US Promoting Democracy in the Middle East? I Don't Think So.

I posted the following comment on Kevin Drum's blog in response to this post on Obama and democracy:

No US president can speak of "promoting democracy" in the Middle East as long as we are allied with and propping up dictators across the region, expanding a war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, failing to pay reparations to Iraq, and supporting Israel's denial of Palestinian refugees the right of return. Our overall effect in the region is utterly anti-democratic. You can't claim to promote democracy with one hand while you're holding people down and destroying societies with the other hand. Until the US ceases ALL its imperialist policies in the Middle East, it will be promoting tyranny and destruction there, not democracy. As I argued here, while Obama may be prettifying the face of US imperialism, he is preserving its core features, and the result is going to be more of the same for the Middle East (see also here). Finally, it's absurd for a US president to lecture the rest of the world about having an adequate civil society after the last eight years. It's the rest of the world that should be lecturing us.

Obama's Cairo Speech: Imperialism and the International Double Standard

Ali Abunimah of Electric Intifada has a great article on the speech for the Guardian that points out that "Once you strip away the mujamalat – the courtesies exchanged between guest and host – the substance of President Obama's speech in Cairo indicates there is likely to be little real change in US policy." You can see this by looking at the plan Obama laid out for individual conflicts, or you can look at the overall logic he applied to the Middle East.One way you can look at this logic is as a two-tiered system for evaluating responses to conflict: one for the US and its allies, and another for everyone else.

According to Obama, when the US is wronged, even when only a relatively small number of its citizens are affected, it has the right to respond with overwhelming force:

Over seven years ago, the United States pursued al Qaeda and the Taliban with broad international support. We did not go by choice, we went because of necessity. I am aware that some question or justify the events of 9/11. But let us be clear: al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on that day. The victims were innocent men, women and children from America and many other nations who had done nothing to harm anybody.

Al Qaeda's murder of 3,000 Americans justifies the invasion of Afghanistan, but America's invasion of Iraq, in which many times that number died, were injured, or were forced to flee their homes, doesn't justify resistance. Those who fight back against the American occupation of Iraq are "extremists" who have to be isolated. (As Matthew Yglesias pointed out a couple weeks ago, an "extremist" is generally anyone who doesn't accept American hegemony.)

Likewise, America's invasion of Afghanistan, its support for dictators across the Middle Easat, and Israel's expulsion of Palestinians from their land and its refusal to let them return don't justify resistance, even though all these policies are far more deadly and destructive than al Qaeda's attack against America. That's a double standard for the use of military force, which is one of the essential underpinnings for imperialism, and under Obama it will continue to be official US policy, despite all the pretty talk about respect and understanding.

Matthew Yglesias and Josh Marshall Debate Imperialist Strategy for Afghanistan

Matthew Yglesias and Josh Marshall are kicking around the pros and cons of American strategy for the Afghan invasion. Marshall has previously supported escalation of the invasion, but is now starting to have some doubts:

Furthermore, if you look at the history, the role of Afghanistan going back over the last few decades, wasn't so much that it allowed for safe havens but that the guerilla, semi-irregular wars there spun off thousands of violent, highly-trained and religiously intoxicated extremists who later spread out around the world spreading terror right and left. And that makes intensifying the conflict in Afghanistan to prevent the growth of safe havens a logically questionable proposition.

This is correct. Al Qaeda emerged out of the CIA-funded resistance to Russia's invasion. The Taliban emerged out of the resistance to the formerly CIA-funded warlords once they'd taken the country over and were running it into the ground. What this tells you, if you didn't know it already, is that when imperialist powers invade weak countries, the result is mass death and destruction, social breakdown, political chaos, and a power vacuum, which in turn lead to the rise of dictators or warlords, which in turn invite yet another round of imperial invasion, starting the cycle all over again.

