence and chaos, and thereby utterly discredit them for a generation or more.

While we’re on the subject, the Tunisian uprising isn’t going to lead to regional transformation. As Josef Joffe argues, Tunisia was just prosperous enough, and most other Arab countries are either too poor and their peoples too poorly-educated, or they are so rich on account of oil wealth that their peoples will not follow the Tunisian example. The good news for Tunisians is that they were far enough away from Iraq that they were not directly affected by its convulsions and refugees, and the overwhelmingly negative example of Iraq did not deter them from rising up against their own dictatorship.

* If Tunisia’s uprising is a “middle class revolution,” as some are calling it, and if Tunisia is a good prospect for the successful development of representative government because of its secular, well-educated, large middle class, Iraq became a much worse prospect when the invasion and ensuing chaos drove a huge percentage of Iraq’s middle-class, educated professionals out of the country.

Dave Weigel profiles Herman Cain, the former businessman and Tea Party favorite who just announced the formation of his exploratory committee for a presidential run. I was glad that Weigel asked him about foreign policy and national security, since most stories about him ignore his views on these subjects. To no one’s surprise, Cain’s answers are very hawkish:

“I support the surge in Afghanistan but I would have sent those troops earlier than the president sent them,” said Cain. “I don’t know, because I’m not privy to all of the intelligence, if we can win in Afghanistan. If we can, then I would have never announced a withdrawal date [bold mine-DL]. And so the first thing that I’d do [if elected] is summon the experts to find out can we win. If the answer is yes, what is it going to take? And I’m not going to broadcast it to our enemies as to when we’re going to get out of there.”

He restated this, to be clear about how much he saw his job as handing out tasks to smart people. “If the experts—the generals, the joint chiefs of staff—if they believe we can win, I’m not going to tear up the plan they give me,” he said. “I’m going to execute the plan. If we can’t win, I want to know what we can do to exit with dignity out of that country.”

Cain spent some more time explaining his view of the war on terror—“we’re going to be in this war forever” [bold mine-DL] —and the Iraq War. “The people of Iraq, they wanted to become a democracy,” he said. “If they did not want to become a democracy, I do not think President Bush forced it upon them. Once it was clear that they wanted to become a democracy, President Bush pledged to help them do that. I know enough from the reports that I’ve read that this is something the Iraqi people wanted.”

This has to be discouraging to anyone who might have hoped that a Tea Party-aligned possible presidential contender would bring anything new or remarkable to the substance of the primary debates for the next cycle. Cain wasn’t kidding when he toldThe Atlantic‘s Josh Green that when it came to “our conservative beliefs and values, Sarah Palin and I are probably identical.” The trouble is that Cain is very sharp and much, much more policy-oriented than Palin, or many of the other 2012 contenders for that matter. While many of his foreign policy arguments may be awful, he will be able to articulate and defend them more ably than most of the other candidates. If they all run, Cain, Rick Santorum and John Bolton are going to be falling over one another to claim the mantle of most unelectable hawk during the primary debates.

It’s not as if Cain has been keeping his hawkish national security views a secret. An earlier version of his Facebook page* defined his national security views this way: “A strong military – Defense spending should be used more effectively, but never cut below 4% of GDP. The fight against Islamic Fascism is global. Fight it wherever it is a threat to the United States of America. Let our intelligence agencies do their jobs.” That pretty much summed it up: global, perpetual war against “Islamic fascism,” no reductions in military spending, and no effort to rein in what intelligence agencies do. The last part seems to me to be code for resuming detainee abuse and torture. In short, Cain seems to have embraced Bushism in foreign policy in 2010-2011 to a degree that very few Republicans did when Bush was President and still reasonably popular.

* Cain’s Facebook page is now very bland and vague on policy positions.

Nevertheless, George W. Bush must be pleased to see the debate breakout over the best route to Middle East democracy. It was only a few years that the liberal elite assured us that Muslim self-rule was a fantasy. ~Jennifer Rubin

I don’t know about “the liberal elite,” but people opposed to the Bush administration’s illegal war in Iraq and ruinous “freedom agenda” actually argued that it would be extremely difficult to construct Western-style liberal democracies in countries that had no political tradition of representative or constitutional government. This is true. It is extremely difficult, it doesn’t seem to be worth the effort and resources devoted to it, and it remains a foolish thing for the U.S. to pursue as a major foreign policy goal. What we also said was that it was outrageous and wrong to invade another country, trample on its sovereignty, wreck its infrastructure, and impoverish its people. What was even worse was to claim that we had liberated it, when we were actually handing it over to the tender mercies of sectarian militias and establishing what turned out to be a repressive government that often resorts to police-state tactics. In 2003, Muslim self-rule was already a reality in Turkey, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. The fantasy was the idea that the U.S. could forcibly topple an authoritarian government and readily install a functioning liberal democratic government in Iraq, and that this would then lead to regional transformation. Except for the first part, none of this happened. So far, the Tunisians seem to be managing much better on their own than Iraq did under the tutelage of U.S. occupiers.

