The Embarassment of Empire (long essay)

[Thanas]

By David Bromwich

The embarrassments of empire

From Egypt to Pakistan, February 2011 will be remembered as a month unusually full of the embarrassments of empire. Americans were enthralled by a spectacle of liberty in which we felt we should somehow be playing a part. Here were popular movements toward self-government, which might once have looked to the United States as an exemplar, springing up all across North Africa and the Middle East. Why did they not look up to us now?

The answer became clearer with every equivocal word of the Obama administration, and every false step it took in trying to manage the crisis. A person suffers embarrassment when something true about himself emerges in spite of reasonable efforts to conceal it. It is the same with nations. Sovereign nations are abstract entities, of course -- they cannot have feelings as people do -- but there are times when they would blush if they could.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was weakened and finally brought down by nonviolent popular actions that started in Cairo and spread to Alexandria, Suez, and many other cities. At first, Mubarak took a dictator's prerogative and named his successor. Soon after, he changed his mind and declined to step down. At last, he gave in to the unrelenting demands of the people and pressure from the army.

Throughout the 18 days of upheaval, Washington spoke of the need for an "orderly transition." President Obama and his advisers seemed to side with the Egyptian demonstrators vaguely and sentimentally, yet they never sought a connection with them, not even through a figure of international renown like Mohamed ElBaradei, the former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency who earned a Nobel peace prize in 2005. The U.S. took extreme care not to offend Mubarak. There was a period of perhaps three days after Obama dispatched Frank Wisner (a former ambassador and personal friend of Mubarak) as special envoy to consult with the dictator when the world was given to understand that America was planning the longest of farewells.

Such was the American response to an expression of popular will that had no precedent. For in the end, the protest swept up millions of demonstrators: by some estimates nearly a quarter of Egypt's population of 81 million, in a mass action whose exhilaration could be shared by all who watched. The crowd in Tahrir Square had none of the poisonous quality of a mob. Even the most respectable citizens -- doctors, lawyers, teachers, shopkeepers, women as well as men -- were drawn in little by little, visiting the demonstrations after work, throwing in their lot, and finally staying overnight in the square.

President Obama sanctified the process only after it was sealed by success. He said, in a telling phrase, that it had been a "privilege" for him to watch "history taking place." To add, as Obama did, that the result belonged to the Egyptian people alone was fitting; yet the protestors could respond with perfect justice that they owed nothing to American help. Was this degree of detachment inevitable?

Look into the order of events a little more closely and you see a picture of the contradictions of American policy over the last half-century. On day one of the protest, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pronounced the Egyptian government "stable"; two days later, on a news program, Vice President Joe Biden refused to call Mubarak a dictator; the following day, President Obama said he had spoken to Mubarak and "urged him to meet the aspirations of the Egyptian people."

If that sounds vague, far vaguer was to come. Having dispatched Wisner to Cairo, the president committed himself to this sentiment: "An orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now." A wishful commandment that read like a polite editorial. It left unclear the meaning of "orderly," the meaning of "now," and the meaning of "meaningful."

Day nine found the administration "concerned" about attacks on the protestors, but not concerned enough to do anything. Obama did, however, call Mubarak once more. In a private version of the "wishful commandment," he told him that it was time to go. Mubarak did not go.

The chaos of day 12 offers a striking reflection of the stance of the White House as spectator. Returned from Cairo, Wisner asserted that Mubarak must be allowed to stay for several months longer, since his "continued leadership is critical." In the same tenor, Hillary Clinton affirmed that any transition to democracy "takes some time. There are certain things that have to be done in order to prepare." Yet the White House and the State Department went out of their way to dissociate themselves from the explicit conservatism of Wisner's injunction.

Right to the end, Obama limited himself to comforting generalities whose practical significance was obscure. On day 13, for example, he allowed that Egypt was "not going to go back to what it was." Meanwhile, the administration that went on the record in favor of "real, concrete" reforms never named one.

Stability First, Democracy Second

To say that our leaders covered themselves with shame would be melodramatic. To say that they were embarrassed by unforeseeable obstructions would be much too kind. They could not help speaking for democracy, because that is what the U.S. thinks it stands for; if our actions sometimes expose us to the charge of hypocrisy, our words have the single-mindedness of sincere belief. How then did American policy in February come so palpably untethered?

