“A little-noticed blog post by a veteran intelligence reporter averred Tuesday that the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group weighed a plan prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion that sought to discredit Saddam Hussein by portraying him as gay.” (thanks Olivia)
There are more US troops in Afghanistan than Iraq for the first time since Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003, officials say.
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Egypt has yet again extended its State of Emergency by two years.
Those my age may recall a running joke back when Saturday Night Live first debuted in the 1970s: the newscast reporting that Generalissimo Francisco Franco was still dead. For Egypt, the Emergency’s continual renewals are not only a reminder that Anwar Sadat is still dead, but that, almost 29 years since his assassination, the reaction to the assassination is ongoing. For indeed, that’s what the Emergency stems from. Of course, Sadat would turn 92 this year and even Mubarak will presumably retire by that age, but the Emergency persists.
In the 2005 Presidential elections, the first in which Husni Mubarak competed directly against a range of opposition candidates (without any danger of losing, of course), he promised to lift the Emergency Law and replace it with an anti-terrorism law. This has not yet happened, but heck, it’s only been five years, and it’s not like he has a rubber-stamp Parliament. (Oh, wait. He does.) Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif explained in his speech on extending the Emergency (a speech left to the Prime Minister as Chief Technocrat, not to the President to whom, as we learn below, the law is “abhorrent”):
To that end, the President of the Republic committed himself in his electoral platform to lift the state of emergency and formulate a new counter terrorism law which would balance personal freedom with the interests and security of society. The Government reiterated this commitment a few weeks ago before the UN Human Rights Council, and today the Government restates this commitment to the representatives of the nation to lift the state of emergency as soon as a balanced law is adopted which does not permit the use of extraordinary investigation measures unless necessary to counter terrorism, and then only under complete supervision by the judiciary. The Government is committed to presenting this law for public discussion, and to deliberate on it with the National Council for Human Rights and the civil society organisations.Ladies and Gentlemen,
Previously the Government had stated that it was requesting an extension of the state of emergency even though it was abhorrent to it, because we do not wish to govern under extraordinary conditions, but at the same time we do not wish to squander what we have achieved. Our achievements may not rise to the level of our ambitions or fulfil all our hopes, but we hold on to them, desiring to improve and develop them. They were not achieved easily, surrounded as we are by an unstable region, threats of terrorism around the world, and an unforeseen severe financial crisis. Nonetheless, and notwithstanding these conditions, we have been able to implement gradual political reform, and achieved economic growth which many states failed to accomplish. We were able to create job opportunities for our youth, and we are committed to increase them and wipe out unemployment, which is our highest priority and a major weapon against terrorism.
While it would be unjust to credit the stability we enjoy, and which has permitted us to achieve so much, to the emergency law alone, it would also be unjust to ignore the fact that the application of the emergency law has spared the nation the threats of terrorism and stopped many terrorist crimes before they could be committed.
Yes, the government is again extending the State of Emergency even though it is “abhorrent to it.” (Full English text of the speech can be found here.) It’s purely to prevent terrorism and narcotics trafficking. (And Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.)
Even so, Nazif went out of his way to make it clear that this would be a kinder, gentler Emergency Law. The government is sensitive to the bad reputation the law carries with it, and is trying to soften it a bit.
But if the tone of the renewal is a bit Orwellian, let’s be fair to the Egyptian government here as well. In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, nobody bothered to pass Emergency Laws. There was no effort to pretend to a rule of law. Egypt at least keeps officially extending the Emergency. Yes, it restricts freedom of expression, assembly, and much else. But Egypt for all its faults is not Saddam’s Iraq, Asad’s Syria, or even Ben ‘Ali’s Tunisia. There is an independent press which can criticize the Emergency Law, here for example, a still relatively independent judiciary which is divided over extending the law, and the renewed but kinder, gentler law will, apparently, be more limited.
