Day by day, the US/Israeli/Saudi directed counterrevolution intensifies the violence in North Africa and the Middle East. In Libya, NATO military operations obstensibly launched to prevent a mass slaughter of civilians is now being conducted for the express purpose overthrowing the Gaddafi regime. Predictably, an intervention originally described as one of limited duration has become open-ended, with British military advisors already on the ground. Libya therefore constitutes one form of the colonial manipulation of the democracy movements that have erupted across the Middle East, the incorporation of legitimate demands for social transformation within a broader context of increasing imperial control over the region. Given what has transpired in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt, the mission has an urgency that it would otherwise lack, the necessity of containing the liberatory social forces within those countries. Of course, the immediate victims are the people of Libya, caught between a violent, kleptocratic dictator and a rebel movement dependent upon NATO and religious extremists.

If they are not already concerned, the people of Egypt and Tunisia should be alarmed at what is happening nearby. Because of the weakness of the rebellion, the inability of its participants to remove Gaddafi without outside assistance, the door was opened for countries like France, Italy and the US to attempt to reassert a more overt imperial role. Hence, we should not dismiss the possibility that, if social reforms fail in Egypt and Tunisia, resulting in violent conflict, the US, Europe, and, more covertly, Saudi Arabia and Israel, will intervene to render them ungovernable. Such an outcome, analoguous to what transpired in Lebanon in the 1980s and, in a much more extreme case, Algeria in the 1990s, is a more acceptable outcome than the emergence of stable governments capable of charting an independent course. Indeed, it appears that the Saudis are already providing substantial funding to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and there are rumors that the violence between Copts and Muslims is being instigated by outside forces, such as, again, the Saudis. Meanwhile, Obama has publicly announced a carrot for Egypt, a billion dollars in loan guarantees and a billion dollars of debt relief, subject to Egypt's meeting its commitments, a euphemism for continued participation in the effort to crush Palestinian resistance in the occupied territories.

For the occupied territories remain the most vexing problem for the counterrevolutionaries. Despite the efforts of Fatah and Hamas, a Palestinian mass movement has stepped onto the stage in the most spectacular fashion, centered around, horror of horrors, the right of return for people exiled to refugee camps for decades. On Sunday, May 15th, the IDF found itself confronted by thousands of people, insistence upon entering Israel and the Golan Heights to return to the locations where they had once resided. Consistent with past practice when facing large numbers of Palestinians, it fired large ammunition, and, in Gaza, even artilliery shells. 15 died, with many more wounded. As with much lesser episodes of IDF violence, such as, for example, force directed against protests seeking to stop construction of the apartheid wall in the West Bank, there was no condemnation, and, in the US, there was nearly universal political support for Israel's actions. Protests are again planned for this weekend, and the IDF is naturally prepared to respond with force. The protests are an inevitable manifestation of something far more serious, the imposition of social control and surveillance measures throughout the occupied territories by Israel that make it impossible for any peace settlement, other than the creation of a new unitary state throughout all of Palestine, to be implemented. Accordingly, the IDF violence in response to the May 15th protests is a foreshadowing of much greater violence to come, as the segregated society of Palestine, both within and without the occupied territories, can only be perpetuated through the increased application of it.

As a consequence, Syria presents a counterrevolutionary dilemma. Certainly, the US, the Saudis and the Israelis would love to be rid of Assad, particularly because of the relationships that Syria has preserved with Hizbollah and Iran. But there is a serious problem. Assad has maintained control over the Syrian populace when it comes to challenging Israel over its retention of the Golan Heights and its treatment of the Palestinians. On May 15th, Assad either lacked the ability of use force to prevent protesters from attempting to enter the Golan, or had no inclination to do so because of criticism over his repressive measures to retain power. One need only look to Egypt to recognize what the US, the Israelis and the Saudis fear if Assad is removed, a newly assertive populace insistent upon ending collaboration with Israel. With the fall of Mubarak, the situation is so acute that the military is manipulating sentiment against Israel in order to preserve its socioeconomic privileges. A public expression of support for Israel is an act of political suicide, while harsh criticism is received enthusiastically. Thus, there will be no NATO airstrikes upon Syrian targets and the deployment of military advisors to assist the movement. The counterrevolutionary expectation is probably that Assad survives in a much weakened position, but even that is problematic, because Assad would find it much more difficult to impose restrictions upon political activity, as current events demonstrate.

