[Peace-discuss] US foreign policy, June 2009

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Season of Travesties: Freedom and Democracy in mid-2009
	Jul 09, 2009 By Noam Chomsky

June 2009 was marked by a number of significant events, including two elections 
in the Middle East: in Lebanon, then Iran. The events are significant, and the 
reactions to them, highly instructive.

The election in Lebanon was greeted with euphoria. New York Times columnist 
Thomas Friedman gushed that he is "a sucker for free and fair elections," so "it 
warms my heart to watch" what happened in Lebanon in an election that "was 
indeed free and fair — not like the pretend election you are about to see in 
Iran, where only candidates approved by the Supreme Leader can run. No, in 
Lebanon it was the real deal, and the results were fascinating: President Barack 
Obama defeated President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran." Crucially, "a solid 
majority of all Lebanese -- Muslims, Christians and Druse -- voted for the March 
14 coalition led by Saad Hariri," the US-backed candidate and son of the 
murdered ex-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, so that "to the extent that anyone came 
out of this election with the moral authority to lead the next government, it 
was the coalition that wants Lebanon to be run by and for the Lebanese -- not 
for Iran, not for Syria and not for fighting Israel." We must give credit where 
it is due for this triumph of free elections (and of Washington): "Without 
George Bush standing up to the Syrians in 2005 -- and forcing them to get out of 
Lebanon after the Hariri killing -- this free election would not have happened. 
Mr. Bush helped create the space. Power matters. Mr. Obama helped stir the hope. 
Words also matter."

Two days later Friedman's views were echoed by Eliott Abrams, a senior fellow at 
the Council on Foreign relations, formerly a high official of the Reagan and 
Bush I administrations. Under the heading "Lebanon's Triumph, Iran's Travesty," 
Abrams compared these "twin tests of [US] efforts to spread democracy to the 
Muslim world." The lesson is clear: "What the United States should be promoting 
is not elections, but free elections, and the voting in Lebanon passed any 
realistic test....the majority of Lebanese have rejected Hezbollah's claim that 
it is not a terrorist group but a `national resistance'...The Lebanese had a 
chance to vote against Hezbollah, and took the opportunity."

Reactions were similar throughout the mainstream. There are, however, a few 
flies in the ointment.

The most prominent of them, apparently unreported in the US, is the actual vote. 
The Hezbollah-based March 8 coalition won handily, by approximately the same 
figure as Obama vs. McCain in November 2008, about 54% of the popular vote, 
according to Ministry of Interior figures. Hence by the Friedman-Abrams 
argument, we should be lamenting Ahmadinejad's defeat of President Obama, and 
the "moral authority" won by Hezbollah, as "the majority of Lebanese...took the 
opportunity" to reject the charges Abrams repeats from Washington propaganda.

Like others, Friedman and Abrams are referring to representatives in Parliament. 
These numbers are skewed by the confessional voting system, which sharply 
reduces the seats granted to the largest of the sects, the Shi'ites, who 
overwhelmingly back Hezbollah and its Amal ally. But as serious analysts have 
pointed out, the confessional ground rules undermine "free and fair elections" 
in even more significant ways than this. Assaf Kfoury observes that they leave 
no space for non-sectarian parties and erect a barrier to introducing 
socioeconomic policies and other real issues into the electoral system. They 
also open the door to "massive external interference," low voter turnout, and 
"vote-rigging and vote-buying," all features of the June election, even more so 
than before. Thus in Beirut, home of more than half the population, less than a 
fourth of eligible voters could vote without returning to their usually remote 
districts of origin. The effect is that migrant workers and the poorer classes 
are effectively disenfranchised in "a form of extreme gerrymandering, Lebanese 
style," favoring the privileged and pro-Western classes.

