Gay N Gay: iran

Showing posts with label iran. Show all posts

Bring the Sentinel Home (Bring Him Home!)

A good many Americans rejoiced when Barack Obama became President, on the grounds that they no longer had a president who embarrassed them before the world. That didn't last long, not because Obama isn't embarrassing, but because his devotees will defend anything he says or does.This one is relatively mild compared to his new Facebook ad promising to outbid any Republican candidate on aid to

Bring the Sentinel Home (Bring Him Home!)

American Interests?

Glenn Greenwald has a good, if by-the-numbers piece on Obama's hypocrisy in condemning Iran for hypocrisy. It's good to have the quotations, but there's nothing really new in it; anyone who hasn't noticed Obama's hypocrisy either isn't paying attention, or doesn't want to see it.Obligingly, an Obama apologist with the screen name JC Watts leapt into the fray. His rebuttal is also by-the-numbers

American Interests?

Squandering Our Sanctimony

The Great and Powerful IOZ has been back from self-imposed exile for a few weeks now, but not (in my not-so-humble opinion) exactly on stride. His comment today on the conviction of American backpackers for espionage in Iran was pretty good, though:Well, Hillary Clinton is disappointed, proving once more that while the poor Persians must make do with the Ghazal, our greatest, infinitely

Squandering Our Sanctimony

Who Would Barack Bomb?

Glenn Greenwald wrote a useful post at Salon on Wednesday, mocking Secretary of State Clinton's warning that Iran may be in the process of becoming a military dictatorship.

Reuters, February 15, 2010: "The United States believes Iran's Revolutionary Guards are driving the country toward military dictatorship and should be targeted in any new U.N. sanctions, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Monday. . . . 'We see that the government of Iran, the supreme leader, the president, the parliament, is being supplanted and that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship,' she said."

As Greenwald pointed out, this is laughable. It even got some laughs from her audience, according to one commentator he cites.

Half a century of American foreign policy flatly contradicts this sentiment (which is why Clinton heard soft chuckles and a few muffled guffaws as she spoke). The US has adored military dictatorships in the Arab world, and has long supported states dominated by the shadowy world of intelligence services. This became even more obvious after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when Washington intensified cooperation with Arab intelligence services in the fight against Al-Qaeda and other terror groups.

Washington’s closest allies in the Middle East are military and police states where men with guns rule, and where citizens are confined to shopping, buying cellular telephones, and watching soap operas on satellite television. Countries like Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, as well as the entire Gulf region and other states are devoted first and foremost to maintaining domestic order and regime incumbency through efficient, multiple security agencies, for which they earn American friendship and cooperation. When citizens in these and other countries agitate for more democratic and human rights, the US is peculiarly inactive and quiet.

If Iran is indeed becoming a military dictatorship, this probably qualifies it for American hugs and aid rather than sanctions and threats. Clinton badly needs some more credible talking points than opposing military dictatorships. (Extra credit question for hard-core foreign policy analysts: Why is it that when Turkey slipped out of military rule into civilian democratic governance, it became more critical of the US and Israel?)

Of course the US adoration of military dictatorships is not limited to the Arab world. Honduras provided a recent reminder of that, to which the Obama administration responded with resounding waffling, but the whole Western hemisphere south of the Rio Grande has a pretty consistent history of military dictatorships we could do business with, and elected governments we couldn't. South Korea was ruled by military dictatorships for a quarter century, and the US has never been very comfortable since that happy state of affairs came to an end. So many "Free World" leaders when I was growing up just happened to be, if not Generals, then military men: Chiang Kai-shek, Augusto Pinochet, Francisco Franco, Anastasio Somoza, Manuel Noriega, and numerous rulers of Argentina, among so many others. Typically, when Somoza's dictatorship was overthrown by the Sandinistas, the US evacuated as many of his military thugs as possible for use against the new government.

