Aljazeera (Arabic) reported on a conference of Arab thinkers and commentators entitled “The Arab Revolution and Democracy – The roots of sectarianism and how to combat it” organized by the Arabic Centre for the study and research in political thought. It warns that “sectarian and ethnic tensions and divisions are complicating and impeding the birth of democracy in the region.”

These obstacles and problems on the road to true democracy should come as no surprise to any objective observer of events.   Those with vested interests in the old despotic regimes are not going to relinquish their power and wealth so easily. Driving the revolution into the destructive blind alley of sectarianism and ethnicity is their way of countering the glorious revolution of the young.

Azmi Bishara, head of the Centre, opined that these sectarian tensions should have been expected and “it is wrong and naïve to sweep them under the carpet of unity”

Wajeeh Kanso, academic at the University of Lebanon, believes that “sectarianism is an ever present danger” because knowledge of the true democratic ideals is superficial among the populace, citing – and regretting – the lack of representation of the young revolutionaries in the new parliaments.

I agree that there are these dangers. The question, however, is this: are those divisions really deep in society or are they being played up and heightened by counter-revolutionary forces and corrupt politicians to shore up their power base?  I believe it is the latter, even in Iraq where the fabric of Iraqi society was ruptured by the illegal war.

Egypt, a pivotal country in the Arab world, is still a revolution in progress. The Egyptian people are now struggling with the military junta that still more or less represents the old regime. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo to commemorate the first anniversary of the revolution on 25 January, and to remind the Supreme Council of the Armed forces that currently rules Egypt that they have not gone away and will continue their protests until full democracy is established.  What happens in Egypt matters and will have a profound influence on the rest of the Arab World.

I am not as pessimistic as many commentators are; the reason being that this revolution is grass roots based; it is not led by army officers spouting nationalism and empty slogans, only to become worse than the kings and despots they replace. The revolutions are led collectively by young people who have, particularly in the cases of Tunisia and Egypt, given the world a lesson in the power of mass peaceful action.  They have shown that their idealism, passion, resilience and their courage are stronger and more powerful than the instruments of repression and violence wielded by the regimes of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak.  Their tenacity in using peaceful means to fight the forces of darkness is nothing short of miraculous.

The revolutionary young of Egypt are fully aware that more needs to be done.  Al-akhbar Arabic Newspaper (27 January) quotes some of the people in Tahrir Square and gives a flavour of the slogans on banners, such as “Down with military rule” and “Where is our revolution, Field Marshal, we do not feel any change?”  in reference to Field Marshal Tantawi, Head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).  One demonstrator was quoted as saying:

What we achieved needs to be safeguarded… and most important to remember is that some of the actions of the military junta are more brutal than those of the dictator Hosni Mubarak.  The revolution must continue until full powers are transferred to an elected government.

The chains of fear imprisoning the Arab people have been broken by the revolutionary young; the genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back. The tide of pent up yearning to be treated with dignity, respect and to be free is triumphant. Sectarianism is but one of a number of setbacks and difficulties on that road on which Arab masses have embarked. But make no mistake, these will be overcome and Arabs will be free.

In this past year as the world witnessed uprisings from Santiago to Zuccotti Park to Tahrir Square, social media has been lauded as a weapon of mass mobilization. Paul Mason, a BBC correspondent, wrote in his new book published this month Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, (excerpted in the Guardian) that this new communications technology was a “crucial” contributing factor to these revolutionary times. Nobel peace laureate and Burmese human rights campaigner, Aung San Suu Kyi, pointed out in a lecture in June that this “communications revolution…not only enabled [Tunisians] to better organize and co-ordinate their movements, it kept the attention of the whole world firmly focused on them.” CNN even ran an article comparing Facebook to “democracy in action”, while Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who was imprisoned in Egypt for starting a Facebook page told Wolf Blitzer that the revolution in Egypt “started on Facebook” and that he wanted to “meet Mark Zuckerberg some day and thank him personally.”

While the positive contributions of technology to social movements and uprisings have been been amply noted, if not overstated, more attention needs to be paid to the intrinsic dangers looming in the co-optation of this technology-driven networking, specifically by Washington, but by other repressive governments as well.

Clay Shirkey, professor of New Media at New York University, wrote in the January/February 2011 issue of Foreign Affairs that “the state is gaining increasingly sophisticated means of monitoring, interdicting, or co-opting these tools.”

The Dangers of Digital Diplomacy

The Senate report, “Latin American Governments Need to ‘Friend’ Social Media and Technology” was written at the request of U.S. Senator Richard G. Lugar (R-IN) in order to assess the U.S. Department of State’s use of digital diplomacy.

“Despite Latin America’s broad social and economic progress, many countries in the region still face challenges to democracy similar to those recently seen in the Middle East,” wrote Lugar in the introduction to the report. “In the extreme cases, countries like Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua are led by authoritarian leaders who curtail civil and political freedoms.”

The report urges improving internet infrastructure in the region, along with expanding the use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter as essential in order to advance Washington’s foreign policy interests. This is also identified as a way to reassert Washington’s influence in a part of the world where it has been perceived to be waning since the Bush Administration and the subsequent rise of center-left governments in the region.

“In particular, the characteristics of Latin American social media use and engagement of connectivity resources…indicate that this area could be primed for substantial positive change in a manner similar in nature, if not in process, to that recently observed in the Middle East,” the report states.

The right-leaning journal Americas Quarterly praises this “smart idea” calling it “an innovative strategy to advance U.S. goals”, one of them being the need to “ramp up our data collection and research on the impact of social media and technology on fostering democracy in the region, particularly Venezuela.”

This all falls under what has been dubbed 21st Century Statecraft, the brainchild of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“Traditional forms of diplomacy still dominate, but 21st-century statecraft is not mere corporate re-branding—swapping tweets for broadcasts. It represents a shift in form and in strategy—a way to amplify traditional diplomatic efforts, develop tech-based policy solutions and encourage cyberactivism,” explains the New York Times in a July 2010 article.

Described as a “marriage of Silicon Valley and the State Department,” Washington has turned to “Software engineers, entrepreneurs and tech C.E.O.’s…to think of unconventional ways to shore up democracy and spur development” abroad.

“On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does,” said Clinton in a speech on internet freedom in January 2010.

In August 2011 the Washington Post reported findings by the Lowy Institute for International Policy which show that U.S. State Department officials now operate some 230 Facebook accounts, 80 Twitter feeds, 55 YouTube channels and 40 pages on Flickr.

But Judith McHale, former under secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department, gave a more honest assessment in March 2011 of what’s driving the State Department’s new initiative, stripped of the flowery and misleading language of freedom and democracy.

“New media and connective technologies enhance our ability to listen…Social media provides new ways for us to keep our ear to the ground,” said McHale. “Of course, we are not interested in developing social media platforms for the sake of having them. We are interested in applying social media to promote our strategic objectives in the Americas.”

But as history has shown, Washington’s strategic interests are often antithetical to freedom and human rights. And it is naïve to think that the State Department would be conducting this form of diplomacy in “a principled and regime-neutral fashion,” as intellectual apologists like Anne-Marie Slaughter may profess. And in Latin America, ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) countries are undoubtedly in Washington’s cross-hairs.

During a June 30, 2011 Senate hearing,“The State of Democracy in the Americas”, Senator Lugar asked Roberta Jacobson, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of the Western Hemisphere at the time, to name programs specifically targeting ALBA countries. Jackson noted in her answer that the “Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor has programs that support media training in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Ecuador; these programs address the use and impact of social media, along with traditional topics such as independent journalism, investigative reporting, and overcoming self-censorship.”

All of these countries have democratically-elected governments, and while they all are struggling in varying ways to build stronger democratic institutions and to translate democratic rhetoric into functioning policy, Washington’s meddling in internal affairs through 21st Century Statecraft is dangerous for social movements and democratic activists.

The Social Networking Counterinsurgency

On February 3, 2011 the Senate held a hearing examining US intelligence agencies’ alleged lack of anticipation of the uprisings in Egypt. Afterwards, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said “she was particularly concerned that the CIA and other agencies had ignored open-source intelligence on the protests, a reference to posts on Facebook and other publicly accessible Web sites used by organizers of the protests against the Mubarak government,” the Washington Post reported. The CIA has an Open Source Center, where analysts based in a headquarters in an undisclosed location in Virginia, along with analysts in working in U.S. Embassies (“to get a step closer to their subjects”) throughout the world monitor as many as millions of tweets per day, along with Facebook updates and other open source media outlets.

Wired Magazine reported in July that the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. Wired’s Adam Rawnsley points out:

It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself…SMISC is supposed to quickly flag rumors and emerging themes on social media, figure out who’s behind it and what.

Furthermore, the military solicited contracts for the development of software to create fake Facebook personas, to be “replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent,” the Raw Story reported in February. Private security contractor HB Gary has already been exposed for doing such a thing on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce as a way to “infiltrate left-leaning groups” in the country, as ThinkProgress revealed last year courtesy of 75,000 private company emails provided by the hactivst group Anonymous.

These strategies are particularly cynical given the following passage from Lugar’s Senate report:

Collaborators of President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela recently hacked the Twitter accounts of opposition activists. Staff strongly believes that this example indicates how policy needs to take into consideration the extent repressive governments will take to silence democratic voices using this technology.

What officials seem to be saying is: never-mind what happens in this country. The fact that the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring “social media sites, blogs, and forums throughout the world” isn’t important. And while US corporations are selling surveillance systems to repressive regimes, that’s just the free-market supply and demand economics at work.

And even if, “What elevated the [Occupy Wall Street] activism to a national and global movement, though, was the sophisticated and widespread use of social media,” as Betty Yu, national organizer at the Center for Media Justice, wrote last month, these same tools can, and are, being used to monitor, undermine and co-opt these and similar movements.

So if Washington approaches Latin American governments with aid for internet infrastructure and training, citizens and governments should approach this as a very loaded Trojan Horse.

I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita … ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’.

— J. Robert Oppenheimer, 22 April 1904 – 18 February 1967
Scientific Director of the Manhattan Project, on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Chilling ironies surely do not come much greater than the Nobel Peace Prize winning President of the United States, in an election year, having contributed to global instability and the possibility of nuclear conflict, to such an extent that the “Doomsday Clock”, maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago, has this week been moved to five minutes to midnight.

The forward-creeping hands of the symbolic clock, maintained since 1947, two years after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, indicate the closest to global catastrophe in twenty six years, with the exception of 2007, when the hands were similarly set under the gung-ho “Bring ‘em on”, presidency of George W. Bush.

What a world away from Obama’s June 2009 speech at Egypt’s Al Azhar University, where he declared he was in Cairo: “… to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims round the world (and to) share … tolerance and dignity…”

He asserted: “There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another and to seek common ground … the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful then the forces that drive us apart.”

Tell that to the bereaved, maimed, homeless Libyans, Iraqis, Afghans, the US-menaced people of Syria, over one third of whom are  fourteen or under; the annihilation-threatened Iranian population, nearly a quarter also children, fourteen years or under.

Tell it to Iran, so demonized, yet which generously hosts one of the largest refugee populations in the world. (1999 UNHCR figures cite at a cost then, to embargoed Iran, of ten million $s a day.)

Tell it also to the droned and blown (away) of Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia.

A “ … sustained effort to listen …”, has been largely denied the untried, incarcerated, abused, tortured in Bagram and Guantanamo’s “gulags of our times”, as totally during the Obama presidency as the years before.

But back to the ticking Atomic clock. Alarmingly, the furthest from “midnight” it has ever been is seventeen minutes, in 1991, when the US and then Soviet Union, under George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (31 July), a heartening seven minute leap from the ten to midnight of 1990, even that, in spite of the onslaught of the 32 nation war on Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait. The Berlin Wall had, however, fallen and the Cold War seemed to be ending.

In 1963, 1972, both years of seemingly ground breaking arms limitation treaties between the US and Soviet Union, the clock still stood at ten minutes to midnight.

Even when India tested a nuclear device, and the US and Soviet Union both modernized their destructive potential in 1974, the clock stood four minutes further away from annihilation than Obama’s contribution – then at nine minutes to midnight.

As the United States aircraft carriers, Carl Vinson and John C. Stennis, bristling with nuclear and other holocaustal weapons,  and twitchy testosterone-fuelled troops, steam Iran-wards, to either bomb nuclear installations – with the danger of a potential nuclear winter – or bomb to keep the Straits of Hormuz open for one fifth of the world’s oil supplies – the clock is just two minutes back from when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in 1947, officially starting the nuclear arms race.

It is three minutes from the two minutes to midnight – the most apocalyptic ever – of 1953, when both the US and Soviet Union tested thermo-nuclear devices within nine months of each other.

There are about 19,000 nuclear weapons in the world according to the Science and Security Board. That’s enough to blow up the Earth many times over. We are really in a pickle”, says Kennette Benedict, Executive Director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, of their latest clock re-set.

“Recognizing our common humanity is only the beginning of our task”, said President Obama, in Cairo, when some believed his “Yes, we can”, meant peace, and a new dawn for the planet and humanity.

No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation on any other. It’s easier to start wars than to end them.… It’s easier to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share.  But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path.

There’s one rule that lies at the heart of every religion  – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

This truth transcends nations and peoples — a belief that isn’t new; that isn’t black or white or brown; that isn’t Christian or Muslim or Jew.† It’s a belief that pulsed in the cradle of civilization, and that still beats in the hearts of billions around the world. It’s a faith in other people, and it’s what brought me here today”, he concluded.

Indeed! Beware of Presidents bearing Nobel Peace Prize tags.

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1871)

The lexicon of Israel and its Western lobbyists constantly needs parsing to know just what is meant. Most glaringly is the term “settlers”, which suggests peaceful pioneers wishing to integrate with the locals. In Israel, the word “settlers” is a loaded term, for they are “aggressive squatters, half a million of them in over 100 illegal colonies — ugly blots on an otherwise lovely landscape … who terrorise local villagers, vandalise their crops, pollute their land and harass their children,” as described by Stuart Littlewood. The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids that an occupying power transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

Most recently we saw casual reference to native Christian and Muslim Palestinians as an “invented people”. US Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich revived this insult, repeating Gold Meir’s quip in 1969 to The Sunday Times. At the time, Israel was basking in its devastating victory in the 1967 war, occupying all of Palestine and Sinai. The eternal Sinai Bedouin are fortunate that Meir didn’t have enough time — or gall — to claim that they too are a mere figment of some anti-Jewish schemer’s imagination. Their cousins in the Negev desert are now being expelled to make way for 10 Jewish settlements “to attract a new population to the Negev”.

Meir was extrapolating on her more famous phrase, also recorded in the same Sunday Times interview, that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land”. Not only is this a cruel lie, one intended to justify theft of a people’s land, but it is a case of plagiarism, as it was Lord Shaftsbury, an early enthusiast of using a Jewish state in the Middle East as an imperial beachhead, who first used the phrase in 1839.

Meir surely knew this, just as she knew that it is not the Palestinians, a people who can trace their heritage back to the time of the Prophet Mohammed or further, but the Israeli people who are the “invented” ones. Israeli citizenship is barely 60 years old, and Israelis are a disparate lot, made up most of East European and Russian immigrants and Arab Jews, most of whom do not share a common language or even religious practice. The Russian immigrants, many of whom are not even Jewish, are defiantly secular.

Even worse than invented people are “unpeople”, a term George Orwell coined in 1984 (1948) to refer to the complete elimination of people by vaporising them, leaving no trace. Israel’s growing arsenal of nuclear and white phosphorus bombs actually bring this reality uncomfortably close for Palestinians and other Arab neighbours of Israel.

Noam Chomsky points out that in October, Western media applauded the release of IDF prisoner Gilad Shalit, kidnapped in 2006 — during an illegal Israel attack on Gaza — in exchange for a thousand Palestinians, kidnapped for, well, simply being unpeople in the wrong place at the wrong time. One almost thinks the Israelis like to randomly jail thousands of these unpeople as collateral to retrieve the few “real people” caught in criminal acts, and then pride themselves that one Jew is more precious than a 1000 Arabs.

What about the claim of the representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations in May 1947, who said “‘Palestine’ was part of the province of Syria” and that, “politically, the Arabs of Israel were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity.” Yes, the very notion of a nation state is a 19th century concept, and arose only as a result of imperialism spreading around the world, with the result that there are two kinds of nationalism — the empire’s, built on racism and exploitation of the Third World (hence “Rule Britannia” and “the Jewish State”) and the national liberation movements in the periphery (hence Palestine). So, when it comes down to it, we are all invented peoples, one way or another.

Another lexical sleight-of-hand that Palestinians have to fight is the now standard reference to “Jews versus Arabs”, which should be “Jews versus Muslims and Christians” or rather “diaspora Jewish colonisers versus native colonial subjects”, as many Jews are of Arab origin and “Jewish” in the first place refers to a religious affiliation. There is no Jewish nationality, despite Stalin’s decision to create one in the 1930s, just as there is no Muslim or Christian nationality, but rather a Jewish faith.

Even many Western Jewish critics of Israel such as Independent Jewish Voices say one thing and mean another. For them, fighting anti-Semitism is the primary goal. Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JfJfP) state that they “extend support to Palestinians trapped in the spiral of violence and repression” because they “believe that such actions are important in countering anti-Semitism”. In other words, even as they use words critical of Israeli atrocities, they effectively condone Israeli actions (as long as they are not too atrocious). Given that these critics are a tiny group, they act “to vindicate the Jewish people of crimes committed by the Jewish State in the name of the Jewish people”, says ex-Israeli Gilad Atzmon.

So it is hardly any wonder that Egyptians are looking closely these days at the meaning of the word “peace”, as in “peace between Israel and Egypt”. An important part of the 1979 Peace Treaty was the clause that guaranteed “full autonomy” for the Palestinians within five years. For 27 years, Israel has been violating this clause. Instead of “full autonomy”, three decades on, the Palestinians are being called an “invented people”, and the US patron of this treaty is winking as Israeli leaders prepare to ethnically cleanse this imaginary people.

Following Egypt’s revolution last year, the treaty immediately became a political football, with just about all politicians talking about revising or cancelling it. The alarm bells rang in Washington and Tel Aviv and there are ongoing secret negotiations between the US and the Egyptian military demanding ironclad assurances that the treaty will remain in force before the generals hand over power to a civilian government. This was confirmed last week by Egypt’s most respected statesman and presidential hopeful Mohamed ElBaradei, who told the Iranian news agency Fars, “The negotiations were completely secret and confidential … I believe that the Americans wanted to ensure that the deals signed between Egypt and Israel will remain intact if Islamists ascend to power.”

No Egyptians want a US-backed military coup in Egypt, especially the Islamists. Hence, Salafist Al-Nour Party spokesman Yousry Hammad was quick to tell Israeli radio that “the treaty is binding because Egypt has signed it,” while explaining that the Egyptian people want to amend certain articles to enable Egypt to better control Sinai, “and that we must be able to send aid to our Palestinian brothers in Gaza without problems.”

Interestingly, the Muslim Brotherhood is more nuanced in its political platform, referring to criteria for examining international agreements based on Sharia law and the degree of Israel’s compliance with the agreement. Re-examining the treaty is embedded in the Freedom and Justice Party’s (FJP) platform and calls for any decision on the treaty by the new parliament to be put to a referendum. Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Rashad Al-Bayoumi says, “We weren’t party to the peace treaty; it was signed away from the Egyptian people and thus the people must have their say.” FJP Secretary-General Mohamed Saad El-Kataany reaffirmed last week that the FJP respects all international treaties as long as they achieve their goals. Which, of course, leaves the fate of the Camp David Accords of 1979 very much in question, given Israel’s violation of it for the past 27 years.

Nobel Peace Prize winner ElBaradei is dismissed by some Egyptians as a liberal who served the US world order as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, though, in fact, he has called for former President George W Bush and his cabinet to be tried by the International Criminal Court for war crimes for the “shame of a needless war” on Iraq. We must do this, he writes in his memoirs The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times, to answer the question, “Do we, as a community of nations, have the wisdom and courage to take the corrective measures needed, to ensure that such a tragedy will never happen again?” ElBaradei also warned Israel in April that as president he would consider taking the ultimate “corrective measure”: “If Israel attacked Gaza we would declare war against the Zionist regime.”

If this liberal Egyptian politician is to be believed, then a Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist dominated parliament will most certainly support him, as would virtually all Egyptians. So all the US intriguing with the military behind Egyptians’ backs will not save Israel’s bacon. Nor will all the lexical sleights-of-hand about “settlers”, “invented people” and even soft Zionist criticism of Israel. And when the imperial project of colonising Palestine by the invented Israeli people inevitably ends, many of the latter will decide to dust off their European and American passports, brush up on their French, Russian or American slang, and rediscover their ethnic roots in the lands of their forefathers.

No less an Israeli icon that Theodore Herzl wanted just that. Herzl’s original idea about ending anti-Semitism is found in his diaries in a letter he wrote the pope offering to arrange a mass conversion of Jews in Hungary as the beginning of a total conversion to Christianity and complete assimilation of Jews into European secular society. When this didn’t pan out, he then turned to mass migration to Palestine as the fall back solution.

For all the lexical gymnastics employed by Israel lobbyists, Israel is really just the latest manifestation of the Jewish diaspora, a colony, the brainchild of British empire and Jewish dreamers, and is fated to remain so until it disowns its imperial origins and learns to speak the local lingo, which just happens to be Arabic, not reinvented Hebrew. Recall Humpty Dumpty’s fate, despite his clever use of words in the pursuit of power.

Both leaders said what would be expected of them under these circumstances. Haniyeh asserted that his movement’s “presence with the Brotherhood threatens the Israeli entity,” and Badie reaffirmed the Brotherhood’s commitment to “issues of liberation, foremost the Palestinian issue” (MENA and AP, December 26).

