Good news in Yemen:

Defense Ministry Mohammad Nasser Aliis just gave a brief statement saying the army would defend Saleh against any coup against democracy.

There have been dozens of major defections today, including the most powerful military officer, who controls 60 percent of the army.

France's foreign ministry has said that Saleh's departure is is unavoidable, according to Al Jazeera. Washington is still sticking with its ally.

Meanwhile, in Bahrain, Secretary of State Clinton announces US support for the Saudi troops that have entered the country:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton affirmed here Saturday the US commitment to protect the security of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states, accusing Iran of being a factor of instability in the region.

Iran pursues a private agenda to destabilize neighboring countries and undermine peace and stability in the Gulf region, Clinton said.

She made the remarks in a press conference at the Elysee Palace after a summit of world leaders on the international military action against the regime of Libyan leader Col Muammar Qaddafi.

It’s a priority for the US administration to work with partners in the Gulf region against the concern over the behavior of Iran, she said.

Commenting on the deployment of troops from the Peninsula Shield Force in the Kingdom of Bahrain in the wake of violent protests, Clinton said it was a sovereign right for Bahrain to seek help from GCC member states under the joint defense treaty they had signed.

Has no one told Clinton that she sounds eerily like the Soviet apparatchiks who justified the 1968 invasion of Czechoslavakia on the ground that the people there needed to be protected against a bourgeois counterrevolution? I am starting to worry that, while the Iranian nuclear research program has not ignited a conflict between the US and Iran, turmoil in Bahrain just might.

And, right on cue, Ethan Bronner of The New York Times writes an article empathizing with the plight of the Sunni elite:

When Bahrain’s pro-democracy movement began its demonstrations in Pearl Square last month, Atif Abdulmalik was supportive. An American-educated investment banker and a member of the Sunni Muslim elite, he favored a constitutional monarchy and increasing opportunities and support for the poorer Shiite majority.Atif Abdulmalik, an investment banker, was initially supportive of the protests, but then feared they would harm the economy.

But in the past week or two, the nature of the protest shifted — and so did any hope that demands for change would cross sectarian lines and unite Bahrainis in a cohesive democracy movement. The mainly Shiite demonstrators moved beyond Pearl Square, taking over areas leading to the financial and diplomatic districts of the capital. They closed off streets with makeshift roadblocks and shouted slogans calling for the death of the royal family.

Twenty-five percent of Bahrain’s G.D.P. comes from banks, Mr. Abdulmalik said as he sat in the soft Persian Gulf sunshine. I sympathize with many of the demands of the demonstrators. But no country would allow the takeover of its financial district. The economic future of the country was at stake. What happened this week, as sad as it is, is good.

I'm shocked, shocked to find that the Times considers the perspective of an American educated investment banker critical to understanding events in Bahrain. After all, it is physically located in Manhattan. Here we have an illustration of what As'ad Abukhalil stated in relation to Egypt, that the movement would, over time, become more and more class conscious with the passage of time.

While the US and Saudi Arabia act to polarize the political struggle along sectarian lines so as to make the Iranians the fall guy, the situation on the ground is one of increasing class conflict, with the the predominately Shia poor focusing their anger on the obscene wealth and power of the al-Khalida family. Clearly, there is a synergy between the sectarianism of the US and the Gulf States, and the emerging class consciousness on the streets. It is a sign of the desperation of the US and Saudi Arabia that they have no choice but to adopt a strategy for containing the protests that has the alarming consequence of bringing the class struggle to the fore.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Bahrain, Gulf States, Hillary Clinton, New York Times, Shia

UPDATE 3: From a New York Times article today:

Just days after President Obama demanded publicly that change in Egypt must begin right away, many in the streets accused the Obama administration of sacrificing concrete steps toward genuine change in favor of a familiar stability.

America doesn’t understand, said Ibrahim Mustafa, 42, who was waiting to enter Tahrir Square. The people know it is supporting an illegitimate regime.

Hat tip to the Angry Arab.

UPDATE 2: Wael Ghuneim will be released as well. This is good news, as he has been incarcerated since January 28th. An Egyptian telecommunications tycoon, Naguib Sawiris, intervened and spoke to Omar Suleiman personally about it.

UPDATE 1: Al Jazeera reporter Ayman Mohyeldin has been released.

INITIAL POST: This is an extremely troubling development: US warships and troops are being readied to assist to the Multinational Force and Observers commander to support its mission of supervising the security provisions of the Egypt/ Israel Peace Treaty, and make sure it is prepared in case evacuation of U.S. citizens from Egypt becomes necessary. Given that the only people attacking Americans are the pro-Mubarak police and security forces, the security apparatus that the US has been aligned with for decades, why is this happening?

Of course, we can speculate on many reasons, but I can't think of any that are favorable to the movement in Egypt. I am especially alarmed at the possibility that the troops are being sent to give the regime a free hand in the suppression of the protests, as occurred in 1980 when the US military assumed the responsibility of protecting South Korea's border with North Korea, so that South Korea could send troops south to suppress a rebellion against the dictatorship n the city of Kwangju. The justification for this action is striking, as it mirrors the current US approach to Egypt since the protests began:

The participants in the May 22 meeting, according to the declassified minutes I later obtained from the National Security Council, included the Deputy Secretary of State, Warren Christopher; Holbrooke, assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific; Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser; CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner; Donald Gregg, the NSC’s top intelligence official for Asia and a former CIA Station Chief in Seoul; and U.S. Defense Secretary Harold Brown.

This crack foreign policy team quickly came to a consensus. The first priority is the restoration of order in Kwangju by the Korean authorities with the minimum use of force necessary without laying the seeds for wide disorders later, the minutes stated. Once order is restored, it was agreed we must press the Korean government, and the military in particular, to allow a greater degree of political freedom to evolve.

The U.S. position was summed up by Brzezinski: in the short term support, in the longer term pressure for political evolution. As for the situation in Kwangju, the group decided that we have counseled moderation, but have not ruled out the use of force, should the Koreans need to employ it to restore order. If there was little loss of life in the recapture of the city, we can move quietly to apply pressure for more political evolution, the officials decided. Once the situation was cleared up, the war cabinet agreed, normal economic ties could move forward – including an important $600 million Export-Import Bank loan to South Korea to buy American nuclear power equipment and engineering services.

Unlike South Korea in 1980, the protests in Egypt have spread far beyond one city which can be isolated, hence, the strategy, which is an enduring feature of US foreign policy, had to be implemented differently. For the first stage of the effort, Tuesday and Wednesday were critical days. After Mubarak and Obama made complimentary televised public statements on Tuesday, the police and security forces hit the streets within minutes after Obama left the lecturn. Al Jazeera reported attacks upon protesters in Alexandria and Port Said about 30 minutes later, and these attacks spread to Cairo over the course of the night. While Mubarak hoped that such violence would allow him to retain power, it is possible that the Obama administration let them go forward for the more limited purpose of disciplining the protesters sufficiently to accept the perservation of the regime without him. The US surely knew of the attacks in advance, given extensive contacts between the US and the Egyptian military and security services. Furthermore, the military's unwillingness to suppress the attacks is also quite telling in light of this relationship. After the fact, the US has stubbornly refused to condemn Mubarak and Suleiman for the violence, relying upon a public perception of chaos in Egypt to absolve them of any responsibility.

Clearly, there is a split in the Obama administration over retaining Mubarak in power, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressing support for our Pinochet in waiting, Omar Suleiman, while Obama's envoy to Egypt, Frank Wisner, asserted that Mubarak should be allowed to write his own legacy after giving 60 years of his life to the service of his country. For anyone naive enough to believe that the Obama administration values the interests of the Egyptian people, Wisner's remarks dispel any remaining doubt. But it is important to understand that this split is one of tactical implementation, not strategy, and that Mubarak will be cast aside at the opportune time, if necessary:

Robert Springborg, professor of national security affairs at the US Naval Postgraduate School, said the army was manipulating the situation by dragging out a resolution of the crisis.

He said the army's aim was to focus the anger of the uprising against Mubarak rather than the military.

It's political jujitsu on the part of the military to get the crowd worked up and focused on Mubarak and then he will be offered as a sacrifice in some way. And in the meantime the military is seen as the saviours of the nation.

The military will engineer a succession. The west – the US and EU – are working to that end.

We are working closely with the military … to ensure a continuation of a dominant role of the military in the society, the polity and the economy.

