This Week: Democracy, Stability, Empire

"Quote" of the Week: "America is Different"

"The Kind of Democracy That We Want to See"

Greetings,

I said in the last Notes, "Coming up: Small items, short articles. Fun!" But...

Much to my surprise, this week's Notes is only one quote and one essay. It's all about events in the Arab world, as it turns out, and it just took a lot of space to make my point.

I still have a lot of clippings from various media that I want to talk about. In fact, a couple of them are already written, so the fun will begin next week, and may take a few issues to clean up some of this stuff. But we'll start the process next week. I promise!

Nygaard

"Quotes" of the Week: "America is Different"

Some comments can be better understood when placed next to other comments. Thus we have two "Quotes" of the Week this week.

The first one is President Obama, speaking to the nation on March 28th on the subject of Libya. He said:

"Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different."

Well, maybe not all that different. The day before Mr. Obama uttered those words, Rolling Stone magazine published a report called "The Kill Team." The magazine's lead-in reads as follows:

"How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses—and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon."

This is real nightmare material, but if you wish to see some of these extremely graphic photos, or just read about the killings, the cover-up, and so forth, visit the Rolling Stone website.

"The Kind of Democracy That We Want to See"

People have been asking me to comment on recent events in the Arab world, so here goes.

I'll take as my starting point a statement made by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in testimony before Congress a couple of weeks ago. I found it extremely revealing, yet it remained virtually unreported in the corporate media in this country.

Clinton was testifying before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs on March 10th when she got to talking about democracy in the Middle East. She referred to the uprisings in the Arab world—what some have called the Arab Spring—as "remarkable changes," and stated that "Yes, it's exciting and it also presents very significant challenges to America's position, to our security and to our long-term interests."

Uh-oh. When elites in The World's Only Superpower begin to talk about "security" and "interests," it won't be long until the Pentagon gets involved. In this case it took nine days.

But the most revealing comment made by the Secretary was not that one, but a comment she made later on, when she said:

"We have an enormous stake in insuring that Egypt and Tunisia provide models for the kind of democracy that we want to see."

The kind of democracy that we want to see.

The revealing thing about this particular comment is her acknowledgment that there are different kinds of democracy in the world, and that the U.S. will only support certain kinds. In fact, Clinton referred to "models," which is even more revealing.

History is filled with instances of the U.S. obstructing democratic processes in various countries that were models—or were threatening to become models—of the kind of democracy we don't want to see. Just in the past five years we have seen reports of U.S. interference in elections in Brazil, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Iran, Haiti, and Egypt. What the U.S. has done in relation to democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is several orders of magnitude greater than simple "interference." And it was just one month ago that there emerged, courtesy of Wikileaks, a report of U.S. interference in elections in Peru, including the election coming up next month. Many, many more examples can be found by taking a quick glance at William Blum's 2004 book "Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II."

Here's why the idea of a "model" is so revealing: It explains how and why an Empire sees "threats" where other countries do not. While most countries define threats in terms of possible attacks on themselves, an Empire sees a threat in any country that can be seen to be thriving while pursuing a course that does not support the grand plan of the United States. That is, any country—no matter how small—that might inspire other countries to strike off in an independent direction poses a "challenge to America's position," as Secretary Clinton phrases it. America's position as Imperial Superpower, she means. This has been true for decades, and explains why the U.S. has been willing to interfere in countries that, at first glance, would hardly be seen to pose a serious threat to the United States. Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, and so on. When threats come in the form of models, as Clinton says, then the size of the nation is less important than its symbolic power. And that power can present itself whether a country is run by an independent dictator or by a democratic process. If, on the other hand, a country's leadership is reliably in the U.S. camp, then the goal becomes "stability," which is valued far more than democracy, for reasons that are not that hard to see.

Stability and Democracy

Those seeking to understand or predict U.S. behavior would do well to understand the meaning of that often-heard term "stability." The United States officially is seen to support "stability" in the Middle East and elsewhere, while enemies are typically seen as promoting instability. It's such a truism that we can even find statements like this one, from the prestigious Center for Strategic and International Studies:

"The Middle East is a troubled region, and instability in the region presents a major threat to peace, regional stability, the flow of energy exports, trade, and investment."

The virtue and goodness of "stability" is so widely-accepted in U.S. political culture that it apparently can make even a nonsensical statement like this—where "instability" is seen to be a problem because it threatens "stability"—appear meaningful. But it's worth understanding what, exactly, is meant by the word "stability," and why it is so central to U.S. foreign policy.

A country is stable to the extent that the forces that manage it are strong, and are perceived by the population to be strong. If a country is run by a dictator, and the dictator is strong, and the population believes that the dictator is strong, then the country is stable. If a country is democratic, and its democracy is strong, and the population believes that the democracy is strong, then that country also will be stable.

As far as the United States is concerned, either kind of stability is fine as long as the orientation of the nation fits with U.S. plans. That is, as long as the nation does not "significantly challenge America's position." What happens, though, when the majority of a nation's population does not want to be a part of the U.S. plans for the region, or the world? That's when democracy would pose a "significant challenge to America's position." A quick look at Arab public opinion will give a hint of the "challenges" that Ms. Clinton sees when she ponders the prospect of democracy in the Arab world.