For that matter, the Iranian revolution was barely over when the US began selling arms to Iran with Israel as the middle man, in hopes of bankrolling a military coup against the new regime that would return Iran to the bloody days of the Shah. Clinton's remarks seem more an expression of US wishes than a warning.

Clinton's current remarks also seem to represent a change from past US government propaganda on Iran. I mean, I thought that the Islamofascist Ayatollah Khameini and President Ahmadinejad were the bad guys who were trampling on Iranian democracy and threatening gallant little Israel with nuclear weapons, but according to the Reuters story,

Clinton later told reporters in Riyadh that she hoped "this is not a permanent change but that instead the religious and political leaders of Iran act to take back the authority which they should be exercising on behalf of the people."

If you're not used to government lying and obfuscation, you might think that Clinton here was endorsing the authority of Khameini and Ahmadinejad. Consistency and honesty are not part of the toolbox of Secretaries of State, nor of the Presidents they serve.

Who Would Barack Bomb?

Glenn Greenwald wrote a useful post at Salon on Wednesday, mocking Secretary of State Clinton's warning that Iran may be in the process of becoming a military dictatorship.Reuters, February 15, 2010: "The United States believes Iran's Revolutionary Guards are driving the country toward military dictatorship and should be targeted in any new U.N. sanctions, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

Who Would Barack Bomb?

Doomed to Repeat It, Before It's Even History

President Obama ranted to the G20 Summit about Iran's nuclear program the other day. "Rant" is the right word, too. Where did Obama ever get his reputation as an effective speaker? Every time I hear him, I cringe: the hectoring tone, the mechanical Daddy-Won't-Stand-For-This-One-Second-Longer attitude. And when I read him, the obfuscations and lies drive me up the wall.

Numerous writers have been pointing out the errors in Obama's tirade (with this defender), but does he care? He's the President. For all I know he may have the support of most Americans on Iran (though not on Afghanistan, probably because we have American troops dying over there while we don't - yet -- in Iran; but does he care?), but he's still wrong. And I've known just how bad he was since I read his New York Daily News op-ed piece (via SteveB's comment under this article) from 2007 (see "discussion" here); it prepared me to be skeptical of him and his acolytes forever after. As I wrote in comments at A Tiny Revolution (no link to the comment, alas):

Reading SteveB's diary and the comments was interesting too; it made me notice some things about Obama's op-ed that I hadn't before. For example, Iran as a "challenge to American interests" -- "American interests" meaning, of course, the usual elite corporate interests. As Noam Chomsky likes to say, when national politicians and the media denounce "special interests" they mean working people, racial minorities, women, the elderly -- in short, the vast majority of the American population. By "the national interest" they mean the wealthy, the corporate, a tiny percentage of the population.

Bearing this in mind, the main threat to American interests in the Middle East is the government of the United States of America. It is also the main threat to peace in the Middle East, with Israel a close second. The foreign country most responsible for violence in Iraq, including arming Shi'a terrorists, is the United States of America. That Obama would single out Iran, in the face of this well-known reality, shows just how dangerous he is.

His insistence on diplomacy is not reassuring. Some of the Kos commenters yelled that Obama was calling for diplomacy, not war! But by chance I looked at Jon's post of April 19, 2007, in which he quoted George Bush saying, three days before the invasion of Iraq: "Tomorrow is the day that we will determine whether or not diplomacy can work..." Bush always pretended -- not very convincingly, of course -- that he only went to war because diplomacy had failed. (So did Clinton, so did Bush Sr.) So, who'd trust Obama? Not me.

There's another thing I've been meaning to mention here, from Whatever It Is I'm Against It, this quotation from an interview Obama gave to the Toledo Blade:

I was always a big believer in - when I was doing organizing before I went to law school - that focusing on concrete, local, immediate issues that have an impact on people’s lives is what really makes a difference and that having protests about abstractions [such] as global capitalism or something, generally, is not really going to make much of a difference.