Springborg's comments raise a subject that has been underreported, the role of the US military in determining US policy in Egypt. Some of you may recall that it publicly opposed the removal of Suharto in Indonesia in 1998. Here, the US military may be playing a central role because of its relationship with the Egyptian army, using it to broker a resolution favorable to the US as described by Springborg. Accordingly, it is now an appropriate time for negotiations after the attacks earlier in the week. Already, Suleiman is seeking to obtain a maximum propaganda advantage from them, announcing concessions designed to preserve the regime's grip on power, including freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Perhaps, the credibility of these concessions can be measured by the detention of an Al Jazeera reporter, Ayman Mohyeldin, a few hours ago. Beyond this, it appears that the language in the statement to the effect that the participants expressed their absolute rejection of any and all forms of foreign intervention in internal Egyptian affairs is already being put to nefarious purposes. A Google employee in Cairo, Wael Ghuneim, was arrested by the security forces in Cairo during protests on January 28th. He is now facing possible torture in relation to charges of undermining the government through an online smear campaign for the benefit of foreign agencies. Both of these situations are reminiscent of the methods used by the coup regime in Honduras to retain power in 2009, with the tacit of approval of the US. The police and the security forces create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation in order to slow the flow of information that benefits the opposition. I am fearful that we will soon see purportedly uncontrollable and unaccountable death squad activity directed towards figures associated with more radical groups, as has happened in Honduras as well. Elections will thereafter be held under conditions most favorable to the US and the regime, with the participation of the most assertive pro-democracy and leftist groups hindered by this harassment and violence.

Such covert activity, covert in the sense that is not publicly acknowledged, fits rather well with another part of the statement: The state of emergency will be lifted based on the security situation and an end to the threats to the security of society. This is the language of dictatorship, which is always rationalized because of perpetual threats to the security of society, and Mubarak and Suleiman are well positioned to generate an endless number of such threats in the manner already discussed. In other words, they can manipulate the state of emergency to their advantage through their own actions. Furthermore, such language may also refer to the characterization of possible anti-Zionist, anti-US sentiment as such a threat. So, it appears that Mubarak and Suleiman support a process of political transformation and accountability, as set forth in the statement, where the state of emergency or the threat of one, if it is lifted, can be used to control the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. No doubt, protests and actions directed towards lifting the blockade of Gaza will be suppressed.

To his credit, Mohammed El Baradei understands. Based upon what his observer told him about the negotiations, he said this on Meet the Press today:

The process is opaque. Nobody knows who is talking to whom at this stage. It's managed by Vice President Suleiman. It is all managed by the military and that is part of the problem.

I have not been invited to take part in the negotiations or dialogue but I've been following what is going on.

If you really want to build confidence, you need to engage the rest of the Egyptian people - the civilians.

Issandr El-Amrani, a sober minded journalist who posts at The Arabist, gets it, too:

With Hillary Clinton's backing for Suleiman as the lead on a transition in Egypt, we are quickly heading towards the formation of another strongman regime that cannot be trusted to deliver on the changes needed in the political environment. There needs to be a mechanism to integrate the opposition into the heart of the state to grant full legitimacy to its demand, and reduce the perception (and reality) of Omar Suleiman being the sole man at the helm.

Of course, his implicit willingness to accept Suleiman as a successor to Mubarak is troubling, but I have quoted it to illustrate his recognition that the US and the regime are working together to bring about the preservation of the dictatorship in new clothes.

Meanwhile, the US is sending troops and warships to secure the Sinai and the border with with Gaza, so as to continue the economic strangulation of the Palestinians, among other things, if this process fails to quell the protests. As'ad Abukhalil observes that, in nearby Tunisia, the protesters are taking appropriate measures in response to US efforts to preserve the power of the dictatorial regime there:

Why we are watching Egypt, take note of what is happening in Tunisia. The plan set in place there by Jeffrey Feltman during his visit there to save the regime is breaking down. Tunisian rebels keep pushing and keep insisting on dismantling the apparatus of power of the previous regime. They keep attacking the security and police headquarters of the previous regime.

We will soon discover whether such action will be necessary in Egypt. For now, it is encouraging to hear that some protesters are attempting to mobilize government workers to go out on strike.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Egypt, Hillary Clinton, Neoliberalism, Political Violence, US Military

From Democracy Now earlier this week:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s start with Pakistan and this catastrophe there and who is helping to help the people.

TARIQ ALI: It is the worst disaster we have seen for a very long time—24 million people homeless; massive malnutrition, which already existed, now worse; malaria and cholera raging in the camps, if one can call them that, where people are taking refuge. This should be a global appeal to the entire world to send doctors, to send medicines, to send food, to—for the United Nations really to move in and take over the rescue effort. That is what needs to be done. Any government—I admit the Pakistani government under Zardari is totally corrupt, and that is putting people off giving money, but there are lots of other organizations at work there which can be given money, and teams of doctors can be sent with medicines. I mean, the Cubans went during the last earthquake, and it was very effective.

But, I mean, just remember what happened in this country when the levees burst in New Orleans. People were stunned and shocked by the images that were coming out from New Orleans. Well, this is a hundred times worse. And so, this country really needs—its people need all the help they can get. Their tragedy is that they are ruled by a venal and corrupt elite. That’s not the fault of the people. And the overwhelming majority of the country is not involved in religious extremism. The images of Pakistan which we’ve seen on the screens just talks about sort of beards and people, you know, picking up guns. The overwhelming majority of the country is not like that, and it really needs help.

AMY GOODMAN: Just looking at the latest figures that the United States is spending, not on helping Pakistan, but on war, President Obama signed into legislation—this was one month ago—a war funding bill that provided 37 billion more dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama signed the bill without public remarks in a low-key Oval Office session. With the new war spending, the total amount of money Congress has allotted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has now surpassed $1 trillion.

TARIQ ALI: This is obscene. I mean, on any level, judged by any criteria—moral, political, economic—it is obscene what is taking place and the amount of money being spent on the wars. And, I mean, I’ll give you a concrete example. A few weeks ago, the city of Jacobabad in the province of Sindh in Pakistan was threatened by the River Indus. A hundred thousand people were risking their lives. Their homes had already gone. The government’s health department appealed to the Pakistani air force that they needed helicopters to transport people to take medicines. They were told that they couldn’t use the nearest air force base, the Shahbaz Air Force Base near Jacobabad, because it was occupied by the United States, and the United States were using it to send drones to kill villagers in other parts of the country and would not make that air base available for rescue operations. So the priorities are all upside down. And, you know, this is a president who put out, initially, a sort of humane face to the world: We’re going to be different. It’s virtually—it’s the same business which goes on.

AMY GOODMAN: We have heard that story over and over, the secret base, that not only was it not used to be a place for aid, but that water was diverted so that it flooded areas of hundreds of thousands of people around it so it wouldn’t flood the base. But this issue going on, Obama administration has been criticized for sending only six helicopters, despite a Pakistani request for dozens more. The US has denied the request because helicopters play such a key role in the war in Afghanistan. A senior military official was asked about this by the Washington Post, and he said the decision would have had to come from Washington, adding, Do [the helicopters] exist in the region? Yes. Are they available? No.

But this goes to a very important issue of national security and the justification for the wars in Iraq and the drone attacks in Pakistan. It’s about national security in the United States. It’s about going after people who threatened the United States. So this issue of killing in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the amount of money that’s used for it versus paying for aid that could well sway so many millions of people to feel much more positively about the United States.

TARIQ ALI: Well, exactly. You know, I mean, on that level, they should have poured in aid to try and help peoples, encourage the rest of the world to send doctors. All this should have been done. They don’t think like that, Amy. This war has now become obsessive for the American military political rulers. And Obama, as we know, has in fact ordered more drone attacks on Pakistan in his two years in office than Bush did for his previous eight years. And these drone attacks are largely killing civilians. When you read terrorists destroyed, militants killed, don’t believe it. Very unlikely that more than ten percent of those people targeted have anything to do with helping the Taliban or whatever they’re accused of. It’s largely innocent people being killed. And, you know, a year ago or so when that poor Iranian woman died, Neda, in Tehran and the entire world wept for her and a moist-eyed president appeared on the White House lawn, that same day US drones killed fifty women and children in Pakistan, and there wasn’t a mention of it on the news. So, their behavior is creating so much anger. So the notion that these wars are going to stop people hating or racking the United States is just nonsense. It’s the exact opposite that’s going on.

Indeed, the US military apparently had other priorities as the water level of the rivers rose in late August:

It has been reported earlier that the US Air Force has denied the relief agencies use of the Shahbaz airbase for the distribution of aid and assistance. Soldiers of the Pakistan army, a federal minister and the administration of Sindh province are blamed for the incident involving Shahbaz Airbase at Jacobabad district in Sindh province in which it has been reported that flood waters were diverted in order to save the airbase. The diversion of the floodwaters is blamed for inundating hundreds of houses and the displacement of 800,000 people. According to the media reports, the Federal Minister of Sports along with soldiers from the army and a contingent of officials from the Sindh provincial government breached the Jamali Bypass in Jafferabad district of Balochistan province during the night between August 13 and 14 to divert the water entering the airbase which has remained in US Air Force hands since the war on terror started in 2001.

