Zakaria: An Arab Spring country passes the 'democracy test'

Are we all happy about this? If not, why not? Because it doesn't fit our paradigm?

Going deeper, Zakaria posits that Tunisia succeeded where Egypt failed not because Tunisia's Islamists were better, but because Tunisia was more modern, literate globalized, urban and better-educated, with stronger civic groups and labor unions:

"And so, there was relative parity between Islamists and their opponents. Tunisia's Islamic parties shared power, in other words, not because it was better than the Muslim Brotherhood [in Egypt] but because it had to. Tunisia had more of the preconditions that have historically helped strengthen democracy than did Egypt." 

Can Arab countries be real democracies?

By Fareed Zakaria 

November 3, 2014 | CNN

Can Arab countries be real democracies? Well, one of them, Tunisia just did well on a big test.

More than twenty years ago, the scholar Samuel Huntington established his famous "two turnover test" for fledgling democracies. He argued that a country can only be said to be a consolidated democracy when there have been TWO peaceful transitions of power.

Tunisia passed Huntington's test after last weekend's election, when – for the second time – a ruling establishment agreed to hand over power. Tunisia's relative success is in marked contrast to the abysmal failure of Egypt, the Arab world’s largest and once most influential country.

As in Tunisia, Egyptians also overthrew a dictator three years ago...but after Egypt's brief experiment with democracy, in which the Muslim Brotherhood was elected and then abused its authority, today the country is ruled by a repressive dictatorship.

Zakaria: What's really wrong with the Middle East

This analysis by Zakaria is must-read stuff for everybody, but especially my dear conservative friends who are all ginned up for another open-ended U.S. troop engagement in the Middle East -- this time to fight ISIS.

On talk radio I am hearing supremely ignorant and stupid stuff that boils down to plain xenophobia anti-Muslim rhetoric. These conservative talking heads conflate ISIS, al Qaeda, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood as if they are all one organization working in cahoots with grand, global aims. They only get away with such balderdash because of Americans' ignorance and eagerness to believe the worst about all Arabs and Muslims.  

Why they still hate us, 13 years later

By Fareed Zakaria

September 5, 2014 | Washington Post

Watching the gruesome execution videos, I felt some of the same emotions I did after 9/11. Barbarism is designed to provoke anger, and it succeeded. But in September 2001, it also made me ask, “Why do they hate us?” I tried to answer that question in an essay for Newsweek that struck a chord with readers. I reread it to see what I got right and wrong and what I’ve learned in the past 13 years.

It’s not just al-Qaeda. I began by noting that Islamic terrorism is not the isolated behavior of a handful of nihilists. There is a broader culture that has been complicit or at least unwilling to combat it. Things have changed on this front but not nearly enough.

It’s not an Islam problem but an Arab problem. In the early 2000s, Indonesia was our biggest concern because of a series of terrorist attacks there after 9/11. But over the past decade, jihad and even Islamic fundamentalism have not done well in Indonesia — the largest Muslim country in the world, larger in that sense than Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya and the Gulf states put together. Or look at India, which is right next door to Ayman al-Zawahiri’s headquarters in Pakistan, but very few of its 165 million Muslims are members of al-Qaeda. Zawahiri has announced a bold effort to recruit Indian Muslims, but I suspect it will fail.

Arab political decay. The central point of the essay was that the reason the Arab world produces fanaticism and jihad is political stagnation. By 2001, almost every part of the world had seen significant political progress — Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, even Africa had held many free and fair elections. But the Arab world remained a desert. In 2001, most Arabs had fewer freedoms than they did in 1951.

The one aspect of life that Arab dictators could not ban was religion, so Islam had become the language of political opposition. As the Westernized, secular dictatorships of the Arab world failed — politically, economically and socially — the fundamentalists told the people, “Islam is the solution.”

The Arab world was left with dictatorships on one hand and deeply illiberal opposition groups on the other — Hosni Mubarak or al-Qaeda. The more extreme the regime, the more violent the opposition. This cancer was deeper and more destructive than I realized. Despite the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and despite the Arab Spring, this dynamic between dictators and jihadis has not been broken.

Look at Syria, where, until recently, Bashar al-Assad actually had been helping the Islamic State by buying oil and gas from it and shelling its opponents, the Free Syrian Army, when the two were battling each other. Assad was playing the old dictator’s game, giving his people a stark choice — it’s either me or the Islamic State. And many Syrians (the Christian minority, for example) have chosen him.

The greatest setback has been in Egypt, where a nonviolent Islamist movement took power and squandered its chance by overreaching. But not content to let the Muslim Brotherhood fail at the polls, the army displaced it by force and moved back into power. Egypt is now a more brutal police state than it was under Mubarak. The Muslim Brotherhood has been banned, many of its members killed or jailed, the rest driven underground. Let’s hope that ,10 years from now, we do not find ourselves discussing the causes of the rise of an Islamic State in Egypt.

What did I miss in that essay 13 years ago? The fragility of these countries. I didn’t recognize that if the dictatorships faltered, the state could collapse, and that beneath the state there was no civil society — nor, in fact, a real nation. Once chaos reigned across the Middle East, people reached not for their national identities — Iraqi, Syrian — but for much older ones: Shiite, Sunni, Kurd and Arab.