Bahrain is a tragedy, one that will haunt the US much as the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel does. In Bahrain, the US and the Saudis, as discussed here previously, responded to the democracy movement by sectarianizing it, characterizing it as an Iranian inspired Shia scheme to destroy the monarchy. With US and Saudi acquiescene, the Sunni royal family has unleased a sadistic repression, rounding up Shia so that they can be tortured and raped, firing them from their jobs and bulldozing mosques. As stated here previously:

If Salih in Yemen and al-Khalida in Bahrain succeed in suppressing public protest, they will then proceed to impose even more severe authoritarian measures of social control, with the assistance of private contractors recommended by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia. As with the current violence, the US will issue public denunciations without adopting any measures to induce Salih and al-Khalida to ameliorate their repressive measures, indeed, as noted, it will instead provide covert aid to intensify them, hidden from public view through the black box of war on terror programs. The poor populace of both of these countries are going to soon find themselves subject to the sort of technological surveillance and violence inflicted upon people in the occupied territories and Afghanistan. The need to economically exploit these people for the benefit of the elites will be the only contraint upon it.

Indeed, the suppression of the Shia has been accompanied by a public relations campaign to assure everyone that all is well, so that people from countries in the developed world will feel comfortable enough to return and enjoy Bahrain as a tourist destination.

The counterrevolutionaires face an inescapable contradiction in Bahrain. In order for Bahrain to be rendered sufficiently stable in order to continue to play a valuable role in the perpetuation of US, Israeli and Saudi hegemony, it must modernize sufficiently to be incorporated into a global neoliberal axis that is hostile to feudalism and sectarian strife. Bahraini modernization therefore requires the creation of a Shia middle and upper middle class that associates their status with the policies of regime. But the Sunni elite cannot retain control of Bahrain without drawing sharp distinctions between Sunni and Shia so as to justify harsh measures against the Shia. In this, Bahrain has disturbing implications for the Saudis themselves. For the US, the problem is a different one. US troops still remain in Iraq, a country with a Shia majority. Opposition to the occupation remains strong, with recent public protests against it. The government does not feel secure enough to enter into an agreement to provide a legal authorization for US troops to continue to be stationed within the country. If they were under any doubt, events in Bahrain reveal what the US really thinks about the social and political empowerment of the Shia. As elsewhere, the counterrevolution is dependent upon the use of military force and repressive measures of social control to prevail, administered to the degree necessary.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Empire, Bahrain, Egypt, Gulf States, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia

Earlier today, President Obama delivered a speech concerning US objectives in the Middle East and North Africa. Overall, As'ad Abukhalil probably has it right: It is not that it brought nothing new: It was not even novel or original rhetorically. I don't see any reason why he delivered it.

The tiresome centerpiece of this speech was this gem about Palestine:

So while the core issues of the conflict must be negotiated, the basis of those negotiations is clear: a viable Palestine, and a secure Israel. The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine. The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state.

What one hand giveth, the other hand taken away, as the purpose of any land swaps is, of course, to allow Israel to retain settlements illegally constructed in the occupied territories. Furthermore, Obama is well aware that there is a tremendous power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians, as most recently evidenced in the Palestine Papers, so the notion that these swaps would result from a mutual agreement is merely an effort to legitimize a coercive process.