We have supported a succession of military strongmen in Egypt going as far back as 1952, when the CIA judged Gamal Abdel Nasser a plausible bulwark against Communism. The U.S. gives Egypt $1.3 billion annually in aid (mostly military). Of all our clients, only Israel gets more, at $3 billion annually. The view in Washington has long been that those two nations will oversee "the neighborhood" on our behalf. That is why a nonviolent insurgency on the West Bank, if it should occur, would meet as baffled a response from Washington as the February days in Egypt. The embarrassment is part of the situation.

A fair surmise is that Obama was no less confusing in private than in public; that when he spoke to Mubarak, his words were muffled and decorous: "You must begin leaving, but I will never desert you" -- something like that. The difference between Mubarak's shakiness in his first televised speech to the country and his evident composure in his second speech may well be explained by a signal that he took for an assurance.

I will never desert you, one recalls, is the message that Barack Obama conveyed to Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson (when Obama was still a candidate); to the banks and financial firms (in February 2009); to Dick Cheney and the torture lawyers (in his National Archives Speech of May 2009); to General David Petraeus (in the months preceding the 2009 administration review of the Afghan War); to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu via the Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak (in the summer of 2009); and to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (in February 2011).

The need to give assurance seems to be an inseparable trait of Obama's character. He deals with big decisions by first moving to cement a secure alliance with the powers-that-be, no matter how discredited they are, no matter how resounding his previous contempt for them may have been. Yet this is a reflex that often prematurely cedes control to the powerful over whom he might otherwise be in a position to exert leverage. That fight, however, is not for him.

To say it another way, Obama visibly hates crisis. He is so averse to the very idea of instability that he seems unable to use a crisis to his advantage. Seldom, to judge by the evidence thus far, is he the first, second, or third person in the room to recognize that a state of crisis exists. The hesitation that looked like apathy and the hyper-managerial tone of his response to the BP oil spill offered a vivid illustration of this trait. Egypt brought out the same pattern.

How did the statements and actions of the president and his advisers strike Egyptian demonstrators who were risking their lives for freedom? A February 6th story in the New York Times by Kareem Fahim, Mark Landler, and Anthony Shadid concluded that "the moves amounted to a rebuff to the protesters," and added that this was the way things looked to those in Tahrir Square: "By emphasizing the need for a gradual transition, only days after emphasizing that change there must begin immediately, the Obama administration was viewed as shifting away from the protesters in the streets and toward stronger backing for Mr. Mubarak's hand-picked elite."

To capture the zig-zag path of American policy over the 18 days before Mubarak fell is not an easy task; but it is fair to say that the administration went from thinking the protests signified next to nothing, to pleading for an orderly transition, to emphasizing the necessary slowness of an orderly transition, to upbraiding Mubarak for so obviously standing in place, to rejoicing at the triumph of liberty. All this, in the course of just over two weeks.

Why could the U.S. not speak with a single voice? We say the word "democracy" and invoke its prestige with such careless fluency that we are surprised when we see its face. But here, the embarrassment was not only public and diplomatic, it was also personal and sentimental. A dictator through long acquaintance may become a familiar and comforting associate. In the second week of February, it emerged that Wisner's law firm, Patton Boggs, had handled arbitration and litigation on behalf of Mubarak's government, and that Secretary of State Clinton had said as recently as March 2009: "I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family."

Our Empire and Our Election Cycles

If American officials looking at Egypt felt themselves "cabined, cribbed, confined," anyone who knew the history of our Middle East policy could see the immediate cause. There was also a mediate cause, so ubiquitous as to be easily forgotten. This was, of course, Israel and the constant presence of Israel in American politics. In the last three months alone, Sarah Palin made public plans for a trip to Israel, and the Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee said that the U.S. ought to "encourage the Israelis to build as much as they can and as rapidly as they can" on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.

Nor has Barack Obama been indifferent to such pressures. In earlier years, he expressed unmistakable sympathy for the cause of Palestinian independence; but the story changed in 2008, as he entered the last leg of the race for president. In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), in June of that year, Obama made an astonishing pledge with religious overtones: the American commitment to Israeli security was, he said, "sacrosanct." On his way to the White House, Obama purged his advisorate of figures like Robert Malley and Zbigniew Brzezinski who were deemed unsuitable by the Israel lobby.