I should have paid greater attention to my mentor in graduate school, Samuel Huntington, who once explained that Americans never recognize that, in the developing world, the key is not the kind of government — communist, capitalist, democratic, dictatorial — but the degree of government. That absence of government is what we are watching these days, from Libya to Iraq to Syria.

U.S. foreign policy must be moral as well as prudent

This entire op-ed by Harvard professor Joseph Nye is worth reading. I especially liked his comparison of Bush 41 vs. Bush 43 [emphasis mine]:

When we cannot be sure how to improve the world, prudence becomes an important virtue, and grandiose visions can pose a grave danger. This is sometimes forgotten by those who want Obama to place bigger bets in the revolutions of today’s Middle East. It is one thing to try to nudge events at the margins and assert our values in the long term; it is another to think we can shape revolutions we do not fully understand. There is a difference between a limited punishment of Syria for breaking an international taboo on the use of chemical weapons and becoming involved in a civil war. In foreign policy, as in medicine, it is important to first do no harm. Bush 41, who lacked the ability to articulate a vision but was able to steer through crises, turned out to be a better leader than his son, who had a powerful vision but little contextual intelligence about the region he tried to reshape.

Definitely I agree with Nye that prudence is the word of the day -- of the decade -- in U.S. foreign policy.  We'll be paying for Dubya's imprudence in Afghanistan and Iraq for decades to come. What I disagree with is Nye's America-first view on foreign policy that naturally gives U.S. presidents the right or the option to intervene militarily wherever they wish, as long as their "big bets" show promising odds of success over there -- success as defined by us, over here. 

What Nye and others don't realize is that we are in a new era, a new wave of democratization, now continuing in the Arab-Muslim world. The arc of history bends toward democracy. The U.S. has played no small role in that. (Pat self on back). So anybody straining against that arc will feel the pain, eventually. That goes for the U.S. at home or interfering abroad.

Egypt offers preliminary evidence that Arab-Muslims refuse to go back to dictatorship.  They've had a taste of revolution and they liked it.  Certainly I disagree with the way the Egyptian military with the support of some Egyptians ousted the democratically elected President Morsi, even while I sympathize with their grievances against him.  The street protests of an active urban minority proved very effective, but it was hardly democratic or representative of the wishes of 84 million Egyptians.  Nevertheless, what did we immediately see thereafter? The Egyptian military promised fresh elections.  We'll see if the generals follow through on their promise -- and the U.S. should pressure them hard to do so -- or if the interim government will ban the Muslim Brotherhood as a political party. Nevertheless, the point is that a "new normal" has been established: elections, democracy.  Baby steps.  

Hence, Nye rightly reminds America to think of revolutions in terms of decades, not weeks or years, and to "first do no harm."  But Nye is old-fashioned in his chauvinistic belief that the U.S. can intervene boldly in other nation's affairs and still be lucky enough to avoid blowback.  No.  The world has changed. Everything happening everywhere is known to everybody; and small voices can have huge ripple effects in unexpected places.  Like our back yard.

More importantly, we must graciously accept that the international institutions of peace, national sovereignty and democracy that America helped to build in the 20th century increasingly constrain U.S. foreign policy options as they gather power and widespread recognition. That is a good thing for everybody, the U.S. included. We shouldn't struggle against those reassuring bonds; we shouldn't strain to unbend that just arc.

What I'm getting at, finally, is a plea for a moral foreign policy based on U.S values.  Yes, really and truly.  Not just words to that effect, but deeds. That is the way.  

Many will say I'm naive.  But I say: isn't it in fact naive to think anymore, post-911, that we can make agreements with dictators and hope to maintain control, through them, over millions of angry and oppressed people?  People with access to the Internet, and weapons, and relatives, friends and sympathizers all over the world?  OK, maybe for a while.  But then what?  All that anger will burst forth eventually... and do we really want to bear the brunt of it?  

No.  We must be respected by the people of the world, and not just their leaders.  And we can do that only by leading with our values that we believe are universal (and in fact God-given) and that lead to the greater happiness of all mankind.  If we really believe that, and we're right, then America should prevail.  If we only pay lip service to our values outside U.S. borders, or think they are only for white Christians surrounded by two oceans, then... By all means, let's rely on old-fashioned realpolitik and brute force to get what we want.  But then we shouldn't be shocked or outraged when others resent us or even try to kill us in response; and no more asking ourselves, then, in a pitiful mockery of self-reflection, Why do they hate us?

The foreign policy risk behind the Arab revolutions

By Joseph S. Nye Jr.

August 31, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/17sysWe

U.S. must use leverage on Egypt's military

Every American who cares about foreign policy and what's happening now in Egypt should read this cool-headed analysis of America's 33-year patronage of Egypt's military.

That relationship has cost the U.S. about $66 billion in military aid since the signing of the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, including about 1,000 tanks and 220 fighter jets.

To Bishara's analysis I would add one remark that Gary "The War Nerd" Brecher often makes when discussing war and conflict in countries like Egypt, Syria, etc.: these countries don't maintain a robust military to protect or fight against foreign enemies; they keep armies to control their own populations. 

And U.S. military aid helps them to do that.  Are we cool with that?