Zlyad Clot, one of the people responsible for their release, put it succinctly:

The peace negotiations were a deceptive farce whereby biased terms were unilaterally imposed by Israel and systematically endorsed by the US and EU. Far from enabling a negotiated and fair end to the conflict, the pursuit of the Oslo process deepened Israeli segregationist policies and justified the tightening of the security control imposed on the Palestinian population, as well as its geographical fragmentation. Far from preserving the land on which to build a state, it has tolerated the intensification of the colonisation of the Palestinian territory. Far from maintaining a national cohesion, the process I participated in, albeit briefly, was instrumental in creating and aggravating divisions among Palestinians. In its most recent developments, it became a cruel enterprise from which the Palestinians of Gaza have suffered the most. Last but not least, these negotiations excluded for the most part the great majority of the Palestinian people: the seven million Palestinian refugees. My experience over those 11 months in Ramallah confirmed that the PLO, given its structure, was not in a position to represent all Palestinian rights and interests.

Today, Obama announced that this farce will continue. But there is something else embedded in his speech that deserves comment as well. Obama rhetorically aligns himself with the liberatory aspirations of the protest movements that have proliferated throughout North Afica and the Middle East, while retaining a close alliance with monarchies in the Persian Gulf, most importantly, the House of Saud. For those of you with long memories, it should sound familiar. Back in the late 1970s, President Carter, along with his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, and his United Nations Ambassador, Andrew Young, emphasized the importance of human rights as an objective of US foreign policy, while announcing that the Gulf states now fell underneath a protective US military umbrella.

Needless to say, this is a policy that has become increasingly threadbare, with events in Palestine and Bahrain exposing the cynical calculation behind it. Throwing money at the problem in an effort to corral the fractuous revolutionary movements within safe, neoliberal boundaries, is one patchwork solution, with Obama promising US assistance to the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, but this is consistent with the paradoxical naivete that so characterized Carter's presidency, as I noted back in 2007:

Carter, as later, with Clinton, consciously eschewed the trappings of the imperial presidency, and emphasized a religious inspiration for his life in politics quite different than the fundamentalist kind repeatedly described by Bush. He, with a charming naivete, has sought to live a life of humble Christian service, and, while President, believed that the public would respond to his example, and his attempts to educate them. It was a simpleminded idealism that might have been very effective in a communitarian society, but it was destined to fail in the crucible of the final stages of the Cold War, with the contours of the coming neoliberal order, designed to drain away the energy of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, already visible.

Accordingly, it was now the primary function of leaders to depoliticize the social life of their countries, not encourage it, and sadly, a lot of people were ready to acquiesce. Carter, unlike his successors, lacked a clear understanding of his role, and, hence, swung between social and economic policies that disempowered people, and attempts to motivate people through education, appeals to rationality and community involvement (and, if necessary, sacrifice, as with his national energy policy).

In other words, Carter actually believed that Americans, and, indeed, people everywhere, could be persuaded to endorse an increasingly deregulated, privatized world under the benign oversight of the US, and, curiously enough, he still seems to believe it today.

There is very little in this analysis that cannot be equally applied to Obama. Unfortunately, just as the neoconservatives have consistently warned, the consequences of such a paradoxical fusion of realpolitik and idealism are combustible, as Carter discovered with the revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua.

And, as I observed in 2007, the US is now confronting an even more politically charged situation than Carter did:

Now that it has become evident, after Iraq, that the world cannot be subjected to the demands of transnationals and finance capital through force, Carterism suggests a rosier outcome through dialogue, multilateralism and economic coercion. If adopted, it will fail again, even more so than in the 1970s, because it retains that enduring American perspective that it is our mission to modernize the world in our image, despite increasing opposition to such an endeavor.

Nothing reveals the poverty of US policy in North Africa and the Middle East more than the fact that, faced with one of the most important political uprisings in human history, the US can only respond by throwing more gasoline onto the fire.

Labels: American Empire, Barack Obama, Egypt, Gulf States, Israel, Neoliberalism, Palestine, Tunisia

UPDATE 3: More on the situation in Suez, from Egyptian Chronicles. Apparently, clashes between the police and the protesters are intensifying, but the army has not been called into city. Instead, people may have mistaken the uniforms of the police for those of the military, as they are reportedly similar outside Cairo. It is well worth reading the Egyptian Chronicles post in its entirety.