Egyptians sometimes note that they come in for a lot of Western criticism even though their press and society is, in many ways, freer than a lot of other Arab countries. The criticism is accurate but, I think, misunderstands the reasons for the critique. Egypt is still the largest Arab country, the country so many others have followed and looked to; it was one of the first to defy colonial rule and one of the first to evoke pan-Arab emotions. It has also been one of the most liberal and open societies in the Arab world, outside of Lebanon at least, and it has the oldest media and the richest cinema and television culture.
Of those to whom much is given, much is expected. Egypt is arguably the oldest culture in the world, certainly the oldest unified nation. It has a deep, rich role in Arab history and in the history of Arab nationalism. Egyptians would be (rightly, I think) insulted if one compared them to Yemen or Jordan or Libya, so the government really should not be tempted by the “we’re not as bad as Syria” argument.
And, precisely because the press is freer and more independent, it’s easier to see the failings. I don’t expect Egypt anytime soon to replicate what happened yesterday in London, when after 13 years in office the ruling party handed over power to the opposition, letting the Queen do the one constitutional duty left to her. But even though there is considerable openness in Egypt compared to its Arab neighbors, the Emergency Law remains a thorn in the side of the opposition, and its renewal, even if in kinder, gentler, form, is a constant reminder that Egypt’s relatively open society (though lacking political democracy) can still be constrained and the open windows closed at any time.
Criticism of Egyptian lack of democracy is not because it is the worst Arab country in these matters, but because it is one of the best, but still falls so short of what it could be.
Saudi Al Hayat’s ‘flavor’ in FP/ here. Joyce Karam is calling for a concerted effort to quell Hezbollah: Her favorite tool: the Hariri tribunal!
Regardless of the accuracy (or lack thereof) of the reports about Syria allowing the transfer of Scud missiles to Hezbollah, the absence of the Lebanese government from the debate is extremely alarming. It is also telling of the subdued state of affairs in the country, as well as the changes in the recent political dynamics, which have come at the expense of the United States and its allies.
Recent statements by Lebanese leaders, notably in response to official U.S. comments, reflect the shift in policy and rhetoric that Lebanon has undergone in the past few years. Prime Minister Saad Hariri likened the accusations of the alleged transfer of Scud missiles from Syria to Hezbollah to “the weapons-of-mass-destruction allegations against Saddam Hussein: They were never found; they did not exist.” Hariri was followed by his defense minister, Elias El-Murr, who claimed that “neither the Lebanese army nor the intelligence have any information about the transfer of the missiles” and “we heard about it through the media only.” Compare that with February 2007 when El-Murr himself ordered authorities to intercept an arms shipment to Hezbollah, and a few months before that when Hariri and his allies championed U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 in the aftermath of the July war, calling for demarcating the Lebanon-Syria border and an end to weapons smuggling to Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
Understandably, a lot has happened since then. Hezbollah’s show of force in Beirut in May 2008 led to a change in government…….. a diplomatic retreat on the part of the United States and its allies from the Lebanese field. This was due to a combination of other pressing policy priorities and a lack of leverage on the parties both inside and outside Lebanon, which were disappointed by Washington’s inability to reshape the situation after Hezbollah’s actions on May 7, 2008. This exposed the limitations of George W. Bush’s policy in isolating Syria and not having the necessary diplomatic tools on the ground to curb its allies.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman ….. added that “seeking to isolate Syria in the international community inhibited our ability to forge international consensus and speak with one voice.”
While the Bush administration made a crucial mistake by completely shutting out Damascus and ignoring the peace process for most of its first term, Barack Obama’s administration is making a different mistake by scaling down the level of engagement and diplomatic efforts on this issue. Washington was almost absent in the aftermath of the Lebanese elections and the new government formation last summer … Meanwhile, Hezbollah has, according to a recent report by the U.S. Defense Department on Iran’s military power, “exceeded 2006 Lebanon conflict armament levels” and is receiving around $200 million in funds from Tehran annually. Reversing Hezbollah’s gains will require the United States and the international community to increase their engagement with the government in Beirut and have a more robust diplomatic presence in the country. Talking to Syria is a necessity, but that alone will not be enough to contain Hezbollah’s arms smuggling. Indeed, the situation is not exactly what it was in the 1980s, when then-President Hafez al-Assad had a larger say in the party’s decision-making. Iran has increased its regional clout after the Iraq war, and Hezbollah has growing confidence after the 2006 war and the events of 2008.
