Peace and Justice Post

Driving Through the Gates of Hell and Other American Pastimes in the Greater Middle East

As we’ve watched the dramatic events in the Middle East, you would hardly know that we had a thing to do with them.  Oh yes, in the name of its War on Terror, Washington had for years backed most of the thuggish governments now under siege or anxious that they may be next in line to hear from their people.  When it came to Egypt in particular, there was initially much polite (and hypocritical) discussion in the media about how our “interests” and our “values” were in conflict, about how far the U.S. should back off its support for the Mubarak regime, and about what a“tightrope” the Obama administration was walking.  While the president and his officials flailed, the mildest of questions were raised about how much we should chide our erstwhile allies, or encourage the massed protestors, and about whether we should “take sides” (as though we hadn’t done so decisively over the last decades).

With popular cries for “democracy” and “freedom” sweeping through the Middle East, it’s curious to note that the Bush-era’s now-infamous “democracy agenda” has been nowhere in sight.  In its brief and disastrous life, it was used as a battering ram for regimes Washington loathed and offered as a soft pillow of future possibility to those it loved.

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After 30 years of championing President Hosni Mubarak on all issues, one of the strongest voices in Egypt’s state-run media, the al-Ahram newspaper, has led its Monday issue with a front page editorial reversing that stance.

The editorial, written by editor-in-chief Osama Saraya, cheers the “nobility” of the growing protest movement against Mubarak and lambastes the dictator for refusing to make serious changes.

The article didn’t explicitly call for President Mubarak to resign but the demands for reform spark a major shift from the paper, Egypt’s largest and most respected, and Saraya’s history as an advocate who can spin anything Mubarak does as heroic appears over.

Indeed, the entire state media aparatus appears to have noticed that their effort to gloss over the uprising is dramatically damaging their credibility, and all are starting to reverse course and add at least some coverage of the only thing going on in Egypt that really matters to most.

By Robert Parry, Consortium News,  February 6, 2011

When you’re listening to the many tributes to President Ronald Reagan, often for his talent making Americans feel better about themselves, you might want to spend a minute thinking about the many atrocities in Latin America and elsewhere that Reagan aided, covered up or shrugged off in his inimitable “aw shucks” manner.

After all, the true measure of a president shouldn’t be his style or how he made us feel but rather what he did with his extraordinary power, what were the consequences for real people, either for good or ill.

Yet, even as the United States celebrates Reagan’s centennial birthday and lavishes praise on his supposed accomplishments, very little time has been spent reflecting on the unnecessary bloodbaths that Reagan enabled in many parts of the world.

Those grisly deaths and ugly tortures get whisked away as if they were just small necessities in Reagan’s larger success “winning the Cold War” – even though the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was already winding down before Reagan arrived on the national scene. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Reagan’s ‘Tear Down This Wall’ Myth.”]

Yet, Reagan’s Cold War obsessions helped unleash right-wing “death squads” and murderous militaries on the common people in many parts of the Third World, but nowhere worse than in Latin America.

In the 1970s and 1980s, as Latin American security forces were sharpening themselves into finely honed killing machines, Reagan was there as an ardent defender, making excuses for the atrocities, and sending money and equipment to make the forces even more lethal.

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by Dennis Hans, CommonDreams.org, Feb 8, 2011

As the nation pays tribute to Ronald “Dutch” Reagan on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth, media coverage is every bit as laudatory as when he turned 90.  I wrote in 2001 about PBS’s fawning tributes on the Charlie Rose show and the Jim Lehrer NewsHour.  Then, as now, one of the most glaring omissions was the human cost of his foreign policies.  In the interest of filling out the Reagan portrait, let us consider a few regions unfortunate enough to capture his attention, starting with Central America.

In January 1981, the newly inaugurated Reagan inherited Jimmy Carter’s policy of supporting a Salvadoran government controlled by a military that, along with the security forces and affiliated death squads, killed about 10,000 civilians in 1980.  In the first 27 months of the Reagan administration, perhaps another 20,000 civilians were killed.  El Salvador’s labor movement was decimated, the opposition press exterminated, opposition politicians murdered or driven into exile, the church martyred.

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CAIRO – The Egyptian revolution is being dissolved right in front of the world’s eyes by an optical illusion.

The protesters who have been on the streets for two weeks still want President Hosni Mubarak out. Now. Yet United States President Barack Obama is firmly in not-so-fast mode, glad that “Egypt is making progress”. Obama has not mentioned even once the capital words “free elections”.

Washington’s “orderly transition” road map – fully supported by Tel Aviv and European capitals – is a facelift. Mubarak stepping down has become an afterthought; the already anointed successor is Vice President Omar Suleiman, the former head of the Mukhabarat, whom the protesters call “Sheik al-Torture”.

Sheik al-Torture already behaves as a president – while the actual president is still inhabiting his palace, but as a ghost. The regime, a brutal military dictatorship, remains an immovable subject – even while being denounced by the protesters as illegitimate from A to Z, from the executive to the legislative. The key point is that acting president Suleiman is the regime. If French philosopher Jean Baudrillard was alive, he would say this revolution never took place – except on the world’s television screens.

