Beinart: Cheney openly disparages 'Bush Doctrine'

Here's recent revisionist history, revised by the guy who recently made history, Dick Cheney! Peter Beinart explains [emphasis mine]:

It’s worth recognizing how directly Cheney is repudiating Bush’s vision. Bush’s core point—repeated by a thousand supportive pundits—was that when Middle Eastern dictators don’t allow democratic dissent, jihadist terrorism becomes the prime avenue for resistance. Egypt today is a textbook example. The Muslim Brotherhood won a free vote. In power, it ruled in illiberal ways. But Egypt was still due for additional elections in which people could do just what Bush had urged them to: express their grievances democratically. Instead, the military seized on popular discontent to overthrow the government, massively repress freedom of speech, and engineer a sham election. And just as Bush predicted, Egypt’s Islamists are responding by moving toward violence and jihadist militancy.

But it’s Cheney’s view, not Bush’s, that is ascendant on today’s right.  It’s now common to hear hawkish pundits declare that Brotherhood parties should be barred from running anywhere in the Middle East, which represents a full embrace of the authoritarian-stability argument that Bush devoted his second inaugural to arguing against.

Because Obama’s rhetoric about freedom and democracy is less soaring than Bush’s, the media often calls him a realist.  But as Obama’s Egypt policy shows, he’s actually proved far more willing to risk relationships with dictatorial American clients than most of his conservative critics would like.

Obama’s foreign policy is only “realist” in comparison to the vision Bush laid out in 2005—a vision now being trashed widely in his own party.  If there remains any significant faction in today’s Republican Party willing to risk America’s relationships with friendly Arab tyrants in the name of democracy, it is headquartered in Dallas, where a former president seems content to express himself merely through art.

Real historians will be studying Dick Cheney for decades. They'll eventually decide, I predict, that he was a malicious influence in the White House who parroted his President's foreign policy line when he couldn't get his way, while seeking to undermine it in practice. Now Cheney is repudiating Dubya out in the open. 

I for one agree that democratization is the only future for the Middle East, but that means Saudi Arabia, firstly, and then Egypt, Iran, Israel and Turkey. The rest will follow suit. But democracy can't be established at the point of a U.S. gun -- especially when it must be preceded by national liberation. Recent experience has asserted, once again, that national liberation is primarily the job of those who would be liberated. (And we're talking about countries that were drawn up by outside Western powers; the people inside those borders might not agree with those lines).  The U.S. can assist only at the fringes.

Dick Cheney Just Buried the Bush Doctrine

By Peter Beinart

June 27, 2014 | The Atlantic

URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/dick-cheney-just-buried-the-bush-doctrine/373621/

Sovereign nation states, Mideast and GWOT

Lemme try to boil this down a bit.  It's written by an eggheaded, blame-America-first Princeton professor with an axe to grind, to be sure, but there's some really good stuff in here nevertheless.

The main thing is Prof. Mayer's comparison (albeit tortured) of the present Middle East with Westphalian Europe in mid-17th century.  

The point is that, as every poly sci major knows, the Peace of Westphalia and the end of the Thirty Years War heralded the dawn of the modern European nation-state, and the principle of sovereignty of states that we hold so dear today, in the UN and international law.  You could even say that state sovereignty is the sine qua non of international law; without it, you have the jungle where the strong prey upon the weak.  What Westphalia did, in essence, was start the process whereby the strong nations acknowledged the weak nations' right to exist and govern their own affairs, and furthermore, strong states acknowledged it was in their own best interests (i.e. the interests of peace) to do so.  Because we're all interconnected.    

Prof. Mayer reminds us that the development of Westphalian-European nation-states was a pretty bloody, God-awful process in relative historical terms.  Furthermore, he sees a similar process happening now in the Middle East... although the borders of those nation-states were drawn by colonial powers that then did not take into account pesky things like historically who controlled what region, what religious sects dominated those regions, etc.  He hopes that this process, about 300 years later, won't be as bloody.  