Parallel to its comprehensive peace efforts and aid to Lebanese state institutions, the Obama administration should consider resuming the trilateral cooperation with France and Saudi Arabia on Lebanon. The mechanism was initiated by the Bush administration in the aftermath of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s 2005 assassination and was crucial in securing the Syrian withdrawal, establishing the Special Tribunal for Lebanon ……Without such engagement and with Hezbollah’s growing control, the current status quo is increasing the risks of a second confrontation between Israel and the Iranian-backed party — a conflict whose outcome would be inevitably catastrophic on both the Lebanese people and the U.S. agenda in the region.”
I received some snarky message after the Shahzad attempted bombing in Times Square, asking if I were still standing behind the idea of Islam as a religion of peace. It was a stupid comment. Classical Islamic law forbids murder and forbids terrorism, and it forbids aggression. Whether that makes it a religion of peace is a matter for debate; it isn’t my diction. Medieval Islam, like medieval and even modern Christianity (cf. the Portuguese and Spanish Empires’ ‘God, glory and gold’), was used as an imperial ideology, sometimes for conquest states– but that use of it was contrary to the verses of the Qur’an instructing believers not to commit aggression and to agree to peace treaties with others who seek them.
But in any case, no contemporary Muslim-majority country I can think of would launch a war of naked aggression purely on an Islamic basis. In fact, few wars of naked aggression have been initiated by Muslim-majority countries in the past few decades. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980 was an act of aggression on a self-proclaimed Islamic state by a secular Arab nationalist one, and premised on Arab nationalism, not Islam. Violence in the Levant is usually at least framed as a response to Israeli aggression. The issue of Morocco in the Western Sahara is national and territorial, and both parties are Muslim.
That is, few self-consciously “Islamic” polities have behaved as illegally and wrongly as did George W. Bush when he invaded Iraq on false pretenses and in the absence of an attack by Iraq on the US.
The people who say that “Islam” authorizes aggressive violence are a fringe of cultists and typically non-state actors. Those kind of people, you have in any society. The Hutaree in Michigan are a Christian sect that allegedly makes similar assertions. And you have the Christian fundamentalist Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda.
So the snarky question was a stupid and uninformed question. But it looks even stupider in the light of the revelation that it was a Senegalese Muslim, Alioune Niass, who discovered the smoking SUV in Times Square and urged a friend to call 911. That is, New Yorkers were saved from that bombing by a Muslim. See this MPAC article. (MPAC is a really great group and non-Muslims worried about bigotry against Muslims really should join it (membership link here).
Niass was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, which noted that he got no recognition for his heroism.
And, the snarky question would look even more stupid in light of the announcement by Gen. David Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander in charge of the Greater Middle East and of the struggle against the Pakistani Taliban that Shahzad acted as a lone wolf, not as part of an organized plot. Shahzad is a Pashtun from an elite family (his father had been the equivalent of a two-star general in the Pakistani air force). He had not been a student activist of the Jamaat-i Islami, the fundamentalist party in Pakistan. If he did plot the bombing, he is as likely to have been motivated by Pashtun nationalism as Islam. Pashtuns are an ethnic group in northwest Pakistan, and often feel disadvantaged by the policies of the Punjabi-dominated central government in Islamabad. Even nationalist Pashtuns like the Awami National Party, which now rules the North-West Frontier Province (Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa) initially objected to Pakistani military attacks on Pashtun Pakistani Taliban because of ethnic solidarity, not religious.
