Framemaker, the photographer who took this photo of the demonstrations in Egypt says, "A new "third force" gathers momentum in the mideast. Between Western-backed, modernizing, authoritarian governments on the one hand and also-authoritarian fundamentalism on the other, we see the emergence of a new movement for democracy and social justice in the mideast. A breath of fresh air.
I'm sorry, but I have trouble believing him. I guess it's because I've lived long enough to see many revolutions come and go around the world, and more than a few turn out to bring to power forces as bad -- if not worse -- than the regimes they overthrew.
I'm also much less enthralled with rock-throwing, car-burning, and screaming of obscenities and proclamation of ecstatic revolutionary theories than many people on Twitter.
Thomas Carothers of Carnegie Endowment has an interesting essay posted, Tunisia -- Not a Color Revolution but No Solace for Autocrats.
I think it's important to add that the revolutions in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, and even Palestine are not necessarily the droids the global wired left are looking for, either -- but I'm happy to be surprised.
That is, they are jumping to bless the revolutionary movements in the Middle East enthusiastically, but without any of the caution, cynicism or even hatred they bring to the colour revolutions of the post-Soviet East, which they tend to denounce as Western-sponsored, insincere, inauthentic, etc.
So I view them as having a definite double standard on revolutions and social change.
In fact, much of what you see on Twitter is a global swoon right now. WikiLeaks and DDOS supporter NoNeck, who also runs our NYS government servers (yikes!) gushes on Twitter:
in 2007, I met a network of Egyptian geeks who showed me more love & generosity than most westerners. I tear at the current thought of them.
Always, that need in the Western idealist, that need to ascribe to the Exotic Other features missing in one's own people! Always, the belief in hospitality and love greater than any man has at home! Yes, we should weep about people living under oppression and harmed by it, and even hold a special place in our heart for the ingenious geeks. But yes, we can ask why they are throwing rocks and burning cars and why they hate Israel so hysterically, too.
Clay Shirky and Rebecca McKinnon are tweeting and retreeting about evil American corporations helping evil Egyptian autocrats -- and I respond that this is a silly moral equivalence between companies that are pragmatic and regimes that are deadly -- and fails to concede that their dissident friends coming to power might very well want these companies they're willing to chase away *now* to come back and provide jobs and investment in their country.
Egypt's internet crackdown, courtesy American companies http://act2.freepress.net/sign/dpi #netfreedom #jan25 (via @rmack)
(There's actually just...one company. And we're not sure in fact they are actively helping the Egyptian despots, but they do sell technology for deep inspection of packets that could be used to spy on dissidents. The story originates in a piece by Timothy Karr in Huffpo. Timothy Karr is a typical leftizen with a blog filled with attacks on Genachowski for not being radical enough, hate on AT&T and Comcast for being telephone companies, furies over Fox News, and agitation for "Net Neutrality". All of this by way of noting that he is highly selective on the "freedom" causes he choses and only very sporadically interested in the problems of oppressive regimes abroad related to the Internet, as his main issue is fighting capitalist media in the U.S. -- and I'm sorry, I never believe people when they "represent 2 million people" especially when it's a list of the usual suspects -- and I'm not surprised to see this kind of criticism of Karr, or this kind of rebuttal).
As I will explain, it's not that companies aren't somehow beyond criticism, or that we shouldn't protest their practices if in fact we can document that they did evil things (er, did we?). No, it's that this reaching to balance, balance, always balance the saddlebags every time we criticize anything abroad with a whack at America, too. It's just plain myopic and even infantile, if not suspect.
What's the real agenda here? Is the real purpose to attack capitalism by magnifying the sins of corporations, or single out America for special hatred in the world? Sorry, but as I point out in my answer to Carothers, we need to steer the global left -- if they are sincere about their concerns for human rights and justice, which I don't believe they always are -- toward Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and other regional powers REALLY able to influence these situations -- and usually for the worse.
And say, can't you guys just ever condemn tyranny without making it seem like it's all made in America?
Something called SavetheInternet (turns out it is run by Karr, too) is protesting Egypt's shutdown of the whole Internet -- but a glance through their site doesn't show them ever protesting any other Internet freedom problems, and mainly campaigning for "Net Neutrality," which I view as a little-disguised call for overreach by a U.S. government agency, the FCC, to run the business of the Internet -- the sort of government control these groups usually protest elsewhere, including in the U.S.
Gosh, I *do* wonder where all these Internet freedom fighters have been for the last month on Turkmenistan. I think I and Steve LeVine are the only people in the Western world who have written about this outrage. Russia's MTS was completely shut down by the Turkmen government, blocking 2.4 million people -- half the population! -- from accessing cellular communications, including Internet access which is difficult to get otherwise in this isolated and oppressive country. No freedom fighters whatsoever have shown up for this blatant grab -- it just wasn't interesting enough and didn't involve being able to Blame America First or blame some recognizable Western corporation.