It is very telling that Haniyeh’s first official visit outside Gaza as prime minister was to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in Cairo’s Moqattam district. He shared his message – of resistance against Israeli occupation, national unity with rival Fatah and reaching out to Muslim countries – and then resumed his regional tour.

Since 2006, Hamas has attempted, but largely failed to win the approval of governments in Muslim-majority countries. Muslim solidarity was the thrust of Hamas’ foreign policy, aimed at lessening Palestinian political and financial dependence on the US and other Western governments. It failed because, as it turned out, US financial and political leverage is too overpowering and far-reaching for a relatively small movement like Hamas to singlehandedly challenge. But, as Haniyeh himself reiterated, times are changing

In the first and second rounds of Egyptian elections, the Brotherhood’s newly created Freedom and Justice party won more than 35 percent of the vote. The electoral success was hardly an anomaly. The Islamic Nahda party, which formed the first post-revolutionary government in Tunisia, won more than 40 percent of the vote last October. Morocco’s Justice and Development party won the November elections and the Islamic leaning of Libya’s new political set up is all too palpable. There have been marks of Islamic political influence in other countries across the region.

The reformation of the political landscape in the Arab region has tempted many to infer polarizing, if not frightening conclusions. Israeli army Home Front Command Chief Major General Eyal Eisenberg was one of the first in Israel to refer to these developments as an Arab Spring turning into a “radical Islamic winter”. He said, “This leads us to the conclusion that through a long-term process, the likelihood of an all-out war is increasingly growing” (Arutz Sheva, September 5).

However, what truly worries Israel is not the radicalization of Muslim societies, but the rise of Islamic politics to represent a rational, mainstream political discourse. It threatens Israel because it could rally many Arabs around one cohesive political agenda, and repositions Palestine, once more, as central to what many Muslim intellectuals refer to as the “Islamic Awakening”.

Israeli fear mongering aside, the US – Israel’s main benefactor – must find ways to co-exist with the new political arrangement. Other Western governments too “will have to adapt to a power shift they have long sought to prevent,” wrote Roula Khalaf and Heba Saleh in the Financial Times (December 28).

For Israel, however, the transformation in regional politics will prove unbearable. It is not Tunisia’s Nahda party that Israel is most concerned about, of course; it is Hamas. This is partly what compelled Haniyeh to venture out of Gaza. As the US is hoping to control, if not manage, the rise of Islamic parties, Hamas aims at ensuring a primary position for Palestine – as seen through the prism of the Islamic movement – in the region’s new political landscape.

There is little doubt that Hamas’ rise to political prominence in 2006, and the numerous subsequent attempts at isolating and destroying it will influence new Islamic parties in various Arab countries. Hamas’ ability to survive has certainly registered among new Muslim politicians in Egypt and elsewhere. Now, with the early fruits of the Egyptian revolution being plucked by Islamic parties, Hamas is guardedly making its move. Hamas is a “jihadi movement of the Brotherhood with a Palestinian face,” said Haniyeh in Cairo.

A quick look at the roots of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine shows that Haniyeh was hardly exaggerating. Since the Society of the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Ismailiyya, Egypt in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna and a few others, it quickly found in Palestine a rally cry to unite Muslims through the entire region. The first link between the movement and Palestine was formed in 1935, when Abd al-Rahman al-Banna (the founder’s brother) visited Palestine and met with the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.

The Brotherhood became visible during the revolt of 1936, as they communicated the Palestinian message with an Islamic tone to the rest of the Arab world. The cause of Palestine promptly became the central mission and calling of the Brotherhood, as Hasan al-Banna himself headed the newly founded General Central Committee to Aid Palestine.

More, in April 1948, when most Arab governments delayed in partaking in the defense of Palestine, the Muslim Brotherhood deployed three battalions of volunteers. Estimates of the number of Brotherhood volunteers in Palestine during the war and the subsequent Nakba vary, but Hasan al-Banna himself noted, in March 1948, that the movement had approximately 1,500 volunteers in Palestine.

The relationship between the Brotherhood and Palestine had it ebbs and flows, but the rapport was never completely severed. Even before Hamas was officially established in 1987, the movement functioned under various classifications, all directly affiliated with Egypt’s Brotherhood.

The recent Cairo meeting between Haniyeh and Badie could be understood within that historical context, representing a triumphant reunion and possibly open coordination. This would once again rejuvenate the Brotherhood’s Palestine connection, and grant Hamas greater political leverage – after years of isolation, and despite the current political turmoil in the region.

Of course, Hamas’ challenges are many and growing. Leading among them is Israel’s violent escalation in Gaza, and the unremitting US pressure. Still, it is expected that Hamas’ political message and outlook will continue to find balance between Palestinian exceptionality and the more inclusive Arab and Islamic framework.

By venturing out of Gaza, Haniyeh is hoping to expand the diameters of the Palestinian Islamic movement into Egypt and beyond – thus reclaiming what Hamas once considered ‘the strategic depth’ of the Palestinian cause. While such a push failed to attain its objectives in 2006, 2012 is a brand new year.

After a century of scheming in the Middle East and Central Asia by first Britain and then the US, the tables turned much faster than anyone could have imagined. As the pivotal 2011 draws to a close, it is the perfect moment to look at how we got here. The rollercoaster ride has been long and terrifying, and it is vital to understand where it is taking us.

From the 19th century on, it was clear to imperial strategists such as Cecil Rhodes and Halford MacKinder, motivated by the desire to conquer the world, that the “heartland”, Eurasia, was the key to securing the proposed world empire. WWI was supposed to clinch the deal, with the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate leaving the Levant “free” to be carved up and secured. The Indian Raj was the empire’s base for securing Central Asia and the Far East .

But the horrors of the war led to an unforeseen result: revolution in Russia, inspiring a growing anti-imperial movement across Eurasia. Inspired by Russian revolutionaries, the Raj seethed in discontent, demanding freedom from the British yoke, and Chinese patriots coalesced around their own rapidly growing Communist movement. Historic Turkestan was now off limits, part of the Soviet Union or in the case of Afghanistan, unconquerable.

WWII erupted as Germany attempted to snatch the world empire from the British and destroy its Russian nemesis, but this merely accelerated the decline of the Euro-imperialists, their schemes exposed as relying on mass slaughter and cold, calculating privilege for the elite of the imperial centre.

When the war ended, there were hopes that imperialism would end too. The empire had been forced to ally with the Communists to defeat the Germans, and to promise to dismantle the imperial system after WWII. This new world order was to be one of independent nations competing on a level playing field. But what should have been the last gasp of this inhuman system of “free trade” in the service of empire gained a new lease on life, as the US had escaped the 20th century’s cataclysms unscathed, and its capitalists were eager to take on the mantle of empire ceded by the bankrupt Brits.

Moreover, a new, subtle but key force in the new empire was the Jewish state established by the British and Americans in the heart of the Middle East, a blatant colonial entity which draped its imperial role in the language of anti-colonial liberation. This, despite the fact that it was created by dispossessing the native Arabs, even as neighbouring Arabs in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and North Africa were gaining nominal independence from their colonial masters.

This new playing field witnessed a long, bloody match, pitting the empire’s forces against both Communists and anti-colonial forces. After millions of deaths, it culminated in the defeat of the Communists in 1991, and a new game began, with world control once again the prize.

The dreams of revolution and an end to empire were dashed, and this new world order was once again baldly imperial, as planners accelerated their plans, epitomised by the rise of the neoconservatives with their Project for a New American Century, combining market fundamentalism and imperial aggression in a deadly cocktail where there were no longer any geographical limits.

The former Communist union, especially Turkestan, with its strategic location and oil wealth, was quickly brought into the imperial orbit. Even China was accommodated, as it acceded to the world economic order established by the empire after WWII.

But the baggage of empire continued to complicate the picture. The Islamists, so useful in the destruction of the Communist bloc, resisted imperial designs. Israel, also useful throughout the post-WWII struggle against both the Communists and the 3rd world liberation forces, established itself as an independent player and even posed as the new imperial coach, penetrating to the heart of the empire and asserting its own goals of expansion and hostility against its Muslim neighbours.

At its beheast, the resulting wars have been against the Arab and Muslim world, but two decades of attempts to subdue them have merely hardened Muslims’ opposition to empire, even as the devastation caused by imperial designs increases.

Hence, the Arab Spring of 2011 and the accession to power of Islamists via the ballot box across the Middle East . Hence, the unwinnable war against the Afghan people, that brought empire to its knees in fateful 2011, even as the slaughter of insurgents and civilians increased. Yes, the imperialists managed a clever ruse, invading Libya to depose the clownish Gaddafi, but the Islamists and fiercely independent tribes there are unlikely allies of empire.

The tsunami of resistance to imperialism surged throughout 2011 around the world, while the empire’s leaders put a worldwide “missile defence” system in place. But even as radars and missiles were installed in Europe, the rising tide reached the empire’s shores in 2011, as financial crisis led to rising poverty and unrest in the imperial centre itself.

Taking inspiration from the Arab Spring, mass demonstrations in Greece and Spain erupted and Wall Street, the empire’s “heartland”, was occupied. The “99 per cent” entered the political lexicon as the people vs the ruling elite (the 1 per cent who own half of the country’s assets). Even Israel and newly capitalist Russia witnessed mass demonstrations, as ordinary citizens began to realise how the system works, or rather doesn’t work for them. How increasing disparity of wealth is the logical result of market fundamentalism and control of the economy by financial capital.

2011 will go down in history as a year as fateful as 1917, when the blinkers fell away from the common people’s eyes in Russia and they rose up against their oppressors. But while 1917 witnessed a Communist revolution against capitalism and imperialism by a small corps of professional revolutionaries, 2011 has witnessed a mass, leaderless revolution facilitated by telecommunications, and in the case of the key Middle East, inspired by Islam.

There is no Lenin, not even a Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the one Arab leader who managed to slow down the imperial steamroller in the Middle East and is still revered for his defiance. Unlike Communist revolutionaries of yore, the new leaders in the Middle East of what must be called the Islamic revolution of 2011 are not the object of veneration, something that Islam as a religion warns against.

Revolutions always start in the weakest links. Thus, the Middle East has a head start on the revolutionary process over the West, though through the growing Palestinian solidarity movement, notably the global Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign, the struggles of East and West are increasingly seen to be one and the same. What will be the decisive test for the new revolutionaries in the Middle East and the West itself is how well they can navigate the political shoals and landmines laid by a century of empire.

How to dismantle apartheid Israel without it unleashing nuclear war on the world? How to put an end to US world financial blackmail centred on the dollar without the US strategists taking everyone else down with them? While the empire is on the defensive, it is still powerful and as its star wanes, it will only become more lethal.

The foes of empire are popping up faster than the empire’s drones can knock them off. They are found not only in Arab (and Persian) lands, or even in a skeptical Russia and still-Communist China. As the links in the system continue to fray, they are increasingly in the heart of the empire itself. Americans and Europeans will continue to develop alternatives to empire, financially, economically and politically, in their own communities and continue to link up with their comrades-against-arms in the heart of the supposed enemy in Eurasia .

More and more Americans are involved in co-ops, worker-owned companies and other alternatives to capitalism. Some 130 million Americans are part owners of co-op businesses and credit unions. As Obama cuts funding to states, the latter considers establishing their own banks and use public pensions to fund state economic development.

There is a wealth of expertise in the “heartland” of the empire that can help show the whole world the way out of the imperial dead end. The new generation in America lacks the Cold War paranoia about socialism: Americans under 30 years old are “essentially evenly divided” as to whether they preferred “capitalism” or “socialism”, according to a 2009 Rasmussen poll.

Even as the world environment degrades, even as imperial arms continue to kill, maim and choke demonstrators and insurgents both at the heart of the empire and in the heart of the “enemy”, we can take heart in the new sense of human dignity which 2011 spawned, and fight the intrigues of empire with new vigour in 2012.

Without substantial social reform and redistribution of economic assets, representative institutions – no matter how ‘democratic’ in form – will simply mirror the undemocratic power relations of society. Democracy requires a change in the balance of forces in society. Concentration of economic power in the hands of a small elite is a structural obstacle to democracy. It must be displaced if democracy is to emerge.¹

All reformers, no matter how radical they thought themselves to be, could be (and have been) caught up in reform structures whose underlying purpose is to reduce the inharmonics of the existing social system.²

Even as attempts to curb protests through evictions and violence are conducted across the country, the movement is spreading – every day, more and more flock to their local  parks and city centers, rallying under the banner of “Occupy!” First it was Occupy Wall Street, a call put out by Adbusters, a quasi-Situationist organization that has been at the forefront of the “culture jamming” ethos since 1989. From there, it was Occupy Chicago, Occupy Los Angeles, Occupy Boston, Occupy Omaha. The movement has gone global, with protestors catching the Zeitgeist in London and Rome. Regionalized discontent led to international solidarity in Greece, as further austerity measures loom on the horizon – imposed by none other than a government that dares to call itself socialist.

The central concept of the OWS movement is populist in nature, harking back to those that resisted capitalism’s harsh realities in the earlier parts of the 1900s: there is a major disconnect between the 99% of the population and the 1% that acts as the center of wealth and power. At the core, this division is rooted in Marxist terminology, the proletariat versus the bourgeois and their exploitation. We demand democracy, the multitude is saying, from Lexington, Kentucky to Madrid, Spain. We demand freedom from economic exploitation, freedom from indentured servitude to the moneyed class, freedom to live our lives with a higher degree of autonomy than has been allowed by those who seek to manipulate and oppress for their own material gain. Be they students in the universities, underpaid workers who need government aid to live, or citizens horrified that a piece of every paycheck is going to bail-out reckless firms and to support foreign wars, the multitude is gradually realizing that they are the engine of this world, and that it is time for them to sit in the driver seat. But all is not right in the movement. It is in times of unrest and cries to social change that hegemony rears its ugly head. Since time immemorial, overt repression has been swapped for the far more subtle process of assimilation – the system acknowledges its defects, and then harnesses people power and guides it by hand into compromises that leave the primary mechanisms of domination intact. Radical change is exchanged for the more “mature” approach of working within the system. This is a very real threat to the Occupy movement, one that needs to be acknowledged and resisted by any member who truly believes in striving for a better tomorrow.

Egypt: The Inspiration

OWS’s genesis lies not just in Adbusters, but in the Spanish Indignants movement, a coalition advocating grassroots democracy in reaction to the impact of the international financial crisis on their nation. Leading the coalition is a group by the name of ¡Democracia Real YA! (Real Democracy NOW!), which called for international solidarity and protests on October 15th. Adbusters responded with a poster portraying a dancer atop the Wall Street bull, and request for people to join together to occupy the “second capital” of wealth and power in the United States – Wall Street.

¡Democracia Real YA!’s initial inspiration for the international protest was the shocking success of Arab Spring,³ the multi-country revolt that succeeded in toppling one of the world’s worst dictators, the US-backed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. The opposing coalition, consisting mainly of tech-savy youth organizations such as the Coalition of the Youth of the Revolution and the 6 April Youth Movement, has been a consistent icon and inspiration for the Occupy movement, and rightfully so – it is one of the rare examples of people pushing for social change and getting it. So often we see revolt being crushed under the wheels of power, organization shattered, and violence suppressing hope. But even with Egypt, questions must be asked.

Ideological solidarity is giving way now to direct ties being formed between these desperate threads that are disrupting the international order. Egyptian activist Mohammed Ezzeldin gave a rousing speech to protestors in NYC’s Washington Square Park, discussing the direct lineage between the two revolts. “”I am coming from there — from the Arab Spring. From the Arab Spring to the fall of Wall Street,” he said. “From Liberation Square to Washington Square, to the fall of Wall Street and market domination, and capitalist domination.”⁴

Wired magazine has also reported that Ahmed Maher, one of the founding members of the 6 April Youth Movement, has traveled from Egypt to Washington D.C.’s McPherson Square to directly interact with the Occupiers there and advise them on courses of action. For sometime now Maher has been communicating with the protestors in the multitude’s medium of choice – “We talk on the internet about what happened in Egypt, about our structure, about our organization, how to organize a flash mob, how to organize a sit-in, how to be non-violent with police”⁵ – but this will mark the first time that he has come face to face with the people he refers to as his “brothers.”

Behind and Below the Masses: the revolution factory

The Egyptian revolt, much like its counterparts in Tunisia and Libya, was a direct fall-out from the processes of globalization; namely, the domestic impact of US policies that were driving high the price of essential living commodities. As reported in the McClatchy Newspapers:

The Fed [Federal Reserve Bank] has been engaged in what economists call “quantitative easing,” buying U.S. Treasury bonds to attack the threat of deflation — the phenomenon of falling prices across an economy.

Quantitative easing has the effect of raising asset prices, whether they’re the prices of stocks or what traders are willing to pay for commodities such as wheat or corn. One of the side effects of this policy is that the dollar weakens against other currencies, and that’s helped push up the global prices of commodities.⁶

As the article notes, the Fed’s quantitative easing has led to wheat prices rising 70% over the past year, certainly bad news for the country of Egypt, which stands as the US’s eight largest export market. With an economy pried open by the International Monetary Fund to a flood of international products under the banner of benevolent “structural adjustments,” the skyrocketing prices in the US means skyrocketing prices in Egypt. With an oppressive leader under the thumb of the United States military, the stage was ripe for revolution. In other words, Egypt, like the other countries involved in Arab Spring, was on the surface revolting against domestic policies; at its core; however, the revolt was against the structures of Late Capitalism, the mechanics of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri refer to as “Empire” – the international monetary system that is rapidly rendering the concept of the “nation-state” obsolete.

So Mubarak is toppled and the Egyptian people seemingly liberate themselves. And what is the result? The country comes under the rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Led by Mohamed Hussein Tantawi (a man described as “Mubarak’s poodle” for his loyalty to the disposed leader⁷ the Council has declared to honor all existing political treaties and agreements, as well as maintaining the neoliberal stance of its predecessor. “We are not moving back to a socialist past,” Egypt’s temporary government has declared,⁸ as the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, and the European Investment Bank plan to descend upon the country with an “action plan” for foreign investment and “sustainable growth.⁹

Thus, Washington and the IMF’s program will go unchanged as it moves from Mubarak’s dictatorship to the new parliamentary democracy. How did it happen? How did we get from point A (the masses, infused with revolutionary potential) to point B (a cosmetic facelift of the prevailing economic system)? An analogous situation can be found in South Africa, where the spirit of the revolution was laid down in a document known as the Freedom Charter. In this document we can find declarations such as “the national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people… the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.¹⁰ Yet when the dust settled after 1994, a radically different picture emerged: the apartheid-era finance minister, Derek Keyes, remained in his position as head of the South African bank; the ANC signed onto the international General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; the World Bank was free to impose restrictions on socialized business models; and the IMF exerted authority over the approach to issues such as minimum wage. In the words of one activist, “they never freed us. They only took the chain from around our neck and put it around our ankles.”¹¹

The dominant system will always resist widespread structural change, and the most common method of doing this is through the power of non-governmental institutions. Foundations constitute a main apparatus of this process – “everything the Foundation did could be regarded as ‘making the World safe for capitalism’, reducing social tensions by helping to comfort the afflicted, provide safety valves for the angry, and improve the functioning of government,” said McGeorge Bundy, the long-time president of the Ford Foundation.¹² There is also the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a brainchild of the Reagan administration that seeks to provide a capitalist economic framework for developing nations, and ease former left-wing states into a financial and militaristic stance in line with Washington’s key values. The NED receives its funding from the State Department through the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and in turn funnels the money into four subsidiary organizations: the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (Solidarity Center). The NDI and IRI are allied with their respective American political parties, while the CIPE is affiliated with the US Chamber of Commerce. The Solidarity Center, on the other hand, is a program of the AFL-CIO labor union consortium. Other NED funds flow into Freedom House, a US-based human rights organization that has been described as a “Who’s Who of neoconservatives from government, business, academia, labor, and the press.”¹³ American libertarian politician Ron Paul has provided an excellent analysis and critique of the whole “democracy promoting” apparatus:

The misnamed National Endowment for Democracy is nothing more than a costly program that takes US taxpayer funds to promote favored politicians and political parties abroad. What the NED does in foreign countries, through its recipient organizations the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute (would be rightly illegal in the United States. The NED injects “soft money” into the domestic elections of foreign countries in favor of one party or the other. Imagine what a couple of hundred thousand dollars will do to assist a politician or political party in a relatively poor country abroad. It is particularly Orwellian to call US manipulation of foreign elections “promoting democracy.” How would Americans feel if the Chinese arrived with millions of dollars to support certain candidates deemed friendly to China? Would this be viewed as a democratic development?¹⁴

After playing a role in the “color revolutions” of Georgia and the Ukraine, the NED’s attention then turned to Egypt. A recent New York Times article has revealed, citing WikiLeaks cables, that the disparate bands of dissident groups have been receiving “training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and Freedom House.”¹⁵ Verification independent of the New York Times article can be found as well. Madeleine Albright, former Clinton-era Secretary of State and chairman of the NDI, appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show to give her analysis of the events in Egypt. “You mentioned that I was chairman of the board of the National Democratic Institute,” Albright says to Maddow in the interview, responding to the pundit’s questions concerning the post-Mubarak government. “We have been working within Egypt for a very long time, in terms of developing various aspects of civil society, and dealing with various and talking to opposition groups who are prepared to participate in a fair and free election.”