Then, in June 2009, he made his celebrated Cairo speech, with its message of hope and sympathy for the progress of a liberal Muslim society. There at Cairo University, Obama called for a halt both to Palestinian terror and the Israeli occupation. Soon after, Hillary Clinton reiterated the demand that Israel enforce a complete stop to the building of settlements, with no exceptions for "outposts" or "natural growth."

Benjamin Netanyahu simply defied these grave utterances; and he soon found he could do so with impunity. By the end of that summer, Obama had been persuaded to let pass in quiet disapproval anything Israel chose to do. The mid-term elections were now drawing close; and Obama apparently judged it expedient to have his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and family photographed on a visit to the Golan Heights.

Yet the ascent of the administration to that perfection of embarrassment was gradual and its stages deserve to be remembered. When, in March 2010, Vice President Joe Biden paid a visit to Israel (saying "It's good to be home"), he was greeted by an announcement from the interior ministry that it had approved the construction of 1,600 new building units for Jews in East Jerusalem: a calculated insult to President Obama. This led Biden to issue a public rebuke of Netanyahu, and Hillary Clinton to restate the administration's anti-settlement policy. A request by Netanyahu to visit the White House was subsequently refused.

Netanyahu, however, realized that such embarrassment would eventually work to his advantage. By the end of May, thoughts of the mid-term election were coming to the fore in Washington. Without Israeli policy having changed in any way, the Obama administration began to warm up. The election-sensitive nature of this thaw was borne out by the revelation, in January 2011, that the White House had been dealing with Ehud Barak in preference to Netanyahu; that it had been charmed by his competence, seduced by his promises, and was now "furious" at his non-performance in the peace process.

So the pattern has been: a step toward pressure on Israel, followed by a step back into the arms of the Israel lobby -- the second step coinciding with an upcoming election cycle. The 2012 election and its financing are already much on Obama's mind. Unhappily for him, Turkey, Brazil, and other countries sympathetic to the Palestinian cause chose this moment to put forward a U.N. resolution condemning the Israeli occupation of conquered lands and designating Israel's settlements there "illegal."

Again, there was an embarrassed phone call from Obama, this time to Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. Could the PA put off the vote? Or, if there had to be a U.N. statement, did it have to commit the U.S. to a legally binding resolution? But Abbas himself had lost confidence in Obama and his own reputation had recently been badly tarnished by WikiLeaks revelations of the PA's capitulation to past American requests. The settlements were in any case in violation of international law, specifically article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which states: "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." Abbas accordingly rebuffed Obama's entreaty for a milder resolution and the American president suffered the embarrassment of issuing his first veto in the U.N. in utter defiance of the hopes expressed so eloquently in his Cairo speech.

But the interlude was not over. For Obama could not bear to stand as the sole obstacle (alongside Israel) to a unanimous vote in favor of the resolution without making it clear that he did so with a bad conscience. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, offered the explanation in public in a speech that managed to concede almost every particular the resolution had specified: "Continued settlement activity violates Israel's international commitments, devastates trust between the parties, and threatens the prospects for peace."

If there is any precedent for such an "Explanation of Vote," the precedents must be few. The only difference between Obama's position and the U.N. resolution was that the resolution would have backed such words by enforceable action. "Set honor in one eye," says Brutus in Julius Caesar, "and death i' th'other, and I will look on both indifferently." The embarrassment of the U.N. vote was that Obama set justice in one eye, and a presidential campaign in the other, and the world was in a position to see which way he turned.

Diplomacy and Counterterrorism

Raymond Davis is the American operative in Pakistan, officially described at first as a "technical adviser," who on January 25th interrupted a drive in the city of Lahore to shoot and kill two Pakistanis. Davis took care to photograph the corpses and called in a back-up jeep for help, which, in its rush, knocked over and killed a third Pakistani. Before he could get back to the U.S. consulate, Davis was arrested by the local police.