In Iran, the electoral results issued by the Interior Ministry lacked 
credibility both by the manner in which they were released and by the figures 
themselves. An enormous popular protest followed, brutally suppressed by the 
armed forces of the ruling clerics. Perhaps Ahmadinejad might have won a 
majority if votes had been fairly counted, but it appears that the rulers were 
unwilling to take that chance. From the streets, correspondent Reese Erlich, who 
has had considerable experience with popular uprisings and bitter repression in 
US domains, writes that "It's a genuine Iranian mass movement made up of 
students, workers, women, and middle class folks" - and possibly much of the 
rural population.  Eric Hooglund, a respected scholar who has studied rural Iran 
intensively, dismisses standard speculations about rural support for 
Ahmadinejad, describing "overwhelming" support for Mousavi in regions he has 
studied, and outrage over what the large majority there regard as a stolen election.

It is highly unlikely that the protest will damage the clerical-military regime 
in the short term, but as Erlich observes, it "is sowing the seeds for future 
struggles."

As in Lebanon, the electoral system itself violates basic rights. Candidates 
have to be approved by the ruling clerics, who can and do bar policies of which 
they disapprove. And though repression overall may not be as harsh as in the 
US-backed dictatorships of the region, it is ugly enough, and in June 2009, very 
visibly so.

One can argue that Iranian "guided democracy" has structural analogues in the 
US, where elections are largely bought, and candidates and programs are 
effectively "vetted" by concentrations of capital. A striking illustration is 
being played out right now. It is hardly controversial that the disastrous US 
health system is a high priority for the public, which, for a long time, has 
favored national health care, an option that has been kept off the agenda by 
private power. In a limited shift towards the public will, Congress is now 
debating whether to allow a public option to compete with insurers, a proposal 
with overwhelming popular support. The opposition, who regard themselves as free 
market advocates, charge that the proposal would be unfair to the private 
sector, which will be unable to compete with a more efficient public system. 
Though a bit odd, the argument is plausible.  As economist Dean Baker points 
out, "We know that private insurers can't compete because we already had this 
experiment with the Medicare program. When private insurers had to compete on a 
level playing field with the traditional government-run plan they were almost 
driven from the market." Savings from a government program would be even greater 
if, as in other countries, the government were permitted to negotiate prices 
with pharmaceutical corporations, an option supported by 85% of the population 
but also not on the agenda. "Unless Congress creates a serious public plan," 
Baker writes, Americans "can expect to be hit with the largest tax increase in 
the history of the world -- all of it going into the pockets of the health care 
industry." That is a likely outcome, once again, in the American form of "guided 
democracy." And it is hardly the only example.

While our thoughts are turned to elections, we should not forget one recent 
authentically "free and fair" election in the Middle East region, in Palestine 
in January 2006, to which the US and its allies at once responded with harsh 
punishment for the population that voted "the wrong way." The pretexts offered 
were laughable, and the response caused scarcely a ripple on the flood of 
commentary on Washington's noble "efforts to spread democracy to the Muslim 
world," a feat that reveals impressive subordination to authority.

No less impressive is the readiness to agree that Israel is justified in 
imposing a harsh and destructive siege on Gaza, and attacking it with merciless 
violence using US equipment and diplomatic support, as it did last winter. There 
of course is a pretext: "the right to self-defense." The pretext has been almost 
universally accepted in the West, though Israeli actions are sometimes condemned 
as "disproportionate." The reaction is remarkable, because the pretext collapses 
on the most cursory inspection. The issue is the right TO USE FORCE in 
self-defense, and a state has that right only if it has exhausted peaceful 
means. In this case, Israel has simply refused to use the peaceful means that 
have been readily available. All of this has been amply discussed elsewhere, and 
it should be unnecessary to review the simple facts once again.