Freedom House also openly admits their role in fomenting the unrest. In a May 2009 report, the organization discusses their “New Generation Project” within Egypt, seeking to empower the nation’s “Youtube generation” by “promoting exchange” between “democracy advocates” and “emerging democracies” to “share best practices,” “providing advanced training on civil mobilization” and helping them understand the benefits of “new media.”¹⁶ In 2008, representatives from the organization attended the “Alliance of Youth Movements,” an activist summit funded by the State Department, Facebook, MTV, Google, and Youtube to provide a fertile meeting ground for ‘digital activists’ and the corporate leaders behind “new media.” The summit has subsequently been the topic of a set of leaked WikiLeaks cables, describing an ‘unnamed activist’ who there presented “his movement’s goals for democratic change in Egypt.”  This same unnamed activist then met with a series of US Congressmen, discussing with them an “unwritten plan for democratic transition” of Egypt into a parliamentary democracy, a plan that had been accepted by “several opposition parties and movements.”¹⁷

Disturbingly, this is the same milieu that Ahmed Maher, now an adviser to OWS, travelled in. As researcher Tony Cartalucci has reported:

This of course  isn’t Maher’s first trip to the United States. Years before the Egyptian revolution, the United States was quietly preparing a global army of youth cannon fodder to fuel region wide conflagrations throughout the world, both politically and literally. Maher’s April 6 organization had been in New York City for the US State Department’s first ‘Alliance for Youth Movements Summit’ in 2008. His group then traveled to Serbia to train under the US-funded ‘CANVAS’ organization before returning to Egypt in 2010 with US International Crisis Group (ICG) operative Mohamed ElBaradei to spend the next year building up for the ‘Arab Spring.¹⁸

CANVAS (Centre for Applied Non Violent Action and Strategies) was founded in 2003 by the Serbian youth organization Optor! (Resistance!), which utilized nonviolent methods of revolt to bring down Slobodan Milošević. Not surprisingly in the least, the organization had received millions of dollars in funding from both the NED and IRI¹⁹ while CANVAS itself has worked closely with Freedom House.²⁰ Given the close ties between these youth-based activist organizations and US State Department’s bureaucracy, perhaps it is distressing to note that former Optor! Member and leader of CANVAS, Ivan Marovic, has given talks at the OWS rallies in NYC.²¹

The Right’s Favorite Boogeyman – and a useful opportunity

Perhaps the centerpiece of the Egyptian Revolution was the individual Mohamed ElBaradei, a director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and presidential hopeful for Egypt’s parliamentary democracy. ElBaradei, however, has ties of his own to suspicious Western interests – he sits on the board of trustees of the International Crisis Group, which has been described by Madeleine Albright as a “full-service conflict prevention organization.” Despite this astute observation, the membership rosters of the Crisis Group’s various chairmen, trustees, and directors shows a significant overlap with affiliates of the National Endowment for Democracy: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Morton I. Abramowitz, and Stephen Solarz are just a handful of Crisis Group members who represent the interests of both. Here we can find the favorite whipping boy of the right-wing media, the billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Vilified as some sort of a socialist by the likes of Glenn Beck and Michael Savage, Soros, in truth, is far from that sort of ideology. A key figure in the transition of former Soviet states into the world of globalized capitalism, Soros helped engineer the economic ‘shock therapy’ that thrust Poland into a financial tail spin as extensive structural adjustments rattled the already crumbling economy.²²

Soros, despite being a clear member of the 1%, has publicly stated his support of OWS:

Billionaire financier George Soros says he sympathizes with protesters speaking out against corporate greed in ongoing protests on Wall Street… Soros says he understands the frustrations of small business owners, for instance those who have seen credit card charges soar during the current crisis.²³

There are ties, albeit indirect ones, that can tie Soros to the fledgling Occupy movement. MoveOn.org, a regular recipient of Soros funding, has thrown its weight behind the protestors in an apparent sign of solidarity. As TruthOut’s Steve Horn writes:

On October 5, Day 19 of Occupy Wall Street, MoveOn.org sent out an email calling on clicktivists (as opposed to activists) to “Join the Virtual March on Wall Street.” “The 99% are both an inspiration and a call that needs to be answered. So we’re answering it today, in a nationwide Virtual March on Wall Street to support their demand for an economy that serves the many, not the few … Join in the virtual march by doing what hundreds have done spontaneously across the web: Take your picture holding a sign that tells your story, along with the words ‘I am the 99%,’” wrote Daniel Mintz of MoveOn.org.²⁴

MoveOn.org has a long history of left-wing co-option; as people flooded the streets of American cities in protest of the Iraq War, the online institution dove right into the populist fervor and proceeded to utilize people’s discontent with the Bush administration to garner support for John Kerry’s presidential campaign. The same process was repeated just a handful of years later, with MoveOn.org acting the second largest lobbying organization for Barack Obama (aside from the President’s own Organizing for America). Through a strategic ad campaign – one of MoveOn’s personnel is John Hlinko, a “social media marketing expert” – the organization managed to create a literal army of voters for Obama, reinforcing that the same “hope and change” imagery that was being pumped out by the campaign itself. Both MoveOn and Organizing America’s methodology was a foreshadow to the systems of new media utilized by the Arab Spring protestors; this tool is now being called “netroots,” the transporting of traditional grassroots activities into the virtual sphere.

MoveOn.org is not the only group chiming in to support for OWS. Rebuild the Dream, a progressive-style organization founded by former Obama White House adviser Van Jones, has championed the protestors – “Let’s all support Occupy Wall St.” reads a blurb on their website homepage. During an MSNBC interview, Van Jones directly linked the OWS movement to the Arab Spring, stating “you are going to see an American Fall, an American Autumn, just like we saw the Arab Spring.”

However, the institution changes that OWS is calling for contrast sharply with Jones’ vision of how to take America back: “We’re talking about U.S. senators who want to run as American Dream candidates – soon to be announced. We’ve reached out to the House Democratic Caucus; there are House members who want to run as American Dream candidates.²⁵ Simply put, Rebuild the Dream is an unofficial organ of the Democrat Party, much like how MoveOn.org utilized, mobilized anti-war protestors to generate a large sector of the Democrat’s voting base. In actuality the ties run closer than that – Jones had worked hand in hand with MoveOn.org to initially launch Rebuild the Dream. Furthermore, he had been a senior fellow at Center for American Progress; the progressive institution has received funding from both George Soros²⁶ and the Democracy Alliance organization, where Soros sits on the board of directors.

Co-option of social activism has always been the modus operandi of the Democrat Party. They play “’the role of shock absorber, trying to head off and co-opt restive [and potentially radical] segments of the electorate’” by posing as ‘the party of the people.²⁷ President Obama, riding the crest of the MoveOn.orgs of the country – and not to mention a well orchestrated propaganda campaign – has fit this concept to a T, something that has even been noted by members of the liberal establishment:

Two and a half weeks after Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election, David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official, commented on the president-elect’s corporatist and militarist transition team and cabinet appointments with a musical analogy. Obama, Rothkopf told the New York Times, was following “the violin model: you hold power with the left hand and you play the music with the right.²⁷

Liberal commentator Thomas Frank has observed the process of “voting for one thing, getting another” at work in the Republican Party:

The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again, receive deindustrialization … Vote to get governments off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking … Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.²⁸

Is it really any different for the Democrat Party? Vote to end wars, receive troop escalation and change only years after the fact. Vote to allow workers to retain their rights, receive trade agreements that export jobs overseas. Vote to reign in the power of Wall Street, receive taxpayer-funded bail-outs that create moral hazards and prop up corrupt financial regimes. From the left to the right, the story is the same – the great violin keeps playing cheerfully as the world burns. It’s only the hands grasping it, not the system that change.

One of the clearest portraits of co-option in recent history would be the history of the conservative Tea Party Movement. In its infancy, the Tea Party was a movement launched by libertarian politician Ron Paul, a staunch opponent of the government’s infringement on civil liberties, its use of military force on foreign soil, the monopolization of the financial market by entities such as the Federal Reserve Bank, and the crony capitalism that eventually erupted into the bail-outs. Aside from certain economics view, there is certainly a great deal in Ron Paul’s – and the early Tea Party Movement’s – agenda that is entirely compatible with the demands of the Occupy Movement; it is for this very reason that libertarians have begun to reach out and join in solidarity with the protestors. Furthermore, given the anti-foreign aid and anti-Federal Reserve stance of the early Tea Party Movement, there can perhaps be observed an unspoken lineage between the Tea Party and the uprisings in Egypt and surrounding countries, triggered by Western support of the people’s oppressors and the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve.

Just as Soros controls the purse strings to disrupt and redirect leftist movements into positions aligned with the Democrat Party, the right can find his counterpart in the Koch brothers, the billionaire owners of the little-known Koch Industries. With their money bankrolling organizations such as Americans for Prosperity, David and Charles Koch were able to train torrents of so-called Tea Party activists whose espoused viewpoints far more in line with typical Republican dialogue than with Ron Paul’s libertarian ethos. The focus was shifted from attacking the Fed and ending the wars and towards union-busting, securing borders, and more often than not, reinforcing unequivocal US support for Israel – a direct clash with stance that Paul has taken on the topic.

This “astro-turfing” of grassroots movements, of course, requires multiple organizations and front groups to create the veneer of a unified public opinion, and operating alongside Americans for Prosperity is FreedomWorks. Perhaps it is worthy to take into consideration that when the organization was created from a 2004 merger between the Koch-funded Citizens for a Sound Economy and the neoconservative Empower America, several prominent NED officials sat on the board of directors of the former – including Vin Weber (an adviser to Mitt Romney’s ill-fated 2008 presidential campaign), Jeane J. Kirkpatrick (one of the most prominent of Cold War-era hardliners), and Michael Novak (an expert at the neoconservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute).

The Tea Party’s assimilation into the broader spectrum of the Republican political arena was marked by the establishment of the Tea Party Caucus, a coalition of House of Representatives and Senate members that represents perhaps the most powerful political body sitting in the US government – this consortium of leaders are essentially calling the shots when it comes to the right-wing of the American political system. Its members show utter disregard for the original protests of the Tea Party: Louie Gohmert has been a strong and vocal supporter of the war in Iraq, Steve King has openly supported the lobbying industry for their “effective and useful job[s]²⁹ and Dennis A. Ross was a member of the United States House Oversight Subcommittee on TARP, Financial Services and Bailouts of Public and Private Programs. Joe Barton eviscerated any ideological tie between himself and the early stages of the movement that he claims to rally behind (not to mention a disregard for any allegiance to the notion of really existing free markets) by arguing that the removal of subsidies to oil companies would act as a “disincentive” and result in the corporations going out of business.³⁰

Curiously, the place where this whole process of right-wing co-option began – the corporate-financed milieu of Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks – was intended to be a “powerful answer to the challenge presented by the Left and groups like America Coming Together (ACT), MoveOn.org, and the Media Fund.³¹ All three of these organizations are Soros-financed, revealing the hidden irony that ultimately, these seemingly opposing institutions are simply moving potentially disruptive individuals into an entirely compatible paradigm of power that sits in the dual capitals of Washington D.C. and Wall Street. However, this odd dialectic can be entirely useful. Realizing this process will allow individuals who yearn for legitimate change on either side of the aisle to separate themselves from the system, and hopefully, discover the disparate strands that are ideologically compatible between them and their counterparts. It is a rare opportunity for the discontents of “left” and the “right” to shake off the labels applied to them and create an open dialogue and eventual solidarity with one another.

Conclusions and Other Thoughts

Though it may certainly seem like it, this essay was not written to belittle the OWS movement, or attack the actions of those who stood in opposition to Milosevic, apartheid, or Mubarak. However, it was my intention to acknowledge the shortcomings in the aftermath of these fights – Serbia and South Africa both jumped into bed with the IMF, imposing austerity measures in their nations that allowed persistent poverty to fester and even continue to grow. Egypt is certainly following suit now, so even though the brutal fist of the American-backed regime is gone, the slow-burning fires of neoliberalism continue to carry on the torch. For Serbia and Egypt, their revolts, though brilliant displays of the potential of people power, were in no small part shaped by the technicians in State Department, operating through the long arm of the NED. For South Africa, money from George Soros ended up in the coffers of activist groups who quickly changed their tune from the ANC’s quasi-socialist demands to jump starting South African neoliberalism.³²  Not surprisingly, these same groups showed a willingness to work closely with the NED.³³

The NED, much like Soros’ civil society empowering programs, promotes a little known methodology called low-intensity democracy.

Low-intensity democracies are limited democracies in that they achieve important political changes, such as the formal reduction of the military’s former institutional power or greater individual freedoms, but stop short in addressing the extreme social inequalities within… societies. …they provide a more transparent and secure environment for the investments of transnational capital… these regimes function as legitimizing institutions for capitalist states, effectively co-opting the social opposition that arises from the destructive consequences of neoliberal austerity, or as Cyrus Vance and Henry Kissinger have argued, the promotion of “pre-emptive” reform in order to co-opt popular movements that may press for more radical, or even revolutionary, change.³⁴

Thus, it can be considered to be worrisome that individuals who were trained under institutions that implement this system are turning up at OWS rallies. While the NED’s agenda is to establish low-intensity democracies around the world, this is precisely the type of governance that we are dealing with in the United States, the very system that produced the antagonism found in both the Tea Party and OWS. To consent to it would be a rejection of the spirit of the protest and an embrace of what is opposes.

It is the Democrat Party that could possibly represent this system even more so than the Republicans. It is the party of Social Security, government-provided medical care, and other welfare programs. Does this function of the party not dim and obfuscate the fact that it is also the party of bail-outs and NAFTA? Realizing this simple fact is paramount to creating a movement of legitimate change in the world; we must seek deconstruct low-intensity democracy and replace it with Really Existing Democracy. We have already seen this functioning in a micro-sense at OWS rallies, where leadership positions are voluntary and voted in by the whole of the people. Decisions are made in a similar matter, putting the course of action and the direction of the movement in its entirety in the hands of the protestors, not in bureaucrats and moneymen with agendas of their own. It is organic and autonomous, and on an international level holds to be what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari referred to as a ‘rhizome’ – “a nonhierarchal and noncentered network structure.³⁵

There are further reasons to be optimistic about the movement’s direction. The official OWS website hosts a petition with a “formal demand that MoveOn.org leaves” – “this is OUR movement and it is NOT Obama’s personal reelection campaign,” it reads.³⁶ The leftist online newspaper TruthOut has called attention MoveOn.Org and Rebuild the Dream’s attempts to cozy up to the protestors, while Michel Chossudovsky, the professor emeritus of the economics department at the University of Ottowa, has published a piece for his Centre for Research on Globalization detailing the arrival of NED associates at OWS rallies.

There is an opportunity here. We live in a time marked by crisis, catastrophe, poverty, and war, but it is in times of disruption like these that rifts open in the landscapes of the global system, providing people with a chance to take the wheel, if they so choose. For America, this time arises from the great disappointments of our so-called democratic process – the hookwinking of the masses by the left-right one-two punch by the back to back presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama has led more people to step back, reconsider their presumptions about the world’s machinery, and begin to demand that their voices be heard. What happens from here, with the choices marked by the path to liberation or the well-worn roads of hegemony, is entirely contingent on the will of the people.

1. Barry Gills, Joen Rocamora, and Richard Wilson, Low Intensity Democracy: Political Power in the New World Order Pluto Press, 1993, quoted in Michael Barker “Do Capitalists Fund Revolutions? (Part 1 of 2)” Znet, September 4th, 2007.>
2. James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 Beacon Press, 1968, pg. 254, quoted in Michael Barker, “Liberal Elites and the Pacification of Workers,” State of Nature.>
3. Lauren Frayer “Inspired by Arab Protests, Spain’s Unemployed Rally for Change,” Voice of America May 19, 2011.
4. Matt Sledge “Occupy Wall Street Egyptian Activist Goes ‘From Liberation Square To Washington Square’,” Huffington Post, October 8, 2011.
5. Spencer Ackerman “Egypt’s Top ‘Facebook Revolutionary’ Now Advising Occupy Wall Street,” Wired, October 18, 2011.
6. Kevin G. Hall “Egypt’s unrest may have roots in food prices, U.S. Fed Policy” McClatchy Newspapers, January 31, 2011.
7. “‘Mubarak’s Poodle’ at Head of Egypt’s Transition,” CBS News, February 16, 2011.
8. Emad Mekay, “http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54544″>Egypt takes a step back from IMF ways,” Inter Press Service, February 20, 2011.
9. “Multilateral banks join forces to aid Arab nations,” Yahoo! News, April 14, 2011.
10. Naomi Klein The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Picador, 2007, p. 247-248.
11. Ibid., p. 256-257
12. Quoted in Michel Chossudovsky, “Manufacturing Dissent” Center for Research on Globalization, September 20, 2010.
13. Diana Barahona, “The Freedom House Files,” Monthly Review, January 3, 2007.
14. Ron Paul “National Endowment for Democracy: Paying to Make Enemies of America,” October 11, 2003.
15. Ron Nixon, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” New York Times, April 14, 2011.
16. Freedom House, “New Generation of Advocates: Empower Civil Society in Egypt.”>
17. “Egypt protests: secret US document discloses support for protesters,” The Telegraph, April 23, 2011.
18. Tony Cartalucci “US State Department Funded Agitator in DC Advising #OWS,” Land Destroyer Report, October 18, 2011.
19. Roger Cohen, “Who Really Brought Down Milosevic?” New York Times November 26, 2000.
20. Peter Ackerman, “Skills or Conditions: What Key Factors Shape the Success or Failure of Civil Resistance?” Conference on Civil Resistance & Power Politics, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, 15-18 March 2007.
21. Michel Chossudovsky, “Occupy Wall Street and ‘The American Autumn’: Is It a ‘Colored Revolution?’” Centre for Research on Globalization, October 13, 2011.
22. This topic is covered extensively in Klein, The Shock Doctrine, p. 215-229 and 241-243
23. “George Soros Says He Sympathizes With Occupy Wall Street Protesters,” Huffington Post, October 23, 2011.>
24. Steve Horn, “MoveOn.Org and Friends Attempt to Co-Opt Occupy Wall Street Movement,” TruthOut.
25. Horn, “MoveOn.Org and Friends Attempt to Co-Opt Occupy Wall Street Movement”
26. Laura Blumenfeld “Soros’s Deep Pockets vs. Bush,” Washington Post, November 11, 2003.
27. Paul Street, “Obama’s Violin: Populist rage and the uncertain containment of change,” ZCommunications May 2009.
28. Thomas Frank What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America Henry Holt & Company, 2004 pg. 7
29. Bara Vaida “Rep. King: “Lobbyists Are Useful,” The National Journal’s Under the Influence Monday, March 1, 2010.
30. Brian Beutler “Barton: Govt Subsidies Necessary To Keep Exxon From Going Out Of Business,” Talking Points Memo March 10, 2011.
31. “Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) and Empower America Merge to Form FreedomWorks,” Media release, undated, archived from July 25, 2004.
32. This topic is covered in Michael Barker, “George Soros And South Africa’s Elite Transition,” Swans Commentary May 31, 2010.
33. This is not the only case of NED/Soros collaboration; I have covered the role of both in fomenting unrest in Iran in “Soros and the State Department: Moving Iran towards the Open Society,” Foreign Policy Journal May 14, 2011.
34. William Avilés Global Capitalism, Democracy, and Civil-Military Relations in Columbia State University of New York Press, 2006, p. 18-19.
35. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire Harvard University Press, 2000 p. 299.
36. “Formally demand that Moveon.org leave,” October 16, 2011.

Among depositions, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza cited the Fourth Geneva Convention and the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court which prohibits “the transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

This was just in time to honour the UN-endorsed International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, marked on 29 November to coincide with the anniversary of the UN vote for the Partition Plan, and first marked in 1976. Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activists in 10 European countries staged more than 60 actions as part of a Day of Action calling on supermarkets and governments to “Take Apartheid off the Menu”.

In the UK, 26 November was declared a national BDS Day of Action targeting Britain’s largest supermarket chain Tesco, the only supermarket in the UK that is openly selling illegal settlement goods. Activities ranged from street protests, e-lobbying, re-labelling, flash protests and internet-working. While Agrexco may be kaput as Israel’s largest supplier of fresh produce to Europe, Mehadrin has taken its place and was the target of the European Day of Action Against Israeli Agricultural Produce Exporters.

Demonstrators in the US boarded buses run by Veolia to educate passengers about Israel’s apartheid policies. Boston activists launched a campaign challenging the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Rail Company’s contract with Veolia. In Baltimore, activists demonstrated at Penn Station during rush hour, singing a freedom song and drawing connections between the Palestinian and American struggles for equality, linking Veolia’s profiteering from racism and exploitation in Israel/Palestine to the City of Baltimore’s contracts with its own workers.

In a cynical rearguard bid to attract Christmas shoppers, Israel Lobby activists launched Buy Israel Week November 28, hastily put together to counter the growing BDS tide. Luke Akehurst, director of We Believe in Israel, called for two BUYcott days, featuring discount coupons, sponsored by StandWithUs, El-Al, the Jewish National Fund and other such pillars of Israeli apartheid.

While American sympathisers were politely tolerated in their protests against Veolia’s transport activities in Israel, their compatriots in Palestine proper were violently arrested for confronting Veolia and Egged, the two major culprits, and targets of BDS activists in Europe.

Inspired by their Western supporters, six Palestinian Freedom Riders emulated the legendary Freedom Riders of the American south of the 1960s, riding settler bus 148 near the illegal settlement of Psagot. Much like those courageous black and white Americans (including many Jews) of yesteryear, the Palestinians were forcibly removed and arrested.

This new generation of Freedom Riders will further inspire Westerners for whom “It is a moral duty to end complicity in this Israeli system of apartheid,” according to arrested Hebron resident Badee Dwak. Fellow arrestee Basel Al-Araj minced no words: “The settlers are to Israel what the KKK was to the Jim Crow South — an unruly, fanatic mob that has enormous influence in shaping Israeli policies today and that violently enforces these policies with extreme violence and utter impunity.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker wrote:

Board the buses to Everywhere. Sit freely. Go into Jerusalem with my blessing. Like many of my country people, I have witnessed this scenario before and know where it can lead. To a straightening of the back and a full breath taken by the soul. Some of us have shed blood, others have shed tears. Some have shed both. All sacred to the cause of the dignity we deserve as beautifully fashioned citizens and Beings of this Universe.

Sadly, as he honoured the Freedom Riders of the 1960s for their courage and dedication fifty years ago, President Barack Obama had no such words for the equally brave ones in Israel today.