On February 20th, the Guardian journalist Declan Walsh confirmed the suspicion which the strange incident had immediately spurred that Davis was a CIA agent. The Pakistani government was aware of his identity, Walsh reported, and that was why it had resisted an Obama administration demand that Davis be accorded diplomatic immunity. The following day, the New York Times revealed that it had known who Davis's employer was for some time, but -- at the request of the White House and the State Department -- had refrained from publishing an accurate account of the shooting and its aftermath.

Obama's cup of embarrassment in February was close to running over, but at least he now had a newspaper to share his embarrassment. Why did the Times suppress the truth about Raymond Davis? For reasons of empire. After all, the facts were known all over Pakistan and had been published in the Pakistani press.

In obeying a White House request to keep them out of the American press, the Times (along with the Washington Post and Associated Press) was protecting not Davis himself but a government definition of "tact," while fostering the ignorance of American citizens about the actions of our own government. The protocol of the press under imperial rules -- as the British discovered in the Boer War and Americans have come to know in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan -- is simple and endlessly repeatable: power comes before truth except in cases where the truth is conspicuous.

Journalists are now learning what historians have known for many years -- an agent like Davis is an instrument of a policy that was wrong from the start. For Pakistan has always existed in a state of deep and partly justified paranoia regarding India. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, Pakistani leaders came to consider it a requirement of "strategic depth" that Afghanistan be a reasonably stable neighbor with a compliant government. From the moment in late 2001 when, to spare an investment of ground forces, the Bush administration threw in its lot with the warlords of the Northern Alliance in its invasion of Afghanistan, that policy was sent awry. From then on, Pakistan's leadership would regard the American presence as essentially unstable and counter it in every way consistent with simulated friendship.

Practical wisdom about these matters has never been hard to come by. It shows in the secret dispatches of the foreign service, which we can now read, thanks to another embarrassment: the release of secret diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks. In a cable from Islamabad, dated September 23, 2009, for example, the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson sent the following piece of sound advice to the Obama administration:

In response to queries posed by the National Security Council, Embassy Islamabad believes that it is not possible to counter al-Qaeda in Pakistan absent a comprehensive strategy that 1) addresses the interlinked Taliban threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2) brings about stable, civilian government in Afghanistan, and 3) reexamines the broader role of India in the region. As the queries presuppose, the ending of Pakistani establishment support to terrorist and extremist groups, some Afghan-focused and some India-focused, is a key element for success. There is no chance that Pakistan will view enhanced assistance levels in any field as sufficient compensation for abandoning support to these groups, which it sees as an important part of its national security apparatus against India. The only way to achieve a cessation of such support is to change the Pakistan government's own perception of its security requirements.

Among the most remarkable features of Ambassador Patterson's warning were her repeated mention of India and her allusion to the conflict over Kashmir: scarcely mentioned in official American descriptions of what the U.S. is doing in Pakistan. And here a further embarrassment appears in the background to lengthen the shadow of the Davis incident. The cables show that the Obama administration either is not using, or is not sharing with the American people, the most elementary knowledge of the complexity of a commitment it inherited from its predecessor and now has greatly broadened. These cables suggest that a rhetorical policy, not just of simplification but of conscious distortion, has guided Obama's frequent iterations that "the enemy" in Pakistan is al-Qaeda. It would be as fair to say that the American enemy in Pakistan is Pakistan, and Pakistan's relationship to India, and our own relationship to both.

Embarrassments Are Sacrosanct

Even in the depths of mortification, a lower depth still threatens Washington, thanks to our double image of ourselves. As the sole superpower, we want to be everywhere (and everywhere in charge); but as the best hope of democracy, we must be seen to be nowhere (and nowhere in charge). You might suppose that the greatest threat to such a double image lies in the possibility of the endless documentary on American foreign policy and America's wars being offered by WikiLeaks. In fact, the government's reactions to WikiLeaks have posed a far greater danger -- not to America the superpower, but to the constitutional America in whose name it acts.

The deeper embarrassments of officialdom can easily assume the shape of patriotic outrage. Newt Gingrich, for example, has said that Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, should be treated as an "enemy combatant"; Sarah Palin has claimed he should be pursued just as we pursue the leaders of al-Qaeda and the Taliban; Peter King has recommended that WikiLeaks be classified as a terrorist organization. These statements were predictable, considering from whom they came.