Mr. Ejaz Jakhrani, the Minister of Sports, while explaining the situation to the media said that if the water was not diverted the Shahbaz Airbase would have been inundated. Mr. Jakhrani himself was present along with the district coordination officer of the Jacobabad district, district police officer and other officials when the breach was made. It is reported in the media that Mr. Jakhrani was assigned to protect the air base by officials at the Pakistan army’s headquarter as he was elected from Jacobabad district.

A former prime minister, Mr. Mir Zafar Ullah Khan Jamali said that in order to save Shahbaz Air Base, Jamali bypass was demolished and the town of Dera Allahyar was drowned. Mr. Jamali said that if the airbase was so important, then what priority might be given to the citizens. He blamed minister Jakhrani, DPO and DCO Jacobabad for deliberately diverting the course of the floodwaters towards Balochistan.

Similarly, there are rumors within Pakistan that the Pakistani military and other members of the Pakistani elite have manipulated the breaching of the levees to protect their own properties.

But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and World Bank President Robert Zoellick have found the right emphasis:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed Zoellick, saying that Pakistan must lead by instituting the reforms that will pave the way to self-sufficiency.

The international community will support Pakistan's efforts at reform and reconstruction, she said.

Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi responded by saying that every dollar it receives will be utilized in the most efficient manner ... and in the most transparent manner.

Under the terms of $11 billion in loans the International Monetary Fund has made to Pakistan in recent years, Islamabad had agreed to implement a number of reforms, such as improving the energy sector, boosting tax revenues and fiscal improvements. But it has been slow to implement those reforms.

Translation: the floods in Pakistan represent an unprecedented opportunity to impose an even more rigorous structural adjustment program upon the country. Markets are, after all, more important the needs of millions of people in distress, impoverished people who increasingly have no place within a global economy centered around low cost production and consumption fueled by the use of credit.

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Hillary Clinton, IMF, Neoliberalism, Pakistan, Tariq Ali, US Military

It has long been clear that we need to extend the concept of tokenism to take account of the fact that often these 'exceptional' women and minorities are not just included in positions of power but come to represent the worst aspects of it.

--Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

It is a difficult and painful subject. To what extent has neoliberal society expropriated the aspirations of feminism and the civil rights movement in order to accelerate the the deconstruction of the social welfare state? Mainstream feminism, with its emphasis upon social and economic acknowledgement, promptly sidelined its more radical activists, reducing much of the issue of gender to questions of personal security, pay equity and reproductive rights. Important issues to be sure, but also ones compatible with the emergence of a more conservative economic order with increasing inequality.

Of course, the left, both new and old, bore its share of responsibility as well because of a doctrinal tendency to describe gender as a secondary contradiction, subordinate to the primary one of class conflict, something that a 1970s and 1980s radical like Diana Block unsuccessfully resisted. Or, to put in it plain English, Marxist-Leninist women had to keep quiet for the good of the cause when they encountered abusive, sexist proletarian men. As a consequence, Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton and Benazir Bhutto, among others, stormed the stage and asserted identities as feminist political icons. All, to varying degrees, neoliberal, and all unabashed advocates of militarism.

Similarly, albeit more slowly, we have experienced a succession of African American mayors and governors who, on the whole, have done little to challenge the perogatives of the police in communities of color, and forged coalitions with developers and financial interests to gentrify their communities. Tom Bradley, the first African American mayor of Los Angeles, and Maynard Jackson, the first African American mayor of Atlanta, showed the way for numerous others, including Willie Brown (in San Francisco) and, currently, Kevin Johnson (in Sacramento). A similar trajectory seems to be happening in regard to the emergence of Latino executives, such as Antonio Villaraigosa in Los Angeles.

In one of the most extreme instances of this phenomenon, Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode authorized the assault upon the MOVE residence that resulted in a fire that razed almost an entire city block, killing 11 people and rendering 240 others homeless. Perhaps suggesting that elected women and people of color find themselves incapable of opposing even the most dangerous schemes of law enforcement, Attorney General Janet Reno approved the 1993 attack upon a Waco compound of religious fanatics that 76 people. Relying upon claims of alleged child molestation, she literally killed the children in order to save them. To be fair, until recently, women and people of color have fared better in the legislative realm, at least, that is, until they began acquiescing to the program of corporate subsidy and expanded military operations pursued by President Obama.

Ah yes, President Obama. If there is anyone who could be said to personally epitomize Power's statement, it is him. Quite literally, he is representing the worst aspects of American exceptionalism and global capitalism. He has intensified the war in Afghanistan, expanded US military operations into Pakistan, and, if recent media reports are accurate, into other states in the region, both adversaries and allies, as well. Domestically, he has directed trillions of dollars towards the preservation of the financial sector in its existing, predatory form, while failing to take any action that would stop the ongoing wave of foreclosures or address unemployment. As the response to the BP oil spill shows, he is quite comfortable with administering the federal government in a partnership with transnational corporations, granting them the power to veto any action that consider injudicious. His indifference to the experiences of African Americans easily surpasses that displayed by African American mayors of past decades, as manifested by his selection of Elana Kagan for a position on the Supreme Court, a woman known for advising President Clinton to approve dramatically increased sentences for possession and sale of rock cocaine as opposed to crack cocaine, resulting in exponentially increased sentences for people of color.

Here, in Obama's selection of Kagan, we have the intersection of feminism and multiculturalism as a force for the preservation of the established order. But, does Power make too much of it? On Saturday, I addressed the subject of the left and its failure to fully mobilize its potential by adopting sexist forms of social organization and action. Should we therefore be surprised that capitalism has seized upon this deficiency, and symbolically appropriated feminism and multiculturalism to its advantage? While, as described by Block, the 1970s left prevaricated on the subjects of feminism and gay rights, capitalists seized the opportunity to commodify the experiences of women, lesbians and gays through consumption, and even devised marketing practices to exploit this cache with others as well.

Accordingly, the fact that there were people, like the Obamas, willing to advance themselves by reference to these developments should not be especially shocking either. One of my friends, a Japanese American woman, exclaimed, Why do we have to be perfect? during a conversation with an Asian American colleague about the purported workplace deficiencies of another Asian American coworker. She was alluding to the fact there were plenty of other white male employees with similar or worse defects. Likewise, in this instance, there are plenty of white males who have been willing to start wars, bust unions, defund social programs and subsidize corporations. No one calls them tokens.

Clearly, Power is trying to reinvigorate the concept of tokenism, and give it a contemporary radical resonance, but the term itself has a reactionary, bigoted context, and cannot, in my view, be separated from it. There is also, I think, an implicit assumption that women and people of color possess a potential anti-capitalist solidarity because of the sexism and racism that they have historically experienced. While there is some potential here, to the extent that both often express greater skepticism about capitalism than white men, it is easily exaggerated.

First, as a matter of socioeconomics, there is always the liberal solution of creating a multicultural elite, which has happened on a rather haphazard basis over the last forty years. Second, it subjects women and people of color to a higher standard than white males. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are criticized as tokens, while the Bushes are merely playing out the predictable behaviours of privileged white males. It suggests that women and people of color must deny themselves opportunities for advancement in order to bring about a revolutionary transformation of society. While women and people of color have been horrifically abused by global capitalism, the notion that one can devise a compelling revolutionary doctrine by characterizing them as contemporary noble savages, possessive of an inherent goodness lacking in others, is not very plausible, and a discourse centered around tokenism reinforces such a flawed perspective.

Instead, there should be an egalitarian emphasis upon acknowledging the importance of civil rights and economic justice within society as part of broader collective movement. Political figures, athletes and entertainers have an allure throughout society that is exploited to buttress hierarchical structures of violence and exploitation. Celebrity is a far more insidious phenomenon than tokenism, however defined, and an effective left discourse should focus more upon it than searching for sexual and racial traitors who betrayed the cause.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Barack Obama, Feminism, Hillary Clinton, Neoliberalism

It happened so quickly that few people caught it. There was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Pakistan, exposing the hypocrisy of Eurocentric feminism when a group of Pakistani women tried to impose the same standards on the US that the US imposes upon others:

During an interview broadcast live in Pakistan with several prominent female TV anchors, before a predominantly female audience of several hundred, one member of the audience said the Predator attacks amount to “executions without trial” for those killed.

Another asked Clinton how she would define terrorism.

“Is it the killing of people in drone attacks?” she asked. That woman then asked if Clinton considers drone attacks and bombings like the one that killed more than 100 civilians in the city of Peshawar earlier this week to both be acts of terrorism.

“No, I do not,” Clinton replied.

Clinton no doubt scheduled this particular appearance in furtherance of her long standing efforts to elevate the concerns of women around the world, as she has done on many other occasions, but one wonders why she bothers at all.

