[Reader-list] Fwd: ‘The Arab World Is on Fire’ by Noam Chomsky

[Nagraj Adve]

Date: 3 February 2011
Subject: ‘The Arab World Is on Fire’ by Noam Chomsky



ZCommunications | ‘The Arab World Is on Fire’ by Noam Chomsky |
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[image: 9] ‘The Arab World Is on Fire’
------------------------------
By Noam Chomsky <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/noamchomsky>

Source: ITT/New York Times
Syndicate<http://inthesetimes.com/article/6911/the_arab_world_is_on_fire/>
Thursday, February 03, 2011


 “The Arab world is on fire,” al-Jazeera reported on January 27, while
throughout the region, Western allies “are quickly losing their influence.”



The shock wave was set in motion by the dramatic uprising in Tunisia that
drove out a Western-backed dictator, with reverberations especially in
Egypt, where demonstrators overwhelmed a dictator’s brutal police.



Observers compared the events to the toppling of Russian domains in 1989,
but there are important differences.



Crucially, no Mikhail Gorbachev exists among the great powers that support
the Arab dictators. Rather, Washington and its allies keep to the
well-established principle that democracy is acceptable only insofar as it
conforms to strategic and economic objectives: fine in enemy territory (up
to a point), but not in our backyard, please, unless it is properly tamed.



One 1989 comparison has some validity: Romania, where Washington maintained
its support for Nicolae Ceausescu, the most vicious of the East European
dictators, until the allegiance became untenable. Then Washington hailed his
overthrow while the past was erased.



That is a standard pattern: Ferdinand Marcos, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Chun Doo
Hwan, Suharto and many other useful gangsters. It may be under way in the
case of Hosni Mubarak, along with routine efforts to try to ensure that a
successor regime will not veer far from the approved path.



The current hope appears to be Mubarak loyalist Gen. Omar Suleiman, just
named Egypt’s vice president. Suleiman, the longtime head of the
intelligence services, is despised by the rebelling public almost as much as
the dictator himself.



A common refrain among pundits is that fear of radical Islam requires
(reluctant) opposition to democracy on pragmatic grounds. While not without
some merit, the formulation is misleading. The general threat has always
been independence. In the Arab world, the United States and its allies have
regularly supported radical Islamists, sometimes to prevent the threat of
secular nationalism.



A familiar example is Saudi Arabia, the ideological center of radical Islam
(and of Islamic terror). Another in a long list is Zia ul-Haq, the most
brutal of Pakistan’s dictators and President Reagan’s favorite, who carried
out a program of radical Islamization (with Saudi funding).



“The traditional argument put forward in and out of the Arab world is that
there is nothing wrong, everything is under control,” says Marwan Muasher,
former Jordanian official and now director of Middle East research for the
Carnegie Endowment. “With this line of thinking, entrenched forces argue
that opponents and outsiders calling for reform are exaggerating the
conditions on the ground.”



Therefore the public can be dismissed. The doctrine traces far back and
generalizes worldwide, to U.S. home territory as well. In the event of
unrest, tactical shifts may be necessary, but always with an eye to
reasserting control.



The vibrant democracy movement in Tunisia was directed against “a police
state, with little freedom of expression or association, and serious human
rights problems,” ruled by a dictator whose family was hated for their
venality. This was the assessment by U.S. Ambassador Robert Godec in a July
2009 cable released by WikiLeaks.



Therefore to some observers the WikiLeaks “documents should create a
comforting feeling among the American public that officials aren’t asleep at
the switch”—indeed, that the cables are so supportive of U.S. policies that
it is almost as if Obama is leaking them himself (or so Jacob Heilbrunn
writes in *The National Interest*.)



“America should give Assange a medal,” says a headline in the *Financial
Times*. Chief foreign-policy analyst Gideon Rachman writes that “America’s
foreign policy comes across as principled, intelligent and pragmatic—the
public position taken by the U.S. on any given issue is usually the private
position as well.”



In this view, WikiLeaks undermines the “conspiracy theorists” who question
the noble motives that Washington regularly proclaims.



Godec’s cable supports these judgments—at least if we look no further. If we
do, as foreign policy analyst Stephen Zunes reports in *Foreign Policy in
Focus*, we find that, with Godec’s information in hand, Washington provided
$12 million in military aid to Tunisia. As it happens, Tunisia was one of
only five foreign beneficiaries: Israel (routinely); the two Middle East
dictatorships Egypt and Jordan; and Colombia, which has long had the worst
human-rights record and the most U.S. military aid in the hemisphere.



Heilbrunn’s Exhibit A is Arab support for U.S. policies targeting Iran,
revealed by leaked cables. Rachman too seizes on this example, as did the
media generally, hailing these encouraging revelations. The reactions
illustrate how profound is the contempt for democracy in the educated
culture.



Unmentioned is what the population thinks—easily discovered. According to
polls released by the Brookings Institution in August, some Arabs agree with
Washington and Western commentators that Iran is a threat: 10 percent. In
contrast, they regard the U.S. and Israel as the major threats (77 percent;
88 percent).



Arab opinion is so hostile to Washington’s policies that a majority (57
percent) think regional security would be enhanced if Iran had nuclear
weapons. Still, “there is nothing wrong, everything is under control” (as
Marwan Muasher describes the prevailing fantasy). The dictators support us.
Their subjects can be ignored—unless they break their chains, and then
policy must be adjusted.



Other leaks also appear to lend support to the enthusiastic judgments about
Washington’s nobility. In July 2009, Hugo Llorens, U.S. ambassador to
Honduras, informed Washington of an embassy investigation of “legal and
constitutional issues surrounding the June 28 forced removal of President
Manuel `Mel’ Zelaya.”



The embassy concluded that “there is no doubt that the military, Supreme
Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an
illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch.” Very
admirable, except that President Obama proceeded to break with almost all of
Latin America and Europe by supporting the coup regime and dismissing
subsequent atrocities.



Perhaps the most remarkable WikiLeaks revelations have to do with Pakistan,
reviewed by foreign policy analyst Fred Branfman in Truthdig.



The cables reveal that the U.S. embassy is well aware that Washington’s war
in Afghanistan and Pakistan not only intensifies rampant anti-Americanism
but also “risks destabilizing the Pakistani state” and even raises a threat
of the ultimate nightmare: that nuclear weapons might fall into the hands of
Islamic terrorists.



Again, the revelations “should create a comforting feeling—that officials
are not asleep at the switch” (Heilbrunn’s words)—while Washington marches
stalwartly toward disaster.

*The New York Times Syndicate*

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