The freedom fighters were pretty much missing from the shut-down of the Internet and jailing of presidential candidates and supporters in Belarus, too, of course -- again, like Evgeny Morozov, they sneer at what they view as inauthentic, Western-backed movements. (In fact, an Austrian company is involved in selling technology to the Lukashenka regime that tracked cell phone users who were at the demonstration December 19, but only a few diehard Belarus-watchers are protesting that -- it's not big, it's not American.)
Too bad the people in what are in fact real movements have to sit in real jail for their participation in what the global left views as fake.
And yep, right on cue there was lefty social media maker NewMedia Jim, the White House cameraman, telling us, in the same tweet that condemns Egypt's shut-down of the Internet, that Obama wants to do this here, too:
RT @marshallk Complete Internet Blackout in Egypt http://rww.to/e7mk1K || notable that White House wants this power too http://is.gd/RMnQ04
Sigh.
Although NewMediaJim lives in a country where he can bash his employer -- the government -- without reprisal, he still feels the need to reference the fact that Obama has talked about some kind of "Internet kill switch". This hasn't come to pass; such a thing won't come to pass given all the opposition to it, and there will be a political struggle, a free debate, and something in the end that is about protection of the Internet in the U.S. from hostile forces. These Internet freedom fighters sure wouldn't like to see the Internet serving hospitals and airports and their own intellectual life shut down by hostile forces, yet they can't concede a discussion that has to happen about what measures need to be taken to prevent that from happening -- as it all too often happens in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, let alone now in the Middle East.
What is it with these people? Why can't they just condemn the Egyptian or Tunisian tyrants and be done with it, without having to also, in equal-opportunity fashion -- bash the U.S.?
To be sure, the U.S. has propped up some of these dictatorships over the years, with a pragmatism about stability and support of Israel that of course the global left doesn't share. I'm not for propping up dictators, certainly, and I heartily condemn torture and tend to ascribe the roots of extremism in the Muslim Brotherhood in part due to the torture of their imprisoned members by the Egyptian regime, but I do peer closely not only at the nature of these revolutions, but at the left's motives in cheering them.
I'm not one to find that support of Israel is some kind of unthinkable evil. It's a democracy -- like what these dissident movements say they will be bringing, right? I also don't worry about Israel somehow winding up exempt from criticism if it is supported, because there is absolutely no shortage whatsoever from all the world's major powers, social movements, and well-funded international organizations to ensure that the largest of microscopes is always and everywhere applied to the sins of this small country in the Middle East surrounded by hostile Arab states (and we'll get to see now, if the revolutions changing them also begin to change the long stalemate on peace in the Middle East -- or exacerbate it).
The Harvard Berkman Center's Jillian York has denounced me in a long-running debate about whether or not the U.S. should help these Arab blogger and political dissident movements -- and as you can see toward the end, implied that asking about how these dissidents newly coming to power will deal with women's rights and the civil rights of people they don't like is somehow prejudiced, even racist, and certain inappropriate as I am "not an expert" on Tunisia. What do I know about Tunisia?! she exclaims.
Well, I and millions of other people know a hell of a lot more about Tunisia than even the experts knew 40 years ago, thanks to the Internet and social media, and yes, we all get to have opinions and we all get to discuss it.
And as for the Muslim Brotherhood, I'm sorry, but even Wikipedia doesn't think that they don't suffer from extremism. Yet the bow-tied deputy managing editor of Foreign Policy Blake Hounshell excoriates CNN:
People asking about Muslim Brotherhood: It's complicated, but not as simple as calling them "extremists," full stop. ~20 percent support.
Oh, please. A little bit of terrorism goes a long way, Blake. And calling for a Caliphate and suppression of women isn't "complicated," but unacceptable. Yeah, I get it that this movement "takes different forums" blah blah. But...what's so hard about calling a movement that is only "partly" about terrorism and oppression "extreme"?
Indeed, if the global wired elite and their latest revolutionary enthusiasm are not willing to do this, they will see a repeat of the Iranian revolutions.
I'm old enough to remember the overthrowing of the Shah of Iran and how despised he was by the human rights groups starting to have influence at that time, and how he fought off communists and Shi'ites and how it seemed he just "had to go". To be sure, I remember some of the older people around me very troubled about the nature of the youth revolution and what would come next. And boy, were they right. And how much their misgivings were drowned out at the time.