In the Arab world, 29 November activities took BDS the logical extra step, with 7,000 Jordanians gathering in the Jordan Valley and marching to the Israeli border to condemn Israel’s settlement expansion, calling for the liberation of Al-Quds (Jerusalem), home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is the second holiest site for Muslims. “We sacrifice our souls and blood for Al-Aqsa Mosque and Al-Quds,” the Jordanians chanted after noon prayers, calling on Jordanian authorities to scrap its peace treaty with Israel.

Even as 100,000s of Cairenes gathered to defend the Egyptian revolution in Tahrir Square 26 November, a rally co-sponsored by Al-Azhar and the Union of Muslim Scholars attended by 5,000 called on Muslims to fight “Jerusalem’s Judaisation”. Al-Azhar Imam Ahmed Al-Tayeb said: “We are telling Israel and Europe that we shall not allow even one stone to be moved there.” Activists chanted: “Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, judgment day has come.”

In other boycott news, a victory for a clutch of brave and principled tennis fans arrested for protesting at the New Zealand Women’s Tennis Open last December, which featured Israeli Shahar Peer. After a year of trials, they were finally exonerated in a landmark decision by High Court Justice Paul Heath, who said “Disruption of an individual’s enjoyment of a sporting event was not the same as disruption of public order.” Quipped a free John Minto, “Annoyance is not a crime, annoyance is part of being in democracy.” The judge said it was clear the protest was meant to convey to the tennis player the concerns at the way Israel treated the Palestinian Territories.

In contrast to the tidal wave of Western artists now boycotting Israel-linked events (the Yardbirds just cancelled a scheduled Tel Aviv show), iconic singer and actor Barbra Streisand performed at a fundraising gala in Los Angeles for Friends of the IDF. Streisand supports OneVoice, which promotes a two-state solution that fails to address structural injustices and has long been discredited. Guests of honour included media magnate Haim Saban and former Israeli Military Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, who commanded the attacks on Gaza in 2008-09 which killed 1,400 Palestinians. An Israeli propaganda video about Streisand’s appearance at the gala features armed Israeli soldiers running in a scenic sunset.  A shameful sunset in her own career.

In a wonderfully shocking divestment move, Israeli powers-that-be are furious at BNP Paribas for shutting down its operations in Israel. Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz and Banks Supervisor David Zaken believe the bank’s board of directors caved to pressure groups, in the first case in years of a foreign bank leaving Israel. BNP Paribas has had operations in Israel since 2003. The bank claims it sustained serious damage from the Greek crisis, yet the only foreign branch it is closing is its Israeli one.

Unfortunately, as yet, no international governmental sanctions against Israel have been imposed in the past few months. On the contrary, the US continues to oppose attempts to boycott Israel, putting great pressure especially on Arab League states, which officially support BDS. Under US anti-boycott legislation enacted in 1978, US firms are prohibited from compliance with any such boycott directly or for a third party, and are required to report any such request to the US Department of Commerce. The WTO is an accomplice, as Israel is supposed to be treated as a Most Favoured Nation by member states.

This pressure has unfortunately had its effect. Morocco and Gulf Coordination Council members, especially Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, acceded to US arguments that boycotting Israel harmed the “peace process” and turn a blind eye to third-party economic relations with Israel and even quietly conduct direct trade.

But the Arab Spring is forcing these truant governments to wake up to their people’s demands. And the US showpiece for its vision of the new Middle East — Iraq — doesn’t dare end boycott activities, which were the hallmark of Iraqi politics prior to the US invasion.

This essay analyzes the changing contemporary context of imperial domination, especially the demise of longstanding client regimes.  It then examines the previous significant ties between western imperial powers and Islamist movements and regimes and the basis of ‘historical collaboration’.

The third part of the paper will outline the political circumstances in which the imperial powers embrace “moderate” Islamists in government and utilize “armed fundamentalists” in opposition to secular regimes.  We will critically analyze how “moderate” Islam is defined by the Western imperialist powers.  Is this a tactical or strategic alliance?  What are the political “trade-offs”?  What do imperialism’s neo-liberal clients and their new ‘moderate’ Muslim allies have in common and how do they differ?

In conclusion, we will evaluate the viability of this alliance and its capacity to contain and deflect the popular democratic movements and repress the burgeoning class and national struggles, especially in regard to the ‘obstacles’ posed by the Israel-US-Zionist ties and the continued IMF policies which promise to worsen the crises in the Muslim countries.

The Transition from Neo-Liberal Client Rulers to Power-Sharing with Moderate Islamists

The key motivation in Washington’s and the European imperial troika’s (England, France and Germany) embrace of what their press and officialdom hail as “moderate” Islamist parties has been the collapse or weakening of their long-term client rulers.  Faced with the ouster of Mubarak, in Egypt, Ali in Tunisia and Saleh in Yemen, mass protests in Morocco and Algeria, the US-EU turned to conservative Muslim leaders who were willing to work within the existing state institutional framework (including the army and state police), uphold the capitalist order and align with the empire against anti-imperial movements and states.  In Egypt, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) (the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood), in Tunisia the Renaissance Party, in Morocco the Justice and Development Party have all indicated their willingness to serve as reliable partners in blocking the pro-democracy movements that challenge the socio-economic status quo and the long-standing military-imperial linkages.

The Islamist collaborators are called “moderate and respectable” because they agree to participate in elections within the boundaries of the established political and economic order; they have dropped any criticism of imperial and colonial treaties and trade agreements signed by the previous client regions – including ones which collaborate with Israel’s colonization of Palestine.

Equally important “moderate” means supporting imperial wars against nationalist and secular Arab republics, such as Syria and Libya, and isolating and/or repressing class based trade unions and secular-left parties.

“Moderate” Islamists have become the Empire’s ‘contraceptive of choice’ against any chance the massive Arab peoples’ revolt might give birth to substantive egalitarian social changes and bring those brutal pro-western officials, responsible for so many crimes against humanity, to justice.

The West and their client officials in the military and police have agreed to a kind of “power-sharing’ with the moderate/respectable (read ‘reactionary’) Islamist parties.  The Islamists would be responsible for imposing orthodox economic policies and re-establishing ‘order’ (i.e. bolstering the existing one) in partnership with pro-multinational bank economists and pro US-EU generals and security officials.  In exchange the Islamists could take certain ministries, appoint their members, finance electoral clientele among the poor and push their ‘moderate’ religious, social and cultural agenda.  Basically, the elected Islamists would replace the old corrupt dictatorial regimes in running the state and signing off on more free trade agreements with the EU.  Their role would keep the leftists, nationalists and populists out of power and from gaining mass support.  Their job would substitute spiritual solace and “inner worth” via Islam in place of redistributing land, income and power from the elite, including the foreign multi-nationals to the peasants, workers, unemployed and exploited low-paid employees.

Why the Empire Arms Fundamentalist Anti-Secular Muslims

While the US and EU have backed respectable “moderate Islam” in heading off a popular upheaval of the young and unemployed, in other contexts they have enlisted violent, fundamentalist Islamic terrorists to overthrow secular independent anti-imperialists regimes – like Libya, Syria — just as they had done earlier in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.  The US, Qatar and the European troika financed and armed Libyan fundamentalist militias and then engaged in a murderous eight months air and sea assault to ensure their client’s ‘victory’ over the secular Gaddafi regime.  Fresh from NATO’s success, the US, the European ‘Troika’ and Turkey, with the backing of the League of Arab collaborator princes and emirs, have financed a violent Muslim Brotherhood insurrection in Syria, intent on destroying the nationalist economy and modern secular state.

The US and EU have openly unleashed their fundamentalists allies in order to destroy independent adversaries in the name of “democracy” and ‘humanitarian intervention’, a laughable claim in light of decade long colonial wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.  All target regimes have one crime in common:  Using their national resources to develop modern secular states – independent of imperial dictates.

NATO  implements its campaigns through conservative ‘moderate’ or armed fundamentalist Islamist movements depending on the specific needs, circumstances and range of options in any given target nation.  With the fall of  pro-Empire ‘secular dictatorships’ in Egypt and Tunisia, pliable conservative Islamist leaders are the fall back “lesser evil”.  When the opportunity to overthrow an independent secular or nationalist regime arises, armed and violent fundamentalist mercenaries become the political vehicle of choice.

As with European empires in the past, the modern Western imperial countries have relied on retrograde religious parties and leaders to collaborate and serve their economic and military interests and to provide mercenaries for imperial armies to savage any anti-imperialist social revolutionaries.  In that sense US and European rulers are neither ‘pro nor anti’ Islam, it all depends on their national and class position.  Islamists who collaborate with Empire are “moderate” allies and if they attack an anti-imperialist regime, they become ‘freedom fighters’.  On the other hand, they become “terrorists” or “fundamentalists” when they oppose imperial occupation, pillage or colonial settlements.

Contemporary History of Islamist-Imperial Collaboration

The historical record of western imperial expansion reveals many instances of collaboration and co-optation as well as conflict with Islamist regimes, movements and parties.  In the early 1960’s the CIA backed a brutal military coup against the secular Indonesian nationalist regime of Sukarno, and encouraged their puppet dictator General Suharto to unleash Muslim militia in a veritable “holy war” exterminating nearly one million leftist trade unionists, school teachers, students, farmers, communists or suspected sympathizers and their family members.  The horrific ‘Jakarta Option’ became a model for CIA operations elsewhere.  In Yugoslavia the US and Europe promoted and financed fundamentalists Muslims in Bosnia, importing mujahedeen who would later form part of Al Qaeda, and then backed the Kosovo Liberation Army, a known terrorist organization, in order to completely break-up and ethnically ‘cleanse’ a modern secular multi-national state – going so far as to have Americans and NATO bomb Belgrade for the first time since the Nazis in the Second World War.

During President Carter’s administration, the CIA joined with Saudi Arabia’s ruling royalty, providing billions of dollars in arms and military supplies to Afghan Muslim fundamentalists in their brutal but successful Jihad overthrowing a modern, secular nationalist regime backed by the USSR.  The murderous fate of school teachers and educated women in the aftermath was quickly covered up.

Needless to say, wherever US imperialism faces leftists or secular, modernizing anti-imperialist regimes, Washington turns to retrograde Islamic leaders willing and able to destroy the progressive regime in return for imperialist support.  Such coalitions are built mainly around fundamentalist and moderate Islamist opposition to secular, class-based politics allied with the Empire’s hostility to any anti-imperialist challenge to its domination.

The same ‘coalition’ of Islamists and the Empire has been glaringly obvious during the NATO assault on Libya and continues against Syria:  The Muslims provide the shock troops on the ground; NATO provides the aerial bombing, funds, arms, sanctions, embargoes and propaganda.

These Islamist-Imperialist coalitions are usually temporary, based on a common secular or nationalist enemy and not on any common strategic interest.  After the defeat of a secular anti-imperialist regime, militant Muslims may find themselves attacked by the colonial neo-liberal regime most favored by the imperial west.  This happened in Afghanistan and elsewhere after the overseas Islamist fighters (Afghan Arabs) returned to their own neo-colonized, collaborating home countries, like Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt and elsewhere.

Contemporary History of Islamist-Imperial Conflict

The relation between Islamist regimes and imperialism is complex, changing and  full of examples of bloody conflict.

The US backed the “modernizing” free market dictatorship of the Shah in Iran, overthrowing the nationalist Mosaddegh regime. They provided arms and intelligence for the Savak, the Shah’s monstrous secret police as it hunted down and murdered tens of thousands of nationalist-Islamists and leftist resistance fighters and critics in Iran and abroad.  The rise to power of the fundamentalist-anti-imperialist Khomeini regime fueled US armed attacks and provoked retaliatory moves:  Iran backed and financed anti-colonial Islamist groups in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Palestine (Hamas) and Iraq (the Shia parties).

Subsequent to 9/11 the US invaded and overthrew the Islamist Taliban regime, re-colonized the country, establishing a puppet regime under US-European auspices.  The Taliban and allied Islamist and nationalist resistance fighters organized and established a mass guerrilla army which has engaged in a decade long war with armed support from Pakistani Islamist forces responding to US military incursions.

In Palestine, Washington, under the overweening control of Israel’s Zionist fifth column, has armed and financed Israel’s war against the popularly elected Palestinian Islamist Hamas government in Gaza.  Washington’s total commitment to the Jewish state and its colonial expansion and usurpation of Palestinian (Muslim and Christian) lands and property in Jerusalem and elsewhere reflects the profound and pervasive influence of the Zionist power configuration throughout the US political system .They secure 90% votes in Congress, pledges of allegiance from the White House, and senior appointments in Treasury, State Department and the Pentagon.

What determines whether the US Empire will have a collaborative or conflict-ridden relation with Islam depends on the specific political context.  The US allies with Islamists when faced with nationalist, leftist and secular democratic regimes and movements, especially where their optimal choice, a military-neo-liberal alternative is relatively weak.  However, faced with a nationalist, anti-colonial Islamist regime (as is the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran), Washington will side with pro-western liberals, dissident Muslim clerics, pliable tribal chiefs, separatist ethnic minorities and pro-Western generals.

The key to US-Islamist relations from the White House perspective is based on the Islamists’ attitude toward empire, class politics, NATO and the “free market” (private foreign investment).

Today’s ‘moderate’ Islamist parties in Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Morocco (and elsewhere), which have offered their support to NATO and its wars against Libya and Syria, uphold ‘private property’ (i.e. foreign and imperialist client control of key industries) and repress independent working class and anti-imperialist parties.  They are the Empire’s “new partners” in the pillage of the resource-rich Middle East and North Africa.

The US-brokered counter-revolutionary alliance among moderate Islamists, the previous military rulers and Washington is fraught with tensions.  The military demands total impunity and a continuation of its economic privileges; this includes a veto on any legislation addressing the previous regime’s brutal crimes against its own people.  On the other hand, the Islamist parties uphold their electoral victories and demand majority rule.  Washington insists the alliance adhere to its policy toward Israel and abandon their support for the Palestinian national struggle.  As these tensions and conflicts deepen, the alliance could collapse ushering in a new phase of conflict and instability.

Emblematic of “moderate Islamist” collaboration with US-EU imperialism is the role of Qatar, home to the ‘respectable’ Arabic media giant, Al-Jazeera, and the demagogic Qatari “spiritual guide” Sheik Youssef  al-Qaradawi.  Sheik Youssef quotes the Koran and Islamic moral principles in defense of NATO’s 8-month aerial bombing of Libya, which killed over 50,000 pro-regime Libyans (themselves Muslims).  He calls for armed imperial intervention in Syria to overthrow the secular Assad regime, a position he shares comfortably with the state of Israel. He urges the “moderate Islamists” in Egypt and Tunisia to cease any criticism of the existing economic order, ( see “Spiritual guide steers Arabs to moderation”, Financial Times, December 9, 2011 – p5).  In a word, this respectable Muslim cleric is NATO’s perfect Koran-quoting “moderate Islamist” partner – a dream come true.

The Strategic Utility of “Moderate” Islamist Parties

Islamist parties are approached by the Empire’s policy elites only when they have a mass following and can therefore weaken any popular, nationalist insurgency.  Mass-based Islamist parties serve the empire by providing “legitimacy”, by winning elections and by giving a veneer of respectability to the pro-imperial military and police apparatus retained in place from the overthrown client state dictatorships.

The Islamist parties compete at the “grass roots” with the leftists.  They build up a clientele of supporters among the poor in the countryside and urban slums through organized charity and basic social services administered at the mosques and humanitarian religious foundations.  Because they reject class struggle and are intensely hostile to the left (with its secular, pro-feminist and working-class agenda), they have been ‘half-tolerated’ by the dictatorship, while the leftist activists are routinely murdered.  Subsequently, with the overthrow of the dictatorship, the Islamists emerge intact with the strongest national organizational network as the country’s ‘natural leaders’ from the religious-bazaar merchant political elite.  Their leaders offer to serve the empire and its traditional native military collaborators in exchange for a ‘slice of power’, especially over morality, culture, religion and households (women); in other words, the “micro-society”.

For their part, they offer to marginalize and undermine the left, anti-imperialist secular democrats in the streets.  In the face of mass popular rebellion calling into question the imperial order, a ‘moderate’ Islamist-imperial partnership is a ‘heavenly deal’ praised in Washington, Paris or London (as well as Riyadh and Tel Aviv).

Conclusion:  How Viable is the Imperial-Islamic Coalition?

Those who thought that the spontaneous pro-democracy movements spelled the end of the imperial order left out the role of organized “moderate” Islamist electoral parties as able collaborators of Empire.  The brutally repressed mass mobilization of unemployed youth was no match for the well-funded grass roots community organization of the moderate Islamists.  This is especially true when politics shifted from the street to the ballot box, a process that the Islamist parties facilitated.  In the absence of a mass revolutionary party seeking state power, the existing military-police state was able to work around the mass protesters and put together a power sharing agreement at least in the short-run.

In the November 2011 elections, the radical Egyptian Islamist party, Nour, gathered one-quarter of the vote in Cairo and Alexandria.  Their showing was even higher among the urban poor districts, which promises even greater support among poor rural constituencies in the coming elections. Essentially a Salafist Islamist party, Nour, unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, combined denunciations of class abuses and elite corruption with mass appeals to a return to a mythic harmonious life.  They used effective grass roots organizing around basic services in order to gain a greater proportion of the working class vote than all the leftist parties combined.  Nour’s message of “class retribution against the …abuses of Egypt’s elite fueled Nour’s new found popularity”, (Financial Times, December 10, 2011 p6).

Despite the successes of the Islamist-Imperial partnership, the world economic crises and especially the growing unemployment and misery in the Arab countries will make it difficult for the ‘respectable moderate’ Islamists to stabilize their societies. They are inextricably constrained by their alliances to function within the confines of the ‘orthodox neo-liberal framework’ imposed by the Empire.  For that reason, the “moderate” Islamists will try to co-opt some secular liberals, social democrats and even a few leftists as ‘minority partners’, so that they won’t be held solely responsible for dashing the expectations of the poor in their countries.

The fact of the matter is that the pro-imperial Islamist parties have absolutely no answer to the current crises:  Charities delivered from the mosque during the dictatorship won them mass support; now more austerity programs imposed from their ministerial posts will certainly alienate and infuriate their mass base.  What will follow depends on who is best organized:  Liberals are limited to media campaigns and tied to economic orthodoxy; the leftists have to advance from protest movements in the downtown squares to organized political units operating in popular neighborhoods, workplaces, markets, villages and slums.  Otherwise radical fundamentalist, like the Salafists, will exploit the people’s outrage with moderate Islamist betrayals and promote their own version of a closed clerical society, opposing the West while repressing the Left.

The US and EU may have ‘temporarily’ avoided revolution by accommodating electoral reforms and adapting to alliances with “moderate” Islamists, but their ongoing military interventions and their own growing economic crisis will  simply postpone a more decisive conflict in the near future.

Angie Tibbs:  Dr. Ezzat, let’s start at the beginning.  In January 2011 hundreds of thousands of Egyptians began their Tahrir Square occupation; you were on the ground there as a journalist and as a medical doctor. Would you recreate the mood of the demonstrators, and, in fact, of the country?

Ashraf Ezzat:  Egyptians still refer to those 18 days (January 25- February 11) as the glorious days of the revolution. Those days will undoubtedly carve their place in the modern history of Egypt. And contrary to what the mainstream media concluded, the Tahrir Square saga that captured the world may have been called for by some activists using the internet social media, but it was mainly fueled and triggered by years of political corruption and oppression. The build-up for this uprising has been brewing for years and specifically after Mubarak made it clear he was bequeathing the presidency for his son, Gamal.

Hence, the general mood of the Egyptians was a blend of dissatisfaction, anger and a potent urge for change. It is funny but it seems that the Egyptians had a clear-cut idea what they wanted from the first day they took to the streets. I joined the protests from the second day; the people on the streets were not divided about their demands.  You could see it in their eyes and hear it as they chanted “Bread, freedom and social justice” … and those three demands are what the “Tahrir Square” is still fighting for.

Dr. Ashraf Ezzat in Tahrir Square

AT:  One of the demands of the protesters was for President Mubarak to step down, effectively ending his 30 year authoritarian rule.  This he did on February 11, at which time the military council took over the country, promising to bring about democracy and to respect the wishes of the people. Did this happen, and did anyone expect it would happen?

AE: The military council of armed forces (SCAF), whose generals are Mubarak’s handpicked appointees, did nothing in the last ten months to promote democracy in the country; on the contrary, the generals, and through their ineptness or unwillingness actually to restore security on the street, have helped to bolster the tide of the counter-revolution.

And hadn’t it been for the thousands who lately returned to Tahrir Square to denounce the military rule and ask for a hand-over of power to a civilian salvation government, the revolution would have been done with and declared dead.

The majority of the Egyptian people kind of hoped the military would lead them out of these difficult times but while most of Egyptians didn’t doubt the capability of SCAF to do so, a lot of activists and political analysts suspected that the way SCAF has been handling things would eventually put the country on the road to democracy.

AT: Are you saying that there were those who believed that in time the SCAF would have, if left in power, brought about democracy?

AE: No, I meant to say that the downfall of Mubarak was so abrupt that nobody actually had seen it coming, not even the military which is part and parcel of the despotic old regime. And while stunned by the uprising’s rapid pace, military generals were following how this people vs. regime uprising was going to end, and they decided not to take sides until this whole thing was almost settled.

And when it was obvious, despite the White House’s pro-Mubarak stance, that the people were gaining the upper hand in this uprising the military, only at that moment, decided to side with the people and this is when the protesters in Tahrir square chanted “ The people and military are joined hand in hand”

But not everybody was fooled by this “wait and see” approach by the military. A lot of activists and political analysts knew that the self-serving generals would try to somehow steer this transitional period in their favor. And that is exactly what they did when they proposed a new draft for a constitution that would shield the military from parliamentary scrutiny and which declares the military the guardian of “constitutional legitimacy,” suggesting the armed forces could have the final word on major policies.