It was not to be expected that an American secretary of state would skirt the edge of the same vigilante sentiments. Yet Hillary Clinton did just that when, embarrassed at the exposure of the slack security of the foreign service and the peculiar frankness of its portraits, she said that WikiLeaks had launched "an attack on the international community." The community of the people of the world, or the community of secret governments and secret armies? To be an enemy of the latter would make Assange an honest journalist. To be an enemy of the former would make him a terrorist.

Attorney General Eric Holder, confronted by the same ferocious descriptions of Assange, and himself embarrassed -- since people were looking to his department to prosecute, even though it was not clear Assange had broken a law -- resolved to discover a law that could be attached to a penalty whose appropriateness he appeared to have decided in advance. "There's a real basis," said Holder vaguely, "there's a predicate for us to believe that crimes have been committed here."

Was the vice president, too, embarrassed when he spoke of Assange as "a high-tech terrorist"? He should have been. If there is a weapon of high-tech terror that is feared in the world today, it is the drones that -- as part of the CIA's covert war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands -- now regularly fire missiles into houses to kill presumed enemies of the U.S., along with anyone standing nearby. And if there is a world leader known for his advocacy of drone warfare, it is Vice President Biden.

We are in the second week of March, and the embarrassments show no sign of abating. On March 3rd, the president stated that the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi must go -- or, in the preferred euphemism of the moment, that he "needs to step down" -- and must do it "now." What could that mean? How does Obama propose to make it stick?

Even for a president who, in the realms of war and peace, is apt to imagine his words weigh more than other people's actions, there are some words that sound so much like actions you should take care not to speak them too emphatically. But never mind: officials in the State Department and at the White House, we are told, have come across a subtler way of expressing themselves than the Bush-Cheney administration which spoke so crudely of "regime change." They now speak of "regime alteration."

Lives and deaths may actually hang on words like these. We think of ourselves as the patron country of democracy in a world that wants to be patronized, but there are other ways of looking at the United States, and other ways of looking at patronage. Samuel Johnson completed his great Dictionary of the English Language in 1755 without financial backers from the aristocracy. When Lord Chesterfield arrived late on the scene to offer his help, Johnson replied in a letter that has become famous: "Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?"

Barack Obama, Frank Wisner, and Hillary Clinton were, in exactly that sense, patrons of the struggle for liberty by the people of Egypt. We embarrass other countries with our help, and it is only natural that we stumble. We are sleepwalking in someone else's house.

I found it to be a profound, thought-provoking piece, especially the section about Obama's modus operandi.

[Simon_Jester]

Likewise.

In this respect, we see a difference between the administrations, one of style- Bush shamed himself on plenty of occasions, but he seldom embarrassed himself: he didn't verbally commit himself to major policies he couldn't or wouldn't deliver on. Clinton before him seldom shamed himself (aside from awkward incidents in his personal life), but did occasionally embarrass himself, though the embarrassments didn't come in such rapid succession.

I think much of what causes Obama to embarrass himself and his country this way is that he's the wrong man to deal with the very active and imperial foreign policy stance Bush committed the US to. He's temperamentally unsuited either to continue the policy (because he doesn't want to exploit of a crisis at the risk of alienating establishment figures), or to ending the policy (because he doesn't want to risk the unpredictable consequences of saying that the situation has become untenable, and creating a crisis).

[Guardsman Bass]

President Obama sanctified the process only after it was sealed by success. He said, in a telling phrase, that it had been a "privilege" for him to watch "history taking place." To add, as Obama did, that the result belonged to the Egyptian people alone was fitting; yet the protestors could respond with perfect justice that they owed nothing to American help. Was this degree of detachment inevitable?

There's nothing surprising about this, because the US didn't know that the protest movement was going to succeed in toppling Mubarak. If they had more openly backed the protesters, and then the movement had failed (leaving Mubarak in power), the US would still have to go deal with the Mubarak regime.

Why could the U.S. not speak with a single voice? We say the word "democracy" and invoke its prestige with such careless fluency that we are surprised when we see its face. But here, the embarrassment was not only public and diplomatic, it was also personal and sentimental. A dictator through long acquaintance may become a familiar and comforting associate. In the second week of February, it emerged that Wisner's law firm, Patton Boggs, had handled arbitration and litigation on behalf of Mubarak's government, and that Secretary of State Clinton had said as recently as March 2009: "I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family."

