Friday, Feb. 4, 2011
With Democracy or Against It—There's No In Between
In America, politicians are rarely compelled to turn
rhetoric into action. Presidents make public commitments to support legislation
while quietly instructing their congressional allies to kill the corresponding
bills. Congresspeople then campaign on policy proposals only to make sure their
respective presidents veto the initiatives.
We all know this game—we know its rigged rules ensure plausible deniability and prevent follow through. But as the Mideast showed this week, just because those are our rules doesn't mean everyone plays by them.
That's what the Egyptian protests against U.S.-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak really represent for us: a poignant demand that we actually embody our democratic creed—a demand whose response shows an American government desperate to avoid walking its talk.
Remember, President Obama told a Cairo audience in 2009 that America would unequivocally back Egyptians' democratic aspirations. Citing our nation's history being "born out of revolution against an empire," he said: "We will support (democracy) everywhere."
That declaration, while admirable, was hardly courageous because it was presented as a foreign-policy version of an American campaign promise—that is, it was issued by a politician who never really expected to be asked for attendant action. In fact, the Obama administration was so certain it wouldn't have to embody its platitudes that it was actively slashing grants for democracy-building in Egypt while maintaining military aid to the Mubarak dictatorship.
As if deliberately bragging about this disconnect between pro-democratic rhetoric and undemocratic reality, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Arab television: "I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family."
Those "friends," of course, fired "USA"-labeled tear gas canisters at the very democratic protestors America promised to support. As the demonstrations persisted, Obama discarded the bromides of his Cairo speech and refused to press for Mubarak's immediate resignation. He then dispatched Vice President Joe Biden to both praise the despot as an "ally" and tell reporters to "not refer to him as a dictator."
Following suit, Clinton said that despite America's stated commitment to democracy, "we're not advocating any specific outcome." When asked whether the administration was at least backing away from her BFF Mubarak, Clinton was reduced to Rumsfeldian incoherence, insisting that "we do not want to send any message about backing forward or backing back."
This left Egypt's Nobel Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei to humiliate our equivocating leaders by stating the obvious: "The American government cannot ask the Egyptian people to believe that a dictator who has been in power for 30 years will be the one to implement democracy."
Despite the indisputable truth of ElBaradei's words, politicians and pundits has mostly defended the administration's behavior. From neoconservatives to Obama loyalists, the mediascape teems with those arguing that though we want democracy, we might have to continue propping up autocrats because democracy could elect regimes we dislike.
But that's the rub: Just as you cannot be sorta pregnant, you cannot kinda support democracy, and only when it does what you want. That's not "supporting democracy"; that's imperialism. Indeed, the ideal of self-governance is as uncompromising as America's views on terrorism: You're either with democracy, or you're against it—and as Martin Luther King noted, we are too often against it.
Echoing President Kennedy's aphorism that "those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable," King warned in 1967 that while our country once "initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world," we were becoming "the arch anti-revolutionaries." That reality has sowed predictable anti-Americanism among populations we've helped subjugate.
Now, though, we may see some much-needed change. With Cairo protestors so blatantly exposing our hypocrisy, we could end up shamed into finally living our democratic values—and fulfilling Dr. King's dream.
David Sirota is a best-selling author whose upcoming book "Back to Our Future" will be released in March of 2011. He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
2011 CREATORS.COM
We all know this game—we know its rigged rules ensure plausible deniability and prevent follow through. But as the Mideast showed this week, just because those are our rules doesn't mean everyone plays by them.
That's what the Egyptian protests against U.S.-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak really represent for us: a poignant demand that we actually embody our democratic creed—a demand whose response shows an American government desperate to avoid walking its talk.
Remember, President Obama told a Cairo audience in 2009 that America would unequivocally back Egyptians' democratic aspirations. Citing our nation's history being "born out of revolution against an empire," he said: "We will support (democracy) everywhere."
That declaration, while admirable, was hardly courageous because it was presented as a foreign-policy version of an American campaign promise—that is, it was issued by a politician who never really expected to be asked for attendant action. In fact, the Obama administration was so certain it wouldn't have to embody its platitudes that it was actively slashing grants for democracy-building in Egypt while maintaining military aid to the Mubarak dictatorship.
As if deliberately bragging about this disconnect between pro-democratic rhetoric and undemocratic reality, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Arab television: "I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family."
Those "friends," of course, fired "USA"-labeled tear gas canisters at the very democratic protestors America promised to support. As the demonstrations persisted, Obama discarded the bromides of his Cairo speech and refused to press for Mubarak's immediate resignation. He then dispatched Vice President Joe Biden to both praise the despot as an "ally" and tell reporters to "not refer to him as a dictator."