AT:  How did Egyptians feel about the military and the police from the commencement of the Mubarak regime up to the demonstrations of January 2011?

AE: Actually Mubarak’s regime was just a police regime. A giant police apparatus that stifled dissent by violent means and that only served and protected the corrupt elite and the president. The citizen/police relation has been quite tense over years of coercion and misconduct. Throughout most of Mubarak’s rule Egyptians feared and somehow distrusted the police.

But in the last couple of years and prior to his ouster they began to loathe the corruption that swept across the whole security apparatus that turned the policeman into a thug with a badge, placed him above the law and allowed him to get away with almost anything … even crimes.

The famous case of the killing of Khalid Saeed, young Egyptian man from Alexandria, who was beaten to death by security forces after he was indicted on framed charges, has incited unprecedented anger and helped trigger the revolution in January. 

While the majority of Egyptians had negative feelings for the police they honored and respected the military for its patriotic role of protecting the sovereignty of the state and for the long and heroic confrontation with Israel especially after the 1973 war.

But I hope that Egyptians will make the necessary and fair distinction between the military forces or the army as a whole and the generals in the military council when they come to judge the conduct of SCAF in the transitional period that followed January 25 revolution.

AT:  In the months since the occupation of Tahrir Square ended, have there been any changes meaningful to Egyptians?

AE: Though a lot of things have remained the same if not for the worse, I would say that the only thing that really changed in the life of Egyptians is their ability to say NO to anything and anyone. And also to vote freely, as we all have witnessed the huge turnout for the first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections.

The Egyptian people broke the fear barrier and this, for people who have been enduring under tyranny for centuries, is quite an achievement. Moreover, I truly believe that once placed on the path of real democracy, the whole world will witness a new and amazingly different Egypt.

AT: Since the demonstrations ended in February, thousands of people have been arrested and tried before military tribunals, yet throughout the occupation of Tahrir Square there appeared to be good relations between the protesters and the security forces.  What caused these widespread arrests and are they continuing?

AE: As I mentioned before, many of the Tahrir activists viewed the stance of the military with suspicion and as days went by it became obvious that the generals were trying to give the old regime a comeback chance. The scenario of chaos and sectarian violence that Mubarak threatened would engulf the country if he was to step down was beginning to be unleashed.

Shortly after the toppling of Mubarak, Egypt began to witness months of unrest, economic plunge, lack of security forces on the street, sectarian violence and a series of churches attacks which culminated in the lethal clashes with a Coptic rally on October 9 that left 27 killed by the military forces in what is now known as the Maspero massacre.

But this was not what the revolutionary youths and activists demanded when they initiated the January uprising. This was not why people got killed in the protests. The people didn’t topple Mubarak to have a military dictatorship instead.

So this is why the honeymoon with the military didn’t last and it wasn’t long before many activists began to point the finger at SCAF for all the scenarios aimed at thwarting the revolution tide. And it wasn’t long either before the thousands – almost 15,000 according to Human Rights Watch – were thrown behind bars and tried before military tribunals until this very day.

AT:  Protesters have again taken to the streets of Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt, and the police are responding, thus far killing over 30 people. What has prompted this, and what do you anticipate happening as a result?

AE:   According to the counter-revolution plan, which the United States fully backed, the military was supposed to grab the power permanently. To set the stage for such scenario, the military in the last ten months has done everything possible not only to thwart the advance of the revolution but to turn the Egyptians against the idea itself as the plan augmented the sense of vulnerability and insecurity of the average Egyptian citizen and cunningly linked it to the revolution.

And just when the generals thought they had managed to hijack the revolution, they were in for a big surprise.

Emboldened by the power they’ve got and by the American support, the generals dared to propose a new draft for a constitution that could only pave the way for a military fascism and this is where they went wrong.  This blatant exploitation on part of the military council triggered the pouring of thousands into Tahrir Square once again in what is now dubbed “the second revolution”.

AT:  The military council is now promising presidential elections before July of 2012.  Is this a satisfactory response to the current uprising? Will the Egyptian people accept this or will they view it as an attempt by the military to divert world attention from its ongoing crackdown? Furthermore, do Egyptians accept the military as a caretaker government? 

AE: Egyptians didn’t flock back to Tahrir Square to demand elections. The protesters in Tahrir Square have made it clear that they don’t want the military council as a caretaker and moreover they insist that the council should step aside and hand over power to a civilian salvation government. In January the protesters in Tahrir Square wanted Mubarak to step down, and in November they wanted the military to step aside.

AT:  Were you surprised to hear the US State Department initially praising the “exercise of self-restraint and professionalism” of the Egyptian security forces with respect to the present demonstrations?

AE:  There seems to be a growing number of people in and around the Tahrir Square angry at being fired on by weapons supplied from countries like the US, making nice noises about democracy and restraint in Egypt. The US government and its weapon companies continue to supply tools of repression, usually for profit, to those who they well know will use them to violate human rights and repress their own citizens.

So once again the unexpected course of the Egyptian revolution – and contrary to the conspiracy theorists who view the Arab revolutions as orchestrated by the CIA & the neo-cons – has exposed the flagrant American double standards in the Middle East and especially in regard to the Arab spring.

The mere fact that protesters refused to meet Mrs. Clinton, the American secretary of state, on her first visit to Cairo after the ouster of Mubarak should tell us how the revolutionary youths of Egypt view the United States’ stance on their revolution.

AT: Do you see a connection between the Egyptian military and possible US and Israel future plans for Egypt?    

AE: I doubt the Egyptian military would undertake any move that could jeopardize its patriotic history, but I would certainly be relieved if this current top command of Egypt military could be replaced soon.  No matter how we look at it, those generals of Egypt military council are part of the old regime.

Indeed our reading into the current turmoil and change gripping Egypt and the rest of the Arab world is bound to open our eyes to a brand new Arab world in the making right now – but not the Condoleezza Rice’s new Middle East. New forces are emerging and the United States will soon have to relinquish its old diplomacy in Middle East that relied mainly on the so called strong allies/dictators and try to prepare for the rise of a new political front – most probably of Islamists – that will rule in Tunisia, Libya, and Cairo and maybe Syria.

AT:  What is happening in Egypt today, and what is the mood of the people?

AE: The parliamentary polls opened amid escalating protests that reject the newly appointed prime minister and a build-up of public opinion that demands the generals must go back to their barracks. The general mood is split between the youths who seem determined to take the revolution to the farthest limit and the older generation who believe that stability and compromise is what the country needs right now.  It is split between the conservative front who thinks it is time we gave our support for the Muslim Brotherhood (the longtime outlawed Islamist political group) and the liberal groups who, despite their modest preliminary showing in the parliamentary polls, believe that we should separate the mosque from the state.

In that sense, you could say the current struggle is between the old and the new or the past and future; in other words, between the conservatives and the liberals. But I don’t think Egypt, the land of moderate Islam and the liberal hub of the Arab world, will get lost as long as the Tahrir Square spirit remains with us.

The Russian investigative journalist, Nikolay Starikov, has written a book which discusses the role of unknown snipers in the destabilization of countries targeted for regime change by the United States and its allies. The following article attempts to elucidate some historical examples of this technique with a view to providing a background within which to understand the current cover war on the people of Syria by death squads in the service of Western intelligence.

Romania, 1989

In Susanne Brandstätter’s documentary Checkmate: Strategy of a Revolution aired on Arte television station some years ago,  Western intelligence officials revealed how  death squads were used to destabilize Romania and turn its people against the head of state Nicolai Ceaucescu.

Brandstätter’s film is a must see for anyone interested in how Western intelligence agencies, human rights groups and the corporate press collude in the systematic destruction of countries whose leadership conflicts with the interests of big capital and empire.

Former secret agent with the French secret service, the DGSE(La Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure) Dominique Fonvielle, spoke candidly about the role of Western intelligence operatives in destabilizing the Romanian population.

How do you organize a revolution? I believe the first step is to locate oppositional forces in a given country. It is sufficient to have a highly developed intelligence service in order to determine which people are credible enough to have influence at their hands to destabilize the people to the disadvantage of the ruling regime.

This open and rare admission of Western sponsorship of terrorism was justified on the grounds of the “greater good” brought to Romania by free-market capitalism. It was necessary, according to the strategists of Romania’s “revolution”, for some people to die.

Today, Romania remains one of the poorest countries in Europe. A report on Euractiv reads:

Most Romanians associate the last two decades with a continuous process of impoverishment and deteriorating living standards, according to Romania’s Life Quality Research Institute, quoted by the Financiarul daily.

The western intelligence officials interviewed in the documentary also revealed how the Western press played a central role in disinformation. For example, the victims of Western-backed snipers were photographed by presented to the world as evidence of a crazed dictator who was “killing his own people”.

To this day, there is a Museum in the back streets of Timisoara Romania which promotes the myth of the “Romanian Revolution”.  The Arte documentary was one of the rare occasions when the mainstream press revealed some of  the dark secrets of Western liberal democracy. The documentary caused a scandal when it was aired in France, with the prestigious Le Monde Diplomatique discussing the moral dilemma of the West’s support of terror in its desire to spread ‘democracy’.

Since the destruction of Libya and the ongoing cover war on Syria, Le Monde Diplomatique has stood safely on the side of political correction, condemning Bashar Al Assad for the crimes of the DGSE and the CIA. In its current edition, the front page article reads Ou est la gauche? Where is the left ? Certainly not in the pages of Le Monde Diplomatique !

Russia, 1993

During Boris Yeltsin’s counter-revolution in Russia in 1993, when the Russian parliament was bombed resulting in the deaths of thousands of people, Yeltsin’s counter-revolutionaries made extensive use of snipers. According to many eye witness reports, snipers were seen shooting civilians from the building opposite the US embassy in Moscow. The snipers were attributed to the Soviet government by the international media.

Venezuela, 2002

In 2002, the CIA attempted to overthrow Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, in a military coup. On the 11th of April 2002, an opposition march towards the presidential palace was organized by the US-backed Venezuelan opposition. Snipers hidden in buildings near the palace opened fire on protestors killing 18. The Venezuelan and international media claimed that Chavez was “killing his own people” thereby justifying the military coup presented as a humanitarian intervention.  It was subsequently proved that the coup had been organized by the CIA but the identity of the snipers was never established.

Thailand, April 2010

On April 12th 2010, Christian Science Monitor published a detailed report of the riots in Thailand between “red-shirt” activists and the Thai government. The article headline read: ‘Thailand’s red shirt protests darken with unknown snipers, parade of coffins’.

Like their counterparts in Tunisia, Thailand’s red shirts were calling for the resignation of the Thai prime minister. While a heavy-handed response by the Thai security forces to the protestors was indicated in the report, the government’s version of events was also reported:

Mr. Abhisit has used solemn televised addresses to tell his story. He has blamed rogue gunmen, or “terrorists,” for the intense violence (at least 21 people died and 800 were injured) and emphasized the need for a full investigation into the killings of both soldiers and protesters. State television has broadcast repeated images of soldiers coming under fire from bullets and explosives.

The CSM report went on to quote Thai military officials and unnamed Western diplomats:

Military observers say Thai troops stumbled into a trap set by agents provocateurs with military expertise. By pinning down soldiers after dark and sparking chaotic battles with unarmed protesters, the unknown gunmen ensured heavy casualties on both sides.

Some were caught on camera and seen by reporters, including this one. Snipers targeted military ground commanders, indicating a degree of advance planning and knowledge of Army movements, say Western diplomats briefed by Thai officials. While leaders of the demonstrations have disowned the use of firearms and say their struggle is nonviolent, it is unclear whether radicals in the movement knew of the trap.

“You can’t claim to be a peaceful political movement and have an arsenal of weapons out the back if needed. You can’t have it both ways,” says a Western diplomat in regular contact with protest leaders.

The CSM article also explores the possibility that the snipers could be rogue elements in the Thai military, agents provocateurs used to justify a crack down on democratic opposition. Thailand’s ruling elite is currently coming under pressure from a George Soros funded colour revolution hysteria called the Red Shirts.

Kyrgystan, June 2010

Ethnic violence broke out in the Central Asian republic of  Kirgystan  in June 2010. It was widely reported that unknown snipers opened fire on members of the Uzbek minority in Kyrgystan. Eurasia.net reports:

In many Uzbek mahallas, inhabitants offer convincing testimony of gunmen targeting their neighborhoods from vantage points. Men barricaded into the Arygali Niyazov neighborhood, for example, testified to seeing gunmen on the upper floors of a nearby medical institute hostel with a view over the district’s narrow streets. They said that during the height of the violence these gunmen were covering attackers and looters, assaulting their area with sniper fire. Men in other Uzbek neighborhoods tell similar stories.

Among the rumours and unconfirmed reports circulating in Kyrgyzstan after the 2010 violence were claims that water supplies to Uzbek areas were about to be  poisoned. Such rumours had also been spread against the Ceaucescu regime in Romania during the CIA- backed coup in 1989. Eurasia.net goes on to claim that:

Many people are convinced that they’ve seen foreign mercenaries acting as snipers. These alleged foreign combatants are distinguished by their appearance – inhabitants report seeing black snipers and tall, blonde, female snipers from the Baltic states. The idea that English snipers have been roaming the streets of Osh shooting at Uzbeks is also popular. There’ve been no independent corroborations of such sightings by foreign journalists or representatives of international organizations.

None of these reports have been independently investigated or corroborated. It is therefore impossible to draw any hard conclusions from these stories.

Ethnic violence against Uzbek citizens in Kyrgyzstan occurred pari pasu with a popular revolt against the US-backed regime, which many analysts have attributed to the machinations of Moscow.

The Bakiyev régime came to power in a CIA-backed people-power coup known to the world as the Tulip Revolution in 2005.

Located to the West of China and bordering Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan hosts one of America’s biggest and most important military bases in Central Asia, the Manas Air Base, which is vital for the NATO occupation of neighbouring Afghanistan.

Despite initial worries,US/Kyrgyz relations have remained good under the regime of President Roza Otunbayeva. This is not surprising as Otunbayeva had previously participated in the US-created Tulip Revolution in 2004, taking power as foreign minister.

To date no proper investigation has been conducted into the origins of the ethnic violence that spread throughout  the south of Kyryzstan in 2010, nor have the marauding gangs of unknown snipers been identified and apprehended.

Given the geo-strategic and geo-political importance of Kyrgyzstan to both the United States and Russia, and the formers track-record of using death squads to divide and weaken countries so as to maintain US domination, US involvement in the dissemination of terrorism in Kyrgyzstan cannot be ruled out. One effective way of maintaining a grip on Central Asian countries would be to exacerbate ethnic tensions.

In August 6th 2008, the Russian newspaper Kommersa`nt reported that a US arms cache had been found in a house in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, which was being rented by two American citizens. The US embassy claimed the arms were being used for “anti-terrorism” exercises. However, this was not confirmed by Kyrgyz authorities.

Covert US military support to terrorist groups in the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia proved to be an effective strategy in creating the conditions for “humanitarian” bombing in 1999. An effective means of  keeping the government in Bishkek firmly on America’s side would be to insist on a US and European presence in the country to help “protect” the Uzbek minority.

Military intervention similar to that in the former Yugoslavia by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe  has already been advocated by the New York Times, whose misleading article on the riots on June 24th 2010 has the headline “Kyrgyzstan asks European Security Body for Police Teams”. The article is misleading as the headline contradicts the actual report which cites a Kyrgyz official stating:

A government spokesman said officials had discussed an outside police presence with the O.S.C.E., but said he could not confirm that a request for a deployment had been made.

There is no evidence in the article of any request by the Kyrgyz government for military intervention. In fact, the article presents much evidence to the contrary. However, before the reader has a chance to read the explanation of the Kyrgyz government, the New York Times writer presents the now all too horribly familiar narrative of oppressed peoples begging the West to come and bomb or occupy their country:

Ethnic Uzbeks in the south have clamored for international intervention. Many Uzbeks said they were attacked in their neighborhoods not only by civilian mobs, but also by the Kyrgyz military and police officers.

Only towards the end of the article do we find out that the Kyrgyz authorities blamed the US-backed dictator for fomenting ethnic violence in the country, through the use of Islamic jihadists in Uzbekistan. This policy of using ethnic tension to create an environment of fear in order to prop up an extremely unpopular dictatorship, the policy of using Islamic Jihadism as a political tool to create what former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Bzrezinski called “ an arc of crisis”, ties in well with the history of US involvement in Central Asia from the creation of Al Qaida in Afghanistan in 1978 to the present day.

Again, the question persists, who were the “unknown snipers” terrorizing the Uzbek population, where did their weapons come from and who would benefit from ethnic conflict in Central Asia’s geopolitical hotspot?

Tunisia, January 2011

On January 16th 2011, CNN reported that ‘’armed gangs’’ were fighting Tunisian security forces.  Many of the murders committed throughout the Tunisian uprising were by “unknown snipers”. There were also videos posted on the internet showing Swedish nationals detained by Tunisian security forces. The men were clearly armed with sniper rifles. Russia Today aired the dramatic pictures.

In spite of articles by professor Michel Chossudovsky, William Engdahl and  others showing how the uprisings in North Africa were following the patterns of US backed people-power coups rather than genuinely popular revolutions, left wing parties and organizations continued to believe the version of events presented to them by Al Jazeera and the mainstream press. Had the left taken a left from old Lenin’s book they would have transposed his comments on the February/March revolution in Russia thus:

The  whole course of events in the January/February Revolution clearly shows that the British, French and American embassies, with their agents and “connections”,… directly organized a plot.. in conjunction with a section of the generals and army and Tunisian garrison officers, with the express object of deposing Ben Ali

What the left did not understand is that sometimes it is necessary for imperialism to overthrow some of its clients. A suitable successor to Ben Ali could always be found among the feudalists of the Muslim Brotherhood who now look likely to take power.

In their revolutionary sloganeering and arrogant insistence that the events in Tunisia and Egypt were “spontaneous and popular uprisings” they committed what Lenin identified as the most dangerous sins in a revolution; namely, the substitution of the abstract for the concrete. In other words, left wing groups were simply fooled by the sophistication of the Western backed “Arab Spring” events.

That is why the violence of the demonstrators and, in particular, the widespread use of snipers possibly linked to Western intelligence was the great unthought of the Tunisian uprising. The same techniques would be used in Libya a few weeks later, forcing the left to back track and modifiy its initial enthusiasm for the CIA’s “Arab Spring”.

When we are talking about the” left” here, we are referring to genuine left wing parties, that is to say, parties who supported the Great People’s Socialist Libyan Arab Jamahirya in their long and brave fight against Western imperialism, not the infantile petty bourgeois dupes who supported NATO’s Benghazi terrorists.  The blatant idiocy of such a stance should be crystal clear to anyone who understands global politics and class struggle.

Egypt, 2011

On October 20th 2011, the Telegraph newspaper published an article entitled, “Our brother died for a better Egypt”. According to the Telegraph, Mina Daniel, an anti-government activist in Cairo, had been ‘shot from an unknown sniper, wounding him fatally in the chest”

Inexplicably, the article is no longer available on the Telegraph’s website for online perusal. But a google search for ‘Egypt, unknown sniper, Telegraph’ clearly shows the above quoted explanation for Mina Daniel’s death. So, who could these “unknown snipers’’ be?

On February 6th Al Jazeera reported that Egyptian journalist, Ahmad Mahmoud, was shot by snipers as he attempted to cover clashes between Egyptian security forces and protestors. Referring to statements made by Mahmoud’s wife, Enas Abdel-Alim, the Al Jazeera article insinuates that Mahmoud may have been killed by Egyptian security forces:

Abdel-Alim said several eyewitnesses told her a uniformed police captain with Egypt’s notorious Central Security forces yelled at her husband to stop filming. Before Mahmoud even had a chance to react, she said, a sniper shot him.

While the Al Jazeera article advances the theory that the snipers were agents of the Mubarak regime, their role in the uprising still remains a mystery. Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based television stations owned by the Emir Hamid Bin Khalifa Al Thani, played a key role in provoking protests in Tunisia and Egypt before launching a campaign of unmitigated pro-NATO war propaganda and lies during the destruction of Libya.

The Qatari channel has been a central participant in the current covert war waged by NATO agencies and their clients against the Republic of Syria. Al Jazeera’s incessant disinformation against Libya and Syria resulted in the resignation of several prominent journalists such as Beirut station chief Ghassan Bin Jeddo and senior Al Jazeera executive Wadah Khanfar who was forced to resign after a Wikileaks cable revealed he was a co-operating with the Central Intelligence Agency.

Many people were killed during the US-backed colour revolution in Egypt. Although, the killings have been attributed to former US semi-client Hosni Mubarak, the involvement of Western intelligence cannot be ruled out. However, it should be pointed out that the role of unknown snipers in mass demonstrations remains complex and multi-faceted and therefore one should not jump to conclusions. For example, after the Bloody Sunday massacre (Domhnach na Fola) in Derry, Ireland 1972, where peaceful demonstrators were shot dead by the British army, British officials claimed that they had come under fire from snipers. But the 30 year long Bloody Sunday  inquiry subsequently proved this to be false.  But the question persists once more,  who were the snipers in Egypt and whose purposes did they serve?

Libya,  2011

During the destabilization of Libya, a video was aired by Al Jazeera purporting to show peaceful “pro-democracy” demonstrators being fired upon by “Gaddafi’s forces”. The video was edited to convince the viewer that anti-Gaddafi demonstrators were being murdered by the security forces. However, the unedited version of the video is available on utube. It clearly shows pro-Gaddafi demonstrators with Green flags being fired upon by unknown snipers. The attribution of NATO-linked crimes to the security forces of the Libyan Jamahirya was a constant feature of the brutal media war waged against the Libyan people.

Syria, 2011

The people of Syria have been beset by death squads and snipers since the outbreak of violence there in March. Hundreds of Syrian soldiers and security personnel have been murdered, tortured and mutilated by Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood militants. Yet the international media corporations continue to spread the pathetic lie that the deaths are the result of Bashar Al Assad’s dictatorship.

