New York Times: “Democracy is bad for US foreign policy”
Posted by seumasach on January 28, 2011
Stephen Gowans
28th January, 2011
Here’s New York Times reporter Mark Landler on Washington’s reaction to the popular uprising in Egypt against the anti-liberal democratic, human rights-abusing Hosni Mubarak, a “staunch ally.”
Washington is “proceeding gingerly, balancing the democratic aspirations of young Arabs with cold-eyed strategic and commercial interests.”
In other words, democracy and human rights are fine, but not when strategic and commercial interests are at stake.
Landler goes on to say that Washington’s cold-eyed commitment to realpolitik and profits “sometimes involves supporting autocratic and unpopular governments — which has turned many of those young people against the United States.”
Well, there’s nothing amiss in Landler’s observation except his downplaying of the frequency with which Washington supports autocratic and unpopular governments – often rather than sometimes.
In Landler’s account of strategic thinking in Washington, it’s all right to support an “upheaval in Tunisia, a peripheral player in the region,” but a “wave of upheaval could uproot valuable allies.” And profits and strategic position demand the possibility be blocked.
After all, the “Egyptian government is a crucial ally to Washington.” And so arrests without charge, including of nearly 500 bloggers, will continue, with Washington maintaining a principled non-interference in Egyptian affairs.
Washington will also continue to tolerate the repressive national emergency law, as it has done since 1981. The law provides the legal cover Washington’s “staunch ally” needs to “arrest people without charge, detain prisoners indefinitely, limit freedom of expression and assembly, and maintain a special security court.” Because this is done in the service of safeguarding US strategic and commercial interests, Mubarak gets US military aid, diplomatic support, and an easy ride in the US media.
Compare that to US treatment of Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe. Even if all the allegations against him were true – and they’re not — the government in Harare wouldn’t come close to matching Mubarak’s disdain for the democratic and human rights values Washington claims to hold dear.
And yet Zimbabwe is deemed by the US president to be a grave threat to US foreign policy, its president denounced as a strongman and dictator, and its people subjected to economic warfare in the form of financial sanctions, while Mubarak is hailed as a staunch ally who must be supported against the democratic aspirations of the Arab street.
The key to this duplicity is that Mubarak has sold out Egypt to US profit and strategic interests, while Mugabe has sought to rectify the historical iniquities of colonialism. Clearly, from Washington’s perspective, Mugabe is serving the wrong interests. Indigenous farmers don’t count. Western investors do.
One wonders where overthrow specialist Peter Ackerman and his stable of nonviolent warrior academic advisors come down on this — on the side of the democratic aspirations of young Arabs or reconciled to the cold-eyed strategic and commercial interests of US corporations and wealthy individuals?
The question, however, may be beside the point. What matters is not whether Ackerman’s janissary Lester Kurtz wants to spout Gandhian bromides to angry Egyptian youths, but whether there’s money to organize and boost the revolutionary energy of the street and how much is being poured into a repressive apparatus to shut it down.
Andrew Albertson and Stephen McInerney (Don’t give up on Egypt,” Foreignpolicy.com, June 2009) have the answer.
The Obama administration has drastically scaled back its financial support for Egyptian activists fighting for political reform. US democracy and governance funding was slashed by 60 percent. From 2004 to 2009, the US spent less than $250M on democracy programs, but $7.8 billion on aid to the Egyptian military.
But even this imbalance overstates the meager support Washington has offered pro-democracy forces. Given Mubarak’s status as a paladin of US commercial and strategic interests, much of Washington’s democracy program spending has probably been allocated to programs that act as a safety valve to divert anger and frustration into safe, non-threatening avenues. Money available to facilitate a real challenge to Mubarak is likely either meager or nonexistent.
With the US establishment vexed by cold-eyed concerns about the need to safeguard imperialist interests against pro-democratic uprisings, champion of nonviolent democracy activism Stephen Zunes can give up whatever dreams he may have had about helping to organize an Egyptian color revolution. When it comes to real democracy, and freedom that counts, the funding cupboard is bare. Color revolutions are for cold-eyed promoters of US strategic and commercial interests, not upheavals against US-backed compradors.
In These New Times 
Tom Paine said
Stephen Gowans has been attacking the legitimacy of nonviolent movements against authoritarian regimes in places like Iran and Zimbabwe for over five years now, so it’s curious that he would suddenly be sympathetic to the nonviolent movement against Egypt’s authoritarian regime. Obviously he likes some dictators but not others. Nevertheless, his skepticism that Peter Ackerman and Stephen Zunes would support a “color revolution” in Egypt because it’s been a U.S. ally is as unfounded as his past attacks on those two scholars. It’s public knowledge that Zunes and Ackerman were among the speakers at a seminar on nonviolent struggle hosted by the Ibn Khaldun Center in Cairo four years ago, which included labor organizers, human rights activists, students, Islamists and others. Moreover, I’m told that the nonviolent conflict institute at Tufts where Zunes and Ackerman speak has had young Egyptian dissidents as participants, and Ackerman’s center has done workshops for Palestinians. So they’ve answered Gowans’ question already and repeatedly: they’re on the side of “the aspirations of young Arabs.”
Al Giordano said
Gowans’ supposed “scholarship” is, once again, made sloppier by his bizarre and two-faced obsession against strategies of nonviolent civil resistance when peoples use it to resist authoritarian regimes (like that in Iran) which he favors and his feigning to be in favor of it when peoples use it to resist authoritarian regimes which he dislikes, like that in Egypt.