In these "violent towel heads'" defense, one could argue that the borders were drawn up by Western powers precisely to divide up awkwardly those "natural" borders and institutionalize conflict in a "divide and rule" philosophy.  This is important to understand because the non-European Middle East (that's redundant but I'll say it nonetheless for emphasis) never had a "Westphalia moment" where it felt the need to draw up strict state borders.  Their borders were more organic and understood, and enforced by tradition and local force.  (And this is one reason why Palestinians who hark from present-day Israel are screwed to this day).

So what does all this mean for the U.S.?  It means that, to compound the complexity of the "Great War on Terror" (GWOT) against nebulous non-state actors that don't recognize governments or borders, we have the wonderful complexity of Arab-Mideast nation-states with poorly drawn borders whose peoples don't necessarily pledge allegiance to those nation-states where they live, but rather to their tribe, religious sect, ethnic group, etc.  This fact strikes our post-Westphalia western minds as horribly backward and primitive and yet that is what Europe was like until the 1600's.  

To sum up, this makes America's defining the terroristic enemy awfully hard.  Even if the U.S. can manage to win cooperation with Mideast nation-states, there is little or no guarantee that local populations will go along with the program.  Again, this throws a monkey wrench into our whole military-diplomatic modus operandi, whereby our political leaders meet with their political leaders over whom we exert some diplomatic, military or economic leverage, and who in return give us certain guarantees.  As the Arab Spring showed us, those guarantees are conditional at best, and blowback-worthy at worst. Because, while our leaders may be viewed as legitimate by their home polities, the Arab-Middle East leaders' polities may simply scoff.    

What all this tells me is that the U.S. must do a much better job at retail diplomacy in the Mideast, speaking to the ethnic and sectarian nations that make up its core, and not only to the nation-states that try to keep a cork on all the bubbling conflict inherent in poorly drawn borders. 

Comments?  Questions?    

America: Its Own Worst Enemy

By Arno J. Mayer

June 18, 2013 | Counterpunch

URL: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/18/america-its-own-worst-enemy/

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: '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

IMF praised economic reforms of Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, etc. -- OOPS!

If you want to know which Mideast dictatorship will be the next domino to fall, don't ask the IMF. They thought everything was hunky-dory.

Just something to keep in mind when the IMF and World Bank are ramming structural reforms down poor and developing countries' throats. They really don't have a clue or seem to care about the consequences of their "tough love."

More broadly, global financial markets don't care about human rights,dignity or liberty. They like government stability and assurances for their investments.

I.M.F. Reviews Praised Libya, Egypt and Other Nations

By Pierre Briancon and John Foley

February 22, 2011 | New York Times

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/business/23views.html?_r=1

Statement at the Conclusion of the 2010 Article IV Consultation Mission to Bahrain

Press Release No. 10/486

December 13, 2010 | International Monetary Fund

URL: http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pr/2010/pr10486.htm

W. Williams: 'Republics' for Republicans, 'democracy' for mobs

Then call us a "constitutional democracy," Professor Williams. Same thing. So there, I solved the "problem."

Actually, with the exception of Britain, I don't know of any Western democracies without a constitution. (And the last time I checked, the mob hadn't yet taken over Britain and voted themselves rich.) So when we say "democracy" it's the same as saying "republic" or "constitutional democracy." When America was founded that wasn't the case, but thanks to the success of the U.S. model, it is today.

I'm not entirely sure why some U.S. conservatives insist on these semantics, but I think it has to do with their basic disdain for and distrust of ordinary people -- just like our Founding Fathers despised and feared the lower classes and called democracy "mobocracy." Elitism and classicm are alive and well among today's Founder-fawning conservatives, despite all their Palin-esque airs of Average-Joe folksiness to the contrary.

Case in point, Williams intentionally provocative opening sentence: "It is truly disgusting for me to hear politicians, national and international talking heads and pseudo-academics praising the Middle East stirrings as democracy movements."

Williams tries to qualify this statement in his op-ed but a sentiment this ugly really can't be redeemed or clawed back.

Whatever the outcomes of these protests may be, they certainly are democracy movements, where the people want more of a say in who runs their government and how it operates. The elitists, er, republicans, are showing their true stripes in light of the 2011 Mideast democracy uprisings.

Democracy Versus Liberty

By Walter E. Williams
February 22, 2011 | Townhall.com

URL: http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2011/02/23/democracy_versus_liberty