When I visited Syria in April of this year, I personally encountered merchants and citizens in Hama who told me they had seen armed terrorists roaming the streets of that once peaceful city, terrorizing the neighbourhood. I recall speaking to a fruit seller in the city of Hama who  spoke about the horror he had witnessed that day. As he described the scenes of violence to me, my attention was arrested by a newspaper headline in English from the Washington Post  shown on Syrian television: “CIA backs Syrian opposition”. The Central Intelligence Agency provides training and funding for groups who do the bidding of US imperialist interests. The history of the CIA shows that backing opposition forces means providing them with arms and finance, actions illegal under international law.

A few days later, while at a hostel in the ancient, cultured city of Aleppo, I spoke to a Syrian business man and his family. The business man ran many hotels in the city and was pro-Assad. He told me that he used to watch Al Jazeera television but now had doubts about their honesty. As we conversed, the Al Jazeera television in the background showed scenes of Syrian soldiers beating and torturing protestors. “ Now if that is true, it is simply unacceptable” he said. It is sometimes impossible to verify whether the images shown on television are true or not. Many of the crimes attributed to the Syrian army have been committed by the armed gangs, such as the dumping of mutilated bodies into the river in Hama, presented to the world as more proof of the crimes of the Assad regime.

There is a minority of innocent opponents of the Assad regime who believe everything they see and hear on Al Jazeera and the other pro-Western satellite stations. These people simply do not understand the intricacies of international politics.

But the facts on the ground show that most people in Syria support the government. Syrians have access to all internet websites and international TV channels. They can watch BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, read the New York Times online or Le Monde before tuning into their own state media. In this respect, many Syrians are more informed about international politics than the average European or American. Most Europeans and Americans believe their own media. Few are capable of reading the Syrian press in original Arabic or watching Syrian television. The Western powers are the masters of discourse, who own the means of communication. The Arab Spring has been the most horrifying example of the wanton abuse of this power.

Disinformation is effective in sowing the seeds of doubt among those who are seduced by Western propaganda. Syrian state media has disproved hundreds of Al Jazeera lies since the beginning of this conflict.  Yet the western media has refused to even report the Syrian government’s position lest fair coverage of the other side of this story encourage a modicum of critical thought in the public mind.

Conclusion.

The use of mercenaries, death squads and snipers by Western intelligence agencies is well documented.  No rational government attempting to stay in power would resort to unknown snipers to intimidate its opponents. Shooting at innocent protestors would be counterproductive in the face of unmitigated pressure from Western governments determined to install a client regime in Damascus. Shooting of unarmed protestors is only acceptable in dictatorships that enjoy the unconditional support of Western governments such as Bahrain, Honduras or Colombia.

A government which is so massively supported by the population of Syria would not sabotage its own survival by setting snipers against the protests of a small minority.

The opposition to the Syrian regime is, in fact, miniscule. Tear gas, mass arrests and other non lethal methods would be perfectly sufficient for a government wishing to control unarmed demonstrators.

Snipers are used to create terror, fear and anti-regime propaganda. They are an integral feature of Western sponsored regime change. If one were to make a serious criticism of the Syrian government over the past few months, it is that they have failed to implement effective anti-terrorism measures in the country. The Syrian people want troops on the streets and the roofs of public buildings. In the weeks and months ahead, the Syrian armed forces will probably rely more and more on their Russian military specialists to strengthen the country’s defenses as the Western crusade begun in Libya in March spreads to the Levant. There is no conclusive proof that the snipers murdering men, women and children in Syria are the agents of Western imperialism. But there is overwhelming proof that Western imperialism is attempting to destroy the Syrian state. As in Libya, they have never once mentioned the possibility of negotiations between the so-called opposition and the Syrian government. The West wants regime change and is determined to repeat the slaughter in Libya to achieve this geopolitical objective.

It now looks likely that the cradle of civilization and science will be overrun by semi-literate barbarians as the terminal decline of the West plays itself out in the deserts of the East.

According to official figures released by the Bahrain Center for Human Rights website, so far 44 Bahraini citizens were killed at the hands of the mercenaries of Al Khalifa regime. The Bahraini martyrs include the 6-year-old Mohammed Farhan, 14-year-old Ali Jawad Alshaikh and 15-year-old Sayed Ahmad Saeed Shams. The Bahraini organization has reported that many of these martyrs were killed while in custody. The Center has also published documents indicating that more than 1,500 Bahrainis, including about 100 women, were incarcerated since the eruption of turmoil in the Persian Gulf country on February 14, 2011 and that more that 90 journalists face life threat.

It’s also said that the Bahraini government has blocked the citizens’ access to more than 1000 opposition websites which are mainly used to organize and plan protests and mass demonstrations.

The Bahraini regime commits all of these aggressive and brutal actions with the direct involvement of Saudi Arabia and the implicit support and backing of NATO and the United States. The author of the Hidden Harmonies China blog in a March 14, 2011 post referred to the abuses of human rights in Bahrain with the flagrant, duplicitous support of the White House: “the Entry of Saudi security forces to crack down on the protesters with deadly force is a complication for U.S. policies, to say the least, since U.S. is reluctant to criticize its oil ally dictators in the region.”

He also called Bahrain the “Las Vegas” of the Middle East, host to the U.S. 5th Fleet and a haunt for the rich Saudis who are forbidden by Islamic laws at home from indulging in alcohol and other immoral enjoyments, “but who often vacation in Bahrain for these reasons.”

Bahraini citizens have uploaded several video files on the internet, showing the cruel and ruthless torturing and persecuting of the protesters by the Al Khalifa lackeys. These videos depict the Bahraini forces using tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse protesters and killing many of them straight away. Some of these videos also show the Saudi and Bahraini cars nonchalantly running over Bahraini children and women, killing them at once.

The U.S.-Saudi project of crackdown on the Bahraini people was also empowered by many of the European cronies of Washington. In July 2011, Germany sold a set of 200 62-ton Leopard tanks to Saudi Arabia which sparked a huge controversy among the German parliamentarians and anti-war activists. According to the Daily Telegraph, Wolfgang Gerhardt, former leader of the Free Democrats, the junior collation member to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, said it was “unacceptable” the deal went through without the knowledge of his party’s MPs. However, the agreement which was worth around USD 1,252 million was concluded and the Saudi government dispatched many of these newly-bought tanks to Bahrain to accelerate and facilitate the bloody clampdown on the protesters.

The situation in Yemen, however, is far more deplorable and appalling. Allvoices.com has reported that as of September 25, 1,870 Yemenis were killed in the revolution and the majority of the martyrs were unarmed civilians taking part in anti-government demonstrations.

The Yemeni dictator who has remained defiant in the face of frequent calls by the tribal leaders, opposition groups and demonstrators to step down and give up power has turned his country into a bloodbath and made the Yemeni uprising the longest, most devastative revolution in the revolutionary wave of protests in the Middle East. The protests in Yemen started on February 3, 2011 and have continued so far. The only reaction of the international community to the brutality in Yemen was an indecisive and faltering resolution by the UNSC which called for “an end to violence” and asked President Ali Abdullah Saleh to accept a peace deal brokered by the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council. However, Abdullah Saleh, who is tacitly supported by the U.S., kept up with the brutalities and according to Yemen Times, 94 protesters were killed after the Security Council adopted the resolution 2014.

In a report published on Yemen Times on November 17, it was revealed that “ninety-four Yemenis were killed and over 800 injured since UN Resolution 2014 was issued on October 21.”

“Tentative reports show that over the last three weeks in Yemen, 124 homes, seven mosques, six public institutions including one hospital, two community wells, and 17 vehicles were effectively destroyed,” Yemen Times reported.

In the days leading to the detainment and death of Moammar Gaddafi, the Western mainstream media were only talking about the Libyan civil war, and the reason was clear: NATO had secured a UNSC resolution to enact a no-fly zone over Libya and it was in the interests of the U.S. and its European partners to give coverage to the tumultuous situation in the North African country. However, the reports and news regarding the carnage in Bahrain and Yemen were predominantly shunned and boycotted, simply because these two despotic regimes were close allies of the U.S. in the Middle East.

In a report published on Independent Australia, Zaid Jiani alluded to the violent crackdown on the protesters in Bahrain and Yemen and posed the question: “is the media downplaying these events because the two dictatorships are firm allies of the West?”

A Think Progress analysis of press coverage by the three major U.S. cable news networks – CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News – from March 14 to March 18 finds that Bahrain received only slightly more than ten percent as many mentions as Libya and that Yemen received only six percent as many mentions as Libya.

Now what concerns the independent thinkers, scholars, university professors, journalists and peace activists is that Syria has become the target of international pressure, simply because it has strong ties with Iran and resistant groups in Lebanon and Palestine, while the reactionary regimes of Bahrain and Yemen are getting away with the felonies which they commit by the virtue of their alliance with the United States.

The Arab League has vindictively suspended the participation of Syria while it has taken no practical step to normalize the situation in the turbulent and chaotic Yemen and Bahrain in which innocent people are being killed on a daily basis by their tyrannical rulers and their loyalists.

All that can be said is that the performance of the Arab League in neglecting the situation in Yemen and Bahrain and exaggerating the unrest in Syria, which is mainly caused by the foreign intervention and the West’s indifference toward the plight of the suppressed nations in Yemen and Bahrain, is an all-out hypocrisy and a clear, undeniable exercise of double standards. Who can really devise a clear-cut solution for this unsolvable dilemma?

Those dreams have been assassinated and we know the identity of the assassin.

For nine long months, we have witnessed an undeclared but unrelenting war of attrition against the Egyptian revolution. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces led by Field Marshall Tantawi has executed one of the most brilliant counter-revolutions in modern history. Even if Tantawi were to step aside today, history would have to accord him credit for accomplishing his mission and breaking the spirit of the revolution.

Like any war of attrition, the desired outcome is to vanquish your opponent by exhausting him to the point where you break his will to resist. The day Mubarak fell, it was hard to imagine that the collective will of the Egyptian people could be broken. But in hindsight, it’s clear that the SCAF put together and executed a brilliant blue print for wearing down the exuberance of the Egyptian masses.

On taking command of the ship of state, the SCAF promised to hold power for six months – just enough time to allow for free and fair elections. By that timeline, which passed unnoticed on August 11, Egypt was supposed to have a new president, a national assembly and a new constitution. That done – the army was to return to the barracks.

To say that the SCAF broke its promise would be a charitable understatement. The hated emergency laws that were used to enforce the dictates of Mubarak’s regime were briefly rescinded, then reinstated and zealously enforced. Fifteen thousand civilians have since been tried and sentenced before military tribunals. The judges who looked the other way and sanctioned Mubarak’s rigged elections continue to infest the court system. The vast media resources at the disposable of the state remain in the safe hands of the old guard. Censorship is back and every journalist knows that the freshly painted red lines are wider than the old red lines. And, once again, the unrestrained hands of a vengeful police force have been unleashed on peaceful protestors.

At every junction of this nine month odyssey, the military junta has defied the public will. The SCAF insisted on keeping Mubarak’s appointed Prime Minister, Ahmed Sahfiq. Only a show of force by millions of demonstrators managed to convince them to appoint ministers untainted by links to the former dictator. And there was one minister who insisted on keeping his position – Field Marshall Tantawi – the 76 year old Minister of Defense, a stalwart Mubarak ally for two decades.

It took concerted public pressure to convince SCAF that Mubarak’s criminal file deserved the attention of law enforcement. When the generals finally conceded to put their old boss and a few of his cronies on trial, they also promised to televise the proceedings. But for unexplained reasons, the cameras were turned off and the trials have been postponed for months at a time on the flimsiest of legal grounds.

At first, it seemed that the generals were simply out of touch with public sentiment and clueless in the art of governing. But with the passage of time, it became evident that they had a deliberate policy of wearing down the revolutionary spirit. Their tactic was to grant concessions only under the duress of mass demonstrations and the predictable result was that the public gradually tired of disruptive million man marches. Simultaneously, the public airwaves, owned and operated by the SCAF, were deployed in a calculated campaign to erode the revolutionary spirit. The talk shows and news programs delivered a not so subtle message that the only fruit of the revolution was economic stagnation and a breakdown in law and order. As part of the effort to undermine the public’s embrace of the uprising, the government media stopped airing the popular video clip music that hailed the sacrifices of the hundreds of young men and women who gave their lives for the revolution.

As if the SCAF needed any reinforcement in their war of attrition against the popular uprising, the political class entered the fray and splintered into sixty odd factions, the largest one being the divisive Muslim Brotherhood which was happy to make back room deals with the generals. A week before the elections, you would be hard pressed to find a single Egyptian who can name ten of the five dozen parties vying for a share of the political spoils.

One of the few tangible gains of the revolution was the public’s right to peacefully assemble and protest. Even that hard won concession has gone with the wind – first with the slaughter of Coptic demonstrators in Maspiro and now with the lethal show of force in Tahrir.

Today, Egyptians look to Tunisia’s recently elected government with envy. But in Egypt, under the skillful hands of a military dictatorship that has six decades of experience under its belt, the uprising has been contained, the old guard remains in charge and the revolutionary spirit has floundered.

As an eyewitness to both uprisings, I can testify that there is little of the euphoria or the universal public support that marked the overthrow of Mubarak. Once you exhaust a nation and cheat a people out of dreams as vibrant as the ones Egyptians shared on January 25, it’s hard to revive that revolutionary spirit again. That spirit was the essential fuel that could have propelled a democratic political renaissance, clean government and economic progress. Whether Tantawi stays or goes, he has to take full credit for assassinating Egyptian dreams.

As they examine the regional chessboard and the formidable array of forces aligned against them, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the military dictatorship of the mullahtariat in Tehran must face, simultaneously, superpower Washington, bomb-happy North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members, nuclear power Israel, all Sunni Arab absolute monarchies, and even Sunni-majority, secular Turkey.

Meanwhile, on their side, the Islamic Republic can only count on Moscow. Not as bad a hand as it may seem.

Syria is Iran’s undisputed key ally in the Arab world — while Russia, alongside China, are the key geopolitical allies. China, for the moment, is making it clear that any solution for Syria must be negotiated.

Russia’s one and only naval base in the Mediterranean is at the Syrian port of Tartus. Not by accident, Russia has installed its S-300 air defense system — one of the best all-altitude surface-to-air missile systems in the world, comparable to the American Patriot — in Tartus. The update to the even more sophisticated S-400 system is imminent.

From Moscow’s — as well as Tehran’s — perspective, regime change in Damascus is a no-no. It will mean virtual expulsion of the Russian and Iranian navies from the Mediterranean.

Yet key lateral moves by the West are already on. Diplomats in Brussels confirmed to Asia Times Online that the former Libyan “rebels” — now trying to come up with a credible government — have already given the go-ahead for NATO to build a sprawling military base in Cyrenaica.

NATO has no final say in such matters. This is decided by the boss — the Pentagon — interested in emboldening Africom in coordination with NATO. As many as 20,000 boots are expected to be deployed on the ground in Libya — at least 12,000 of them Europeans. They will be responsible for Libya’s “internal security”, but also be on alert for possible, further military campaigns targeted at — who else — Syria and Iran.

Bring those Shi’ites down

As much as the latest “coalition of the willing” — which by the way repeats the Libya model — is against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, it also represents a Christian/Sunni war against Shi’ites, be they the Alawite minority in Syria or the Shi’ite majorities in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon.

This is part and parcel of the “strategic opportunity” identified by the powerful Israel lobby in Washington; if we strike against the Damascus-Tehran link, we deal a mortal blow to Hezbollah in Lebanon. That, ideologues believe, can now be sold to world public opinion under the cover of the former Arab Spring — now “Arab Winter” after a metamorphosis, before “Arab Summer”, into the Arab counter-revolution).

As Tehran sees it, what’s really going on regarding Syria is a “humanitarian” cover for a complex anti-Shi’ite and anti-Iran operation.

The road map is already clear. A fractious, unrepresentative Syrian National Council — Libya-style — is already in place. Same for a heavily armed Sunni “insurgency” crisscrossing the borders in Lebanon and Turkey. Sanctions are already essentially hurting the Syrian middle class. A relentless, international campaign of vilification of the Assad regime has been deployed. And psy ops abound, with the aim of seducing sections of the Syrian army to defect (it’s not working).

A report¹ by a Qatar-based researcher for the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) even comes close to admitting that the self-described “Free Syria Army” is basically a bunch of hardcore Islamists, plus a few genuine army defectors, but mostly radicalized Muslim Brotherhood bought, paid for and weaponized by the US, Israel, the Gulf monarchies and Turkey. There’s nothing “pro-democracy” about this lot – as incessantly sold by Western corporate and Saudi-owned media.

As for the National Council, based in Washington and London and sprinkled with the usual dodgy exiles, its program calls for governing Syria alongside the same military that has been — a la the Egyptian military junta — shooting civilian protesters. Makes one think that the only sensible solution would be for the people in Syria to topple the police state Assad regime, while being vehemently against the dodgy Syrian National Council.

This year’s model (dictator)

Then there’s the usually misguided and misinformed West, which believes that the Arab League, now no more than a puppet of US foreign policy, is siding with the democratic aspirations of the Syrian people. Angry Arab blogger As’ad Abu Khalil is correct when he says that after the fall of president Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, “the League is now an extension of the Gulf Cooperation Council [GCC]“.

The GCC is in fact the Gulf Counter-revolution Club. Their favorite sport is to privilege “model” dictators — starting with themselves, but also including Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen and the little kings of Jordan and Morocco, who will be annexed to the GCC because they wish they were in the Persian Gulf (geography dictates they aren’t). On the other hand, the GCC abhors “bad” dictators — the snuffed-out Muammar Gaddafi and Assad, who not by accident are from secular republics.

The House of Saud, Jordan and rising Qatar are more than comfortable doing the US’s and Israel’s bidding. The House of Saud — the GCC’s top dog — invaded Bahrain with 1,500 troops to smash pro-democracy protests very much like the ones in Egypt and Syria. The House of Saud helped the ruling, Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty in 70% Shi’ite Bahrain to conduct widespread torture; Bahrainis confirm that everyone tortured was forced to confess direct links with “evil” Tehran.

In Egypt, the House of Saud supported Mubarak even after he was deposed. Now it supports — with over US$4 billion so far — a military junta that basically wants to keep power, unchecked, over a “democratic” facade.

The House of Saud couldn’t possibly coexist with a successful, democratic Egypt. Anyone believing the House of Saud’s claim to defend human rights and democracy in the Middle East should check into an asylum.

The Arab League — also a House of Saud extension — gave a green card to NATO to bomb a member state. It suspended Syria on November 12 — as it had done with Libya on February 22 — because, unlike in Libya, US and European designs in the United Nations Security Council were duly vetoed by Russia and China.

Welcome to a “new” Arab League where if you don’t prostrate in front of the GCC altar, you’re condemned to regime change.

Worshipping the GCC can’t compare to worshipping the Pentagon and NATO. Jordan and Morocco are members of NATO’s Mediterranean dialogue, and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are members of NATO’s Istanbul Cooperation Initiative. In addition, Jordan and the UAE are the only Arabic Troop Contributing Nations for NATO in Afghanistan.

Ivo Daalder, the Obama administration’s ambassador to NATO, has already ordered Libya to enter the Mediterranean Dialogue, alongside Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Mauritania and Israel. And early this month he told the Atlantic Council what’s needed for an attack on Syria; an “urgent necessity” (such as giving the impression Assad is going to raze Homs to the ground); “regional support” (that will come in a flash from the GCC/Arab League); and a UN mandate (it won’t happen, as Russia and China had made it clear).

So one may expect exactly that from the “coalition of the willing”; some black ops blamed on the Assad regime; immediate support from GCC/Arab League; and probably unilateral action, because via the UN is a no-no.

The Greater Middle East dream

No wonder some sound minds in Damascus, watching the tea leaves, decided to take some action. Damascus did send secret couriers to sound out Washington’s mood. The price to be left alone; to cut all ties with Tehran, for good. The Assad regime was left wondering what would they get in return.

The Alawites, roughly 12% of the population and members of the ruling elite, won’t desert the Assad regime. Christians and Druze expect only the worst from a possible, hardcore, Muslim Brotherhood-dominated new order. Same for a crucial neighbor, the Nuri al-Maliki government in Baghdad.

Russia knows that if the current Libyan model is reproduced in Syria — and with Lebanon already under a de facto NATO blockade — the Mediterranean will indeed become that dream, a NATO lake, which is code for total US control.

Moscow also sees that in the US-conceived Greater Middle East — and talk about “great”, spanning from Mauritania to Kazakhstan — the only countries that are not linked with NATO through myriad “partnerships” are, apart from Syria: Lebanon, Eritrea, Sudan and Iran.

As for the Pentagon, the name of the game is “repositioning”. As in if you leave Iraq you go somewhere else in the “arc of instability”, preferably the Gulf. There are 40,000 US troops already in the Gulf — 23,000 of them in Kuwait. A secret army for the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency is being trained by former Blackwater, “repositioned” as Xe, in the UAE. A NATO of the Gulf is being born. NATOGCC, anyone?

When the US neo-conservatives ruled the universe — that was only a few years ago — the motto was “Real men go to Tehran”. An update is in order. Call it “Real men go to Tehran via Damascus only if they have the balls to stare down Moscow”.

1. See “Revolutionary road: Among the Syrian opposition.”

Events still to unfold will determine the answer but in advance of them, and before Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi demonstrated a degree of panic by announcing that the election of a civilian president would be brought forward, the assessment of many informed observers was in tune with that of Marina Ottaway, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She wrote: “In the early days of the Egyptian uprising, when violence threatened to engulf the country, the military did an admirable job of maintaining order without violence and easing Hosni Mubarak out of office. Ten months later, it has emerged as the most serious threat in the transition to democracy. Recent announcements leave no doubt that the military indeed rules Egypt and intends to maintain its control indefinitely.”