Finally, we must be weary of status quo conservatism motivated by selfish concerns. Russia and China staunchly opposed Kosovo’s independence for the sake of their own quasi-imperial possessions, but did a sovereign government in Pristina really undermine Russia’s ironclad rule over Chechnya or China’s grip on Tibet? ~Parag Khanna

Last week I argued that an independent South Sudan would immediately have all of the problems of a failed state. The same already applies to many of the statelets and would-be statelets that Khanna mentions. While it may seem like a solution to certain problems, and while it is designed to flatter the preferences of Wilsonians everywhere, re-opening the question of territorial boundaries established in the post-war period promises to ignite new conflicts and revive old ones. Partitions might be done reasonably well or poorly, but there is no reason to assume that “velvet divorces” would be the normal outcome. It is a profoundly bad idea, and it is not made any better by the fact that Moscow and Beijing also object to it. The “status quo conservatism motivated by selfish concerns” protects weak states along with the strong: weaker states have their selfish concerns, too. It is the erosion of the principle of state sovereignty over the last twenty years that exposes weak states to the predations of major powers. If there is one thing more misguided than organizing foreign policy around “humanitarian” and democratist meddling in the affairs of other nations, it has to be the revival of the liberal nationalist conceit that there should be an independent nation-state for every group that wants one.

Before anyone goes rushing to endorse a new wave of separatism, we should consider the consequences of separatist movements in the last twenty years. The Balkan Wars of the 1990s were partly the product of the international indulgence of the principle of self-determination, and they were made worse by the inevitable complication that some people stuck on the wrong side of the new border were not permitted their own self-determination. Some of the newly-independent states were free to expel and kill their minorities en masse, and their patrons looked the other way, because they were fighting for their independence. The partition of Serbia was a horrible mistake, and the partition of Georgia that has followed in its wake has been an unfortunate, predictable result of creating new arbitrary national borders to replace the old ones. Eritrean independence, which was once viewed as a good example of a peaceful parting of the ways with Ethiopia, has become one more source of instability in the Horn of Africa. East Timor has proven to be one of the more harmless of the newly-independent states, but serves as a good example of how these “independent” states end up being failed-state dependencies that rely heavily on international support. Depending on how East Timor makes use of its large natural gas reserves, even those resources could prove to be a source of corruption and misrule. Even if most of the new states Khanna imagines prove to be little more than new East Timors, they would all still rank high among the world’s failed states.

Partitions cannot be separated from the ambitions and agendas of the major powers of the day. Some powers will want to bring the newly-independent states into their orbit, and their rivals will either try to block or find ways to sabotage those states. Instead of shielding weaker countries behind the principle of state sovereignty, Khanna’s proposal would open them up to something worse than the quasi-imperial domination of the status quo in China and Russia. Weak states would face threats of internal destabilization and separatist movements sponsored by their more powerful regional neighbors, and those neighbors would portray themselves as supporters of popular liberation movements. In some cases, they might use the cause of self-determination as a pretext for invasion. Naturally, the governments that feel threatened by separatism would be most inclined to portray the new enthusiasm for self-determination as another form of hostile interventionism, which is effectively what it would be. Needless to say, those who are most opposed to spheres of influence should be even more strongly opposed to this proposal than I am, since a proliferation of small, formally independent states offers many inviting targets for economic and political domination by major powers.

Update: If Joel Kotkin’s thesis is correct, and we are living “in the age of tribes,” endorsing a new wave of independence movements seems even more foolish, since many of these movements would be based explicitly on ethnic identity and the politicization of ethnicity through new enthusiasm for self-determination could be very destructive. However, while I don’t doubt the enduring importance of ethnicity and ethno-nationalism, I’m not sure that I find Kotkin’s presentation of this idea all that persuasive.

It will take time to know how real these changes are, but the transitional Tunisian government has started off by making a number of significant concessions on political rights and civil liberties:

Tunisia unveiled Monday a transitional unity government in which the toppled president’s party holds on to key posts, and announced unprecedented freedoms and the release of all political prisoners.

Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi will remain as head of the transitional government, which will prepare for presidential and parliamentary elections after former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali resigned and fled on Friday.

The Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD) retains the key foreign, interior, defence and finance ministries, even after hundreds demanded in protests in Tunis and other cities Monday that the party be abolished.
The new government also includes three leaders of the legal opposition as well as representatives of civil society. But it excludes banned political parties including the Communists and the Islamist Ennahdha party.

Ghannouchi said however that all political parties will be allowed, media will be freed and a lifting of restrictions on non-governmental organisation including Tunisia’s main human rights group, the Human Rights League.

“We announce total freedom of information,” Ghannouchi told reporters after announcing the cabinet. “We have decided to allow all associations to have normal activities without any interference on the part of the government.”

The new government also scrapped the information ministry — a widely hated organ responsible for official propaganda and media controls under Ben Ali’s 23 years in power.

However, some protesters and regime opponents believe the large role for Ben Ali’s ruling party in the new government represents too much continuity with the old order:

Police fired tear gas and water cannons and shot live rounds in the air in the capital earlier Monday to disperse hundreds of protesters demanding the abolishing of Ben Ali’s party.

“The revolution continues! RCD out!” they shouted.

“Bread and water and no RCD!” hundreds more shouted in Sidi Bouzid, where a December 17 self-immolation suicide in an anti-government protest unleashed the movement that forced Ben Ali to quit.

Update: Shadi Hamid and Issandr El Amrani discuss Tunisia on bloggingheads here. In the third segment, El Amrani made an observation about the “not taking sides” statement similar to the one I made here.