Following suit, Clinton said that despite America's stated commitment to democracy, "we're not advocating any specific outcome." When asked whether the administration was at least backing away from her BFF Mubarak, Clinton was reduced to Rumsfeldian incoherence, insisting that "we do not want to send any message about backing forward or backing back."
This left Egypt's Nobel Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei to humiliate our equivocating leaders by stating the obvious: "The American government cannot ask the Egyptian people to believe that a dictator who has been in power for 30 years will be the one to implement democracy."
Despite the indisputable truth of ElBaradei's words, politicians and pundits has mostly defended the administration's behavior. From neoconservatives to Obama loyalists, the mediascape teems with those arguing that though we want democracy, we might have to continue propping up autocrats because democracy could elect regimes we dislike.
But that's the rub: Just as you cannot be sorta pregnant, you cannot kinda support democracy, and only when it does what you want. That's not "supporting democracy"; that's imperialism. Indeed, the ideal of self-governance is as uncompromising as America's views on terrorism: You're either with democracy, or you're against it—and as Martin Luther King noted, we are too often against it.
Echoing President Kennedy's aphorism that "those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable," King warned in 1967 that while our country once "initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world," we were becoming "the arch anti-revolutionaries." That reality has sowed predictable anti-Americanism among populations we've helped subjugate.
Now, though, we may see some much-needed change. With Cairo protestors so blatantly exposing our hypocrisy, we could end up shamed into finally living our democratic values—and fulfilling Dr. King's dream.
David Sirota is a best-selling author whose upcoming book "Back to Our Future" will be released in March of 2011. He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
2011 CREATORS.COM
Mubarack is a heartless dictator and needs to be removed.
Sounds just like what GW Bush did with Saddam Hussein.
I forgot to include another VERY important point about the Israel - Egypt thing in my first paragraph below. - - - The Suez Canal. That is a prime instrument of Business, and the last thing business needs is an Egypt that fails to keep that shipping route open, safe, and mine-free for our goods to be transported through it. A war waging overhead or nearby puts that at risk. Look back to the 60's when the was a big issue.
"Tea Party Warrior", it doesn't matter what Mubarak's ideology is, the point is that the US preferred him in power because he kept their hot-headed, Allah-worshipping, religious conservatives from making trouble for our ally Israel.
--------------------------------------------------
Iran was also a case where the conservative religious element wanted to restore "natural order" to their society, get away from godless, secular attitudes where the headlines read "the miniskirts in Tehran are shorter than in London this year". The US liked the Shah, because the "business of America" could deal with him, but not with the Ayatollah.
Taking Sadam Hussein out of power was a real complication for the US. While he may have ruled from the secular side instead of the religous side, he stood in the way of US oil interests from setting up an unlimited mineral rights deal. Instead, Saddam made sure his country's oil was sold on the world market for what it was really worth, severely cutting into the profit potential that a long-term mineral rights deal would have made. All Bush wanted was a leader in power that would deliver that sweet deal. That's why Bush didn't want to pull out until the right leader was in place. It was never about democracy, it was about oil business.
Business people have known for thousands of years, that you make your real money when the poeple you are dealing with place a very different value on a tradeable item than you do. Like buying Manhattan for $24 of cheap beads. Those beads may have been unique and valuable to the First Nation people who the original european settlers bought the land from, whereas the land was much more valuable to the incoming white Christian outsider, it was an island and easily "defensible" from the heathen red man. Like making a military base from which attacks could be launched and eventually take the rest of the land... sound familiar with our many US military bases aroudn the world?
It's not about democracy here in the US, either. It's about preserving a business climate, plain and simple. Even our military is there for that purpose, to keep others from messing with our business' "business". And that's what our Constitution was set up for on the Federal Powers side, to keep the interstate business under control, if not the differing laws of differing states. The politics was not as important as the day to day business of an earthly, material life.
Business is the element of our society that hates "hope and change" the most. Rebuilding your commerce systems and structures to adapt to "change" costs time and money, may even change who is on top. And business does not want the victims... er customers... to ever have "hope" of turnabout, they ought to just get used to it being that way. As Middle Class Americans, we also realize that we work as agents for Business, or we would not be allowed that socially favorable position.
Too bad we also extend those "us against them" business attitudes to the segregated classes in our own society, not just to our rivals across national borders. We know about rivalries all too well, Packers-Bears stands forever, and Packers-Steelers is the current focus.
But, at the end of the day, we don't really kill the other fans or break businesses over those sports rivalries, so why should we take such a hateful, to-the-death stance over religious rivalries, political rivalries, or race rivalries?