After all, it is evident that Clinton has no interest in what they have to say if it deviates from her belief that the objectives of feminism and US imperialism harmoniously reinforce one another. I have to concede that she deserves praise for scheduling the event, because she has control over her schedule, and she was undoubtedly well aware of what the Pakistani women was likely to say. We were treated to a rare episode wherein a white woman in a position of political power in the US provided a forum for women of color in a country subject to US military violence. She eschewed the public relations of photo opportunity.

Even so, Clinton's unwillingness to engage the sincere, legitimate concerns of her female Pakistani audience demonstrated the farcical nature of the enterprise. She just could not acknowledge that the deaths of Pakaitanis inflicted by US military operations, many of them women and children, were the equal of those killed by al-Qaeda or the Taliban, without demonstrating the impossibility of integrating the universalist principles of feminism with the pragmatic, often militaristic requirements of empire. Indeed, she could not even acknowledge what everyone knows, that these attacks do, in fact, kill many Pakistani women and children in addition to the men, who are, it seems, considered probable militant Islamic fundamentalists, anway. Nor could she open a dialogue with her inquisitors about whether the US strategy in Pakistan is intensifying the violence, as many Pakistanis believe, instead of quelling it.

Of course, the New York Times attempted to come to Clinton's rescue, but only made things worse by suggesting that the women who participated in the interview had been induced to question Clinton in a harsh, inhospitable manner because they had first seen Pakistani journalists do it:

Mrs. Clinton sat down first with the TV journalists because they set the agenda. So great is their influence that the questions posed to Mrs. Clinton by young people the next day sounded like those the broadcasters had asked — blunt and combative, though just short of rude.

An example came Friday at an interview for the program “Our Voice” when a young woman asked Mrs. Clinton whether she viewed the Predator drone attacks used by the United States in Pakistan’s frontier areas as terrorism.

Oh, that silly woman! We all know how inadequate the Pakistani educational system is. If she hadn't seen Hillary questioned in such a blunt, straight forward manner (undoubtedly much more directly than anyone in the US ever does), she would have continued to wonder about whether she should purchase a new kind of eyeliner. Again, the notion that Pakistani women have the own independent agency, an ability to relate to the world around them, separate from what they are told, either by Hillary or the Pakistani media, apparently never occurred to Marc Landler, the reporter who wrote the story. In fact, it goes beyond feminism into the realm of racism, as Landler suggests that the young people of Pakistan are so stupified that they cannot relate to anything other than what is fed to them by the media.

So, Hillary was left to lecturing the people of Pakistan about their inadequacies, which, at the end of the day, boiled down to a refusal to uncritically celebrate that Pakistan is a vassal of the US. We are therefore induced to conclude that her willingness to be critically questioned by Pakistani women served as a fig leaf, however inadequate, to distract attention from what were just more directives from the Raj. A larger question remains, though. Does the 21st Century Raj, the US, tired of Pakistan, intend to shatter it so that it can reconstructed in a more agreeable form? And, is the US attempting to facilitate such an outcome by intensifying the violence that makes the country even less and less governable? It is impossible to ignore these questions, because, if Hillary travelled to Pakistan to push the country towards fragmentation, she would have conducted herself precisely as she did.

Labels: "War on Terror", Air War, American Empire, Feminism, Hillary Clinton, Neoliberalism, Pakistan

Any doubt where the Obama administration stands in relation to the coup in Honduras? If so, this will clarify things:

Mr. Zelaya approached the commanding officer, who stood on the Honduran side of a chain link fence, shook the officer’s hand and then crossed into Honduras. The crowds cheered, and the officers backed away.

Mr. Zelaya labeled the move a triumphant return. The police, however, said he had not officially entered Honduran territory.

“I am exercising my right as the president and as commander in chief of the armed forces,” Mr. Zelaya said. “The people will no longer permit a president imposed by force.”

Mr. Zelaya’s excursion — which, with its caravan of news reporters, continual interviews and symbolic steps over the line, seemed aimed more at media attention than political restoration — was quickly condemned as “reckless” by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

At a news conference in Washington, she said the United States had urged Mr. Zelaya and the de facto government that replaced him to avoid “any provocative action that could lead to violence.”

Strange, isn't it? Clinton doesn't consider the coup itself to be a provocative action that could lead to violence, only efforts to reverse the coup carry this stigma. Meanwhile, during the negotiations that she prefers as a way of resolving the situation, the purported mediation conducted by Oscar Arias, the perpetrators of the coup have adamantly refused to permit the return of Zelaya. Only in the peculiar world of Narco News is this considered a positive development.

Labels: American Empire, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Honduras, Neoliberalism

I perused the Internet sites of the The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Guardian today. None of them had any new articles related to the coup in Honduras and the effort of the deposed President, Manuel Zelaya, to return to the country to serve out his term. After meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week, and then attending a brief, purported mediation conducted by former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, Zelaya is now encountering American indifference.

Some of us anticipated these developments. From the beginning, the US reaction to the coup has been one of wanting to appear as if it supported the return of Zelaya, the elected President, while doing as little as possible to make it possible. Confirmation of this strategy emerged last Friday, when, as noted here, The New York Times, in a headline for an article about the failed mediation effort, described Zelaya, along with the person installed as President by coup, Robert Micheletti, as rivals:

Prospects for a quick resolution of the political crisis in Honduras were thrown into doubt Thursday, as the two men claiming their nation’s presidency left negotiations only hours after they had begun and showed no signs of budging from the positions that have divided the country.

At the risk of coming across as a conspiracy theorist, the erasure of the coup from public consciousness by the Times was telegraphed by the State Department a couple of days before:

While Secretary Clinton reiterated the United States’ condemnation of Mr. Zelaya’s ouster, she stopped short of calling for his reinstatement, a departure from statements by President Obama earlier Tuesday and from the position taken by much of the international community.

When asked whether the United States viewed Mr. Zelaya’s return as central to the restoration of democratic order, she said that she did not want to “prejudge” the talks before they began.

“There are many different issues that will have to be discussed and resolved,” Mrs. Clinton said. “But I think it’s fair to let the parties themselves, with President Arias’s assistance, sort out all of these issues.”

Perhaps, because they perceive no alternative, some supporters of Zelaya, and the social movements associated with him, continue to hope that the Obama administration will take action to bring about his return. On Friday, I had the opportunity to interview Laura Carlsen, director of the Americas Program for the Center for International Policy, about the situation in Honduras. She, quite correctly, insisted that the condemnations of the coup by the Obama administration were a departure from previous Bush administration practice, and held out the hope that the US would follow through with cuts in military and economic assistance.

There is no question that Carlsen is far more knowledgeable about the people and institutions of the Americas than myself, and I recommend her blog highly, but, even so, I am not optimistic. Indeed, she revealed why the US is so ambivalent about the return of Zelaya later during the course of the interview. She observed that the social movements of Honduras, composed of peasants, indigenous people and labor activists, are insistent that the return of Zelaya must take place without preconditions, especially as it relates to efforts to amend the Honduran constitution. In their view, the constitution, implemented by the military in 1982, is far too favorable to the oligarchy.

As explained by Carlos Reyes, a Honduran labor leader and National Coordinator of the Popular Resistance:

When the current Constitution was drafted in 1981, both the country and the region were under a low intensity war sponsored by the United States and its ambassador to Honduras, John Dimitri Negroponte.

Honduras was officially governed by civilians, but it was the military that effectively ruled the country, under the command of General Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, a murderer who ordered the death of countless civilians. In that context, the business sector, following instructions from the United States embassy, set out to achieve two goals: the sale of Honduras, and the reduction of the State with the purported aim of eliminating poverty. These two principles permeated the Constitution, with the ensuing effect of advancing a neoliberal agenda and everything that such a model entails.

In 2005, the country reached its most critical moment with the signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States (DR-CAFTA), which unleashed an intense wave of protests led by our social movements. The DR-CAFTA delivered a final blow to the Constitution, and we saw that it was time to form a Constituent Assembly to rewrite the Constitution and recover our sovereignty.

Carlsen is no doubt correct, and it is precisely for this reason that the US will obstruct the return of Zelaya as anything other than a figurehead to serve out the remaining months of his term. If Zelaya resists, the US is willing to give the coup leaders all the time they need to shatter the power of the social movements that so threaten its economic interests there. Expect any future aid cutoffs to be carefully calibrated so as to enable the dictatorship to stay in power until elections that the US can then embrace.

As Keegan Keegan observed last Friday:

The ball is back in the court of Zelaya and the social movements. Do they wait for the next opportunity to discuss the situation or for the international community to take more concrete measures or do they reject dialogue as a strategy of the oligarchy to maintain power for long enough to shift public and international opinion?

My opinion is that the need for concrete actions is immediate and that every day which passes under this dictatorship is a day lost by the Honduran people. The advances of the ALBA (Allianza Bolivariana Para Los Pueblos de America Latina, Bolivarian Alliance for the peoples of America) and its many programs have been stolen from the Honduran people. President Zelaya decided to join the ALBA after the oligarchy refused to support his plans to create a more just Honduras. Today it was announced that in the face of the aggressions of the coup government around 80 of the 120 Cuban staff providing services to the Honduran people have left the country.