Generals and patrons: The American-Egyptian military

By Marwan Bishara

August 15, 2013 | Al Jazeera

URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/08/2013814212819564477.html

Gingrich: Neocons may now be non-interventionist

Gee, whaddya know?  Maybe old neocons can learn new tricks!

I wonder though if Newt's change of mind could have anything to do with shifting political winds on the Far Right -- Newt's political provenance and final refuge -- towards libertarian isolationism?   

I do have a bone to pick with Gingrich's aside that, "[W]e really need a discussion on what is an effective policy against radical Islam, since it’s hard to argue that our policies of the last 12 years have [sic] effective."

How does one measure our effectiveness?  No more 9/11s?  Number of Americans killed?  Number of attacks by Islamists, period?  Number of Islamist terrorists killed?  What's the metric?  Whatever it is, I'd argue we've been doing pretty well.  (You can find a data base of 40 years of terror attacks against the U.S. here.)

One could certainly argue that America's means of fighting terrorism -- drone strikes, domestic spying, sanctioned murders, renditions and torture in secret prisons, etc. -- exceed the scale of the threat we face, and do more harm than good.

But more important, we non-interventionist liberals must part ways with the Gingrichs, Pauls and Cruzes when they continue to state, all too casually, that the U.S. is at war with Islam.  We are not even "at war" with radical Islam.  We're not at war with anybody, constitutionally or operationally speaking.  It's possible to argue we're not even fighting al Qaeda anymore.  Needless to say, we must continue to seek out, thwart and kill or arrest those who threaten to attack, or attempt to attack and kill us.  Period.  

Declaring war on a whole religion or a religious sect is stupid and self-defeating.  Four hundred years of Christian Crusades against Muslims followed by 120 years of war between Catholics and Protestants should have taught the West as much.  

Radical Islam, whether home-grown or foreign, is not a threat to America, a priori or sine exceptione.  And terrorism is not an enemy that we can fight a war against.  

We Democrats and liberals must not sanction stupid bumper-sticker generalizations about the world that lead America into trouble.  

UPDATE (08.12.2013): The American Prospect ran an article on August 9 on the same topic, making many of the same points I did: "Neocons vs. Non-Interventionists: Let the Games Begin!"  If the GOP is going to have a debate on foreign policy, I predict it will be quiet and internal.

Newt Gingrich rethinks neoconservative views on U.S. military interventions

By Ralph Z. Hallow

August 4, 2013 | Washington Times

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a leading neoconservative hawk and staunch supporter of Israel, says the U.S. military interventions he has long supported to promote democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere have backfired and need to be re-evaluated.

“I am a neoconservative. But at some point, even if you are a neoconservative, you need to take a deep breath to ask if our strategies in the Middle East have succeeded,” the 2012 Republican presidential hopeful said in an interview.

Mr. Gingrich supported the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but he said he has increasingly doubted the strategy of attempting to export democracy by force to countries where the religion and culture are not hospitable to Western values.

“It may be that our capacity to export democracy is a lot more limited than we thought,” he said.

Mr. Gingrich at times has expressed doubts about the U.S. capacity for nation-building, but he said he now has formed his own conclusions about their failures in light of the experiences of the past decade.

“My worry about all this is not new,” Mr. Gingrich said. “But my willingness to reach a conclusion is new.”

Mr. Gingrich said it is time for Republicans to heed some of the anti-interventionist ideas offered by the libertarian-minded Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, and Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, tea party favorite and foreign policy skeptic.

“I think it would be healthy to go back and war-game what alternative strategies would have been better, and I like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul because they are talking about this,” Mr. Gingrich said.

Mr. Paul, a longtime critic of neoconservatives on foreign policy, argues that war must be a last resort and never should be used for nation-building.

In a June 24 column in The Washington Times, Mr. Paul wrote that Americans were told for many years that the radical Taliban would return to power quickly unless U.S. forces remained in Afghanistan.

“Well, guess what, after 12 years, trillions of dollars, more than 2,200 Americans killed, and perhaps more than 50,000 dead Afghan civilians and fighters, the Taliban is coming back anyway!” Mr. Paul wrote.

He noted a similar pattern of radical resurgence in Iraq after American forces withdrew.

As far back as December 2003, Mr. Gingrich was questioning the follow-up for the successful U.S. invasion.

“I am very proud of what [Operation Iraqi Freedom commander Gen.] Tommy Franks did — up to the moment of deciding how to transfer power to the Iraqis. Then we go off a cliff,” he told Newsweek magazine. He said the point should have been “not ‘How many enemy do I kill?’, [but] ‘How many allies do I grow?’”

He also noted his past wariness about U.S. military interventions, often telling audiences that “we could directly guarantee democracy in Iraq and not stay a day longer than needed in Korea.” “Korea has been a 63-year engagement,” he added with a laugh.

Mr. Gingrich argued less than two years ago that President Obama should have “quietly tried to push” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak out of office.

But he now questions whether even U.S. indirect intervention in Egypt to back the overthrow of the longtime Egyptian leader and U.S. ally might have been a mistake. “Here’s a simple question: ‘Is Egypt really better off than going back to Mubarak since it’s hard to argue that the Muslim Brotherhood’s dictatorship is better than Mubarak?’” Mr. Gingrich said.

