Amazon.com Widgets

As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Like Borat In The Antique Shop

The United States in the Fourthbranch era really does resemble Borat in an antique shop, constantly knocking shit over, and claiming we're going to fix everything as we simultaneously make it worse. What's similar, however, is that, just like Borat, we're playing a role, and we're not actually interested in making ANYTHING better, least of all through this bumper sticker of democracy promotion

The Washington Post today has an Iranian detainee pleading with the Bush Administration to stop with the happy talk of "bringing democracy" to Iran, because it's only making the nation more and more autocratic:

A radio reporter being detained in Iran urged the Bush administration yesterday to end its vocal campaign for democracy there, saying it encouraged Iran's government to curtail its citizens' freedoms [...]

(Parnaz) Azima said the Bush administration's $66 million campaign to promote change inside Iran through Persian-language news, entertainment and music broadcasts has spurred President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government to work to eliminate Iran's democracy movement.

"I hope that Mr. Bush's administration doesn't repeat this. This is a very serious mistake," she said. "The open announcements about funding democracy in Iran have angered the government, and now they have one goal -- to crush those activities and to put pressure on the Iranian activists, especially those who are inside Iran."


This isn't the first time we've heard about Iran curtailing freedoms recently. They are arresting and purging the country of its intellectual class, particularly academics. They're also enforcing censorship codes, cracking down on protesters, and forcing civil society groups into hiding. Why is this happening now? The Iranian economy is in a lot of trouble. They were forced to ration gasoline today because, while being an exporter of oil, they don't have the refining capacity to keep up with domestic demand. Gas stations were burned by angry motorists. And the whole economy is showing problems, not just the energy sector.

Like any authoritarian society threatened by popular unrest, the mullahs are cracking down on dissent. But they have an incredible ally in this: the United States. All this public rhetoric about regime change in Iran, and particularly about the military options, has led to where we are: an unpopular government that can still garner popular support by pointing to American infilitration.

Michael Hirsh's Newsweek article about life in Iran tells a pretty robust story:

The president's effort, launched more than a year ago, has so far had the opposite effect of what Bush intended. Even though it's made little headway in promoting discontent with the regime, the mullahs have used it to intimidate reformers by tainting them as U.S. collaborators. "All the local democracy [groups] are complaining about it," said Azima, a thin, frail woman wearing a beige manteau and paisley higab, in an interview at her lawyer's office. "They don't want to have contact with me." [...]

Such is the paradox of Iran today. After years of turmoil, including mass street protests against the regime in the 1990s, the revolution has adapted. Among the public, political apathy now reigns. Active political opposition to Islamic rule is all but gone. And the current government, led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is adopting a rather savvy tactic of letting ordinary people enjoy themselves a bit and, above all, taste the fruits of prosperity. He can afford to do so, sitting on $70 billion to $80 billion in oil revenue a year, which he uses to subsidize Iran's isolated economy (though Ahmadinejad has become widely unpopular for reintroducing state control of private business and driving up inflation). At the same time, his government is permitting less and less political dissent. Radio and TV are totally controlled by the government, and newspapers—which remain quasi independent—were recently confronted with a new, stricter censorship code [...]

The success of this oppressive but subtly effective system should give the regime-change advocates in Washington some pause. From the evidence in the streets of Tehran, there is no indication that this is a government or a political system that's ripe for overturning. In fact most Iranians—government officials and opposition figures alike—tend to poke fun at the Bush democracy program. "If the Americans are willing to spend their budget inside [Iran] for the purpose they are pursuing, they should just give the money to us directly," Ali Larijani, the chairman of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told NEWSWEEK with a laugh. "They are just distributing it through the wrong channels."


I know "understanding the enemy" is verboten in American foreign policy, but we might want to try it sometime before we pour a bunch of money down a sinkhole in the name of "democracy promotion." Countries are obviously going to react with a certain protectiveness about their sovereignty when they see this major effort to undercut them from the outside. This is also true in Gaza, where we've had our thumbs on the scale of democracy ever since we recklessly pushed elections, only to see Hamas come out as the victor. As Juan Cole put it:

The events of the past few days have driven a nail into the coffin of Bush's "democratization" program for the "Greater Middle East." The Haniyah Hamas government had come to power in free and fair elections, but was immediately boycotted, starved of resources, and actually often simply kidnapped by the Israelis; and is now being put out of office in a kind of coup. The people of the Arab world are not blind or stupid. If this is what the "Greater Middle East" looks like, it will too closely resemble, for their taste, the colonial 19th century, When Europeans dictated government to Middle Easterners.


I would submit that this is pretty much exactly how the neocons want things to go in the Middle East, particularly in Iran. Rather than seeing democracy flourish from the bottom up, they would RATHER make an open and awkward statement of regime change, forcing the Iranians to become more belligerent, further opening tensions and pushing toward a wider war. In Palestine, I believe the idea was to bring Hamas out into the open so they could be cut off and humiliated, through the "thumbs on the scale" promotion of Fatah over them. They may have even wanted to isolate them in Gaza, making it easier to starve them out. These are some dangerous games that The Fourthbranch Administration is playing, and they're designed to increase the possibilities of more global combat, more use of weapons and defense contractors, and more projection of massive American military might. Some people just don't learn any lessons.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

|