And, everybody in Pakistan is upset by the continued US Predator drone strikes on Pakistani soil by covert operatives and sometimes by Blackwater-Xe contractors. (President Obama unwisely joked about the Predators last Saturday; it is not a joking matter in Pakistan). I have long worried about the unforeseen consequences of the Predator strikes, which are illegal in international law and done as a covert operation and so outside the US democratic framework. None of this in any way excuses the bloody-minded terrorism plot against civilians in Times Square. But to simple-mindedly equate such violence with “Islam,” the religion of 1.5 billion people or nearly a sixth of humankind, and to blame it on the Qur’an, is, well, I’ll say it again: uninformed and stupid.
PS For Pakistani-American anxieties over being tarred with this brush, see this report from Aljazeera English:
“… At least one of those barred on Monday for alleged ties to Saddam Hussein’s banned Baath party was a winner for Iraqiya. Allawi’s allies said they did not see the election result changing because the number of votes invalidated was small. They said any winning candidates affected would be replaced by the next Iraqiya nominee in line in the same constituency. But any reduction in Iraqiya’s representation could reignite Sunni anger, just as the sectarian violence unleashed after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion recedes…”
Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said at Columbia U. that a military strike on Iran over its nuclear enrichment activities would be his ‘last option.’ He makes an excellent point, too often overlooked. In some instances the price of doing something is just about as high as the price of doing nothing. A US strike on Iran would risk throwing Iraq and Afghanistan into chao, with our troops in the midst of it.
The Obama administration is now moving tighten economic sanctions on Iran, as an alternative to a more direct approach. These measures include pressuring countries and firms not to buy Iranian petroleum and gas; pressuring them not to sell gasoline to Iran; and attempting to make it difficult for Iranian banks to interface with the world economic system.
While these measures could impose costs on Iran, these costs can easily be borne by the country, and more especially by the regime.
Moreover, it is unclear that Obama can even swing further sanctions on Iranian petroleum and gas. Such harsh measures are opposed by Brazil, Russia, India and China, the so-called BRIC bloc of nations that are emerging diplomatic and economic players outside the US-dominated G7 nations. At the BRIC summit in Brazil last week, a consensus emerged against strong new sanctions on Iran. Brazil is on the UN Security Council at the moment, and in May Lebanon will assume the rotating chair of that body. Given that Turkey also currently has a seat and is strongly opposed to new Iran sanctions, it may be difficult for Obama to get a significant new resolution.
Few commodities are more easily transported and more fungible (easily exchanged for other goods or for cash) than gasoline, and the plan for a gasoline embargo on Iran (popular in Congress) is a pipe dream.
But we are hardly in a stage of black marketeering. Rather, direct deals are being done by major players, despite the withdrawal of some players, such as Lukoil, from exporting gasoline to Iran. Chinaoil just directly sold Iran 600,000 barrels of gasoline, and Sinopec, another Chinese oil giant, is preparing to resume direct gasoline sales to Iran. Soft gasoline demand in Asia because of the global economic downturn has left petroleum companies with high inventories that they are eager to offload anywhere they can, and Iran as a destination suits them fine.
Reuters reports, “As long as there is money to be made, and economic benefits to be taken advantage off, Iran will always find ready sellers of gasoline from the international market,” a trader said. “The politicians don’t understand markets…sanctions are cosmetic.”
And if direct sales became difficult, indirect ones would be substituted. And if that became difficult, smugglers would step in. A lot of Iraqis would get rich. And while paying extra to smuggle things in would hurt ordinary Iranians, the regime would use its oil profits to cushion the elites and keep them happy. (That cushioning is why very severe sanctions on Iraq never had a chance of shaking the Baathist regime).
The man said it all: ’sanctions’ are purely cosmetic, designed to make it look as though US politicians had taken some dramatic and effective step. It is odd that the politicians in Washington, who are always loudly proclaiming their belief in the market, think its iron laws can be suspended by a simple vote on their parts.
And another development taken as a bellwether of increasingly effective sanctions turns out to have been a mirage. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak clarified remarks he made last Thursday about creeping sanctions on Iran. He was misunderstood to have said that Petronas, the Malaysian petroleum company had suspended gasoline sales to Iran, but he never said any such thing and it never happened. He referred to a cancelled third-party spot oil deal that collapsed for purely economic reasons.