The former speaker added that U.S. military action in Syria would risk a repeat of interventionist foreign policy mistakes.

“I explicitly would not go into Syria,” he said. “I would look at the whole question of how we think of the governments in other countries,” he said.

He said the result may be another military dictatorship in Egypt and that would be better than rule by the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood.

“It’s hard to argue the chaos in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Lebanon make for a better future,” Mr. Gingrich said.

The fear of many in the United States and Israel is that the Arab Spring is bringing not Western-style democracy but simply replacing secular authoritarians with militantly Islamic religious governments that are hostile to Israel and the U.S., he said.

“I certainly would have allied myself in the 1970s and 1980s with the strategy of intervention and defeating the Soviet Union, but there is definitely a reflection point for conservatives and Republican Party leaders on how we have approached our major national security questions,” Mr. Gingrich said. “I am not alone in asking the question: ‘Are we making progress after the Arab Spring?’”

A top official in the George W. Bush administration, which oversaw the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns and occupations, offered partial agreement with Mr. Gingrich.

“People want to know if Gingrich has really changed his opinion — his point of view — because if he has it will make an impact,” said former Bush political director Matt Schlapp.

“There are plenty of conservatives and Republicans who think that those decisions to go into Afghanistan and Iraq were overly aggressive,” said Mr. Schlapp. “But I believe the vast majority of Republicans are hoping these life-and-death decisions we made in Afghanistan and Iraq were the right decisions to combat terrorism.”

Mr. Gingrich said the U.S. “should begin to focus narrowly on American interests” rather than on attempting to change systems of governance abroad to our liking.

“I think we really need a discussion on what is an effective policy against radical Islam, since it’s hard to argue that our policies of the last 12 years have effective,” he said.

Mr. Gingrich repeated comments he expressed in an interview on Laura Ingraham’s radio show supporting Mr. Paul in his extended contretemps with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a fellow Republican. Mr. Christie sharply criticized what he called the “esoteric, intellectual debates” he said Mr. Paul and his allies were staging in the face of the need for stronger security polices in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I consistently have been on the side of having the courage that Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have, and I think it’s sad to watch the establishment grow hysterical, but, frankly, they’re hysterical because they have no answers,” Mr. Gingrich said on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

Mr. Gingrich predicted that Mr. Christie’s attack was the “first sign” of more to come from the party’s foreign policy establishment.

“The establishment will grow more and more hysterical the more powerful Rand Paul and Ted Cruz become,” Mr. Gingrich said. “They will gain strength as it’s obvious that they are among the few people willing to raise the right questions.”

Only an elite can secure the gains of revolution

I'm not a fan of Anne Applebaum but she makes a good point here, one that I have already mentioned:

As the Arab Spring nations mark their second anniversaries, it’s worth keeping this [post-Soviet] precedent in mind. True, there were dissenters of many kinds in pre-revolutionary Egypt, as one expert told Foreign Policy this week. But “they were largely suppressed, except for the mosque and the soccer pitch. With these two institutions, the numbers were too big and the emotions they evoked were too strong.” The result: The Muslim Brotherhood was the only political “party” with any organizational capacity after 2011. And Egyptian soccer clubs are the only organizations that can reliably be counted on to create major protests, as they have recently. Another alternative elite was not available.

The upshot is that positive change in the Mideast and North Africa is going to take many years, because the erstwhile regimes there brutally suppressed the formation of any kind of local elite, and a civil society in which they could exchange ideas and cooperate:

After all, the time to help create an alternative [in Arab Spring countries] was three, five or, better yet, 10 years ago. But even then, an authentic alternative elite couldn’t have been wholly created on the outside, by exiles or by foreigners: If opposition leaders aren’t the product of an indigenous impulse to create alternative institutions — political parties, charities, newspapers, human rights organizations — then they won’t have the political clout to push through radical reforms when they get the chance. Yet in many Arab states, the opportunity to start doing so arrived only in 2011, and the alternative elite is forming only now.

We Americans especially like to believe the myth that revolutions are mass endeavors. The truth is that our American Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution and others were carried out by a minority of the population led by a tiny, well-educated, well-connected elite. The People always need leaders -- especially people trying to move on after bad leaders.

Preparing for freedom before it comes

By Anne Applebaum

February 7, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/XXLMuB

Lowry: What U.S. did in 200 years, Egypt must do in 2

NRO's Rich Lowry is not utterly stupid so let me use his latest op-ed as an emblem of right-wing wrongness. His criticisms of President Obama's policies vis-a-vis Egypt suffer from several Amero-centric, neo-con fallacies. Namely:

-  Events abroad happen quickly, in cause-and-effect timelines that correspond neatly to U.S. Presidential policies and tenures;

-  The U.S. has the power to shape events abroad; the exercise of that power is simply a function of U.S. willpower and determination, usually in the form of military action; and

-  America's agreeing to talk to foreign leaders = commiseration with those same foreign leaders = a "man crush."