UPDATE 2: An excerpt from an excellent interview of International Socialist Review editor Ahmed Shawki and Egyptian American activist Mostafa Omar by Lee Sustar:

WILL THE political demands of the protest merge with the economic demands of workers?

Mostafa: I'm not sure who put the call out for a national strike. But what happened on January 25 in the textile city of Mahalla is telling. A demonstration that started in the morning with 200 people had, by the end of the day, reached 45,000 people. I suspect a lot of workers who have been protesting want to continue demonstrating.

The other remarkable thing is that the Egyptian national trade union federation--led by people appointed by the government--has partially broken with the government in the two weeks following the Tunisian uprising. They want price controls, an increase in wages and a system of subsidized outlets for basic food. People can't find staples like tea and oil. For the union officials to demand this is unheard of, because these people supported neoliberalism. That is the impact of Tunisia.

Meanwhile, the conditions facing workers are growing worse. The official unemployment figure is 12 percent, but the real figure is 24 or 25 percent. Food prices are out of control. One kilo of tomatoes--a staple good--is $2; it used to be 35 cents not long ago. That's prohibitively expensive in a country where government workers make only about $26 a month. The question of hunger is real. And now the IMF is pressuring the government to remove the subsidies on gasoline prices.

That's a big reason why--and people in the West often miss this--there has been an increase in the workers' struggle over the last three years. Every day, there's a strike--and on the day of action, there were 12 major strikes. The government settled them right away by promising everything they wanted.

THE U.S. media focuses always on the supposed threat of "Islamic radicalism" in Egypt as in the rest of the Middle East. Is it a factor in this struggle?

Mostafa: Twice now, the Muslim Brotherhood has abstained from any call for a national strike or a national demonstration. First in 2006, and again this year, it didn't support the day of anger.

They are still the biggest political force in the country, but they refuse to enter into a confrontation with the government. It's really the workers' movement and the radical youth that are the driving force, not the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is still the main opposition party with the most clout, but it isn't behind this at all.

A lot of young people and workers coming into the movement in the last two weeks are open to democratic and socialist ideas. Even a lot of the young supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood are open to a different analysis--one that doesn't just see the conflict as Islam vs. the West. On one protest, for example, an obviously religious man carried a sign that said it doesn't matter if you're Muslim or Christian, join the struggle.

That's a big change from January 1, when violent attacks on Christian churches made it seem like the country was on the verge of civil war between Muslims and Christians. Last year saw more attacks on Christian churches than any time in modern Egyptian history. But today, there are many Christians who have joined in common struggle with Muslims against the police and corrupt state, even though church leaders called on them to stay away from the protests.

All this means that there is an opening for the left--especially the socialists--to grow. There is new blood in the movement, and the Muslim Brotherhood isn't fighting. It's the left that is taking up this fight, along with new radicals.

By way of background, it is important to remember that the IS, through people like the late Chris Harman, and, probably, Ahmed Shawki as well, placed a strong emphasis upon establishing an enduring contact with the Egyptian working class. Mostafa Omar's emphasis upon public dissatisfaction with deteriorating economic conditions, and the delegitimization of governmental institutions that accompanies them, is evocative of Greek protests in late 2008 and early 2010, even if the Greek protests possessed an enduring anti-authoritarian character that, to date, has not yet clearly emerged in the current Egyptian ones.

Hat tip to t at Pink Scare

UPDATE 1 (3;27PM Pacific time): Unconfirmed reports that the Egyptian army has replaced the police on the streets of Suez, with all forms of communication shut down by the government. Meanwhile, the streets of Cairo remain unsettled.