Do we really need to have yet another thread that will ultimately amount to "yes, the US supports dictatorships that work with us and serve our national interest even while talking about democracy and such"? This is well-treaded ground.

Our Empire and Our Election Cycles

The answer to this whole section (which basically amounts to "Obama sides with Israel due to domestic political concerns") is that Obama really does not have a lot of tools he could use to pressure Israel on the settlements, since Israel has a lot of political support in Congress (he can't cut off funding, for example, since Congress could just pass it right over his veto). About all he has are symbolic gestures, none of which seem to deter Netanyahu.

In obeying a White House request to keep them out of the American press, the Times (along with the Washington Post and Associated Press) was protecting not Davis himself but a government definition of "tact," while fostering the ignorance of American citizens about the actions of our own government.

They may have been returning the favor for the US government and others keeping quiet about David Rohde's kidnapping while they tried to negotiate with his kidnappers.

I suspect, though, that this author is reading too much into it. Most likely what happened is that the US government called up and asked them if they would hold off on mentioning that Davis was CIA, claiming that it would hurt relations with Pakistan.

[Simon_Jester]

Dropping "Yes the US supports dictatorships that work with us..."

There are still some other interesting issues. One thing I would like to see discussed, rather than seeing Just Another Obama Stinks Thread, is a discussion of presidential leadership styles- what did past presidents have that Obama didn't, and vice versa?

For example, the US suffered a number of "embarrassments" of this type during the Clinton years (Rwanda and Somalia come to mind; in the first case we committed to intervene in a case of genocide and didn't, while in the latter we committed to provide humanitarian aid and didn't). I'm not sure exactly what to call the embarrassments of the Bush years, as distinct from the shames of the Bush years- Abu Ghraib was no mere 'embarrassment.'

Do different presidential administrations suffer foreign policy embarrassments at different rates? What contributes to being embarrassed more often, or less often? Was this kind of thing a problem for other nations which tried to establish global or regional hegemons in the past?

[Guardsman Bass]

Do different presidential administrations suffer foreign policy embarrassments at different rates?

I suspect it's a combination of bad timing, and embarrassments being over-shadowed by greater policy problems (which is the case with Bush II). Clinton was faced with a number of situations that amounted to "there is a humanitarian catastrophe going on - intervene and it gets really complicated and messy (plus Americans might die), don't intervene and a tragedy will quite possibly occur", in places like Somalia, Bosnia, and so forth.

Bush II, as far as I remember, did not have those types of situations. The foreign policy embarrassments he had (such as that plane that crashed and was recovered by the Chinese early in his presidency) have more or less disappeared into obscurity due to the Iraq invasion and Afghan conflict.

What contributes to being embarrassed more often, or less often? Was this kind of thing a problem for other nations which tried to establish global or regional hegemons in the past?

I think the embarrassment mostly comes when a country is militarily powerful, officially dedicated to keeping the peace/promoting democracy/whatever, and everyone thinks it has the power to settle things. Thus, when a conflict arises, there's always going to be the tendency to say "do something!", because the expectations are there.

There are still some other interesting issues. One thing I would like to see discussed, rather than seeing Just Another Obama Stinks Thread, is a discussion of presidential leadership styles- what did past presidents have that Obama didn't, and vice versa?

Much of my knowledge about the leadership styles of Obama and Bush II is based off of countless news articles and blog posts, plus some of Bob Woodward's books on both. From that, one of the main differences seems to be that Bush II had a tendency to "commit" to figures promising some form of solution on the foreign policy/military front, and then stick with them for a while even when there was condemnation and criticism (Rumsfeld, Petraeus in 2007-2008, and Casey in 2004-2006 come to mind). Obama doesn't seem to have nearly as much of a tendency to "stand by" certain figures in his administration.

[Sidewinder]

The writer seems childishly naive, if not downright divorced from reality. Is it really that bad to put stability first, democracy second? If the protesters resorted to violence, and Egypt was threatened by civil war, does really think letting Egypt fall to civil war, is better than leaving a dictator like Mubarak in charge?