Next, I don't want to compare Egypt to America, but... let me compare today's Egypt to America.  The American Revolution took 8 years.  It was a country of about 2.5 million, not counting slaves and Indians, a majority of which was loyal to King George throughout.  After that we had the destined-to-fail Articles of Confederation that lasted 8 years before being replaced by the U.S. Constitution.  It could be argued that many disputes left unsettled by the Federalists and Anti-Federalists festered and resulted in the American Civil War 72 years later.  That civil war was followed by Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and eventually the Civil Rights movement, culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, adopted 188 years after the Declaration of Independence.

And that all started in a podunk colony on the ass-end of nowhere in the 18th century.  Compare that to today's Egypt, the most populated Arab country in the world with 84 million people.  What Lowry and other conservative pundits are doing is expressing disappointment with Egypt's failure to transition smoothly and non-violently in the span of 2 years from a brutal dictatorship of 30 years to a simulacrum of U.S. republican democracy that was  perfected over some 200 years.

So let me make obvious the absurdity of the criticism laid at President Obama's feet: that in a mere two years since Mubarak was forced to step down during peaceful protests, the failure of Egypt to transform itself into a peaceful, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state with tolerance and free speech for all, represents a FAILURE of PRESIDENT OBAMA.  Meanwhile, in fact, liberals and non-Muslims in Egypt have been withdrawing from the constitutional convention in protest of the mangled process of its drafting and approval by referendum.  Still, it's Obama's fault that things aren't turning out ideally, now, immediately.

Folks, it doesn't get any more partisan, Amero-centric and short-sighted than this... and all from the editor of the most "intellectual" conservative media outlet around.  So you can imagine what dumber conservatives are saying about U.S. policy vis-a-vis Egypt.  It's completely unmoored from reality.

America needs a huge dose of humility, chased with a swig of its own long and tortured history for study.  Hell, I don't know how things are going to turn out there.  But I sure as hell know that we Americans can't determine the outcome.  That fact may drive many neo-cons and pundits nuts to the point of denial, but that's just the way it is.  

The Brotherhood Delusion 

Morsi consolidates his dictatorship while the Obama administration tells itself bedtime stories.

By Rich Lowry

November 30, 2012 | National Review

URL: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/334475/brotherhood-delusion-rich-lowry

Reply to R. on the Arab 'movie' protests

What does this have to do with Bush?  Seriously.

You have countries in the Arab Spring who said they'd had enough of their current leaders.  What's so scary about it from the neocon/Bushites point of view is that we didn't instigate it.  But in fact the neocons were hoping that democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan would lead to a new wave of democratization in the Arab world. Remember?

Well, here it is, just not as we anticipated, not for our reasons, not on our timetable. And these people are not dumb: they realize that the U.S. gave $ billions to their oppressor in Egypt for decades because he kept the peace with Israel.  They realize that the U.S. didn't give a shit about human rights in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. They realize we were willing to tolerate their oppression for our own geopolitical aims.  

So now we expect them to see us as "allies" because we're all "democratic" brothers now. Not so fast.  In fact it's us that has to prove we give a shit about them and their democracy, and not vice-versa.  They've endured worse than we can ever impose on them.  They have no fear of U.S. power and we just have to get used to that; hence our threats, tantrums and condemnations don't mean shit to people who have endured torture and brutality for the past 2-3 decades.  

You want them all to put on their tri-cornered hats and start reading Jefferson and Hamilton and see us their allies?  Not so fast.  

Beyond that, they have no idea what "free speech" is about.  They all buy into Islam and Islamic rule.  They don't make the connection between tolerance for other religious beliefs and tolerance for other political beliefs, and the relation to their personal political liberty.  Why should they make that connection?  In many of these countries, religion was the only secret outlet they had to organize and express their discontent, allowed within certain boundaries by their oppressor.  They had no "civil society," as such.  If you know development like I do, then civil society is a prerequisite for a normally functioning democracy.  Elections are the veneer; human organization is the guts and the engine.  That was all killed and missing.  Religion was the only avenue of somewhat free expression in these countries.  And so through religion they have learned to express their political discontent.  Thus today the religious freaks have the bully pulpit, because everybody else was killed or jailed.  That's not going to change overnight.

We can't really begin to understand it; we can only admit that we we don't understand it.  We must keep the dialog open.  These people don't give two shits about our drones and our warships; they aren't afraid of anything because they have been through hell already.

These are the populations we're dealing with.  You can call them stupid or backward, but there are objective reasons for their attitudes.  To shake our finger at them and throw tantrums is useless at best, counter-productive at worst.  We need to start from zero with these people.  They are ignorant and brutalized populations with nothing but fundamentalist religious institutions allowed by their dead regimes through which to express their gripes.  They are about 400 years behind our political development.  We can't expect miracles from them.  Just like you wouldn't expect a torture victim with zero education to lead his country. 

Rush and GOP: Living in the 19th century

This is a perfect illustration why conservatives cannot be trusted to run U.S. foreign policy, because they have no comprehension of or tolerance for ambiguity.  If anything is slightly ambiguous, they must push it to absurd polar extremes:

RUSH: Wednesday night on Telemundo, Noticiero  Telemundo. The host is Jose Diaz-Balart. He's interviewing Obama, and Jose says, "Would you consider the current Egyptian regime an ally of the United States?"