Gowans’ stale, much-discredited and McCarthyist M.O. has long been to accuse any of us who report favorably about civil resistance vs. dictators he has a man-crush on (Ahmedinejad, for example) as towing some kind of Washington agenda, but when we report how civil resistance is weakening a dictator who doesn’t belong to his favored group, like Mubarak, he seems to think we’re not doing enough. (I had to laugh out loud at Gowans’ sudden claim that $250 million that the US government has reportedly put into civil society efforts in Egypt “isn’t enough,” while I remember other times when Gowans’ has accused that if an NGO invited a single Iranian resistance member to a workshop on strategic nonviolence it constituted a US-backed plot of “soft coups”!)
One of Gowans’ frequent targets is my friend of 33 years, Stephen Zunes (we met when we were arrested together in the US resisting nuclear power corporations). Well, what as Mr. Gowans done to help and build solidarity with the resistance in Egypt during these historic days other than a few throw-away lines in this gibberish-disguised-as-a-blog-post? Nothing! Meanwhile, Zunes has written multiple articles in defense and favor of Mubarak’s opponents in Egypt, something he has been doing for years, by the way. See the record: Compared to Zunes’ solid, consistent scholarship in solidarity with the Egyptian resistance, Gowans is Absent Without Leave. Here are just a couple of links from this week alone of what Stephen has done to ruin Mubarak’s week:
“US Continues to Back Egyptian Dictatorship in the Face of Pro-Democracy Uprising” by Stephen Zunes, Truthout
http://www.truth-out.org/us-continues-back-egyptian-dictatorship-face-pro-democracy-uprising67217
“Live chat replay: Egypt expert on nationwide protests, clashes” (MSNBC live chat interview with Stephen Zunes)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41314997/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/
Zunes has been on Pacifica and other radio programs nonstop this week advocating against the Mubarak dictatorship. What has Gowans done?
In fact – and I ask this as the editor of an online publication, Narco News, that participants in movements in Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Venezuela and elsewhere have thanked as consistent allies in their successful resistances against right wing dictators and their resistances against military coups in center-left nations – Gowans has never, to my knowledge, done anything significant to support the resistance to Mubarak in Egypt, other than cry, as he does today, that Uncle Sam isn’t putting enough money into it.
What a pathetic hypocrite, that Stephan Gowans! Defender of some dictatorships, feigning critic only of those who have been allied with the US. He’s a clown of academia, who nobody, absolutely nobody, takes seriously anymore.
– Al Giordano, Narco News
Tom Hastings said
As usual, Gowans get it half right. Mubarak has been opposed by a wide swath of people from many perspectives–human rights activists, Osama bin Laden, true supporters of democracy, and those whose Maoist approach dictates that they oppose anyone their enemy supports. Gowans can tell us which of these camps, if any, he falls into. If you pay any attention to Zim, you’d have to exclude him from the human rights supporters and democracy supporters. That leaves the al Qa’ida types and the Maoists or some similar violent gang. I guess I don’t get around the blogosphere enough–I don’t run into too many defenders of Robert Mugabe, a freedom fighter-turned-dictator. I do know Zimbabweans, all of whom want him out. Mr Gowans simply cannot accept nor abide that strategic nonviolence can be used to bring about democracy with fewer costs, and that democracy is what most people want. He feels compelled to accuse outstanding scholars of nonviolence like Stephen Zunes of being agents of the US empire. That is a lie. I met Stephen Zunes when he was a young scholar and activist and his work has been to promote people power, period. Period. The more of these traducements that Gowans issues, the more he is refuted with the facts, and the deeper he digs into his pit of calumny. Publishing lies about Les Kurtz and Stephen Zunes and the “one wonders” misleading rhetorical cheap trick is simply way off base and unethical. I’m one of Ackerman’s “stable” and I do the work from an anti-imperialist, totally unpaid place of activism. My last prison sentence for destroying part of a US thermonuclear command facility was three years. While I like Gowans’s research into stupid US sanctions that have heard Zimbabweans more than they’ve hurt Mugabe, I am repulsed by the idea that anyone should defend Mugabe’s brutal dictatorship. And while I couldn’t care less what Gowans thinks about me or anyone in that “stable,” if anyone else is interested in the truth, I only speak for myself, but from what I can observe, all of them I know are delighted and only concerned for the well being of all the brave Arabs in the streets in Egypt and the region. To the extent they maintain nonviolent discipline even under provocation, they will get more gain for less pain and get this great work done faster.
Stephen Zunes said
I’ve been working non-stop the past five days in solidarity with the Egyptian revolution, only to hear that Gowans has once again put out another pack of lies about me and my colleagues. In any case, neither I or any Americans can help to “organize” a revolution in Egypt or anywhere else. Revolutions — nonviolent, violent or mixed — can only be organized by the masses. People like Les Kurtz and I can help provide information on the history and dynamics of nonviolent struggle, but only the people themselves can create change. Personally, I feel where my primary obligation for organizing is here in the United States against US imperialism, including Washington’s support for dictators like Mubarak. Gowans is right to note the hypocrisy of the US government, but to try to link anti-imperialist peace activists like Kurtz and I — or even a liberatarian like Ackerman — to this hypocritical imperialist agenda is completely disingenuous.