[Duckie]

The writer seems childishly naive, if not downright divorced from reality. Is it really that bad to put stability first, democracy second? If the protesters resorted to violence, and Egypt was threatened by civil war, does really think letting Egypt fall to civil war, is better than leaving a dictator like Mubarak in charge?

I dunno, why don't we ask the entire world about Libya and see what the entire global consensus on that is.

Okay, well, the entire world except Nicaragua for some reason.

[Thanas]

The writer seems childishly naive, if not downright divorced from reality. Is it really that bad to put stability first, democracy second? If the protesters resorted to violence, and Egypt was threatened by civil war, does really think letting Egypt fall to civil war, is better than leaving a dictator like Mubarak in charge?

A bad hypothetical and note that it did not stop European leaders from speaking out.

[Sidewinder]

The writer seems childishly naive, if not downright divorced from reality. Is it really that bad to put stability first, democracy second? If the protesters resorted to violence, and Egypt was threatened by civil war, does really think letting Egypt fall to civil war, is better than leaving a dictator like Mubarak in charge?

I dunno, why don't we ask the entire world about Libya and see what the entire global consensus on that is.

I guess it depends on whether the would-be revolutionaries have plans to establish a stable government in its place. If they're anarchist/libertarian/objectivist, then dealing with Qaddafi is preferable to dealing with an Ayn Rand worshipper.

[Thanas]

The writer seems childishly naive, if not downright divorced from reality. Is it really that bad to put stability first, democracy second? If the protesters resorted to violence, and Egypt was threatened by civil war, does really think letting Egypt fall to civil war, is better than leaving a dictator like Mubarak in charge?

I dunno, why don't we ask the entire world about Libya and see what the entire global consensus on that is.

I guess it depends on whether the would-be revolutionaries have plans to establish a stable government in its place. If they're anarchist/libertarian/objectivist, then dealing with Qaddafi is preferable to dealing with an Ayn Rand worshipper.

Sidewinder, do you specialize in ignorant and worthless hypotheticals and strawmen or are you just that stupid?

[thejester]

As Bass said, there's nothing new or particularly illuminating in this article. No shit US self-perception of itself as a bastion of democracy and a promoter of freedom clashes head-on with the practicalities of its foreign policy. What struck me reading it were:

- the author's unfailing location of himself in hindsight;
- and his myopic American perspective.

Doesn't take a detailed knowledge of past events in the Middle East to figure out why the Obama Administration might have been a little bit hesitant in throwing it's all-out support behind a popular uprising, particularly one against a regime inside the US fold. The worst case scenario is already happening in Libya - an apparently succesful popular uprising is slowly being crushed by the incumbent. It's absurd to criticise Obama for having a bob each way in Egypt given past debacles in the region and the potential for sustained bloodshed.

[Patrick Degan]

Our foreign policy seems at times to mirror the Woody Allen film Bananas. In one scene, CIA fighters find themselves facing each other on opposing sides of a pending coup in the South American nation of San Marcos (where Allen's character, Fielding Mellish, will wind up accidentally becoming head of its Marxist revolution). The reason for the CIA putting its people in both sides' forces: the U.S. government wants to make certain that, no matter which side prevails, America would be on the winning side. We keep trying to have our cake and eat it as well and it keeps blowing up in our faces instead.

[PainRack]

Just to play devil advocate, weren't the Democrats and etc saying that the US actually siding with Iranian demonstraters would actually tilt things against democracy?


Could such an ideology also had played any role in explaining the US actions in Egypt?

[Ariphaos]

There is a genuine concern with the idea that a revolution is 'not legitimate' - ie, if we backed the protesters in Egypt or the rebels in Libya, it would be seen as a US-backed revolution and, especially in that region, might lose legitimacy (especially considering our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan).

[Skgoa]

How is it "genuine"? I have seen this claim made by americans severall times now and I have never seen any piece of evidence that its not just imagined. "People will greet us as liberators" and "they hate us because we bombed the shit out of them" is not a binary relation, there are shades of grey inbetween.

[Simon_Jester]

Middle Eastern dictators have a long history of denouncing threats to their rule as US or British-backed attempts to overthrow them. For historical reasons the US and British aren't popular in the region, so this sometimes works.