It's not exactly new to hear Establishment figures (and you can't get much Establishment than Barack Obama is now) deriding popular protests on any subject. Just stay at home, you silly-billies, and let us professionals work out the hard issues! Often you can tell by just how peeved they are that the protests are indeed making them feel the pressure. It's hard to say just how much effect the worldwide protests against globalization have, but it seems that they did support the heads of state who rebelled in the late 1990s against US domination of the IMF and WTO, and that is not a bad thing. Katha Pollitt once did a great piece in The Nation (March 16, 1998, though it's not on the site unless you're a subscriber -- you can see part of it here) about a small, well-organized protest during a "Town Hall meeting" (sound familiar) at Ohio State University meant to drum up support for Bill Clinton's plan to bomb Iraq. It worked so well, to the consternation of Clinton himself, his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and CNN (who helped stage the spectacle) that heads of state from other countries declined to support US warmongering. "Global capitalism" isn't really an "abstraction" in the sense Obama means anyway: the protesters have very concrete notions about what they're against.

What's most offensive about Obama's statement is that, judging from his autobiography, his community organizing in Chicago was based more on his need for a job than for any clear sense of what was wrong and what needed to be done: rather, he went in to try to find something to protest. And even worse, his remarks are a slap in the face to his many earnest and idealistic supporters, who on his recommendation should have stayed home and pressured their city councils instead of joining the campaign of a cynical opportunist who made vague, pretty, and abstract promises that led them to believe he was more than just another politician on the make. Sorry, grassroots -- you were astroturf all along.

Doomed to Repeat It, Before It's Even History

No Matter Who Is President of the US, They Would Bomb Afghanistan

The libertarian blogger Will Wilkinson's latest post is on Iran, mostly drawing on an article by an Iranian exile, Lila Ghobady. Wilkinson allows that he doesn't know much about Iran, and so defers to Ghobady. That's a good idea, but unfortunately Ghobady doesn't know much about countries outside of Iran. Like these United States.

One commenter beat me to pointing out that Ghobady didn't go far enough when she declared that "Iran has not had a democratic, free election for the past 30 years." The reality is that Iran hasn't had a democratic, free election for the past 55 years, since 1953. The extra quarter century of repression is courtesy of the United States and Britain, which objected to the free, democratic election of Mohammad Mossedegh and sponsored a coup, followed by the accession of the Shah Rezi Pahlevi. The Shah ruled Iran harshly, with murder and torture, until he was finally overthrown in 1979.

Ghobady also wrote, correctly, that

There has been no real election. Candidates are all hand-picked and cleared by a central religious committee. It is a farcical imitation of the free nomination/ election process that we have pictured in the free world. There is no possibility that a secular, pluralistic, freedom-loving democratic person who loves his or her country can become a candidate to run for president (or any other office) in Iran.

True enough. But by these criteria, there hasn't been a free election in the US for a long time either. (Notice that in his day, the Shah's regime was numbered among those of the free world, along with many other brutal but non-Communist dictatorships.) Candidates for the Presidency of the US must pass muster by corporate elites and their allies in the two major parties, and a pro-corporate press genuflecting to a narrow caricature of religion, which effectively rules out the possibility of a secular, pluralistic, freedom-loving democratic person becoming a candidate for president, or any other major office, in the United States. When the Republicans stole the 2000 election, they bused in thugs to intimidate the vote counters in Florida, with no response from the Democrats and no popular response in the streets. But then, mass dissent in the US is reviled, penned in, and subject to state violence no less than in Iran -- I have the right to say such things as an individual, but getting together with others would subject us all to surveillance and eventual repression.

That doesn't mean things aren't worse in Iran, only that the posturing of the US media and some media figures is tiresome in its hypocrisy. The saddest part is that many of the protesters in Iran may have believed that the "free world" was watching their struggle, when our leaders were only interested in what political hay they could make of it.

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