OBAMA:  I don't think that we would consider them an ally, but we don't consider them an enemy. They are a new government that is trying to find its way. They were democratically elected. I think that, uh, we are gonna have to see how they respond to this incident. Uh, how they respond to, for example, maintaining the peace treaty with Israel. So far, at least, what we've seen is in some cases they've said the right things and taken the right steps. In others, how they've responded to various events may not be aligned with our interests.

RUSH:  All right.  That's psychobabble, and everybody says so. 

See, U.S. foreign aid should only go to allies like Israel who don't need it in the first place and will do what we want anyway.  Never mind that we gave $ billions in military aid to Egypt's dicator Mubarak for 30 years because he kept the peace with Israel while he brutalized Egyptians, and they all knew it.  Now that Egyptian popular opinion matters, we should cut off all foreign aid to "punish" them, cutting off a major source of U.S. influence, according to Rush.  Now we should resort to remote threats and tantrums. Makes perfect backwards sense, doesn't it?

Whereas President Obama realizes that Egypt -- more precisely, its people -- are on the fence with regard to U.S. power, and he doesn't want to cut them off.  But Rush and conservatives do.  And that would accomplish... what?  ... in the most populous Arab country on Earth?  What in the world would official disengagement and diplomatic tantrums from Washington do to influence the people of Egypt, who rightly recognize that the U.S. enabled their oppressor for 30 years, and now must decide if the U.S. has really turned over a new leaf?  F--k 'em, that's Rush's advice.  That's all well and good... if you think we live in a bubble.  But 9/11 showed that we don't.  

The United States will live or die on its adherence to its cherished values and thus its moral authority to lead the Free World.  If we renounce those, if we renounce the idea of America in the pursuit of American interests, then we must rely on naked power to achieve our selfish aims.  Yet we don't have the stomach to follow through on all that that entails -- we are not 19th century Britain (thank God).  And the world is too transparent and interconnected to submit to neo-colonial tyranny by the U.S. or anybody.  We need a new game plan.  Rush and conservatives are living in the last century.  They are clinging to a dead past and bereft of ideas.

New York Times Scrambles to Spin the President's Idiotic Statement on Egypt

September 14, 2012 | The Rush Limbaugh Show

URL: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/09/14/new_york_times_scrambles_to_spin_the_president_s_idiotic_statement_on_egypt

Rush: 'Obama overthrew Mubarak'!?

"Obama is the guy who gave us this in Egypt by supporting it long before he knew what it was," said Rush Limbaugh yesterday.

Rush then elaborated on his neo-imperialistic view of the Mideast:

In fact, there were a lot of us having problems because some of the conservative media people, people on our side, were falling for this, too. They thought this was the outgrowth of some great Democracy Project.  [Read: The result of Dubya's invasions of Afghanistan then Iraq. - J] That the Arab Spring was spreading the democracy of Iraq further. The tentacles were spreading out throughout the Middle East, and it was starting to show up in Egypt, and from there it would sweep to Syria, and the problem with Israel would minimize, and a bunch of us at the time were warning, it's the exact opposite.  This is an uprising by Al-Qaeda types, by militant Islamists, by Islamist supremacists whose objective in all of this is to take over the Middle East and get rid of Israel.  That's what was happening. 

Allow me to translate: America's "spreading democracy" in the Mideast through the barrel of a gun was fine; but the most populous Arab country in the world removing its corrupt and brutal regime on its own without a bloody war was terrible, because we didn't make it happen, we didn't control it.  (Like we have controlled events in Iraq and Afghanistan: masterfully, with no unintended consequences.)  Oh, and because it made Israel uncomfortable.

Let's be clear: Romney, Rush and the Right are criticizing Obama for not condemning Egypt's peaceful, popular uprising to end 30 years of tyranny. Furthermore, they believe that because Obama did not use U.S. forces to stop it, Obama is responsible for their revolution and its aftermath.  

(This simplistic and wrong "It's Obama's fault" line is also incredibly insulting to the hundreds of thousands of brave Egyptians who protested peacefully and faced down the army to secure their freedom from president-for-life Hosni Mubarak.)

America's Founding Fathers -- who, by throwing off their colonial yoke, started a process of democratization that has spread for more than 200 years -- must be turning somersaults in their graves at such right-wing criticism.

Whenever Rush, et al start on such a neo-conservative, neo-imperialist bent, all it takes is one question to reveal their bloody fangs: What would you have us do then?  We already know the answer: Obama is still mopping up the blood & guts in Afghanistan and Iraq.  That's all they know, that's all they've got in their bag of tricks. That, and their impotent tantrums and condemnations that change nothing.  

(I could write a lot about the naivety and ignorance of Americans who think or say, "They have democracy now, so why can't they just be like us?" That is, some of us expect these brutalized and divided societies to become immediately like us, with our 230 years of bloody conflict, strife and institution-building.  But I'll leave that for another time....)

What pathetic sheep! They all turned out because Obama told them to. Revolution -- pfft!

Caller Nails It! Obama Shot Before He Aimed When He Overthrew Mubarak

September 13, 2012 | The Rush Limbaugh Show

URL:  http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/09/13/caller_nails_it_obama_shot_before_he_aimed_when_he_overthrew_mubarak

What U.S. 'appeasement'?!

I can't believe anybody still publishes V.D. Hanson.  He should have been chased across the U.S. border by an angry mob years ago.