Iran in particular is infamous for accusing pro-democracy activists and journalists of being American or British spies and treating them accordingly.

[Guardsman Bass]

How is it "genuine"? I have seen this claim made by americans severall times now and I have never seen any piece of evidence that its not just imagined. "People will greet us as liberators" and "they hate us because we bombed the shit out of them" is not a binary relation, there are shades of grey inbetween.

This is a blog post, but it's from a reputable source:

The approval by the Arab League of a No-Fly Zone for Libya, combined with increasingly urgent appeals from the Libyan opposition and some Arab voices, has helped build support for an international and American move in that direction. I am just leaving the Al-Jazeera Forum in Doha, where I had the opportunity to discuss this question in depth with a wide range of Arab opinion leaders and political activists as well as several leading Libyan opposition representatives (see this excellent post by Steve Clemons from the same conference). There is both more and less to this Arab support than meets the eye. Arabs are indeed deeply concerned about the bloody stalemate in Libya, and want international action. But if that action takes military form, including the kind of bombing would actually be required to implement a No-Fly Zone, I suspect that the narrative would rapidly shift against the United States.

While Arab public opinion should not be the sole consideration in shaping American decisions on this difficult question, Americans also should not fool themselves into thinking that an American military intervention will command long-term popular Arab support. Every Arab opinion leader and Libyan representative I spoke with at the conference told me that "American military intervention is absolutely unacceptable." Their support for a No Fly Zone rapidly evaporates when discussion turns to American bombing campaigns. This tracks with what I see in the Arab media and the public conversation. As urgently as they want the international community to come to the aid of the Libyan people, The U.S. would be better served focusing on rapid moves toward non-military means of supporting the Libyan opposition.

The deep concern for Libya is real, intense, and passionate. Arab activists and opinion leaders repeatedly warned that if Qaddafi survives it could mean the death of the Arab revolutionary moment. This is part of the wider identification across the unified Arab political space which has palpably emerged among young activists and mass publics. This includes Bahrain, by the way, where the intervention by GCC security forces against the protestors has had a comparable chilling effect even if it has received less coverage on al-Jazeera than has Libya. There is no question that most Arabs desperately want something to be done to save Libya from Qaddafi, and that this is seen as having broad and deep regional implications.

When it comes to military intervention, however, this deep identification with the Libyan protestors intersects uncomfortably with the enduring legacy of Iraq. The prospect of an American military intervention, no matter how just the cause, triggers deep suspicion. There is a vanishingly small number of Arab takers for the bizarre American conceit that the invasion of Iraq has somehow been vindicated. The invasion and occupation of Iraq remains a gaping wound in the Arab political consciousness which has barely scabbed over. Any direct American military presence in Libya would be politically catastrophic, even if requested by the Libyan opposition and given Arab League cover.

A No-Fly Zone with Arab and UN cover would be more palatable, if controversial, but any serious analysis must take into account the likelihood that it would not work and would only pave the way to more direct military action. While I supported it early on, I have learned much from the debate which has ensued. I understand and sympathize with the moral urgency to do something for Libya. But that should not blind us to the costs and risks of a no-fly zone and the limited prospects that it would tip the balance. It isn't a costless, easy alternative to war... it is more likely the preface to deeper military involvement. I am frankly baffled that anyone would take seriously the clamoring of inveterate hawks to ignore the reservations of the military and jump into another ill-considered military adventure in the Middle East. Listening to assurances that military action will be smooth and cheap, with no complications and with great Arab support brings back all the bad memories of 2002. Discussing a No-Fly Zone means discussing the possibility of military invasion. Anything else is irresponsible.

That doesn't mean the U.S. should do nothing. The administration should move quickly and aggressively to recognize the provisional Libyan government, release the frozen Libyan assets to that provisional government, and allow the flow of weapons to them. It should push for ever tighter targeted sanctions against Qaddafi, and continue to mobilize international consensus against his regime to make sure that he remains an absolute pariah without access to international institutions, revenues, or support. It could jam Qaddafi's communications and provide intelligence, and more. The debate should move away from an exclusive focus on military action. That is a dead end where we have been before, and should not be going again.

[Skgoa]

Thats about military intervention, where is the evidence that rhetoric support will hurt the revolution?