The People vs. The Empire

This past summer a major survey of the people in six Middle Eastern countries was conducted by the University of Maryland in conjunction with the well-known polling organization Zogby International. Virtually ignored in this country, the poll goes a considerable way toward explaining why the U.S. has been supporting dictators in the region.

Among the findings in this survey are the following:

Asked which two countries "pose the biggest threat to you," 88 percent named Israel, 77 percent named the United States. No other country was even close. (Algeria and Iran tied for third place, at 10 percent.)

57 percent of respondents said that it would be a positive outcome if Iran were to develop nuclear weapons. This positive attitude toward a nuclear-armed Iran has been increasing for the past several years.

When asked "In a world where there is only one superpower, which of the following countries would you prefer to be that superpower?" only 7 percent said "The United States," roughly the same percentage as chose Russia or Pakistan. (France was the choice of 35 percent.)

A related question asked "Which world leader (outside your own country) do you admire most?" The top vote-getter was Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, with second place being a virtual tie between Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmedinajad.

And there, in large part, is the answer to the puzzle of why the U.S. has so long supported dictators in the region, and to the puzzle of the Secretary of State worrying that the Arab Spring might produce the wrong kind of democracy. Because if this poll is even close to accurate (and I've seen other polls that have indicated similar sentiments) then a true turn towards democracy in the region would likely result in a turning away from the U.S. and Israel and towards countries that are either hostile to the U.S. or in competition with the U.S.

Bahrain and the Big Picture

To illustrate the point, I'll just speculate briefly about one country in the region where the population appears to be anxious for less "stability" and more democracy: Bahrain

The BBC News Service recently noted that Bahrain is "A close ally of the US, [and] is home to the American navy's Fifth Fleet." Adds Reuters, Bahrain is "part of a string of Sunni Gulf allies of the United States that counter the regional influence of Shi'ite power Iran." Were a genuine democracy (the majority of citizens of Bahrain are Shi'ite) to replace the kingdom's "autocratic political order," one can imagine that the Fifth Fleet might be less welcome than it has been. It's entirely possible that a democratic Bahrain could choose to support a stronger Iran, which the people of Bahrain may see as a counterweight to the current regional powers, Israel and the United States. The autocratic regime was the first Gulf state to sign a so-called free-trade agreement with the U.S., in 2006. Thus, when protesters in Bahrain recently asked for UN and American intervention to support their non-violent movement, the response of the U.S.'s chief military man was not to send in the Tomahawk missiles and bombers as we are doing in Libya. Rather, he commented that "I think we have to be very careful to treat every country differently." So, unlike in Libya, we are unlikely to see evidence of U.S. support for the pro-democracy protesters in Bahrain.

Were other Arab states to respond to the current unrest by becoming more democratic, similar threats to U.S. dominance could be expected to materialize. Egypt might change the rules governing the Suez Canal to the detriment of the United States, for example, or it could open up the border with the Gaza Strip, undermining Israel's stranglehold on that part of Palestine.

But there is something else that would be threatened by any genuine move toward democracy, something more fundamental even than military bases and strategic alliances. A global democracy movement would threaten the corporate, Free Market structure that the U.S.-led imperial world order exists to serve. In a world defined by markets, the natural wealth of the world is assumed to be the property of corporations. In such a world even human beings are reduced to marketable commodities, "human resources" whose lives have meaning only to the extent that their labor can be exploited in an increasingly-globalized Marketplace. Any truly democratic system will inevitably come into conflict with this market-based world order, in the process becoming a "challenge to America's position."

There are two ways to preserve that order. One is ideological, in which massive propaganda is employed to convince people around the world either that this order makes our lives better or, if it doesn't, that There Is No Alternative. If enough people can be convinced to like, or at least accept, the way things are, then we can have stable democracies that don't pose "very significant challenges to America's position."

The other route to stability is to keep our non-democratic ally regimes in power, as we have striven to do for so many years in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and elsewhere.

While the Arab Spring is a recent phenomenon, the U.S. preference for stability over democracy is not. Writing in December 2001, when the question of the day was "Why do they hate us?" the St. Petersburg Times ran a lengthy analysis of the history of the "conflict" between Israel and Palestine. They said, in part:

"Current U.S. allies in the Middle East include the monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan, and the governments of Algeria, Egypt, Turkey and Tunisia. All have suppressed militant Palestinian or Islamic movements, and in some cases, nonviolent ones as well. Many Arabs see U.S. support of authoritarian regimes as evidence that stability and oil are more important than justice and right."

And so the evidence keeps coming in: The Empire wants "stability" for an unjust and repressive world order that serves its interests. The people of the world want to destabilize the Empire and replace it with a more democratic world order. As the U.S. Empire's weakness continues to be exposed in Iraq and Afghanistan—and Libya?—we can expect to see more rebellions in countries where U.S. power has kept the lid on for years. Secretary Clinton says of the Arab Spring, "Yes, it's exciting and it also presents very significant challenges to America's position." Those in solidarity with the pro-democracy protesters in the Arab world would do well to echo her words, with one crucial change: "Yes, it's exciting because it presents very significant challenges to America's position."