This exact process is repeating itself right now in Pakistan. The US invasion of Afghanistan temporarily pushed the Taliban out of Afghanistan and forced them to take refuge and regroup in the Pashtun areas of Pakistan, where they had already established themselves. Meanwhile, US pressure on Pakistan forced the government and the army to turn at least partially against the Taliban, which the army and the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, had historically supported. This created a war between the Taliban and the Pakistani army that the army is now losing, which in turn is being used by the US to justify escalating its intervention in Pakistan.

Yglesias agrees that the US needs to stay in Afghanistan, but disagrees with the conventional wisdom that the US's goal should be the elimination of "safe havens" for terrorists. Instead, he think that the US needs to stay in Afghanistan to prevent Pakistan from being further destabilized. He thinks that this requires a political rather than a military solution, and that the US should therefore reduce its use of aerial bombardment, which frequently kills Afghan civilians, in favor of "protecting" civilians from the Taliban, which will supposedly stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan and turn public opinion against the Taliban.

There are several problems with this. First, the US and its warlord allies are no better at protecting the welfare of Afghans than the Taliban, and quite possibly are worse: the warlords, who the US put in power in the first place, are just as brutal and repressive as the Taliban, including in their treatment of women, and always have been, while economically, the Taliban was a significant improvement over the warlords. The US's various interventions, together with the Russian invasion, have been the cause of Afghanistan's instability, not the solution to it.

This pattern of imperial destabilization of Afghanistan doesn't start with the US and USSR. If you go back to the nineteenth century, you find Britain and tsarist Russia competing to dominate Afghanistan. The post-Stalin USSR continued Russia's role as imperialist power, while the US picked up where Britain left off. The current invasion of Afghanistan and its extension into Pakistan fit neatly into this historical pattern. Far from being a stabilizing influence in Pakistan (the ultimate goal of Yglesias's proposed Afghan policy), our invasion of Afghanistan is what destabilized Pakistan in the first place.

The core problem is that Yglesias is under the illusion that invading and occupying a foreign country are somehow going to lead to political stability. This is a dangerous and misguided notion, as I pointed out last week.

Finally, the most important point in this debate is one that neither Yglesias nor Marshall mentions: this invasion is morally intolerable. Strikingly, but unfortunately not surprisingly, neither Yglesias nor Marshall even bother to consider what the effect of the invasion is on Afghans and Pakistanis; their only concern is how it will impact American "national security." Thus, Yglesias writes:

Consider air strikes. If you define the goal as “eliminate safe havens” then maybe airstrikes that accidentally kill Afghan civilians aren’t that big a deal. By contrast, if we’re there to help Afghan civilians, then killing Afghan civilians is a very big deal.

Yglesias thinks that if all the US cares about is eliminating "safe havens," then killing Afghan civilians isn't a big deal. It all boils down to a policy choice for him: we only have to care about killing Afghans if we decide it's in our interest to.

I couldn't come up with a better illustration of the imperialist mindset if I tried.

Matthew Yglesias and the Whitewashing of Social Democracy

When American liberals look at the social democracies of Europe, they see generous welfare states whose policies they'd like to emulate. When liberals turn their attention to the social democratic parties' past, however, they often ignore these parties' history of militaristic and imperialist policies, resulting in serious distortions of the historic record.

This post by Matthew Yglesias is an excellent example of liberals' downplaying of these uncomfortable facts. In it he correctly notes that there was significant resistance to the Nazis from the SPD in the late twenties and early thirties. He also correctly observes that the Communist Party's strategy in 1929-33 of attacking the SPD as "social fascist" was a huge mistake. This policy was implemented by order of the Third Communist International (aka the Comintern), to which the CP belonged. At this time the Comintern was in its "third period" and under the firm control of Stalin, whose catastrophically bad strategies not only helped bring the Nazis to power in Germany but also led to the defeat of socialist forces in the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27. But Yglesias's assertion that the SPD were a force of resistance to the Nazis ignores the SPD's role in paving the way for the Nazis' rise to power during the German Revolution of 1918-23.