Moreover, Iran’s need to import gasoline is probably temporary. It has the wherewithal to build new refineries, and is doing so. Germany’s ABB Lummus has a a $512 million deal with the National Iranian Oil Company and a consortium in Iran to raise gasoline production at the Bandar Abbas refinery to about 3.5 million gallons a day from the present 1.3 million gallons.
In fact, there are ten such projects to expand existing refineries, which could allow Iran to nearly double its production of gasoline by 2012. In addition, Iran is investing nearly $40 billion in building 7 new refineries. So even a successful squeeze on Iran’s gasoline imports, if it could be implemented right away, would only have much effect for 2 years. But such a squeeze is unlikely to be successfully implemented in the first place.
Nor is Iran lacking for customers. A Swiss company just signed a deal worth $13 billion to import Iranian natural gas over the next 25 years. As for financial sanctions, so far Iran is evading them through banking partners in the United Arab Emirates, and Iran and Venezuela have two joint banks. These measures provide Iran with a back door, allowing it to mitigate the effects of financial sanctions.
Very few sanctions regimes have actually produced regime change or altered regime behavior. The US could not even accomplish this goal with regard to a small island 90 miles off its shores, Cuba. That an oil giant half way around the world with a population of 70 million that is as big as Spain, France and Germany can be effectively bludgeoned with sanctions is not very likely.
The US needs to engage in comprehensive security talks with Iran, in hopes of striking a grand bargain. Because as Admiral Mullen rightly says, there are no good military options here.
Karl Marx once remarked that every historical event occurs twice, first as tragedy and then as farce.
On Wednesday evening we got the farcical version of the shoe bomber when the third secretary of the Qatari Embassy appears to have sneaked a smoke in the lavatory of a plane headed for Denver. The flight attendants noticed the smoke, and confronted Mohammad Yagoub al-Madadi, 27. When asked what he had been doing in there, he appears to have made a sarcastic remark about setting his shoes on fire. Big mistake.
The alarmed flight attendants called on air marshalls, who firmly marched al-Madadi back to his first class seat and sat on either side of him. The pilot kept the plane low, and two F-16s scrambled to escort the plane (and no doubt prevent it from being misused if taken over). The whole scenario reminds me of a Monty Python skit.
Al-Madadi is destined to enter the annals of persons who joked around about serious security matters on planes or at airports, and who came to rue the day. There was the pilot who as a practical joke paraded around in front of passengers conspicuously reading a book, “How to Fly a Plane.” He was fired. And then there are all the passengers who earned themselves an extra long interview at security checks in airports by making jokes with the TSA inspectors that included the word “bomb.” Some things you don’t make light of.
There are only about 200,000 native, citizen Qataris. They are among the richest populations in the world per capita, since their small Gulf country sits atop an ocean of natural gas. Their emir gives the US an airbase, al-Udeid, and has been instrumental in capturing key al-Qaeda fugitives. Qataris are often pro-American, and Qatari pilots flew missions against Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War alongside US pilots.
Al-Madadi might have diplomatic immunity. But he doesn’t have Late Night immunity, and should get ready to be the butt of many jokes. Although it is true that the incident might not have been taken quite o seriously by the authorities of it had not involved an Arab, lots of Euro-Americans have run into trouble, as I noted, for inappropriate and lame attempts at comedy at airports or on planes. This story is one of undue arrogance on al-Madadi’s part. Likely a Swede who behaved and spoke the same way would also have been frog-marched off the plane.
Also al-Madadi should recognize that he has a bad nicotine addiction and give up smoking, which will give him lung cancer and tragically shorten his life (not to mention put him in compromising positions like sneaking a few puffs in an airplane bathroom). I’ve often thought that Arabs are always worrying about nefarious plots against them by Americans, but then they voluntarily smoke American cigarettes like chimneys and put themselves in early graves. Many more of them have died in this way than from direct American military or covert action.