INITIAL POST: For those of you who have Facebook accounts (and, please, now is not the time to argue the merit of it), you can go to the We Are All Khalid Said page for updates in addition to the other web sources that I provided yesterday. The most recent posts on the wall (11:42AM, Pacific time) there indicate that the protests remain intense, and that the government has yet to suppress them. For example, there are reports from Suez that the city remains under the control of protesters and that the government is using live ammunition against them. Meanwhile, other reports state that there is street fighting across central Cairo. Some express the hope that the protesters are outlasting the military and the police, who are increasingly fatigued. Of course, Lenin's Tomb, The Arabist and 3arabawy remain good sources of information as well.

And, here's the latest from The Guardian, which also provides a live blog for breaking news:

Running battles between police and anti-government protesters continued in Egypt for a second day, despite the declaration of an official ban by the government on protests and gatherings, and a massive deployment of police in the country's capital.

Riot police and plain clothes officers armed with staves and bars broke up a demonstration outside one of Cairo's biggest tourist hotels, the Ramses Hilton, on the banks of the river Nile.

Tonight groups of demonstrators and police are still playing a violent game of cat and mouse through the city centre's streets – with protesters quickly re-grouping after being broken up.

The sound of police sirens and detonating tear gas canisters could be heard across the city, in the biggest protests against the regime of 82-year-old president Hosni Mubarak in three decades.

Finally, I believe that the protests in Egypt are a good opportunity for us to recognize the false classifications that permeate media coverage of the events there. For example, there is the fact that Tunisia, where the first protests erupted, is considered North African, while Egypt is Middle Eastern, despite their close proximity to one another and their socioeconomic relationships with European countries across the Mediterranean. All three of these vague geographic classifications have stereotypes associated with them, and can lead to absurd results, as As'ad Abukhalil observed today:

Who are those people who cover the Middle East in the New York Times

Look at this sentence: Word of the broad protests in Egypt were slow to circulate here, given that Egyptian television was not reporting them. Tell the writer that every home in the Middle East is able to watch hundreds of channels, including news channels like Aljazeera which covers the entire world. How dumb is this?
Posted by As'ad at 10:30 AM

It is not hard to imagine how reporter John Leland wrote this statement given the internalization of a Eurocentric hierarchy that considers Europeans cultured, North Africans imperfectly so, after all, Tunisia, Morroco and Algeria had the purported benefit of a prolonged French imperial occupation, and Middle Easterners least so. Such a stereotype erases the social, economic and cultural cross-pollination that has occurred not only in recent decades, but over two thousand years of Mediterranean, African and Asian history. Hence, the very plausible possibility that the protests in Tunisia and Egpyt are also related to the ones in Greece is ignored, while we are still subjected to the use of that implicitly pejorative term, with its implications of otherness, emotion and irrationality, the Arab street in relation to this subject.

Apparently, the use of the term is so deeply ingrained that one incessantly encounters it everywhere, even in reports originating in the Arab and Muslim world. It appears to serve the primary purpose of foreclosing any meaningful engagement with what is actually happening in the places under discussion, as well as distancing Americans and Europeans from the aspirations of Arab and Muslim people with which they might otherwise more strongly identify. Of course, the Palestinians have been the most tragic victims in this regard. For those who accept the stereotypes associated with Arabs and Muslims, Israel remains a bastion of European civilization in an otherwise primitive world.

As already noted, there is a different way of relating to what is happening in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere, one that attempts to take into account the social, cultural and economic richness of their lives, one that fully humanizes them, an approach to which I alluded in my review of Tariq Ali's recently released novel, Night of the Golden Butterfly:

One of the most compelling aspects of the novel is Ali's recognition that the adored Maoism of his youth was rooted in Han Chinese nationalism, and hence, could not ultimately provide a model for revolutionary change in the lesser developed world. Here, we hear an echo of his tragic recollection of China's realpolitik decision to align itself with Pakistan when Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) attempted to secede in 1971. Islamic rightists taunted leftists like Ali as they killed and raped the populace, shouting Chairman Mao is with us, not you! He brings this out through the Jindie, a Pakistani Chinese Muslim woman whose family emigrated to Pakistan in the late 19th Century after the Han suppression of a Muslim rebellion in Yunnan province.