Even before the revolution began, the SPD had already embraced militarism and imperialism wholeheartedly. Like other reformist socialist parties in Europe, the SPD supported its home nation's entry into World War I, in gross violation of the basic socialist principle of international solidarity, which demands that workers not murder one another for the benefit of their national ruling class.

Prior to the war, the SPD, like all pre-war socialist parties, had claimed to support the principle of international solidarity and vowed to oppose any outbreak of imperialist war. As soon as this verbal commitment was tested, however, the SPD quickly repudiated it. The socialist parties that made good on their anti-war commitments split from the pro-war parties at the Zimmerwald Peace Conference of 1915 to form a new group under the leadership of Lenin that became known as the Zimmerwald Left.

The SPD again showed its reactionary tendencies in October 1918, as it was becoming apparent that Germany was going to lose the war. At this time, the kaiser invited the SPD to join the government with Prince Maximilian of Baden, the kaiser's cousin, as chancellor. The only catch was that the SPD would have to defend the monarchy, whose existence the SPD had always opposed in the past, and attempt to forestall a revolution that would overthrow it and replace it with a republic. The SPD acquiesced without any hesitation.

However, the SPD's most disastrous embrace of militarism was yet to come: its authorization of the creation of the Freikorps, a right-wing paramilitary organization, and its use of the Freikorps to crush all further revolutionary outbreaks after the overthrow of the monarchy. The Freikorps were first put to work during the Spartakus uprising of January 1919. The uprising was initiated by a group of workers who seized control of several newspaper buildings, including the SPD's Vorwarts, after listening to militant speeches by Karl Liebknecht of the Spartakists and Ernst Daumig of the revolutionary shop stewards. However, neither Liebknecht nor Daumig had called for the occupations; that was done entirely on the workers' own initiative.

Once the uprising began, it quickly became a mass movement under the leadership of the Independent Social Democrats (USPD), who had been ejected from the SPD in 1915 for their opposition to World War I, the revolutionary shop stewards, and the Spartakists. At the behest of the SPD, the Freikorps entered Berlin on January 11 and brought the uprising to a brutal end, murdering 158 people, including the Spartakist leaders Rosa Luxembourg, Karl Liebknecht and Leo Jogiches.

Over the next five years, numerous outbreaks of revolutionary action occurred, and each time the SPD deployed the Freikorps to crush independent workers' organizations and the Spartakus League/CP. By 1923, workers' power had finally been definitively crushed throughout Germany, while the forces of fascism had been greatly strengthened thanks to the government's support of the Freikorps and the military generally.

Both Stalin's decree of the "third period" in 1928-35 and the SPD's policies during the revolution of 1918-23 were catastrophic, but the fact that they happened wasn't an accident. Stalin and the SPD both claimed the mantle of socialism, but both of them were in fact opposed to many of the central tenets of Marxism, such as workers' solidarity, democracy and anti-imperialism. The SPD's behavior in the German Revolution proves that it was no less brutal or reactionary than Stalin or Hitler, and in fact laid much of the groundwork fo the latter.

To bring this back to Yglesias, the moral of this story is the close parallel between the SPD's professed socialism but actual militarism and Yglesias's professed liberalism but actual imperialism. While Yglesias has recanted his early support for the Iraq war and has become a prominent critic of the Iraq war, that hasn't stopped him from supporting Obama's surge in Afghanistan and extension of the war into Pakistan. Does Yglesias honestly believe that the Af/Pak war will succeed where the Iraq war failed? Until he repudiates imperialism completely and recognizes that thre is no such thing as a "good war" under imperialism, he will continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.

(For an account of the German Revolution, see Chris Harman's The Lost Revolution: Germany, 1918 to 1923 or Pierre Broue's The German Revolution, 1917-1923. For more information on the Third International, see Duncan Hallas's The Comintern: A History of the Third International.)