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Karl Marx once remarked that every historical event occurs twice, first as tragedy and then as farce.
On Wednesday evening we got the farcical version of the shoe bomber when the third secretary of the Qatari Embassy appears to have sneaked a smoke in the lavatory of a plane headed for Denver. The flight attendants noticed the smoke, and confronted Mohammad Yagoub al-Madadi, 27. When asked what he had been doing in there, he appears to have made a sarcastic remark about setting his shoes on fire. Big mistake.
The alarmed flight attendants called on air marshalls, who firmly marched al-Madadi back to his first class seat and sat on either side of him. The pilot kept the plane low, and two F-16s scrambled to escort the plane (and no doubt prevent it from being misused if taken over). The whole scenario reminds me of a Monty Python skit.
Al-Madadi is destined to enter the annals of persons who joked around about serious security matters on planes or at airports, and who came to rue the day. There was the pilot who as a practical joke paraded around in front of passengers conspicuously reading a book, “How to Fly a Plane.” He was fired. And then there are all the passengers who earned themselves an extra long interview at security checks in airports by making jokes with the TSA inspectors that included the word “bomb.” Some things you don’t make light of.
There are only about 200,000 native, citizen Qataris. They are among the richest populations in the world per capita, since their small Gulf country sits atop an ocean of natural gas. Their emir gives the US an airbase, al-Udeid, and has been instrumental in capturing key al-Qaeda fugitives. Qataris are often pro-American, and Qatari pilots flew missions against Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War alongside US pilots.
Al-Madadi might have diplomatic immunity. But he doesn’t have Late Night immunity, and should get ready to be the butt of many jokes. Although it is true that the incident might not have been taken quite o seriously by the authorities of it had not involved an Arab, lots of Euro-Americans have run into trouble, as I noted, for inappropriate and lame attempts at comedy at airports or on planes. This story is one of undue arrogance on al-Madadi’s part. Likely a Swede who behaved and spoke the same way would also have been frog-marched off the plane.
Also al-Madadi should recognize that he has a bad nicotine addiction and give up smoking, which will give him lung cancer and tragically shorten his life (not to mention put him in compromising positions like sneaking a few puffs in an airplane bathroom). I’ve often thought that Arabs are always worrying about nefarious plots against them by Americans, but then they voluntarily smoke American cigarettes like chimneys and put themselves in early graves. Many more of them have died in this way than from direct American military or covert action.
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The Pakistani government on Friday tabled a proposed 18th amendment to the constitution, which if enacted will be an enormous advance toward democratization in the country.
I was watching Bill Maher last week and Christopher Hitchens remarked on the Iraqi elections that they “didn’t used to happen” under Saddam Hussein. Likewise, free elections did not happen under Gen. Zia ul-Haq in 1980s Pakistan, or in 1999-2007 under Gen. Pervez Musharraf. And in the 1990s, presidents kept using the martial law amendments to the constitution of Gen. Zia to arbitrarily dismiss elected prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.
But US hawks and Neoconservatives are not celebrating this epochal bill in Pakistan. I ask myself why.
I think it is because Neoconservatism and the arguments of all those who favor democratization at the barrel of a gun are fundamentally Orientalist in character. In some ways they go back to Karl Marx, who in his journalism on India argued that the capitalist British Empire was necessary to shake Indian villages out of their millennia-long sluggishness, from which they could never escape on their own.
During the past 3 years, the Pakistani public has demonstrated repeatedly and on a large scale in favor of the rule of law and the reinstatement of the Supreme Court justices dismissed by dictator Gen. Musharraf. Mind you, they are making a case for civil law and the civil supreme court, not for sharia or Islamic law. They voted in the center-left Pakistan People’s Party in February 2008, and the return to parliamentary rule ultimately, in August 2008, allowed the political parties to unite to toss out of office Gen. Musharraf, who had had himself declared a civilian ‘president’ and was in danger of being impeached for alleged corruption.