Looking back now, would it have been better to get rid of the Shah in stages, instead of having tens of thousands of people tortured and massacred under the regime that came next? Well, nobody ever sees it that way, and it's likely an impossibility. You have to oppose *both*. And yet in the real world of policy, that's not what governments, unlike idealistic human rights groups, are willing to do. So again, I think the global left has to be challenged, in their ecstasy about Arabic civic movements and adulation of violent movements for social justice, about how to ensure that *this time*, it doesn't end like the others. You know, like Algeria?
Carothers says, "it is crystal clear that no hidden hand was at work" in the revolutions now under way in the Middle East.
Well, that doesn't mean there isn't any obvious outside support -- indeed there is, and maybe containing some hidden agendas. Chief among these is the Qatar-funded Al Jazeera which has been crucial in reporting and amplifying the protests in Tunisia and throughout the region -- but consistent with certain less-advertised policy goals as this New York Time piece outlines:
There are also NGOs and research centers such as Global Voices and the Harvard Berkman Center that have supported Tunisian bloggers for years with the same anti-U.S. perspective as Al-Jazeera, and then other groups like Committee to Protect Journalists and cyberdissidents.org which have also provided coverage and solidarity.
Indeed, it was Tunisian blogger Sami Ben Ghrabi that started a huge debate last year about what he viewed as "the kiss of death" from U.S. government support, which some groups in the Middle East have decided to take, only to face browbeating from others:
This "fallacy" theory is one I've debated extensively because I believe there is absolutely nothing wrong with our support of Internet freedom abroad as a central part of American foreign policy; indeed, it is our duty to show solidarity to such forces for democracy in the world:
The Tunisian story isn't over yet. While it can earn me a knock on the head from the Berkman Center's Jillian York to ask pointed politically-incorrect questions, I and others will keep on asking questions about how women's rights and civil rights in general will fare under the Tunisian dissidents if they take power, and whether Islamists waiting in the wing will ensure this is the last revolution for a long time to come, as in Iran -- and no, you dont' have to be unaware of the differences among Middle Eastern countries and their forces for change to ask these relevant questions.
While Carothers draws lessons he thinks authoritarians should learn from these events rather than suggest policy prescriptions for Western powers, it has to be said that by claiming the Tunisian revolution as seemingly "pure and unsullied" with foreign aid, and unemcumbered by an election process (of the sort that USAID and NED trainers love to attach grants to), he is setting up the same stage that the global left is trying to set. That premise says that the U.S. should not aid any democracy movement abroad and bug off with its notions of elections, because they are either endangering dissidents, discrediting them, or proving ineffective. That's not a premise I think Carothers in fact supports.
The fact that the U.S. has been supporting these authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes for 20-30 years with various strategic goals in mind, among them support of Israel, is now used as a club by the myopic global left and by these rock-throwing new revolutionary movements to claim the U.S. is on the wrong side of history.
If all the revolutions go at least as well as the colour revolutions did, and bring to power forces that might be inept and corrupt and replaced 5-10 years later by something that is a revised form of what was once overthrown -- yet nothing as bad as the ayatollahs -- then we can proclaim the U.S. as in the wrong.
But if the U.S. policy is shown as justifiable (in its own terms, not by me) as dictated by a desire to prevent another Iran-type of situation (which followed the fall of the U.S.-supported Shah) and to *legitimately* support Israel (something even liberal Arab dissidents do not wish to do), then perhaps this realpolitik was reasonable, but needed far better calibration, and more vocal condemnation of torture and more support of NGOs.
Can we not look today at the regime of Saddam Hussein and ask whether a staged removal might have been better than a U.S. invasion that set up a situation where 100,000 civilians could be massacred, largely by terrorists, supported by Iran and Al Qaeda?
In any event, the key takeaway from both the colour and the jasmine type revolutions is that the U.S. is not really so relevant. We do not have the funds or the ability to influence these events significantly or for long. The colour revolutions would have happened without us, given the despotic nature of those communist and post-communist regimes, and our support of these supposed moderate Arab regimes for strategic reasons wasn't enough to modify them -- or sustain them in the face of popular discontent anyway.
So rather than flee into quietism or isolationism, as figures like Evgeny Morozov, scornful of the U.S. Internet freedom program dictate, we should develop a robust foreign policy and international aid program that sustains freedom and democracy in solidarity with those forces that are consistent with our values, while attempting to maintain some kind of dialogue with authoritarians that does include vocal condemnation of human rights violations and work through international institutions such as the UN. This is far from perfect or easy, but we can be a bit humbled by the fact that our role in these events is not as great as that of Russia, China, or Saudi Arabia in their regions and we need to turn the ire of indignant leftists to the real sustainers of tyranny in these various regions and stop imagining the U.S. is the problem everywhere.
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