The best indicator of whether or not Eygpt’s generals will eventually bow to people power and let democracy have its way will be in their final decision about dropping or not their proposal that new constitutional principles should preserve special powers for the military after the handover to civilian rule. These special powers as originally proposed would give the military a veto over a new constitution and prevent scrutiny of its vast budget. In other words, these “supra-constitutional” principles would enshrine the military’s right to intervene in civilian politics at any time of its choosing.

If Egypt’s generals do seek to control the democratic process by (among other things) fixing elections as Mubarak did, they will back their actions with the assertion that they must do whatever is necessary to prevent radical Islam taking over the country. That would put them on the same page as Zionism’s propaganda maestros. In a recent article for Ha’aretz, Moshe Arens, a former Israeli Minister of Defence and Foreign Minister, wrote the following.

A wave of Islamic rule, with all it entails, is sweeping across the Arab world. It will replace secular dictatorships with Islamic ones. We should have expected nothing else… Observers may fool themselves into believing that the Islamic parties contesting the elections in the Arab countries are ‘mildly’ Islamic, or ‘moderate’ Islamists, but their leaders are neither mild nor moderate.

The unstated but implicit Zionist message Arens is conveying is that the Arab Spring will create more and more states that will become safe havens for Islamic terrorists, and that Israel and the West, America especially, will have to pursue the “war against terrorism” on many more fronts with even greater vigour and escalating expense.

What the overwhelming majority of all Arabs want is an end to corrupt, repressive, autocratic rule. In reality there is no prospect of Muslims who preach the need for violence and practise it calling the shots if democracy is allowed to take root and grow in the Arab world. In Egypt for example, and whatever it may or may not have been in the past, the Muslim Brotherhood is the process of transforming itself, now in the guise of the Freedom and Justice Party, into a modern and progressive political force which truly wants to see Egypt governed by democratic means for the benefit of all and not just a privileged elite. The only thing that could drive a significant number of Egyptians into supporting violent Islamic fundamentalism is never-ending military suppression of their demands for freedom and democracy. (If this were to happen one could say that like George “Dubya” Bush and Tony Blair, Egypt’s generals had become recruiting sergeants for violent Islamic fundamentalism).

In my analysis Arens’ prediction of what will happen in the Arab world is a cover for the real fear of Zionism’s in-Israel and in-America leaders. It is that democracy could or even will take root in the Arab world or at least major chunks of it. Why such a prospect alarms Zionism is not complicated.

Democratically elected Arab governments would have to be reflect the will of their masses, the voters. On the matter of the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel, what is the will of the Arab masses? In their heads if not always their hearts it is not for military confrontation with Israel. It is that their governments be united enough use the leverage they have on America, to cause it to use the leverage it has on Israel, to cause or try to cause enough Israeli Jews to face reality and insist that their leaders make peace on terms which would satisfy the demands and needs of the Palestinians for justice, while at the same time guaranteeing the security and wellbeing of Jews now resident in Palestine that became Israel.

The leverage the Arab world has is in the form of oil, money and diplomatic relations.

For an example of how this Arab leverage could have been used to good effect in the past I’ll turn the clock back to 1967. Now let us suppose that in the weeks following the Six Days War the Arab leaders put their act together and sent one of their number secretly to Washington to deliver this message to President Johnson: “If you don’t get the Israelis back to the pre-war borders, we’ll turn off the oil taps.” (That is how Zionism’s in-Israel leaders would have played the oil card if the boot had been on the other foot, if they had been in the Arab position).

How would Johnson (or any other occupant of the White House) have responded?

If he believed the Arab leaders were united and serious, not bluffing, he would have said something very like the following: “I can’t promise quick action on East Jerusalem but otherwise give me three weeks and I’ll do it.”

In short, the Arabs would not have had to turn off the oil taps. A credible threat to do so would have been enough to motivate Johnson (or any other American president) to use all necessary leverage to bring Israel’s occupation to a quick end.

That’s how the game of political leverage is played.

A real hello to democracy in the Arab world or at least significant chunks of it, and Egypt especially, would be very bad news for Zionism.

Netanyahu is fully aware of this and is escalating his anti Arab Spring rhetoric. In his latest speech to the Knesset he blasted Israeli and world politicians who support the demands for change in the Arab world and accused it of “moving not forward, but backward.” He asserted that his original forecast that the Arab Spring would turn into an “Islamic, anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli and anti-democratic wave” had turned out to be true.

In his report for Ha’aretz, Barak Ravid wrote: “The speech showed an expressed lack of trust in Arab nations’ ability to maintain a democratic regime; a yearning to go back to the days of ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak; a fear of the collapse of the Hashemite royal house in Jordan, and an utter lack of willingness to make any concessions to the Palestinians.”

Netanyahu also slammed those Western leaders, Obama especially, who had pressed Egypt’s generals to tell Mubarak to go. At the time that was happening, Ravid revealed, Netanyahu said in closed talks that the American administration and many European leaders “don’t understand reality”. In his last speech he called them “naive”.

I used to wonder if Netanyahu really believes the nonsense he talks. I am now convinced that he does.

The the latest development in Cairo, the apology by two of the generals on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) are making me wonder if the coming days will see the removal of Field Marshall Tantawi, which is what the protestors in Tahrir Square are demanding. The two generals not only apologized for the deaths of protestors, they said, according to the BBC report I heard, “We do not aspire to power and we do not want to continue in power.”

If those words can be taken at face value, they suggest to me that a majority of Tantawi’s SCAF colleagues have realised that continuing in power, even behind the scenes, would require them at a point to give orders to the army to shoot to kill large numbers of Egyptians, orders which would not be obeyed by the lower ranks and foot soldiers.

If that is the case, Tantawi’s departure would indicate that it is the prospects for a real hello to democracy in Egypt are improving. And if something approaching real democracy [Mr. Hart's definition of "real democracy" -- Ed.] can take root and grow in Egypt, the days of Arab autocrats and despots almost everywhere (probably not Saudi Arabia) may well be numbered.

During the fateful 18 days in January and February when Egyptians took to the streets by the millions to topple the brutal Mubarak dictatorship, President Obama remained largely silent, refusing to call directly for democracy until it was clear that young Egyptians were about to topple the dictator’s three-decade-long rule.

In the months since then, as thousands of Egyptians have been attacked, imprisoned, sexually assaulted and murdered by their government, the United States has not merely remained silent, but has continued to provide crucial diplomatic, economic and military aid to the regime responsible for these crimes.

The latest Egyptian protests were sparked by growing anger over signs that the military leadership plans to hold on to power indefinitely. The military rulers say they will relinquish power once presidential elections are held, but have refused to commit to a plan and a timetable for handing over power to a democratically elected government.

The first of many rounds of voting for parliament is scheduled to begin November 28, but the military has not agreed to form a new government based on these elections. Moreover, it is trying to limit any civilian government from having control over the military’s budget. And it has postponed a presidential election to an indefinite time late in 2012 or in 2013.

Now the façade of a democratic transition has been ripped away and Egyptians are once again battling the military government in Tahrir Square for the future of their country, with at least 35 civilians killed since Saturday. The Obama administration remains as quiet as it was in the early days of the revolution. Such silence is both morally indefensible and politically and strategically disastrous for the United States.

The United States, with $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt every year, supplies a large part of the Egyptian military budget. But it refuses to use its considerable leverage. During Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s visit to Egypt in October, he actually praised the Egyptian military. “I really do have full confidence in the process that the Egyptian military is overseeing,” he said, “I think they’re making good progress.”

On Monday, November 21, White House spokesman Jay Carney only mustered up the courage to call for restraint from “all sides”—as if the pro-democracy activists were somehow equally responsible for the violence. When asked if the generals should specify the date for a presidential election, Carney replied, “I don’t want to dictate specifics to Egypt.”

As during the Mubarak era, the administration appears to believe that U.S. interests, including Egypt’s peace accord with Israel, are more important than the lives of the Egyptian people.

The march for freedom in Egypt cannot be stopped and when Egyptians finally rid themselves of the military government and establish a democratic system, the United States will have few friends in Egypt, or the Arab world more broadly, if it is seen as having supported the military rather than the people at this pivotal moment.

A principled U.S. position would be to immediately issue a strong condemnation of the violence unleashed by the Egyptian military on its people. The U.S. government should suspend all military aid to the Egyptian government until it stops attacking peaceful protesters, and until it releases the 12,000-plus citizens jailed since Mubarak’s ouster and commits to handing over power to a transitional civilian government as soon as parliamentary elections are completed. President Obama should coordinate with other Western allies and supporters of the Egyptian government to develop a clear and strong policy in support of a rapid transition to democracy and apply the full weight of international diplomatic, economic and legal pressure on the military junta towards that end.

Anything less will be a stain on the United States that will haunt this administration, and the United States more broadly, for years to come.

Join us in signing this letter urging President Obama to condemn the military crackdown and stand with Egypt’s brave citizens struggling for democracy.

The relation of information technology (IT), and more specifically the internet, to politics is a central issue facing contemporary social movements.  Like many previous scientific advances the IT innovations have a dual purpose:  on the one hand, it has accelerated the global flow of capital, especially financial capital and facilitated imperialist ‘globalization’.  On the other hand, the internet has served to provide alternative critical sources of analysis as well as easy communication to mobilize popular movements.

The IT industry has created a new class of billionaires, from Silicon Valley in California to Bangalore, India.  They have played a central role in the expansion of economic colonialism via their monopoly control in diverse spheres of information flows and entertainment.

To paraphrase Marx “the internet has become the opium of the people”.  Young and old, employed and unemployed alike, spend hours passively gazing at spectacles, pornography, video games, online consumerism and even “news” in isolation from other citizens, fellow workers and employees.

In many cases the “overflow” of “news” on the internet has saturated the internet, absorbing time and energy and diverting the ‘watchers’ from reflection and action.  Just as too little and biased news by the mass media distorts popular consciousness, too many internet messages can immobilize citizen action.

The internet, deliberately or not, has “privatized” political life.  Many otherwise potential activists have come to believe that circulating manifestos to other individuals is a political act, forgetting that only public action, including confrontations with their adversaries in public spaces in city centers and in the countryside, is the basis of political transformations.

IT and Financial Capital

Let us remember that the original impetus for the growth of “IT” came from the demands of big financial institutions, investment banks and speculative traders who sought to move billions of dollars and euros with the touch of a finger from one country to another, from one enterprise to another, from one commodity to another.

Internet technology was the motor force for the growth of globalization at the service of financial capital.  In some ways IT played a major role in precipitating the two global financial crises of the past decade (2001-2002, 2008–2009).  The  bubble in IT stocks of 2001 was a result of the speculative promotion of overvalued “software firms” de-linked from the ‘real economy’.  The global financial crash of 2008-2009 and its continuation today, was induced by the computerized packaging of financial swindles and underfunded real estate mortgages.  The ‘virtues’ of the internet, its rapid relay of information in the context of speculator capitalism turned out to be a major contributing factor to the worse capitalist crises since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The Democratization of the Internet

The internet became accessible to the masses as a market for commercial enterprise and then spread to other social and political uses. Most importantly it became a means of informing the larger public of the exploitation and pillage of countries and people by multi-national banks.  The internet exposed the lies which accompany US and EU imperialist wars in the Middle East and Sothern Asia.

The internet has become contested terrain, a new form of class struggle, engaging  national liberation and pro-democracy movements.  The major movements and leaders from the armed fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan to the pro-democracy activists in Egypt, to the student movements in Chile and including the poor peoples’ housing movement in Turkey, rely on the internet to inform the world of their struggles, programs, state repression and popular victories.  The internet links peoples’ struggles across national boundaries – it is a key weapon in creating a new internationalism to counter capitalist globalization and imperial wars.

To paraphrase Lenin, we could argue that 21st century socialism can be summed up by the equation:  “soviets plus internet = participatory socialism”.

The Internet and Class Politics

We should remember that computerized information techniques are not ‘neutral’ – their political impact depends on their users and overseers who determine who and what class interests they will serve.  More generally the internet must be contextualized in terms of its insertion in public space.

The internet has served to mobilize thousands of workers in China and peasants in India against corporate exploiters and real estate developers.  But computerized aerial warfare has become the NATO weapon of choice to bomb and destroy independent Libya. The US drones which send missiles that kill civilians in Pakistan and Yemen are directed by computer ‘intelligence’.  The location of Colombian guerrillas and the deadly aerial bombings are computerized.  In other words, IT technology has dual uses:  for popular liberation or imperial counter revolution.

Neo-liberalism and Public Space

The discussion of “public space” has frequently assumed that “public” means greater state intervention on behalf of the welfare of the majority; greater regulation of capitalismand increased protection of the environment.  In other words, benign “public” actors are counter-posed to exploitative private market forces.

In the context of the rise of neo-liberal ideology and policies, many progressive writers argue about the “decline of the public sphere”. This argument overlooks the fact that the “public sphere” has increased its role in society, economy and politics on behalf of capital, especially financial capital, and foreign investors.  The “public sphere”, specifically the state, is much more intrusive in civil society as a repressive force, particularly as neo-liberal policies increase inequalities.  Because of the intensification and deepening of the financial crises, the public sphere (the state) has undertaken a massive role in bailing out bankrupt banks.

Because of large scale fiscal deficits provoked by capitalist class tax evasion, colonial war spending and public subsidies to big business, the public sphere (state) imposes class based “austerity” program-cutting social expenditures and prejudicing public employees, pensioners, and private wage and salaried employees.

The public sphere diminished its role in the productive sector of the economy.  However, the military sector has grown with expansion of colonial and imperial wars.

The basic issue underlying any discussion of the public sphere and the social opposition is not its decline or growth but rather the class interests which define the role of the public sphere.  Under neo-liberalism, the public sphere is directed by the use of public treasury to finance bank bailouts, militarism and expanded police state intervention.  A public sphere directed by the “social opposition” (workers, farmers, professionals, employees) would enlarge the scope of public sphere activity with regard to health, education, pensions, environment and employment.

The concept of the “public sphere” has two opposing faces (Janus-like): one facing capital and the military; the other labor/social opposition.  The role of the internet is also subject to this duality: on the one hand the internet facilitates large scale movements of capital and rapid imperial military interventions; on the other hand it provides rapid flow of information to mobilize the social opposition.  The basic question is what kind of information is transmitted to what political actors and for what social interest?

The Internet and the Social Opposition:  The Threat of State Repression

For the social opposition the internet is first and foremost a vital source of alternative critical information to educate and mobilize the “public” – especially among progressive opinion — leaders, professionals, trade unionists and peasant leaders, militants and activists.  The internet is the alternative to the capitalist mass media and its propaganda, a source of news and information that relays manifestos and informs activists of sites for public action.  Because of the internet’s progressive role as an instrument of the social opposition it is subject to surveillance by the repressive police-state apparatus.  For example, in the USA over 800,000 functionaries are employed by the “Homeland Security” police agency to spy on billions of emails, faxes, telephone calls of millions of US citizens.  How effective the policing of tons of information each day is another question.  But the fact is that the internet is not a “free and secure source of information, debate and discussion”.  In fact, as the internet becomes more effective in mobilizing the social movements in opposition to the imperial and colonial state, the greater is the likelihood of police-state intervention under the pretext “combating terrorism”.

The Internet and Contemporary Struggle:  Is it Revolutionary?

It is important to recognize the importance of the internet in detonating certain social movements as well as relativizing its overall significance.

The internet has played a vital role in publicizing and mobilizing “spontaneous protests” like the ‘indignados’ (the indignant protestors) mostly unaffiliated unemployed youth in Spain and the protestors involved in the US “Occupy Wall Street”.  In other instances, for example, the mass general strikes in Italy, Portugal, Greece and elsewhere the organized trade union confederations played a central role and the internet had a secondary impact.

In highly repressive countries like Egypt, Tunisia and China, the internet played a major role in publicizing public action and organizing mass protests.  However, the internet has not led to any successful revolutions – it can inform, provide a forum for debate, and  mobilize, but it cannot provide leadership and organization to sustain political action let alone a strategy for taking state power.  The illusion that some internet gurus foster, that ‘computerized’ action replaces the need for a disciplined, political party, has been demonstrated to be false:  the internet can facilitate movement but only an organized social opposition can provide the tactical and strategic direction which can sustain the movement against state repression and toward successful struggles.

In other words, the internet is not an “end in itself” – the self-congratulatory posture of internet ideologues in heralding a new “revolutionary” information age overlooks the fact that the NATO powers, Israel and their allies and clients now use the internet to plantviruses to disrupt economies, sabotage defense programs and promote ethno-religious uprisings.  Israel sent damaging viruses to hinder Iran’s peaceful nuclear program; the US, France and Turkey incited client social opposition in Libya and Syria.  In a word, the internet has become the new terrain of class and anti-imperialist struggle.  The internet is a means not an end in itself.  The internet is part of a public sphere whose purpose and results are determined by the larger class structure in which it is embedded.

Concluding Remarks:  “Desktop Militants” and Public Intellectuals

The social opposition is defined by public action:  the presence of collectivities in political meetings, individuals speaking at public meetings, activists marching in public squares, militant trade unionists confronting employers, poor people demanding sites for housing and public services from public authorities…

To address an active assembled public meeting, to formulate ideas, programs and propose programs and strategies through political action defines the role of the public intellectual. To sit at a desk in an office, in splendid isolation, sending out five manifestos per minute defines a “desktop militant”.  It is a form of pseudo-militancy that isolates the word from the deed.  Desktop “militancy” is an act of verbal inaction, of inconsequential “activism”, a make-believe revolution of the mind.

The exchange of internet communications becomes a political act when it engages in public social movements that challenge power.  By necessity that involves risks for the public intellectual:  of police assaults in public spaces and economic reprisals in the private sphere.  The desktop “activists” risk nothing and accomplish little.  The public intellectual links the private discontents of individuals to the social activism of the collectivity.  The academic critic comes to a site of action, speaks and returns to their academic office.  The public intellectual speaks and sustains a long-term political educational commitment with the social opposition in the public sphere via the internet and in face to face daily encounters.

The American phase of this movement began with the Wall Street occupation in New York and has spread to many American cities since, with success in highlighting a radical democratic governance technique and message of unity that surpasses its flaws and overcomes attacks by agents of the 1%. This is all happening at a time when American belief in  supposedly democratic government has sunk to deservedly new lows. Established power is at an extremely bipolar phase in response as  it simultaneously attempts to crush, subvert or incorporate the growing demands of a public frustrated into becoming what minority power fears most: a majority democratic movement for substantial and not merely cosmetic change in the system.

Minority dominators practice obsessive concern for their economic private parts and this masturbatory focus brings the system closer to moral and financial bankruptcy. As the perverse lust for private profit reduces well paid employment in the center by increasing low paid labor in peripheral parts of the shrinking empire, it attacks meager social safety nets in that center which were created to save capitalism during its last global crisis in the 1930s. Public sector work forces are savagely slashed and pensions are cut as less and less people are employed in a political economy that has further reduced humanity from commodities in a market to electronic symbols on a computer screen.

Positive changes in communications offer an opportunity for a massive democratic leap forward but private profiteers still control staggering wealth and their blind lust to amass even more billions has eclipsed – until now – the need to transform and not simply reform material reality.

The American movement has corporate media parroting the political line in the same bi-polar fashion that often lauds the democratic aspect of what’s going on while questioning its purpose.  Meanwhile, military slaughters continue unabated, sometimes with long distance murderers who kill innocents with electronic devises that enable them to do their dirty work in rooms thousands of miles away from their victims with no more human contact than someone playing a video game while seated on a commode. The isolated assassins are an ironic contrast in a world that sees millions in contact they have never before been able to achieve. While some agents of the 1% operate in solitude totally removed from the bloody murders they commit, Bradley Manning sits in prison for acting on his conscience and informing his fellow citizens of the crimes of modern warfare. His action, representative of the high moral ground most people at least wish to occupy, contrasts with the murderous idiocy of what passes for “normal” material reality, and what the new global movement stands against .

Electronic media have finally become truly social but they are not simply the domain of those organizing demonstrations that represent the 99%. Agents of the 1% operate networks of murder and spying that can’t succeed in the long term but add to producing confusion and more violence in the short term. Attacks on the 99% in order to maintain criminal profit margins for the 1% and their agents are taking on increasingly insane character, with even some ruling class members worrying that this could destroy everything and not just their personal wealth.

As an example, continued and ever more feverish claims that Iran is threatening to annihilate Jews with nuclear weapons which do not exist, while the hundreds of nuclear weapons which do exist in Israel are unmentioned by the fanatics there and alleged American government representatives who work for them here. More deadly war is threatened, with death and destruction that would make the present crisis even greater, and it is already slipping beyond the control of the ruling 1% and its agents. Truly, it has never been more essential that the great majority of the 99% move towards the radical economic restructuring and totally transformed political process that is the only thing that will save humanity. And political democracy means the end of private profit accumulation in control of the social and natural environment of planet earth, and the beginning of a system that acknowledges the rights of all people to share the benefits of their world.

We should thank the demonstrators in Tunisia, Egypt and of the Occupy Wall Street Movement for calling our attention to the fact that another world is not only possible but necessary. And then we should join them in bringing it about. Quickly.

This time there were 27 activists, including Americans, Canadians, Irish, Polish, Greek, Palestinian and — for the first time an Egyptian, Al-Masri Al-Youm English Managing Editor Lina Attalah. For 27 years, Israel has been violating the 1979 Peace Treaty with Egypt, which guaranteed “full autonomy” for the Palestinians within five years. So it was appropriate for an Egyptian to become the 27th member of the team of activists trying to break the Gaza siege.

Tahrir passenger Kit Kittredge said, “In our sails is the wind of worldwide public opinion which has turned against the illegal blockade.” Retired US army colonel Ann Wright said, “We carry inspiration from the Arab Spring and the worldwide Occupy movements. Where governments fail, civil society must act. We will not stand by and watch $30 billion of our tax money committed to buying Israel weaponry used to carry out this illegal occupation of Palestine.”