That is, the Pakistani public has conducted a ‘color revolution’ of its own, in the teeth of opposition or skittishness in Washington, and managed to overturn a military dictatorship that had been backed to the hilt by Bush-Cheney, restoring parliamentary governance.
This bill will take that process even further. The president will lose the power, so abused in the 1990s, to dismiss the prime minister at will. Presidents will not be able to prorogue or cancel parliament. They won’t be able to unilaterally appoint the Chief of Staff. The legislative reforms in Pakistan will also give more autonomy to the provinces within the Pakistani federal system. The long-suffering Pashtun people (unfairly branded as all ‘Taliban’ by some observers) will finally get a provincial name recognizing them, as Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan recognize their majority ethnicities.
But none of these achievements is being praised by the right of center US press or the liberal imperialists.
That is because the United States did not spur these developments. The Pakistani public (including humble street clouds) did it themselves, and if anything the US was nervous about losing its favorite military dictator and terrified that democracy would bring instability or provide an opening for the Taliban to take over the country. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton preposterously called Pakistan the ‘most dangerous country in the world.’ Australian gadfly and security consultant David Kilcullen said rather bizarrely in a WaPo interview last year this time that the Pakistani government could fall to the Taliban and al-Qaeda within six months. Pakistan, by democratizing from within and challenging the paradigm of liberal imperialism, either falls off the US radar (it isn’t our project, so why even pay attention?) or is actively disparaged as a form of ‘instability.’ It all has to be about us.
In contrast, the March 7 parliamentary elections in Iraq have been widely lauded by the US right as vindication of George W. Bush’s illegal invasion and occupation of that country. Iraq is a basket case, full of smoldering rubble and an army of displaced people, as well as masses of widows and orphans created by the violence that broke out when Bush created a power vacuum. The party most likely to play kingmaker is the Sadrists, followers of fundamentalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Iraqi politics are far less secular than Pakistan’s. For all the recent violence in Pakistan, it is a much more secure country than Iraq, possessing a large and professional army. Iraq is being lauded as a role model not because it is a success but because it is an American project, in which the little brown irrational people have allegedly once again have had the precious tutelage of white Europeans (and Euro-Americans) generously bestowed upon them.
Pakistan, which at the moment has had a much better political outcome, is ignored or disparaged because the hand of the West is hard to discern in its achievements. The move to weaken the president is not, of course, being taken purely out of altruism. The Muslim League-N wants the PPP president taken down a notch. President Asaf Ali Zardari’s own alleged corruption weakens him and makes it hard for him to resist the demand that the president’s powers be curbed.
What the Pakistani public is doing has much more lasting implications for democratization in the Muslim world than anything Bush did. Pakistan is a Sunni Muslim-majority country, so it has more hope of being seen as exemplary by the 90% of Muslims in the world who are Sunnis, than does Shiite-dominated Iraq. That Pakistan’s politicians are themselves implementing these reforms gives them an authenticity that the US-authored procedures in Iraq largely lack.
Pakistan has a host of daunting problems, including high levels of corruption, the continued undue power of the military and of Inter-Services Intelligence, Taliban-driven political violence, and a legacy of support for terrorism in Kashmir and Afghanistan– neither as yet entirely abandoned. High population growth rates, lack of land reform, and relatively low literacy and internet use all threaten to erode the impressive political achievements of the past 3 years. Even the new bill does not provide and parliamentary checks and balances on the power of the prime minister to appoint persons to high-level positions, and so is deeply flawed.
But there is some good news to be found in Pakistan’s political development from time to time, and this weekend is one of those moments. Americans and Europeans should try a little humility, and find it in themselves to praise these positive accomplishments even if no Western troops set them in motion.
The long arm of the military dictators is losing some of its grasp on Pakistani political institutions, and the country is moving toward a strong parliamentary system. It is something to be happy about, even if the next round of reforms may have to rein in the prime minister himself.
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Learn To Read And Write Arabic
Find out all about the revolutionary secret technique for learning to read and write Arabic. Read the article here.
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