Here, too, as he has done in the earlier novels of the Quintet, Ali touches a upon a theme much highlighted by anthropologists in recent decades, the mutability of ethnic identity. In The Art of Not Being Governed, James Scott describes how the hill peoples of Southeast Asia took on new identities, with changes of religion, social organization and language, seemingly at the drop of a hat in response to perils. While the course of Jindie's life is not this extreme, she is, by the end of the novel, a Pakistani Chinese Muslim who has raised a family in the US. What is she? Pakistani? Chinese? Muslim? American? Of course, the answer is that she is all of them, and more, she is, first and foremost, a woman.

Ali has publicly said that he was motivated to become a novelist by his interest in discovering what do you do in a period of defeat? His brilliance lies in his decision to excavate, contemplate and give fictional representation to this subject within the context of Islam and its relationship with Christianity and the West. But his recognition of the importance of the experiences of people like Jindie also suggests that a resurgent left will someday emerge, centered around an understanding that people have a multiplicity of identities beyond the simplistic ones imposed upon them.

Although we have yet to fully develop such an understanding, the protests in Tunisia and Egypt suggest that we may be closer to doing so that we realize, and, moreover, the more that we adopt this perspective, the more successful we will be.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Egypt, Europe, Israel, Neoliberalism, Tunisia

Esam Al-Amin summarizes the events that brought down the Ben Ali dictatorship in Tunisia:

On December 17, Mohammed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old unemployed graduate in the central town of Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire in an attempt to commit suicide. Earlier in the day, police officers took away his stand and confiscated the fruits and vegetables he was selling because he lacked a permit. When he tried to complain to government officials that he was unemployed and that this was his only means of survival, he was mocked, insulted and beaten by the police. He died 19 days later in the midst of the uprising.

Bouazizi's act of desperation set off the public's boiling frustration over living standards, corruption and lack of political freedom and human rights. For the next four weeks, his self-immolation sparked demonstrations in which protesters burned tires and chanted slogans demanding jobs and freedom. Protests soon spread all over the country including its capital, Tunis.

The first reaction by the regime was to clamp down and use brutal force including beatings, tear gas, and live ammunition. The more ruthless tactics the security forces employed, the more people got angry and took to the streets. On Dec. 28 the president gave his first speech claiming that the protests were organized by a minority of extremists and terrorists and that the law would be applied in all firmness to punish protesters.

However, by the start of the New Year tens of thousands of people, joined by labor unions, students, lawyers, professional syndicates, and other opposition groups, were demonstrating in over a dozen cities. By the end of the week, labor unions called for commercial strikes across the country, while 8,000 lawyers went on strike, bringing the entire judiciary system to an immediate halt.

Meanwhile, the regime started cracking down on bloggers, journalists, artists and political activists. It restricted all means of dissent, including social media. But following nearly 80 deaths by the security forces, the regime started to back down.

On Jan. 13, Ben Ali gave his third televised address, dismissing his interior minister and announcing unprecedented concessions while vowing not to seek re-election in 2014. He also pledged to introduce more freedoms into society, and to investigate the killings of protesters during the demonstrations. When this move only emboldened the protestors, he then addressed his people in desperation, promising fresh legislative elections within six months in an attempt to quell mass dissent.

When this ploy also did not work, he imposed a state of emergency, dismissing the entire cabinet and promising to deploy the army on a shoot to kill order. However, as the head of the army Gen. Rachid Ben Ammar refused to order his troops to kill the demonstrators in the streets, Ben Ali found no alternative but to flee the country and the rage of his people.

On Jan. 14 his entourage flew in four choppers to the Mediterranean island of Malta. When Malta refused to accept them, he boarded a plane heading to France. While in mid air he was told by the French that he would be denied entry. The plane then turned back to the gulf region until he was finally admitted and welcomed by Saudi Arabia. The Saudi regime has a long history of accepting despots including Idi Amin of Uganda and Parvez Musharraf of Pakistan.