Programs which have been delivered over the last year as a result of the ALBA which are no under threat include "Yes I can" (Yo si puedo) the Cuban literacy program which has helped more than 150 000 Honduran's become literate, support for food sovereignty and agricultural development which includes 100 tractors provided by Venezuela, 70 scholarships for Honduran students to go and study in Venezuelan Universities, Mission Miracle (mission Milagro) which has restored the site of around 5000 in Venezuela with the help of Cuban medical staff. Cuba has also supported, the construction and staffing of medical clinics in regions previously denied the right to health services and sports coaches. These are the actions that the Honduran oligarchy is rebelling against. The possibility of an educated population which is guaranteed its basic rights rather than having them determined by their place in the capitalist hierarchy is not acceptable to those who want low wages and a controllable society desperate to buy.

In the next two or three days I think we will know the path of the struggle in Honduras. Either the social movements and Zelaya will take strong action and risk the violence that could be brought upon them by the oligarchy or they will continue with passive actions and the process of a drawn out "dialogue" which will leave the oligarchy in power leading up to the November elections. Neither path is ideal nor do they have definite outcomes but a choice will soon be made.

Yes, the two or three days mentioned by Keegan have just passed, but, generally, he is correct, a decision must be made by the social movements, or one will be forced upon them. . . every day which passes under this dictatorship is a day lost by the Honduran people. Unfortunately, the US, and the Obama administration, knows this better than anyone. Just because the Honduran people find themselves struggling in darkness does not eliminate the possibility of being successful.

UPDATE:

11th Communiqué of the National Front Against the Coup d'etat

The National Front Against the Coup d'etat in Honduras made up of the different organized expressions in the country united in the face of the situation provoked by the coup d'etat, communicates:

1. We energetically condemn the killing of Roger Bados, militant of the Democratic Unity Party and member of the Popular Block. This happened in his house and his house-mate and sister were also wounded. Roger was an active member of the Honduran popular movement and actively participated in the actions against the coup d'etat. We demand punishment for those who thought up and carried out this crime.

2. We reiterate our demand to unconditionally retore the institutional order in the country, at the same time we re-affirm our willingness to continue with a process that leads us to the installation of a National Constitutional Assembly that allows the re-founding of Honduras.

3. With respect to the mediation meetings taking place in San José Costa Rica, we denounce that it has been clearly demonstrated that all of this has been a delay tactic to keep President Zelaya outside of the country. It is not true that the discussions have stayed open, as when the Commission of the Government of President Zelaya asked for this mediation to take place in Honduras they did not respond and the Commission of the coup-makers clearly said that they would not allow this process to take place in our territory.

4. We repudiate the persecution and capture of the reporters from the Telesur Network. Sunday morning they were detained by the national police, taken out of the hotel they were staying at, taken to the embassy of their country, all this under the argument that they don't have anything more to do in. We condemn the repression against the media that tells what is really happening in the country.

5. We make it known amongst the rest of the Honduran population that during the radio programs of the Center for Women's Studies and the Center for Women's Rights transmitted by Radio Cadena Voces, on Saturday July 11th, they cut the signal at the hour they broadcast. In these programs they read news about the actions taking place against the coup d'etat.

6. We communicate that last weekend protests and take-overs against the coup-detat took place all over the country. In San Pedro Sula, Santa Barbará, Sava, Sonaguera, Trujillo, Tocoa, Copan and Tegucigalpa, where on Saturday there was a political cultural act in the place where the Armed Forces killed the young man Isis Obed Murillo. The tribute included protest music from well-known artists, messages from different people, amongst whom were family members of the young man, and there was also a Garífuna ceremony.

7. We put out a call to the whole population for us to continue the struggle and demand the restitution of individual guarantees, for now they have suspended the curfew but they continue violating the rights of the population by keeping our rights suspended. The intimidation of people with militarization of offices, organizations, highways and other places also affects all people.

One can only respect the bravery of the Hondurans and the clarity of their insight, as some American progressives run to catch up with them.

Labels: American Empire, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Honduras, Mainstream Media, Neoliberalism, New York Times

Is it possible that Obama secretly admires the pragmatism of Richard Nixon? The realpolitik of Henry Kissinger? Consider this, from today's New York Times:

On the campaign trail, Senator Barack Obama offered a pledge that electrified and motivated his liberal base, vowing to “end the war” in Iraq.

But as he moves closer to the White House, President-elect Obama is making clearer than ever that tens of thousands of American troops will be left behind in Iraq, even if he can make good on his campaign promise to pull all combat forces out within 16 months.

"I said that I would remove our combat troops from Iraq in 16 months, with the understanding that it might be necessary — likely to be necessary — to maintain a residual force to provide potential training, logistical support, to protect our civilians in Iraq,” Mr. Obama said this week as he introduced his national security team.

Publicly at least, Mr. Obama has not set a firm number for that “residual force,” a phrase certain to become central to the debate on the way ahead in Iraq, though one of his national security advisers, Richard Danzig, said during the campaign that it could amount to 30,000 to 55,000 troops. Nor has Mr. Obama laid out any timetable beyond 16 months for troop drawdowns, or suggested when he believes a time might come for a declaration that the war is over.

In the meantime, military planners are drawing up tentative schedules aimed at meeting both Mr. Obama’s goal for withdrawing combat troops, with a target of May 2010, and the Dec. 31, 2011, date for sending the rest of American troops home that is spelled out in the new agreement between the United States and the Iraqi government.

That status-of-forces agreement remains subject to change, by mutual agreement, and Army planners acknowledge privately that they are examining projections that could see the number of Americans hovering between 30,000 and 50,000 — and some say as high as 70,000 — for a substantial time even beyond 2011.

As American combat forces decline in numbers and more provinces are turned over to Iraqi control, these military planners say, Iraqi security forces will remain reliant on significant numbers of Americans for training, supplies, logistics, intelligence and transportation for a long time to come.

People with good memories will recall that this was essentially the same approach that Nixon and Kissinger devised to implement Nixon's secret plan to end the Vietnam War. They marketed it as Vietnamization, turning the war over to the Vietnamese to fight. It prolonged the war until 1975, resulting in the deaths of thousands more Americans, and who knows how many hundreds of thousands, if not more, Vietnamese.

Fast forward to the chaos in Iraq that was unanticipated by the architects of the 2003 invasion. What to do? The people around Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, more specifically comptroller Dov S. Zakheim, pondered the poor quality of the options available to them, and finally discovered an answer: yes, you guessed it, Vietnamization! Not very surprising given that Rumsfeld served in several posts in the Nixon administration, including US ambassador to NATO.

Or, as the Times reported: Mr. Zakheim has estimated that no more than 75,000 troops would be required, compared with the approximately 160,000 troops the United States will have in Iraq when the additional brigades in Mr. Bush’s plan are deployed. Sounds a lot like . . but that's getting a little ahead of ourselves.

Unfortunately for Rumsfeld and Zakheim, the ferocity of the Iraqi insurgency rendered a proposed draw down of US troops impossible (as it may still be today). As time passed, and the party primary season began, Hillary Clinton proposed her own variation of the Zakheim plan. Obama supporters implied that she was more hawkish than him because of it.

Now, with with Obama having subcontracted foreign policy out to Clinton, Obama has adopted his own variant. It will probably work about as well in Iraq as it did in Vietnam. From the standpoint of an American political figure like Obama, it does have the allure of forestalling acknowlegment of defeat while requiring Iraqis to incur even more of the casualties associated with the attempt to impose an American client state upon the country. No wonder Henry Kissinger is pleased with Obama's selection of Clinton to serve as Secretary of State.

Labels: American Empire, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Iraq War

The Daily Telegraph nails it:

Mr Obama has moved quickly in the last 48 hours to get his cabinet team in place, unveiling a raft of heavyweight appointments, in addition to Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State.

But his preference for General James Jones, a former Nato commander who backed John McCain, as his National Security Adviser and Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, a supporter of the war, to run the Homeland Security department has dismayed many of his earliest supporters.

The likelihood that Mr Obama will retain George W Bush's Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, has reinforced the notion that he will not aggressively pursue the radical withdrawal of all combat troops from Iraq over the next 16 months and engagement with rogue states that he has pledged.

By selecting such hawks, Obama is pushing antiwar supporters to the sidelines:

There is growing concern among a new generation of anti-war foreign policy analysts in Washington, many of whom stuck their necks out to support Mr Obama early in the White House race, that they will be frozen out of his administration.

Mrs Clinton is expected to appoint her own top team at the State Department, drawn from more conservative thinkers.

A Democratic foreign policy expert told one Washington website: "They were the ones courageous enough to stand up early against Iraq, which is why many supported Obama in the first place." Their fear, he added, is that they will not now secure the mid-level posts which will enable them to reach the top of the Washington career ladder in future.