How in the world has Obama "appeased" radical Islamists?  By killing bin Laden and more Taliban fighters in four years than Dubya did in eight? By increasing drone strikes in sovereign Pakistan 6 times, not to mention Yemen and Somalia? By having not a single Islamist terrorist attack on U.S. soil?  By refusing to close Dubya's Guantanamo Bay detention camp?  By carrying out extra-judicial killings of U.S. citizens suspected of Islamist terrorism?  VDH doesn't specify. It's all understood, I guess, if you too reside in his crazy alternate universe where Iraqis are still greeting us with flowers, and we are winning Afghans' hearts and minds as we kill them.

Look, folks, we don't control Egypt, Libya, or Afghanistan and Iraq for that matter. The difference between the first two and the last two countries is pretty significant though: the people of the former two countries decided to overthrow their leaders, and spilled their own blood to make it happen, whereas in the latter two countries, we did it for them and then stuck around way past our welcome as Occupiers.  In Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen, the Arab Spring was their idea; it was their revolution, not ours.  Meanwhile, we have spent a few $ billion in Egypt and Libya on arms and aid, and a few $ trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Not to mention 4,486 U.S. troops killed in Iraq and 2114 in Afghanistan.

If Obama's way is "leading from behind," I'll opt for that any day.  Unworldly and ignorant Mitt Romney and the disgraced neocons whispering terrible advice in his ear are living in the illusions of 2002, not the realities of 2012. We're smarter and better than that now.  Forward, indeed!

Storming Embassies, Killing Ambassadors, and ‘Smart’ Diplomacy

By Victor Davis Hanson

September 12, 2012 | National Review

URL: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/316604/storming-embassies-killing-ambassadors-and-smart-diplomacy-victor-davis-hanson

Gallup poll: Egyptians don't want theocracy

Of course Egyptians don't want theocracy... they want socialism and Marxist communism! Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh already warned us!....

Poll: Egyptians Don't Want Theocracy

By Adelle M. Banks

June 8, 2011 | Religion News Service

[...]

About seven in 10 Egyptians said clerics should advise national leaders on legislation. In comparison, 14 percent said religious leaders should have full authority in creating laws and 9 percent said they should have no authority.

The findings, announced Tuesday (June 7), come from the United Arab Emirates-based Abu Dhabi Gallup Center, which monitors attitudes of Muslims worldwide.

Even as they seek a limited advisory role for clergy, most Egyptians (67 percent) want religious freedom as a provision in a new constitution. A much higher percentage (92 percent) say freedom of speech should be included, and slightly more than half want a new constitution to include freedom of assembly.

Peaceful Mideast change a blow to Al Qaeda

Very interesting analysis. Sometimes what doesn't happen is more significant than what does. Al Qaeda's deafening silence in the wake of the peaceful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt is a great example.

Yet as this piece warns, the gains of peaceful demonstrators could be rolled back; and if they fail; or the military cracks down; and if we don't give peaceful democrats all the support we can, then al Qaeda's silence could be replaced by deadly gloating. They could cite the impotence of peaceful protests as more reason to support violent jihad to overthrow intractable Mideast autocrats.

That's why I was heartened by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's announcement Thursday that the U.S. is committing $150 million (still a drop in the bucket -- about one month's worth of Mubarak-era U.S. aid to Egypt -- and pennies compared to what America is spending in Iraq and Afghanistan) to support democracy and civil society in Egypt.

We can't take our eye of the ball!

Egypt's Peaceful Revolution A Blow To Al-Qaida

By Mike Shuster

February 16, 2011 | NPR

URL: http://www.npr.org/133816008

Limbaugh defines an unacceptable protest

If you have any doubts about what Rush and his ilk consider an acceptable protest, read this:

"I don't want to call it a mob, the protester bunch. And, folks, they're all leftists. They're feminists. They're avowed socialist, leftist, communists, environmentalists. I don't believe that this is just spontaneity. I think this is classic. This is rent-a-mob. I don't doubt that there are genuine grievances felt by some of the people in this group, but this is not a spontaneous, gee, nobody knew this was coming moment. This is the result of organizing. This is just classic community organizing in Egypt."

See, it had to be "spontaneous" to be genuine, meaning: every protester had to come independently and simultaneously to the conclusion that he needed to be out there risking his life and livelihood, fighting a corrupt and oppressive regime. Anything even slightly more collective than that is "community organizing," which as we all know is the 8th deadly sin.

"This is rent-a-mob," he said! Who rented them? How much did more than a million people cost to rent for 18 days, and were they paid in dollars or Egyptian pounds, and where did they pick up their money? Did they earn extra for getting hit with tear gas or pummeled with batons? I really wish Rush would elaborate on this shocking conspiracy.

Back to reality.... If we let these far-right bozos talk for 3 hours a day 5 days a week, eventually they can't contain themselves and reveal their true elitist feelings. Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, et al despise normal people and democracy, that's all there is to it.

Media Jubilant Over Egypt Coup

February 11, 2011 | The Rush Limbaugh Show

URL: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_021111/content/01125106.guest.html

Herbert: Lesson in democracy from Egyptians

If you've ever been witness to a massive protest gathering like the ones in Egypt over the past few weeks, then you understand how insane and cynically duplicitous are the conspiracy theories which charge that someone or some organization was "behind" it all. Nobody can force or snooker people into doing what millions of normal Egyptians did. Indeed their genuineness was what made their exploits so beautiful and inspiring.