Al-Amin also exhaustively documents the complicity of the US and European governments, so it is worth reading his article in its entirety. The French were so supportive of Ben Ali that the foreign minister of the Sarkozy government, Michele Alliot-Marie, offered the assistance of French security forces to put down the rebellion. Meanwhile, President Obama avoided any substantive comment on the situation until the outcome was decided. Or, as As'ad Abukhalil ascerbically said:

The funny announcement by Obama yesterday has clear conclusions: the US administration is thus officially in support of its dictators around the world until the time when they are overthrown. So Obama continued to support the Tunisian dictator until the time when he left the country.

Apparently, the US wasn't that concerned with the fact that the Ben Ali regime had killed between 150 to 200 people since the uprising began on December 17th. Perhaps, it was because the US considered the Ben Ali regime an important ally in the war on terror:

The Tunisian Government is an important ally for the U.S. in its resource-driven colonial wars with Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. A United Nations report on secret detention practices lists Tunisia as having secret detention facilities where prisoners are held without International Red Cross access. Intelligence services in Tunisia cooperated with the U.S. efforts in the War on Terror and have participated in interrogating prisoners at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan and in Tunisia.

And, then, there is the disappointment that the US may lose the ability to continue to persuade future Tunisian governments to impose policies of austerity as Ben Ali did:

. . . Tunisia -- more than almost any country in the region -- has followed the dictates of Washington and the International Monetary Fund in instituting structural adjustment programs in privatizing much of its economy and allowing for an unprecedented level of free trade. These policies have increased rather than decreased unemployment while enriching relatives and cronies of the country's top ruling families. This has been privately acknowledged by the U.S. embassy in a recently-released wikileaks cable, which labeled the U.S.-backed regime as a kleptocracy. The U.S. has also been backing IMF efforts to get the Tunisian government to eliminate the remaining subsidies on fuel and basic food stuffs and fuel and further deregulate its financial sector.

Predictably, the meticulous lenin provides us with the factual and analytical details of this embrace of neoliberalism by Ben Ali:

Globally, the dictatorship aligned itself with neoliberal institutions, acceding to GATT, then joining the WTO. Throughout the 2000s, it forged a closer relationship with the EU, under an agreement removing all tariffs and restrictions on goods between the two. France and Italy have been its main export and import partners in this period. Given his zeal in prosecuting the war against terrorism throughout the 1990s, which mission he took to the UN and the EU, Ben Ali was an obvious candidate to be a regional ally in the Bush administration's programme for reconfiguring the Middle East in America's (further) interests in the context of the war on terror. Ben Ali thus joined Team America, alongside other lifelong democrats such as Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah.

The results of Ben Ali's authoritarian neoliberalism for capital were impressive in their way: GDP on a par with the European periphery, low public-sector deficit, controlled inflation and renewed credit-worthiness. The financial sector was reformed and initially experienced a mini-boom. Significant sections of the public sector were turned over for profitable investment. A total of 160 state owned enterprises have been privatised. The stock market capitalisation of the 50 largest companies listed on the Bourse de Tunis was worth $5.7bn by 2007. Ben Ali's famously, corruptly wealthy family also made a mint from the boom. He himself became a darling of the EU and the US, conferring global prestige on his regime. The cost of all this to the working class, though concealed in some of the official figures, was just as significant. High unemployment, growing inequality, the removal of subsidies for the poor, rising housing costs and weaker welfare protections are among the added burdens of the Tunisian working class in the neoliberal era.