Attalah described how, as Israel warships approached, activists and journalists started throwing equipment into the sea, “fearing that the information stored on them could be used to implicate other activists who were not on board”. When the Israel military asked their destination, organiser Ehab Lotayef replied first, “The conscience of humanity”, and as the Israelis sprayed the peaceful protesters with salt water, “The betterment of mankind”. Attalah counted 15 ships, with “dozens of Israeli soldiers pointed their machines guns at us”.

Their communications system was jammed and they entered the Israel no-mans land. But not without an Israeli practical joke. The Israelis “offered to send one person to inspect for weapons, and if he found nothing, they would let us pass”.

But the ships were suddenly ordered to proceed to Ashdod in Israel, and when the order was ignored, the Israelis boarded the ships, brandishing guns, ready to shoot anyone resisting, and using tear gas and tasers. The Tahrir and the Saoirse were forced to crash into each other, crippling both ships, and their engine rooms flooded, exposing them to the danger of sinking.

What equipment had not been thrown overboard was stolen by the pirates. Israeli Mad Kayal said, “As a Palestinian, I was not surprised at how the IDF treated us; however, for the Canadians and other Westerners onboard, it was a complete shock.” President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek, who in the past called Israel “an indispensable partner for the EU”, refused to criticise his “partner” for the arrest and imprisonment of Irish Euro MP Paul Murphy for three days.

In contrast, Attalah was treated with kid gloves, and — without any exchange of Israeli spies — was taken by an Egyptian embassy official to the border at Taba. She was upbeat in her report, relating how they got much closer this time — 50 km as opposed to 100 km in the past, and how Jewish activists, preparing for the expected Israeli attack, helped translate slogans “This is piracy” and “This is kidnapping” into Hebrew to greet the Israelis.

Shamefully, US State Department official Victoria Nuland warned activists, they “could face civil and criminal penalties in their efforts to deliver resources to the Gaza Strip,” and the US consul in Israel advised them to sign an Israeli deportation agreement. The activists refused, as the statement said they entered Israel illegally and would not attempt another effort to break the Gaza blockade, thereby giving de facto credibility to the seige.

Absurdly, US House Resolution 3131 introduced last month would require the State Department to investigate “the sources of any logistical, technical, or financial support for the Gaza flotilla ships” and produce “a report on whether any support organisation that participated in the planning or execution of the recent Gaza flotilla attempt should be designated as a foreign terrorist organisation”.

The story did not end with the deportation of the plucky activists. Israel cyberwarfare expertise is well known, but so is that of computer hackers Anonymous. They decided to avenge the Freedom Wavers, warning the Israeli military hours before they seized the ships: “If you continue blocking humanitarian vessels to Gaza, then you will leave us no choice but to strike back. Again and again, until you stop.”

A few days later, over a dozen Israeli government websites crashed, including Shin Bet, Mossad, the IDF, the Health, Justice, Housing, Science and Sports Ministries, the President’s Residence, the Immigration Authority, the Israel Land Administration and the Atomic Energy Commission. As Jewish philosopher Hillel the Elder said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Freedom Waves will continue to lap against Israeli gunships in their attempt to reach the shores of Gaza. There are tentative plans for a “Sailing for Freedom” yacht race next summer from Marseille France, a kind of Tour de Méditerranée, going to Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and on to Palestine. Turkey has committed itself to protect future naval convoys breaking the siege.

Land convoys are also being organised. The British group Long Live Palestine has called on people around the world to take part in a convoy of medical aid to break Israel’s blockade on Gaza, starting 27 December. Organisers are planning for Viva Palestina 6 – Return Convoy to be the biggest convoy of aid yet, and hope to involve Egyptians again and enter via the Rafah crossing.

In response to major military and political losses as well as new opportunity, the White House is fashioning a new doctrine of imperial conquest based on intensified aerial warfare, greater extra-territorial intervention, and, when circumstances allow, alliances with collaborators.  This includes the arming and financial backing of retrograde despotic regimes in the Gulf city-states, fundamentalists, opportunist defectors, mercenaries , academic exiles gangsters and other rabble willing to serve the empire for a price.

Whether these ‘changes’ add up to a new post-colonial “Obama doctrine” or simply reflects a series of improvisations resulting from past losses (“making a virtue of necessity” remains to be seen.

We will proceed by outlining the strategic failures which set the context for the “rethinking” of the Bush-Obama policies in mid-2011. We will then point out the ‘reality principle’ – the deep crises and rising pressures – which forced the Obama regime to modify its methods of imperial warfare.  Obama’s changes are designed to retain levers of power under conditions of limited resources and with dubious allies.  The third section will describe these changes as they have occurred; emphasizing their reactive nature – improvised – as unfavorable circumstances evolve and favorable opportunities arose.

The final section will critically evaluate Obama’s new imperial policies, their impact on targeted countries and peoples as well as the consequences for the US.

The Bush-Obama Continuum 2009-2011

Obama took his lead from the Bush administration and ran with it.  He expanded war budgets to over $750 billion; increased ground troops by 30,000 in Afghanistan; expanded expenditures on base building and mercenary troop recruitment in Iraq; multiplied US air and ground incursions in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya.  As a result the budget deficit reached $1.6 trillion; the trade deficit reached unsustainable levels and the recession deepened.  Public support for Obama and the Democrats plummeted. Parallel to Obama’s skyrocketing external imperial expenditures, he spent hundreds of billions of dollars in dozens of internal security agencies further depleting the treasury.  Greater debts abroad and deficits at home were accompanied by the trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street while 10 million homes were foreclosed and  unemployment reached double digits.

Obama retained and expanded the Bush era wars, bailouts, millionaire tax exemptions and proposed draconian cuts in social security, federal funded medical programs and education.  Despite massive military commitments, Obama could not secure a single major military victory.  By the beginning of the third year of his regime, it was abundantly clear that amidst the wreckage of the domestic economy and the demise of key overseas collaborator regimes, the US Empire was under siege.

The Reality Principle

The reality of massive expenditures in losing wars and faltering support at home and abroad, finally penetrated even the most dogmatic and intransigent militarist ideologues in the Obama regime.  Nationalist Islamists were a “shadow” government throughout Afghanistan, inflicting increasing casualties on US-NATO forces even in the capital, Kabul.  In Iraq even the puppet regime rejected a minimum US military presence, as warring factions sharpened their knives, preparing for a post-colonial showdown between willing colonial collaborators, resistance fighters, sects, tribes, death squads, ethnic separatists and mercenaries.  Despite US military threats and Zionist designed economic sanctions, Iran gained influence throughout the region, eroding US influence in Iraq, Syria, western Afghanistan, the Gulf, Lebanon and Palestine (especially Gaza).

The fall of major US client regimes in Egypt and Tunisia (Mubarak and Ali), and mass uprisings threatening other puppets in Yemen, Somalia, Bahrain finally forced the Obama regime to acknowledge that the Israeli ‘model’ of war, occupation and colonial rule via puppet regimes was not viable.  The reality principle finally penetrated even the densest fog surrounding imperial advisers and strategists:  the US empire was in retreat, Obama-Clinton were not custodians of an expanding empire, but the masters of imperial defeats. The  empire-building project of the post-Cold War period, premised on unilateral action and military supremacy launched by Bush senior, continued by Clinton, expanded by Bush junior and multiplied by Obama was a total and unmitigated failure by any imperial standards.

Prolonged losing wars were accompanied by a vast wave of pro-democracy uprisings dumping prized imperial clients. As colonial wars depleted the imperial treasury, impoverished citizens and undermined the “will to sacrifice” for the chimera of Global Greatness.  The national mood was deeply disturbed by the cost of empire but also by the loss of global markets to new Asian competitors in China, India and elsewhere.  Nowhere was the decline of the US more evident than in Latin America where new nationalist reform and developmental regimes, secured divergent policies on key foreign policy issues, generated high growth, collaborated with new trading partners, decisively rejected several US backed coups and repudiated Geithner’s recycled free market dogma. There was nowhere in the world where the Obama regime could claim military victory, economic success or greater political influence.

As the reality of the deficits, losses and discontent entered the consciousness of key policymakers, a new imperial policy agenda took shape, not fully elaborated but improvised as circumstances dictated.

The Making of the “Obama Doctrine”

The first and foremost “recognition of reality” among the Obamites was that in a world of sovereign states, colonial land wars based on territorial armies of occupation were not viable.  They led to prolonged resistance, extended budget over-runs, continuing casualties and were definitely not “self-financing” as the Zionist geniuses in the Pentagon once claimed.  New forms of imperial warfare were needed to sustain the empire and destroy adversaries.

The hard choice facing the Obama regime with regard to Iraq was whether to admit defeat and retreat (in the sense that the US can not retain a colonial presence and will leave behind an unreliable military and political configuration expanding tieswith Iran and hostile to Israel), or to claim “victory´ in the sense of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and weakening Iraq’s role in the Middle East.  The retreat and defeat reality is now rationalized as a “repositioning” of 20,000 troops in the tiny city states run by despotic Gulf monarchies and the posting of war vessels in the Persian Gulf.  Obama-Clinton claim the troops, warships and aircraft carriers would re-enter Iraq if the current regime falls and a new nationalist movement comes to power.  This is a doubtful proposition – as any “re-entry” would return the US to a prolonged, costly war.  The main purpose of the repositioning is to protect the Gulf client dictatorships from their internal pro-democracy movements and to launch a joint US-Israeli air and sea attack on Iran.  In other words, troop retrenchment (as an occupying colonial power) is replaced by a build-up and concentration of air and sea power for attack and destruction of military and economic bases of the Iranian state.

The US retreat is a product of defeat; a departure under duress.  The relocation of troops to petrol-despot mini-states is a downsizing of the US presence and a move to prop-up highly vulnerable corrupt clan-based despots.  The shift from Iraq to the Gulf states is a move to small, safe, sanctuaries from a highly volatile conflictual major state, with a history of resistance and independence.  Since the US can no longer afford an unending large troop presence and cannot secure a ‘residual force’ its retreat to the Gulf states is making a virtue of necessity, a fall-back position to retain a launch pad for the next aerial war.

The Libyan war marks the key imperial formula for retaining Obama’s imperial pretensions.  The pretext for the war was just as phony as the cause bellicose in Iraq: in place of weapons of mass destruction, in Libya charges of genocide and rape were fabricated.   A UN resolution claiming the right to militarily intervene to “protect civilians” was cooked up, and NATO launched an 8 month war based on nearly 30,000 air attacks, to overthrow the established government and destroy the economy.  Obama’s Libyan policy was based on air and naval bombardment and Special Forces advisers; the use of a mercenary army and client ex-pats as the ‘new leaders’; a multi-lateral coalition of European empire builders (NATO) and Gulf state petrol-oligarchs.  In contrast to Iraq and Afghanistan sustained massive air attacks took the place of a large invasion army.  Already Obama’s military strategists have embraced and promulgated the Libyan experience as a new “Obama doctrine” for successfully rolling back independent Arab regimes and movements.  Despite massive propaganda efforts to puff up the role of the mercenary ‘rebels’, the fact is that Gaddafi loyalists were only defeated by the combined air power of the NATO military command.

Obama-Clinton’s celebration of the Libyan victory is premature:  the means to victory involved the thorough destruction of the economy, from ports to irrigation systems, to roads and hospitals; the disarticulation of the labor force, with the forced flight of hundreds of thousands of sub-Sahara African workers and North African professionals.  In other words, it was a “pyrrhic victory”. Washington defeated an adversary it has not won a viable state.

Even more serious, Washington’s client mercenary ground forces include an amalgam of fundamentalist, tribal, gangster, opportunist clan and neo-liberal operators who have few interests in common. And all are armed and ready to carve up competing fiefdoms.  The parallel is with Afghanistan where the US armed and financed drug traffickers, clan chiefs, war lords and fundamentalists to fight the secular pro-Soviet regime.  Subsequent to destroying the regime, the same forces turned against the US and proceeded to spread a kind of pan-Islamic mobilization against pro-US client states and the US military presence throughout South-Central Asia, the Gulf states, the Middle East and North Africa.

Obama’s Libyan formula of using disparate mercenaries to achieve short term military success has boomeranged. Islamic fundamentalist militias and contrabandists are sending tons of ground to air missiles, machine guns and automatic rifles seized from Gaddafi’s arms depots to Egypt, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and all points east, west, south and north.

In a word, the volatile social and military conflicts among the collaborator “rulers” in Libya has all the markings of a failed regime. Neither NATO bases nor oil companies can pretend to establish firm bases of operation and exploitation.

The resort to missile warfare, especially the drone attacks on insurgents challenging US client regimes which figure so prominently in the “Obama doctrine” have succeeded in killing a few local commanders, but at a cost of alienating entire clans, villagers, townspeople and the general public in targeted countries.  Drones’ missiles are killing hundreds of civilians, causing relatives and ethnic kinspeople to join resistance groups. Up to the present, after three years of intensified “missile air warfare” the Obama regime has not secured a single major triumph over any of the targeted insurgencies.  The data available demonstrates the opposite.  In Pakistan not only has the entire northwest tribal areas embraced the Islamic resistance but the vast majority of Pakistanis (80%) resent US drone violations of national sovereignty, forcing even otherwise docile officials to call into question their military ties with Washington.  In Somalia and Yemen, drone and Special Forces’ operations have had no impact in weakening the mass opposition to incumbent client regimes.  Obama’s long distance, high tech warfare has been an ineffective substitute for failed large scale land wars.

The third dimension of the Obama doctrine, the heavy reliance on “third party” military intervention and/or multi-lateral armed interventions, was not successful in Afghanistan and Iraq and was of limited effectiveness in Libya.  The  European multi-lateral forces retired early on in Iraq, unwilling to continue to spend on a war with no end and with virtual no support on the home front.  The same process of short-term low level military multi-lateralism took place in Afghanistan. Most NATO soldiers will be out before the US withdraws.  The Libyan experience with “multi-lateral” air force collaboration in defeating Libya’s armed forces destroyed the country, undermining any post-war reconstruction for decades.  Moreover, “aerial multi-lateralism” followed the formula of “easy entry and fast exit” – leaving the mercenary predators in control on the ground with a documented record of excelling in rape, pillage, torture and summary executions.  Only a brainless and morally depraved Hilary Clinton could sing the praises and dance a jig celebrating the victory of a knife wielding sodomist, torturing a captured President as “a victory for democracy”.

The fourth dimension of the “Obama doctrine” the use of foreign mercenary armies has been tried and failed in a number of cases where incumbent client rulers are under siege from resistance forces.  The US financed the Ethiopian dictatorship’s armed invasion of Somalia to prop up a corrupt, isolated regime holed up in the capital.  After a prolonged futile effort to reverse the tide, the Ethiopian mercenary forces  performed no better. They were followed by the entry of the US-backed Kenyan armed forces which has only led to massacres and starvation of hundreds of thousands of Somalian refugees in Northern Kenya and Southern Somalia and deadly ambushes by the Islamic national resistance. These third party mercenary invasions have totally failed to secure the puppet regime; in fact, they have aroused greater nationalist opposition.

US backed “Third Party” mercenary armed interventions in Bahrain, where Saudi Arabian military forces put down a majoritarian uprising, has temporarily propped up the despotic monarchy but without dealing with the underlying demands of the pro-democracy mass movements.

The fifth dimension of the Obama doctrine is to use highly trained heavily armed “Special Forces” (SF) contingents of 500 more to assassinate insurgent leaders, to terrorize their rural supporters and to “give backbone” to the local military officials.  Obama’s dispatch of a brigade of SF to Uganda is a case in point.  Up to now there is no reports of any decisive victories, even in this tiny country.  The prospects for future use of this imperial tactic is probably limited to locales of limited geo-political and economic significance with weak resistance movements, and only as a “complement” to local standing armies.

The final and probably most important element in the Obama doctrine is the promotion of civil-military mass uprisings and the reshuffle of elite figures to ‘co-opt’ popular pro-democracy movements in order  to derail them from ending their countries’ client relationship to Washington.

Washington and the EU have incited and armed sectarian regional mass and armed movements aimed at overthrowing the authoritarian nationalist Assad regime in Syria.  Playing off of legitimate democratic demands and harnessing fundamentalist hostility to a secular state, the US and EU, with the collaboration of Turkey and the Gulf states, have engaged in a triple policy of external sanctions, mass uprisings and armed resistance against the secular civilian majority and nationalist armed forces backing Basher Assad.  Obama policy relies heavily on mass media propaganda and the exploitation of regional grievances to gain leverage for an eventual “regime change”.

Parallel to the “outsider” political strategy in Syria, the Obama doctrine has adopted an insider strategy in Egypt and Tunisia. Faced with a nationalist-pro-democracy-pro-workers social upheavals in Egypt, Washington financed and backed a military takeover and rule by an autocratic military junta which follows the basic foreign and domestic policies sustaining the economic structures under the Mubarak dictatorship.  While cynically evoking the “spirit” of the Arab spring, Obama and Clinton, have backed the military tribunals which prosecute, torture and jail thousands of pro-democracy activists.  A similar process of “internal subversion” financed by the EU has put in place a coalition of “Islamic free marketers” and pro-NATO politicos who have more in common with the White House then they have with the original pro-democracy mass movements.

In the immediate period the Obama doctrines’ use of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ civilian-military subversion has succeeded in derailing the promising anti-imperial movements that erupted in the early months of 2011.  However, the great gulf that has opened between the recycled new client rulers and the pro-democracy movements has already led to calls for a ‘second round’ of uprisings to oust the opportunists “who have stolen the revolt” and betrayed the democratic principles of those who sacrificed to oust the client dictators.  All the conditions which underlay the “Arab spring” are in place or have been exacerbated: unemployment, police repression, crony capitalism, inequalities and corruption.  The experience of successful rebellion is still fresh and alive among the increasingly disenchanted youth.  Like all of the new Obama imperial policies, the propping up of co-opted officials does not promise a reconsolidation of empire.

Conclusion:  The “Obama Doctrine”

Reactive, improvised policies, with no overarching strategic framework, the so-called “Obama doctrine” shows few signs of reversing the decline of the US Empire.  The deterioration of US “forward positions” in the Arab heartland is not linear nor without tactical advances, especially in light of the Obama regimes’ co-optation of several Islamic leaders in Libya, Syria and Tunisia and the recycling of Mubarak era generals in Egypt.

Under cover of political euphemisms the Obama regime understates the scale and significance of its political and diplomatic losses: the forced withdrawal from Iraq is presented as a “successful mission in regime change”, notwithstanding the burgeoning civil and regime violence between rival sectarian and secular factions.  The US “withdrawal” from Afghanistan, is, in reality, a military retreat as the Taliban and related forces form a shadow government throughout the country and the huge mercenary army funded by billions of Pentagon dollars is infiltrated by Islamic Nationalist militants.

The “drone attacks” presented as a successful new counter-terror weapon crossing frontiers is hyped as an effective cost-effective alternative to large scale ground invasions subject to prolonged armed resistance.  In fact, the “drones” and killings mainly provide sensational propaganda and public relations successes – having little impact revising the larger defeatist political reality.

On the diplomatic front US imperial decline is even more dramatic. The UN General Assembly votes against the US on Cuba, and the UNESCO vote on the admission of Palestine are overwhelmingly hostile to the Obama regime.  Totally isolated, Washington’s “retaliatory” posture of cutting off financial resources further reduces US institutional leverage.

As Obama submits to greater subservience to Israel’s political arm in the US, the 52 “Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations”, and prepares a joint military attack on Iran, even NATO refuses to follow suit.

The great danger of the “Obama doctrine” is that it looks at short term ‘local’ consequences. Air and sea power can successfully bomb Iranian nuclear and military facilities, please the head of the Israeli ruling junta and guarantee American Zionist financial backing for Obama’s re-election campaign.  What is overlooked is the military capacity of Iran to close the world’s most important waterway (the Strait of Hormuz) shipping oil to Europe, Asia and the US.

Obama’s air war successes in Iran would be overwhelmed by Iranian ground and missile attacks of US forces throughout the Gulf.  All US petrol allies in the region would be vulnerable to attack.  Long range Iranian missiles would send millions of Israeli’s scurrying for bomb shelters, even before Obama’s Zionist advisers uncork their champagne to celebrate their “air victory” over Teheran.

The ‘Obama doctrine’ of extra territorial air wars with impunity turned against Iran would provoke a catastrophic conflagration, which would far surpass the disastrous outcome of the land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The “Obama doctrine” is, in reality, a set of improvised policies designed to deal with specific sets of circumstances based on a common overall problem:  how to retain imperial domination in the face of failed colonial-occupation policies.  The tactical success in the air war against Libya and the opportunities opened by a Muslim led uprising in Syria has given rise to the need to formulate a new overall strategy.  Local collaborators are central, especially those with an institutional power base (Egyptian military) or with levers of regional influence in civil society (Islamic movements in Syria).

The attempt to generalize these ‘tactical’ gains into a general offensive strategy, however, flounder on the fallacy of “misplaced concreteness”.  Iran is not Libya:  it has the military power, geographic proximity and economic resources to demolish the weak and vulnerable ‘peripheral’ US client states.  Israel can start a US war against the Islamic world – but it cannot win it. Netanyahu’s losses in the UN cannot be explained away as 193 “anti-semitic” countries.  The Zionist-US-Israeli troika are mutually masturbating in a closet.  They can rant and rave and even precipitate an apocalyptic war, but Obama and Netanyahu are increasingly on the margin of world changes. Their policies are impotent reactions to popular movements envisioning historical transformations, which have even began to enter into the center of empires: Wall Street and Tel Aviv. Ultimately the “Obama doctrine” is doomed to failure as it is incapable of recognizing that the problem of decline is not simply a problem of ‘tactics’ but a basic systemic breakdown of empire building: the cracks and fissures abroad have ignited revolts at home.

1. Thomas Shanker and Steven Lee Myers “US Planning Troop Buildup in Gulf After Exit from Iraq”, New York Times, October 29, 2011.