When the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh see millions of people motivated to take to the streets for weeks on end, facing down tanks and police, and risking their lives and livelihoods, and winning, it scares the bejusus out of them, because their goal is to keep fed-up, average Americans convinced that organizing, protesting, getting angry, and risking one's reputation is never ever worth it, that it come to nothing, and what's worse, that it's anti-American and sinister. (Unless, of course, it's a bland, agendaless, made-for-FOX event for status-quo-supporting whites.)

The truth is that nothing will change unless normal people get angry, get organized, and start making life uncomfortable for the rich and powerful. Many of us, especially on the Left, were inspired but ultimately duped by Obama's hope for change. We thought he'd do the heavy lifting for us, despite the soul-crushing weight of a Wall Street cash machine on his back. We thought voting for him was an accomplishment. (Yeah, we did get our first black president, which meant something for all of a few weeks.) Well shame on us, shame on me. Turns out it wasn't nearly enough. It was only a start. We haven't held his comfortable Ivy League feet to the fire. And we haven't gotten out of our homes and cosy routines to do our part. Unforgivably, his top aide called us "f***ing retards" for demanding real health care reform; then the "vichy Left" snarkily, smugly excoriated those who do get angry, loud, and organized by organizing to denounce organizing. Those events were a real nadir. Let's hope we learn our lesson from Egypt and support each other instead of backstabbing.

But back to Egypt's inspiring optimism.... In a positive variation on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, we can rejoice in Egypt because a victory for democracy and people power anywhere is a victory everywhere. Such achievements remind us not only what is at stake, but what is really possible.

(P.S. - I'm well aware that events in Egypt are touch-and-go, and real democracy and majority rule are by no means guaranteed there. However the possibility of bad outcomes does not negate the power and beauty of Egyptians' accomplishment in January-February 2011. Only in films and fairy tales does one seminal event turn the tide and guarantee a happily-ever-after. America's Revolution did not guarantee our democratic republic would survive or live up to its promise, nor did an Abolition Movement, Civil War, Progressive Movement, Women's Right's Movement, or Civil Rights Movement. Democracy is a work in progress. The monied elites are always trying to roll back the people's gains; and for the past 30 years in the U.S., they've been winning. Nevertheless, we draw inspiration from our and others' past accomplishments because they remind us that, together, we will prevail.)

When Democracy Weakens

By Bob Herbert
February 11, 2011 | New York Times

While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn't really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.

So what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding and increasingly obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest, while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the social safety net, saying we can't afford them. One state after another is reporting that it cannot pay its bills. Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands. Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a serious crime problem, laid off nearly half of its police force. Medicaid, the program that provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage assault from nearly all quarters.

The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from. In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist. The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president's re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash won't be talking much about the wants and needs of the poor. They'll be genuflecting before the very rich.

In an Op-Ed article in The Times at the end of January, Senator John Kerry said that the Egyptian people "have made clear they will settle for nothing less than greater democracy and more economic opportunities." Americans are being asked to swallow exactly the opposite. In the mad rush to privatization over the past few decades, democracy itself was put up for sale, and the rich were the only ones who could afford it.

The corporate and financial elites threw astounding sums of money into campaign contributions and high-priced lobbyists and think tanks and media buys and anything else they could think of. They wined and dined powerful leaders of both parties. They flew them on private jets and wooed them with golf outings and lavish vacations and gave them high-paying jobs as lobbyists the moment they left the government. All that money was well spent. The investments paid off big time.

As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson wrote in their book, "Winner-Take-All Politics": "Step by step and debate by debate, America's public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefited the few at the expense of the many."

As if the corporate stranglehold on American democracy were not tight enough, the Supreme Court strengthened it immeasurably with its Citizens United decision, which greatly enhanced the already overwhelming power of corporate money in politics. Ordinary Americans have no real access to the corridors of power, but you can bet your last Lotto ticket that your elected officials are listening when the corporate money speaks.

When the game is rigged in your favor, you win. So despite the worst economic downturn since the Depression, the big corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, the stock markets are up and all is well among the plutocrats. The endlessly egregious Koch brothers, David and Charles, are worth an estimated $35 billion. Yet they seem to feel as though society has treated them unfairly.

As Jane Mayer pointed out in her celebrated New Yorker article, "The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry — especially environmental regulation." (A good hard look at their air-pollution record would make you sick.)

It's a perversion of democracy, indeed, when individuals like the Kochs have so much clout while the many millions of ordinary Americans have so little. What the Kochs want is coming to pass. Extend the tax cuts for the rich? No problem. Cut services to the poor, the sick, the young and the disabled? Check. Can we get you anything else, gentlemen?

The Egyptians want to establish a viable democracy, and that's a long, hard road. Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a real democracy slip away.

I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn just a few weeks before he died in January 2010. He was chagrined about the state of affairs in the U.S. but not at all daunted. "If there is going to be change," he said, "real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves."

I thought of that as I watched the coverage of the ecstatic celebrations in the streets of Cairo.