Suspicion of Mr Obama's moves has been compounded, for some liberals, by the revelation that Mr Obama has for several months been taking advice from Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to the first President Bush.

His return to prominence in Washington represents a resurgence of the old school conservative realists, who were largely eclipsed during this Bush administration by the neoconservatives.

They place US national interests above the quest to defend human rights or to spread democracy. Progressives and liberals see Mr Scowcroft's hand in the move to retain Mr Gates, an old friend, at the Pentagon and also in the expected elevation of Gen. Jones.

The article, written by Tim Shipman, is a very good one that highlights the fundamental issues in play, despite recourse to some questionable characterizations of the participants. For example, the defense of human rights and the spread of democracy have often been a pretext for US imperial activity, as it was in Iraq, so advisors with such a background aren't necessarily superior to conservative realists. It all depends on the situation and the particular realist and human rights defender involved.

With this aside, the article points towards three important issues related to US democratic processes. First, Obama's abandonment of his antiwar advisors demonstrates how impervious the foreign policy establishment is towards even the most mildly dissenting view. US intervention in the Middle East has been historically bipartisan, and remains so. Regardless of any electoral result, representatives of the bipartisan consensus will remain in power, except that the means to achieve agreed upon objectives may change. Hence, US forces may soon find themselves predominately engaged in combat in Afghanistan, rather than the other way round in Iraq, but the goal of imperial dominance remains.

Second, there is the fact that the institutions of the military-industrial complex, as manifest in the Defense Department, Homeland Security, the Pentagon and, yes, even the State Department, possess accumulated institutional values that cannot be challenged within the electoral process. It is acceptable for ambitious people who intend to make careers in these institutions to make aggressive errors in support of US policy, recalling Barry Goldwater's famous line, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, but even the mildest criticism or public disclosure of internal decisionmaking processes is heresy.

Accordingly, that new generation of antiwar policy analysts in Washington has been taught a rather painful lesson. They won't make the mistake of publicly expressing their antiwar views again, if anything, they will err on the side of utterances of a markedly violent, unilateralist kind, and the generation behind them will be instructed to keep their mouths shut as well. We are not just experiencing a short term fight over patronage within the Obama administration, but one that will shape the contours of acceptable dissent within the foreign policy establishment for many years. It is a great tragedy that will cast a long shadow.

Finally, there is the even more frightening prospect as to whether the US electoral process itself is merely an entertainment spectacle for the purpose of inducing the public to believe that it has a power that it does not, in fact, have. Obama frequently relied upon his opposition to the war in Iraq to differentiate himself from Hillary Clinton. He emphasized it as an indication that his election would result in meaningful change, a departure from the bipartisan practices of military aggression that characterized the Bush presidency. And, yet, now we discover that Hillary will be approving the appointments to the State Department, and that his appointments to military, foreign policy and intelligence positions are nearly uniformly in support of the war, as is his chief of staff.

One is tempted to call this a coup, but that would be a mistake, because we are merely observing the intended operation of the system. Predictably, local progressives counsel me to be patient, even as the right pushes on, full steam ahead. Has American liberalism, or progressivism, if you like, been reduced to a form of social symbolism, divorced from the material realities of the world around it? We will soon find out, because Obama has already expressed his intention to send 15,000 to 25,000 more troops to Afghanistan immediately upon taking office. Will they object?

Labels: Activism, Afghanistan, American Empire, Barack Obama, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Iraq War, Liberals

The Clintons rolled Obama on foreign policy. Not only are we not getting out of Afghanistan, we aren't getting out of Iraq, either:

Before Hillary Clinton has been formally offered the job as Secretary of State, a purge of Barack Obama's top foreign policy team has begun.

The advisers who helped trash the former First Lady's foreign policy credentials on the campaign trail are being brutally shunted aside, as the price of her accepting the job of being the public face of America to the world. In negotiations with Mr Obama this week before agreeing to take the job, she demanded and received assurances that she alone should appoint staff to the State Department. She also got assurances that she will have direct access to the President and will not have to go through his foreign policy advisers on the National Security Council, which is where many of her critics in the Obama team are expected to end up.

The first victims of Mrs Clinton's anticipated appointment will be those who defended Mr Obama's flanks on the campaign trail. By mocking Mrs Clinton's claims to have landed under sniper fire in Bosnia or pouring scorn on her much-ballyhooed claim to have visited 80 countries as First Lady they successfully deflected the damaging charge that he is a lightweight on international issues.

Foremost among the victims of the purges is her old Yale Law School buddy Greg Craig, a man who more than anyone led the rescue of his presidency starting the very night Kenneth Starr's lurid report into the squalid details of the former president's sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky were published on the internet in 1998. Despite his long and loyal friendship with the Clintons, Mr Craig threw his lot in with Mr Obama at an early stage in the presidential election campaign. As if that betrayal to the cause of the Clinton restoration was not enough, Mr Craig did more to undermine Mrs Clinton's claims to be a foreign policy expert than anyone else in the some of the ugliest exchanges of the battle for the Democratic nomination.

Until this week he was poised to be the eminence grise of the State Department, organising as total revamp of America's troubled foreign policies on Mr Obama's behalf. Its turns out that Mrs Clinton's delay in accepting the president elect's offer to be his top foreign policy adviser had much to do with her negotiating the terms of the job and insisting on the right to choose her own state department staff and possibly even some of the plumb Ambassador postings. She wanted guarantees of direct access to the president – without having to go through his national security adviser. Above all she did not want to end up like Colin Powell who was completely out-manoeuvred by the hawkish Vice President Dick Cheney who imposed neo-conservative friends like John Bolton on the State Department and steered the US towards a policy of using torture to achieve its aims.

Leonard Doyle of The Independent tells the story as primarily one of political inside baseball, a story of personalities caught up in the fight for spoils as a new administration takes power. But it is much more serious than that. Hillary Clinton has been consistently hawkish in regard to Iraq and Iran, and her advisors, the people that are now going to find themselves in the State Department, despite backing the losing candidate, share those views:

It should come as no surprise that during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Obama spoke at a Chicago anti-war rally while Clinton went as far as falsely claiming that Iraq was actively supporting al-Qaeda. And during the recent State of the Union address, when Bush proclaimed that the Iraqi surge was working, Clinton stood and cheered while Obama remained seated and silent.

Clinton's advisors are similarly confident in the ability of the United States to impose its will through force. This is reflected to this day in the strong support for President Bush's troop surge among such Clinton advisors (and original invasion advocates) as Jack Keane, Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon.

Clinton's top foreign policy advisor -- and her likely pick for Secretary of State -- Richard Holbrooke, insisted that Iraq remained "a clear and present danger at all times." He rejected the broad international legal consensus against such offensive wars and insisted European governments and anti-war demonstrators who opposed a U.S. invasion of Iraq "undoubtedly encouraged" Saddam Hussein.

Clinton advisor Sandy Berger, who served as her husband's national security advisor, insisted that "even a contained Saddam" was "harmful to stability and to positive change in the region" and insisted on the necessity of "regime change." Other top Clinton advisors -- such as former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright -- confidently predicted that American military power could easily suppress any opposition to a U.S. takeover of Iraq.

By contrast, during the lead-up to the war, Obama's advisors recognized as highly suspect the Bush administration's claims regarding Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" and offensive delivery systems capable of threatening U.S. national security.

Now advising Obama, former Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, argued that public support for war "should not be generated by fear-mongering or demagogy." Brzezinski seems to have learned from mistakes like arming the Mujahideen. He warned that invading a country that was no threat to the United States would threaten America's global leadership because most of the international community would see it as an illegitimate act of aggression.

Another key Obama advisor, the Carnegie Endowment's Joseph Cirincione, argued that the goal of containing the potential threat from Iraq had been achieved as a result of sanctions, the return of of inspectors, and a multinational force stationed in the region serving as a deterrent. Meanwhile, other future Obama advisors -- such as Susan Rice, Larry Korb, Samantha Power, and Richard Clarke -- raised concerns about the human and material costs of invading and occupying a large Middle Eastern country and the risks of American forces becoming embroiled in post-invasion chaos and a lengthy counter-insurgency war.

These differences in the key circles of foreign policy specialists surrounding these two candidates are consistent with their diametrically opposing views in the lead-up to the war, with Clinton voting to let President Bush invade that oil-rich country at the time and circumstances of his choosing, while Obama was speaking out to oppose a U.S. invasion.

Hillary Clinton has a few advisors who did oppose the war, like Wesley Clark, but taken together, the kinds of key people she's surrounded herself with supports the likelihood that her administration, like Bush's, would be more likely to embrace exaggerated and alarmist reports regarding potential national security threats, to ignore international law and the advice of allies, and to launch offensive wars.