Some among the fragmented opposition want the head of the constitutional court to be appointed as interim president, and then preside over the election of a constituent assembly. Others – including the youth movement – want a national committee to supervise the Washington-sanctioned “orderly transition”.

Gilbert Achcar, professor of international relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, goes straight to the point, “In order to impose such a thorough change, the mass movement would need to break or destabilize the regime’s backbone, that is, the Egyptian army.”

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2008 diplomatic cable published by the Daily Telegraph quotes Israeli official as saying that Israel was ‘most comfortable’ with prospect of Omar Suleiman becoming Egypt’s next leader.

Haaretz, Feb 11, 2011

By The Associated Press

Egypt’s Vice President Omar Suleiman was long seen by Israel as the preferred candidate to succeed President Hosni Mubarak, secret U.S. diplomatic cables published Monday suggested.

	President Shimon Peres shaking hands with Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman during their meeting in Tel Aviv on November 4, 2010.

According to an August 2008 cable released by WikiLeaks and published by the Daily Telegraph newspaper on its website, a senior adviser from the Israeli Ministry of Defense told U.S. diplomats in Tel Aviv that the Israelis believe Suleiman would likely serve as “at least an interim president if Mubarak dies or is incapacitated.”

A U.S. diplomat who classified the cable, Luis Moreno, wrote that although he deferred to the Embassy in Cairo for Egyptian succession scenario analysis, “there is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect of” Suleiman.

The cable quoted the adviser to Israel’s defense ministry, David Hacham, as saying an Israeli delegation led by Defense Minister Ehud Barak was “shocked by Mubarak’s aged appearance and slurred speech,” when it met him in Egypt. “Hacham was full of praise for Soliman, however,” it said. Suleiman was spelled Soliman in some of the leaked cables.

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Jean-Bertrand Aristide, The Guardian, Feb 4, 2011

Graduating electricians and plumbers in Port-au-Prince, July 2010. The quake left a gaping hole in the vocational training vital to reconstruction Photograph: Ramon Espinosa/AP

Haiti’s devastating earthquake in January last year destroyed up to 5,000 schools and 80% of the country’s already weak university infrastructure. The primary school in Port-au-Prince that I attended as a small boy collapsed with more than 200 students inside. The weight of the state nursing school killed 150 future nurses. The state medical school was levelled. The exact number of students, teachers, professors, librarians, researchers, academics and administrators lost during those 65 seconds that irrevocably changed Haiti will never be known. But what we do know is that it cannot end there.

The exceptional resilience demonstrated by the Haitian people during and after the deadly earthquake reflects the intelligence and determination of parents, especially mothers, to keep their children alive and to give them a better future, and the eagerness of youth to learn – all this despite economic challenges, social barriers, political crisis, and psychological trauma. Even though their basic needs have increased exponentially, their readiness to learn is manifest. This natural thirst for education is the foundation for a successful learning process: what is freely learned is best learned.

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Chris Hedges, TruthDig.com, Feb 6, 2011

AP

By Chris Hedges

Empires communicate in two languages. One language is expressed in imperatives. It is the language of command and force. This militarized language disdains human life and celebrates hypermasculinity. It demands. It makes no attempt to justify the flagrant theft of natural resources and wealth or the use of indiscriminate violence. When families are gunned down at a checkpoint in Iraq they are referred to as having been “lit up.” So it goes. The other language of empire is softer. It employs the vocabulary of ideals and lofty goals and insists that the power of empire is noble and benevolent. The language of beneficence is used to speak to those outside the centers of death and pillage, those who have not yet been totally broken, those who still must be seduced to hand over power to predators. The road traveled to total disempowerment, however, ends at the same place. It is the language used to get there that is different.

This language of blind obedience and retribution is used by authority in our inner cities, from Detroit to Oakland, as well as our prison systems. It is a language Iraqis and Afghans know intimately. But to the members of our dwindling middle class—as well as those in the working class who have yet to confront our new political and economic configuration—the powerful use phrases like the consent of the governed and democracy that help lull us into complacency. The longer we believe in the fiction that we are included in the corporate power structure, the more easily corporations pillage the country without the threat of rebellion. Those who know the truth are crushed. Those who do not are lied to. Those who consume and perpetuate the lies—including the liberal institutions of the press, the church, education, culture, labor and the Democratic Party—abet our disempowerment. No system of total control, including corporate control, exhibits its extreme forms at the beginning. These forms expand as they fail to encounter resistance.

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By Shamus Cooke, Countercurrents.org, Feb 6, 2011

The revolution in Egypt erupted like all revolutions do, from the bottom up. It was unemployment and high food prices that propelled working and poor people into action. Now, the media reports that the “opposition” in Egypt is a group of well-to-do folks who have very little in common with the poor of Egypt.

This top down takeover of the revolution is being engineered with the support of the U.S. and European nations, the same allies of the dictatorship that lasted three decades. If this elite group of Egyptians manages to gain power, they’ll soon find themselves confronted with the real opposition of Egypt, the overwhelming majority of working and poor people.

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