Once again relying on the impunity it receives as a US client, Israel brought 
the month of June 2009 to a close by enforcing the siege with a brazen act of 
hijacking. On June 30, the Israeli navy hijacked the Free Gaza movement boat 
"Spirit of Humanity" -- in international waters, according to those aboard -- 
and forced it to the Israeli port of Ashdod. The boat had left from Cyprus, 
where the cargo was inspected: it consisted of medicines, reconstruction 
supplies, and toys. The human rights workers aboard included Nobel Laureate 
Mairead Maguire and former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who was sent to 
Ramleh prison in Israel - apparently without a word from the Obama 
administration. The crime scarcely elicited a yawn - with some justice, one 
might argue, since Israel has been hijacking boats travelling between Cyprus and 
Lebanon for decades, kidnapping and sometimes killing passengers or sending them 
in Israeli prisons without charge where they join thousands of others, in some 
cases held for many years as hostages. So why even bother to report this latest 
outrage by a rogue state and its patron, for whom law is a theme for 4th of July 
speeches and a weapon against enemies?

Israel's hijacking is a far more extreme crime than anything carried out by 
Somalis driven to piracy by poverty and despair, and destruction of their 
fishing grounds by robbery and dumping of toxic wastes - not to speak of the 
destruction of their economy by a Bush counter-terror operation conceded to have 
been fraudulent, and a US-backed Ethiopian invasion. The Israeli hijacking is 
also in violation of a March 1988 international Convention on safety of maritime 
navigation to which the US is a party, hence required by the Convention to 
assist in enforcing it. Israel, however, is not a party - which, of course, in 
no way mitigates the crime or the obligation to enforce the Convention against 
violators. Israel's failure to join is particularly interesting, since the 
Convention was partially inspired by the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1985. 
That crime ranks high in Israel and the West among terrorist atrocities -- 
unlike Israel's US-backed bombing of Tunis a week earlier, killing 75 people, as 
usual with no credible pretext, but again tolerated under the grant of impunity 
for the US and its clients.

Possibly Israel chose not to join the Convention because of its regular practice 
of hijacking boats in international waters at that time. Also worth 
investigating in connection with the June 2009 hijacking is that since 2000, 
after the discovery of apparently substantial reserves of natural gas in Gaza's 
territorial waters by British Gas, Israel has been steadily forcing Gazan 
fishing boats towards shore, often violently, ruining an industry vital to 
Gaza's survival. At the same time, Israel has been entering into negotiations 
with BG to obtain gas from these sources, thus stealing the meager resources of 
the population it is mercilessly crushing.

The Western hemisphere also witnessed an election-related crime at the month's 
end. A military coup in Honduras ousted President Manuel Zelaya and expelled him 
to Costa Rica. As observed by economist Mark Weisbrot, an experienced analyst of 
Latin American affairs, the social structure of the coup is "a recurrent story 
in Latin America," pitting "a reform president who is supported by labor unions 
and social organizations against a mafia-like, drug-ridden, corrupt political 
elite who is accustomed to choosing not only the Supreme Court and the Congress, 
but also the president."

Mainstream commentary described the coup as an unfortunate return to the bad 
days of decades ago. But that is mistaken. This is the third military coup in 
the past decade, all conforming to the "recurrent story." The first, in 
Venezuela in 2002, was supported by the Bush administration, which, however, 
backed down after sharp Latin American condemnation and restoration of the 
elected government by a popular uprising. The second, in Haiti in 2004, was 
carried out by Haiti's traditional torturers, France and the US. The elected 
President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was spirited to Central Africa and kept at a 
safe distance from Haiti by the master of the hemisphere.

What is novel in the Honduras coup is that the US has not lent it support. 
Rather, the US joined with the Organization of American States in opposing the 
coup, though with a more reserved condemnation than others, and without any 
action, unlike the neighboring states and much of the rest of Latin America. 
Alone in the region, the US has not withdrawn its ambassador, as did France, 
Spain and Italy along with Latin American states.

It was reported that Washington had advance information about a possible coup, 
and tried to prevent it. It surpasses imagination that Washington did not have 
close knowledge of what was underway in Honduras, which is highly dependent on 
US aid, and whose military is armed, trained, and advised by Washington. 
Military relations have been particularly close since the 1980s, when Honduras 
was the base for Reagan's terrorist war against Nicaragua.

Whether this will play out as another chapter of the "recurrent story" remains 
to be seen, and will depend in no small measure on reactions within the United 
States.

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3922