By contrast, as The Nation magazine noted, a Barack Obama administration would be more likely to examine the actual evidence of potential threats before reacting, to work more closely with America's allies to maintain peace and security, to respect the country's international legal obligations, and to use military force only as a last resort.

In terms of Iran, for instance, Cirincione has downplayed the supposed threat, while Clinton advisor Holbrooke insists that "the Iranians are an enormous threat to the United States," the country is "the most pressing problem nation," and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is like Hitler. This is consistent with Clinton's vote for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment that opened the door to a potential Bush attack on Iran, and with Obama's opposition to it.

Or, to put it concisely, Obama has subcontracted foreign policy out to Clintonista hawks.

Oh, but you say that he will stand up to them when Hillary, taking advantage of her direct line to the President, pushes their crazy interventionist ideas? Sure he will, just like he stood up to her when she and Bill demanded that he throw some of his most loyal foreign policy advisors over the side of the boat. This is beginning to look more and more like an unmitigated catastrophe. Even I'm shocked at the rapidity by which Obama is abandoning loyal constituencies in a misguided attempt to consolidate his power inside the Beltway. Meanwhile, I continue to get self-congratulatory e-mails from local progressives who supported Obama even as the election is stolen from them.

UPDATE: The content of The Independent article is briefly confirmed in a soft focus personality piece in today's New York Times.

Labels: American Empire, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Iraq War, War with Iran

An entertaining personal recollection of the Clinton years by Sam Smith of the Progressive Review.

Labels: Democrats, Elections, Hillary Clinton

Apparently, to be a member, you don't have to have an official position with the campaign. Just like you don't need to be a member of the Bush Administration to be a neoconservative. I guess it's too much to expect reporters at the New York Times to accept the limitations of journalism.

Labels: Hillary Clinton, Neoconservatives, New York Times

Labels: Barack Obama, Elections, Hillary Clinton

From the USA Today:

Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday to continue her quest for the Democratic nomination, arguing she would be the stronger nominee because she appeals to a wider coalition of voters — including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests.

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

Can't get more obvious than that, can you?

Labels: Barack Obama, Elections, Feminism, Hillary Clinton, Racism

. . . by suppressing the black vote. Killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis just didn't get the job done.

Labels: Barack Obama, Elections, Feminism, Hillary Clinton, Racism

Another article about the misogynistic treatment of Hillary Clinton that just can't seem to find any space to mention her vote to authorize the President to attack Iraq, her vote for to list Iran's Republican Guard as a terrorist organization, an act that, by itself, could be cited by Bush to justify an attack there as well, and her prodigious fundraising success with defense contractors. For the women interviewed, it seems, the lives of Iraqis and Iranians, regardless of gender, aren't very politically very important, being mostly Muslims and all.

Or, maybe, these women assume that all of us are militarists? Or, perhaps, the author cherrypicked the quotes to fit the story that she wanted to publish? That's always a strong possibility.

Oops, there is a brief throwaway reference to Clinton's support for the Iraq war in the last paragraph, after much handwringing and dismay as to the undercurrent of misogyny that the women interviewed perceive in relation to the excitement generated by Obama. It is, after all, essential that such subjects be placed in the appropriate context.

Labels: "War on Terror", Feminism, Hillary Clinton, Occupation of Iraq, War with Iran

From Sam Smith over at the Progressive Review:

. . . my work leads me into a frustrating dichotomy. At some points of the day I concern myself with the often trivial distinctions we make between candidates. But then, moments later, I find myself facing news that glaciers are in their worst shape in 5,000 years, that the Iraq War may cost $1 trillion, that Bush has assaulted the Constitution again, and that the financial markets are in their worst shape in decades. And none of the candidates who stand a chance of being elected - McCain, Clinton or Obama - have anything useful or meaningful to say on such topics.

Indeed, the candidates' emphasis upon trivialities is remarkable, as their campaigns look more and more contrived with each passing day. But it raises another related question: Is it an inevitable product of the US political process, and, if so, should we participate in it at all?

A couple of days ago, I commented upon the deficiencies of Obama's foreign policy positions over at Left I on the News, and suggested that we refuse to vote, because we merely legitimize this illusory process of political participation by doing so. After all, people have historically advocated electoral boycotts in a variety of contexts when it was apparent that an electoral process was being manipulated. Like any political strategy, sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't.

Eli Stephens over at Left I on the News rejected my suggestion:

Richard, not voting is precisely what the ruling class would love for you to do. By not voting at all, you are sending a message that you are one more apathetic American who is perfectly content in your own little house, and isn't concerned that the world is blowing up and falling down outside you. Every vote garnered by a Ralph Nader or a Cynthia McKinney or a Gloria La Riva is one more vote that says, OUT LOUD, that you are fed up with the system and want real change. Not voting is like having an antiwar protest in your living room. No one hears it.

In a different way, Justin Raimondo over at antiwar.com would reject it as well. In regard to the anti-imperialist struggle, he has exhibited, as a libertarian, a remarkable degree of political pragmatism. In 2004, he openly exhorted people to vote for John Kerry, in 2006, he fervently hoped for a Democratic victory, and, now, in 2008, it is clear that he wants to see Barack Obama elected as the next President. Given his belief that the anti-imperialist struggle is the essential one of our time, one that I share with him, he is quite willing to support political figures that are, in most other respects, antithetical to his libertarian philosophy. He is also willing to support them with full knowledge that none of them will bring the troops home tomorrow, but may assist with the creation of a social movement that will do so in the future.

But there are problems with the views of both Stephens and Raimondo. Stephens, to his credit, supports a candidate for President, Gloria La Riva, whose views closely parallel his own. But does a vote for her, or Nader or McKinney really say that I am fed up with the system and want real change? For those of you familiar with my postmodernist sensibility, it should come as no surprise that I doubt it. Instead, I tend to believe that the presidential campaign has become a manifestation of a spectacle of the kind described by Debord. In this instance, the imagery of the campaign has long ago substituted for the notion that we actually exercise political power by participating in it.

There is also the practical aspect, as presented in my original comment over at Left I. Do Nader, McKinney and La Riva challenge the system by standing as candidates, or do they legitimize it? If they did not run, there would only be two candidates, the Republican and the Democratic one. Regardless of the outcome, we could plausibly argue that much of society was not represented in it. But, what happens when, as in 2004, Nader runs and gets approximately 0.5% of the vote? Of course, the result is taken as proof that the remaining 99.5% of the voters were perfectly happy with a limited choice between the two major party candidates.

A response to Raimondo requires walking upon different terrain. As I said, his disciplined pragmatism is commendable. Most people find it hard to understand that, to obtain an absolutely essential result, one must often vote for candidates that have other disreputable qualities. He is consistently willing to do it in order to curtail, and eventually eliminate, US imperial influence. No, the flaw lies elsewhere. Raimondo is operating on the assumption that the person who becomes President matters in regard to transforming the American Empire. Or, to put it differently, that it is possible to elect someone who will retain their independence from the powerful interests that dominate this country and much of the world.

Unfortunately, a Napoleon, a Gorbachev, an FDR, they don't come around that frequently, and, even when they do, they require a confluence of external events, a backdrop of domestic and international turmoil, to empower them. Perhaps, we are living in such a time, but, as my evaluation of Obama and the activism of Direct Action to Stop the War indicate, I consider the underlying social aspects of US life more important than the political process, at least at this time. It is also important to note that Raimondo, unlike Stephens, is more willing to vote for a major party candidate as a form of long term reformism.

Labels: Barack Obama, Elections, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Justin Raimondo

UPDATE: People fought back, so now Ferraro is a victim. She's served her purpose for the Clinton campaign, and now it can go through the charade of accepting her resignation.

INITIAL POST: And their candidate for President is Hillary Rodham Clinton. Too bad Lester Maddox and George Wallace are dead, either would make a good vice presidential nominee, after all, doesn't she need help down south? And where are Sarah Jones and Chuck D. when you need them to confront this sort of thing?

Meanwhile, the establishment of the Democratic Party continues to sit on the sidelines as the Clintons and their surrogates, like Ferraro, ignite a racial firestorm that will burn the party down to the ground. As a non-aligned leftist, I can only marvel at their cowardice, even as the obvious appeals to bigotry, now that we have moved beyond the more subtle dog whistles, anger me. Is this the sort of world that I should anticipate, one in which the violence of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan persists indefinitely, while the Clintons mainstream the vitriolic politics of racial and gender division into the Democratic Party, and thus, much more broadly throughout society?

In this brave new world of perpetual warfare abroad and racial conflict at home, one wonders whether crowd control will become a growth industry. One also wonders whether the new found associates of these feminists like Ferraro, Steinem, NOW and Emily's List, those Rust Belt blue collar workers that have responded to Hillary's fear tactics, will become steadfast allies in the fight for choice. It seems rather improbable. Meanwhile, African Americans are likely to be preoccupied with more immediate concerns, increasingly unable to discern friends from enemies.