This does not mean that the average working class person has experienced an absolute decline in income throughout this period. In fact, the development of the cities has meant more people moving from the poorer rural areas to cities and towns where absolute poverty is less common. What it means is that wage growth has been suppressed by the government, and made conditional upon productivity rises. In the private sector, liberalisation means that the discipline of the market has been used to extract higher productivity from the workforce. The total effect is that more of the wealth that has been generated has gone into the pockets of the very rich. In simple terms, it means that the rate of exploitation has been increased. For as long as the political opposition was effectively suppressed, and for as long as the trade union movement was effectively subjugated, the old order could continue. But that in turn depended on the regime's ability to boast that it was creating a wealthier economy that would eventually benefit everyone. That is, the viability of the regime rested on the viability of neoliberal institutions, both domestically and globally - and that is exactly what has taken a knock.

lenin's exposition is enlightening because of his recognition that the so-called war on terror and the imposition of neoliberal economic policies are interrelated aspects of the same social process. It is difficult for one to exist in the absence of the other, as the invasion and occupation of Iraq demonstrated. Without the invasion, there would have been no subsequent attempt to incorporate the Iraqi economy into the neoliberal order. Meanwhile, elite support for the invasion was dependent upon this opportunity to privatize a heavily socialized economy.

Hence, the Ben Ali regime comes across as one that recalls Pinochet's Chile, one that actively participated in the repression of people considered enemies of the US, while serving as an economic laboratory for policies that the US would like to see imposed globally. Much as Pinochet proselytized against the leftist peril that he reduced to communism, prefiguring the rise of Reagan and Thatcher, Ben Ali was an anti-terrorism missionary, preaching his gospel prior to the creation of the Project for a New American Century and 9/11.

Indeed, the parallels between Operation Condor, a sort of Phoenix Program brought to the southern cone of South America by Pinochet and his regional allies in the 1970s, and the current war on terror are striking:

Operation Condor (Spanish: Operación Cóndor, also known as Plan Cóndor, Portuguese: Operação Condor), was a campaign of political repression involving assassination and intelligence operations officially implemented in 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America. The program aimed to eradicate alleged socialist and communist influence and ideas and to control active or potential opposition movements against the participating governments. Due to its clandestine nature, the precise number of deaths directly attributable to Operation Condor is highly disputed. It is estimated that a minimum of 60,000 deaths can be attributed to Condor, possibly more. Condor's key members were the governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. The United States participated in a supervisory capacity, with Ecuador and Peru joining later in more peripheral roles.

So, like a mistress attending the funeral of her married lover, US officials present a public appearance of stoicism while privately shedding tears of sorrow for the passing of the Ben Ali regime. We can only hope that the rebellion succeeds in eradicating whatever the residual power of his supporters so that the archives of the military and interior ministry can be opened to scrutiny in order to discover what horrors US and Tunisia intelligence perpetrated. Given the military's astute decision to act against Ben Ali's supporters in the security forces, as described by Al-Amin, it remains doubtful that this will happen.

FOOTNOTE: lenin has also written several other excellent posts about the Tunisian situation, which can be found here and here and here. In the last one, he ponders the peril that the revolution may pose for other US allies in the region:

But if, as seems increasingly possible, the revolt spreads and takes down some other pro-American regimes in Egypt, Jordan or Algeria, then Obama has problems. One can well imagine him, despite his ongoing commitment to aggression in Afghanistan and Pakistan, going down as a Carter-style weakling if a few US embassies in the region start to look vulnerable. Which is why I would expect some sort of panicked intervention by the US and its local proxies to be going on even as you read.

If only someone in one these embassies would get in contact with wikileaks. Just imagine the valuable service that it could provide by releasing sensitive diplomatic cables related to US actions in Tunisia in close to real time.

Labels: "War on Terror", Activism, Africa, American Empire, Chile, IMF, Neoliberalism, Political Violence, Poverty, Sadomasochism, South America, Tunisia

Of course, the Angry Arab is essential if you want an independent perspective on what has happened there that doesn't rely exclusively on American and European sources. As noted here previously, the dictatorship of Ben Ali has been a stalwart ally in the so-called war on terror, which probably explains the belated US response to the turmoil there.

Labels: "War on Terror", Activism, Africa, American Empire, Political Violence, Tunisia