Labels: Barack Obama, Feminism, Hillary Clinton, Racism

UPDATE: Gaius provides his perspective, based upon his good memory when it comes to Democratic Party politics. Yes, Ferraro was a classic instance of the Peter Principle in action, someone who rose far beyond their capabilities, which renders her insulting remarks about Obama especially ironic. Oh, you want to know why some updates are posted separately, why others are not? Generally, the lengthier ones got separate post treatment, while shorter ones don't. And, then, of course, there's always the whim of the blogger.

INITIAL POST: No doubt, Ishmael Reed is not surprised. If African American men are not sinister threats, they are the recipients of opportunities to which they are otherwise not entitled, opportunities that come at the expense of others, in this instance, a white woman. African American women get it, too, even if Gloria Steinem doesn't.

I guess I shouldn't be shocked that Geraldine Ferraro said it, after all, Italian Americans and African Americans have historically gotten along so well in New York City. You just get the impression that some of the white female supporters of the Clintons believe that it would be an honor for Obama to drive Hillary around.

Labels: Barack Obama, Feminism, Hillary Clinton, Racism

A great article by JoAnn Wypijewski about the Clintons:

The people never have been interesting to the Clintons, not in organized, confident form. They have been interesting as election props and poll numbers, and interesting as victims, atomized, whose pain could be felt, causes championed, and misery exploited. They are interesting to Bill on rope lines, as exemplars of popular adulation and individuals to be charmed or lectured. Hillary used to hate the rope lines, hate being touched, and in the 1992 campaign she used to make sure that big men were around her to keep the plebs at bay. That changed as her ambition grew and she discovered Purell instant hand santizer. Having purelled universal health care as a live issue for a generation, she's back at it, just where she wants to be, as an answer to a murmured prayer, among a populace mobilized for nothing but elections.

Wypijewski masterfully summarizes the amorality of the Clintons in terms of their political practices. But that is not the source of the brilliance of the article. Others, including her friend, Alexander Cockburn, have done it many times in the past, although her piece is an exemplary exampe of the genre, and should be read in its entirety for that reason alone.

No, the brilliance lies elsewhere. Despite the fact that she never once uses the term postmodern or alludes to the postmodern condition, she has, by interweaving recent political history, personal experience and subjective analysis, presented one of the most concise descriptions of it in recent memory.

Consider Wypijewski's introduction:

Three weeks before the Ohio primary Blanche McKinney, an assistant manager at Stark Metro Housing and a member of CWA Local 4302 in Canton, told me, "Do we have the time to get someone in there who's inexperienced? No. It's got to be someone who on day one can immediately begin solving problems, because we don't have the time." Her union brothers in the group I was talking to were still undecided at that point, but McKinney was for Hillary. The only thing she wasn't sure she liked about the candidate was her health care plan: "a lot of Canadians don't like their program." She seemed relieved when I assured her Hillary was not promoting a Canadian-style single-payer system.

McKinney is solidly in Hillary's most solid base: 59, white, a woman, making less than =$50,000, rural. Although she works in Canton's public housing, she and her husband are also small farmers. He doesn't buy anything unless the label says "Made in America". She says she "never seriously thought this was a problem" but asks her union brothers anyway about Barack Obama's name and the "Muslim connection back then in Indonesia": "You say that doesn't bother you even a little?" The four men, three white and one black, said they didn't think so. Dustin Robinett, white, 33, an AT&T repairman, explained what he saw as Obama's slim "connection to the Muslim nation" (his father's childhood religion, his step-father's religion) before going into an extended consideration of multiculturalism, the melting pot, global experience, religion and politics, the habits of men: "we're all afraid of things that are different."

"In God we trust", said Bob Ramsey wryly, a long-hair AT&T inspector in a camo baseball cap, 41, white.

These were the first people I talked to during a week in Ohio before the primary, so it wasn't until later that I noticed there was something else about McKinney that seemed common among Clinton's most passionate supporters. Most really believed Hillary herself would begin to solve problems immediately upon taking residence at Pennsylvania Avenue. For all the talk after her victory of Hillary as "a fighter" and Ohioans as "fighters" and all of that being a perfect match -- the boxing gloves she held up at events, the endorsement from world middleweight champion and Youngstown native Kelly ("The Ghost") Pavlik -- what seemed truer was that Hillary's solid rank and file aren't fighters at all, or haven't been for a long time. The late Youtube entry into the campaign, a sequence of visuals from Clinton's TV commercials and some still photos backed by John Stewart's "Survivors," made the point precisely. Clinton Country doesn't fight; it survives, and hopes for deliverance.

Within these four paragraphs, Wypijewski identifies many of the primary features of postmodern politics in the US: (1) the marginalization of class conflict; (2) the accompanying demoralization of people who significantly viewed the world through the lens of their class identity and acted upon it; (3) mistrust of collective action and collective political solutions to social problems; (4) a vulnerability to appeals to fear and uncertainty, or, to put it differently, a reflexive tendency to associate the prospect of social transformation with unacceptable risk; and (5) a pseudo-religious reliance upon others for one's protection, and, perhaps, even more broadly, a willingness to relate to external events in pseudo-religious ways.

Wypijewski's social realism paradoxically invokes the abstract theory of Baudrillard as manifested in his early 1980s book, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. In Silent Majorities, he rejected the notion that the masses or social classes existed in such a way as to render the utopian abandonment of capitalist society possible. Of course, Baudrillard was far from the only person to develop this insight, but he did express it in a way that retains great contemporary relevance.

With the collapse of Marxism, there remains, according to this Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, only participation in the cultural creations of media and contemporary communications technologies:

Baudrillard's postmodern world is also one in which previously important boundaries and distinctions — such as those between social classes, genders, political leanings, and once autonomous realms of society and culture — lose power. If modern societies, for classical social theory, were characterized by differentiation, for Baudrillard, postmodern societies are characterized by dedifferentiation, the "collapse" of (the power of) distinctions, or implosion. In Baudrillard's society of simulation, the realms of economics, politics, culture, sexuality, and the social all implode into each other. In this implosive mix, economics is fundamentally shaped by culture, politics, and other spheres, while art, once a sphere of potential difference and opposition, is absorbed into the economic and political, while sexuality is everywhere. In this situation, differences between individuals and groups implode in a rapidly mutating or changing dissolution of the social and the previous boundaries and structures upon which social theory had once focused.

In addition, his postmodern universe is one of hyperreality in which entertainment, information, and communication technologies provide experiences more intense and involving than the scenes of banal everyday life, as well as the codes and models that structure everyday life. The realm of the hyperreal (e.g., media simulations of reality, Disneyland and amusement parks, malls and consumer fantasylands, TV sports, and other excursions into ideal worlds) is more real than real, whereby the models, images, and codes of the hyperreal come to control thought and behavior. Yet determination itself is aleatory in a non-linear world where it is impossible to chart causal mechanisms in a situation in which individuals are confronted with an overwhelming flux of images, codes, and models, any of which may shape an individual's thought or behavior.

It is tempting to say that the inevitable consequence of such a world, one which persists today, is disempowerment. In Ohio, Wypijewski encountered union members who could no longer respond to a presidential candidate who sought their active participation, and instead aligned themselves with the one who emotionally understood their passivity. But that requires us to speak in the language of a sociological perspective of the world that no longer exists.

Rather, it may be more accurate to say that in today's postmodern political environment, people have been conditioned through hyperreal experiences with media and communications technology to associate in ways that are hierarchical instead of egalitarian. The key phrase in the encyclopedia citation is the last one: Yet determination itself is aleatory in a non-linear world where it is impossible to chart causal mechanisms in a situation in which individuals are confronted with an overwhelming flux of images, codes, and models, any of which may shape an individual's thought or behavior.

Yes, you have the same question that I do: what does aleatory mean? Fortunately, wikipedia comes to the rescue: Aleatory means "pertaining to luck", and derives from the Latin word alea, the rolling of dice. Aleatoric, indeterminate, or chance art is that which exploits the principle of randomness. If luck is an increasingly powerful determinant in contemporary social and political outcomes, then, paradoxcially, the consequence is the reenforcement, if not expansion, of the current neoliberal political order, as people are disinclinded to believe that their rational decisions will result in any beneficial outcomes.

One need only spend some time around gamblers to immediately recognize the truth of this statement. In my experience, they were either completely disassociated from mainstream social and political experience, or, if not, prone to taking the most cynical and self-interested interpretation of people and events, leading them, quite predictably, to express a negative, reactionary perspective. Their utopianism ended rather abruptly at the card table or betting window.

The Clintons, as described by Wypijewski, have quite skillfully manipulated these social conditions to their advantage. But they merely constitute a symptom instead of the disease. It is easy to vent righteous anger towards them, but the fault lies, as you might guessed, not with them, but with us.

Labels: Activism, Hillary Clinton, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism