(nb broken links in this thread fixed 10/8/06 - also accidentally brought thread back to the top ...but that's ok as it is  well worth re-reading and posting more replies to)

So far the backlash against "region change" from the old foreign policy establishment has been surprisingly impotent. Nevertheless it has already mobilized majority (but impotent) opposition to the war in Iraq among public opinion in the US, Australia and Britain - as well as overwhelming opposition in the rest of Europe and this has substantially delayed further progress.


We should be actively participating in the real policy debates going on right now. A useful overview for understanding the issues that will inevitably unfold in the mass media in the next period can be found in another article from the US Army War College journal Parameters. Its worth a careful read and follow up analysis. The Strategic Implications of Political Liberalizations and Democratization in the Middle East

 The (dwindling) pseudo-left can be relied on to join the backlash pointing to each and every problem arising as demonstrating once again the "catstrophe" caused by not just leaving the region to rot in stagnation. Most of what passes for the genuine left can be relied on to remain bewildered and confused. What do *we* plan to do? And can we be relied upon to actually do it?

Some more background reading from Reul Gerecht. "Selling out moderate islam" His (pdf downloadable) book on the "Islamic Paradox" was mentioned a year ago as essential for understanding underlying US policy and avoiding confusion in the swirl of current events and "declaratory policy".


The rapidity with which the Bush administration switched from its initial weak position on the cartoons confirms my impression that Gerecht's line of supporting democratic revolution, regardless of its inevitable short term "anti-American" consequences,  is the underlying administration policy which however is still quite isolated and poorly understood by the people supposed to implement it and thus still has to be concealed to minimize the backlash against it - with lots consequent confusion.


His recent comments on Iran also seem a good guide to US policy (make empty threats of sanctions and bombing while stepping up support for regime change by the Iranian people).

PS I was feeling guilty about not having responded yet to bpors incomprehension of Zambelli's "Strategic Implications..." article in the "Hamas and Egypt thread.  Hopefully he's gone now and others can see for themselves how his position coincides with the reactionary backlash against region change.

Will just quote one paragraph of the article:

Despite the end of the Soviet threat, US relations toward the Middle East continued to be driven by Cold War calculations. Supporting and guaranteeing the security of friendly autocratic regimes to ensure access to the region’s energy resources and favorable pricing mechanisms, containing the rise of regional powers with the potential to threaten US interests, deterring aspiring powers such as a revamped Russia, China, and even Europe from gaining a foothold in the region, supporting Israel as a surrogate of US power and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, nonproliferation, Islamic radicalism, and terrorism took precedence over all else.

 Plus one sentence of bpor's response:

Arthur, if anyone believes this nonsense they are just gullible tools for U.S. right-wing imperialism.

 That, plus bpors production of dramatic evidence that the author of an article in the US Army's War College journal is indeed working for US imperialism, summarizes the quintessence of pseudo-leftism.


It's hard to tell whether he really believes that the Chavez government was overthrown by a US coup or that Hamas is about to be overthrown by witholding US funding. What is clear however is that he's quite certain that the conservative forces opposed to the Bush administration have been proved right:

The Iraqi constitution (if you bother to read it) states clearly that no matter what law is written, the final word is the Koran.

The Baathist Party, and the military, were not banned or disbanded because Bush was pro democracy. It was because Bremer suggested it at the urging of Chalabi, who saw the Baathists and the army as a potential threat to his ascendancy. And that policy has proved a disaster for democracy. Without an army, Iraq can't defend itself. Ironically, against disaffected soldiers who were once in that army. Without a revamped Baath party, the Sunnis could not properly organize for the elections, making them feel even more marginalized, and fueling the insurgency even further. And this has helped make Iraq the mess it is today. Bugger-all reconstruction, no political resolution, and ever mounting death-tolls and violence.

Bush is a genius.(extreme sarcasm!)

These are exactly their themes - democracy will only lead to islamic regimes hostile to US interests - better to support the existing Arab autocracies with strong armies holding down the people instead of paying in blood and treasure for the costs of dangerous change.


As explained in Zambelli's article that was the rationale for the old policies which imploded with 911.


As the old order crumbles throughout the region, at each stage the old guard of the foreign policy establishment, together with the pseudo-left will point out the enormous dangers involved, how traditional American interests and alliances are being undermined and how these disasters are all due to Bush's stupidity. For a preview of the subjects of future rantings from the likes of bpor read the sober analysis of current US interests and their expected strategic consequences in the articles linked from this topic.

Francis Fukuyama, famous for proclaiming the "End of History" has now proclaimed the end of neoconservatism under the title After neoconservatism in the New York Times magazine.

Here's the central theme.

But it is the idealistic effort to use American power to promote democracy and human rights abroad that may suffer the greatest setback. Perceived failure in Iraq has restored the authority of foreign policy "realists" in the tradition of Henry Kissinger. Already there is a host of books and articles decrying America's naïve Wilsonianism and attacking the notion of trying to democratize the world. The administration's second-term efforts to push for greater Middle Eastern democracy, introduced with the soaring rhetoric of Bush's second Inaugural Address, have borne very problematic fruits. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood made a strong showing in Egypt's parliamentary elections in November and December. While the holding of elections in Iraq this past December was an achievement in itself, the vote led to the ascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran (following on the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June). But the clincher was the decisive Hamas victory in the Palestinian election last month, which brought to power a movement overtly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In his second inaugural, Bush said that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," but the charge will be made with increasing frequency that the Bush administration made a big mistake when it stirred the pot, and that the United States would have done better to stick by its traditional authoritarian friends in the Middle East. Indeed, the effort to promote democracy around the world has been attacked as an illegitimate activity both by people on the left like Jeffrey Sachs and by traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan.

 There is indeed a flurry of such books and articles and we can expect even more as the full implications of islamist election victories in countries like Egypt sink in. If books and articles by the likes of Fukuyama or Buchanan could end history, it would have ended long ago. Fukyama traces the "pedigree" of some leading neocons (mostly associated with the Cold War anti-communist social democrats) and uses it to explain:

How, then, did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the "root cause" of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq? Neoconservatives would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold war ended.

 His complex ideological explanation is based on their alleged jewish "trotskyism" and "leninism" despite the fact that they were from the right-wing of the social democrats when the left wing split off in support of Students for a Democratic Society and the sixties "movement".


A simpler explanation could also explain why people with quite different ethnic and political backgrounds such as George Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice reached much the same conclusions. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact  that  "the "root cause" of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy" - or does that seem too obvious?

(While some of the original organizers of "Social Democrats, USA" had their origins in the Schactmanite CIA/AFL-CIO trotskyites, that was literally decades earlier - Democrat officials like Wohlstetter and their proteges like Wolfowitz opposed the Vietnam war because it was an obviously broken policy, not because of any "leninism"  (and they certainly weren't the only ones who could recognize an obviously broken policy in the middle-east after 911).

Incidentally it was pretty much the same respect for the facts that led them away from "detente" when the Soviet Union was aggressively expanding -  and towards improved relations with revolutionary China under Mao Tsetung, despite their passionate anti-communism. (The notorious "Committee for the Present Danger" in the Reagan years wasn't saying anything about the Soviets that Peking Review had not already pointed out more sharply).


Perhaps they did not believe "democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq" any more than they believed the US faced imminent danger from Iraqi WMDs?

Perhaps they just thought that there was no other way to carry people like Fukayama with them when executing a policy turn in a government plagued with even thicker apparatchiks than the comintern at its worst?


The "gentlemen" of the foreign policy establishment (in the Straussian sense) could never have been pursuaded that it was in the US interest to replace pro-US autocracies with anti-US democracies throughout the region. But they could eventually be convinced, by people who correctly believe that a declining last superpower still has the strength and wisdom to be able to retreat gracefully and accept a few thousand casualties in doing so, that the country that retreated from Somalia in the face of 19 casualties was now launching an aggressively unilateralist program for world conquest rather than a retreat.


Now Fukuyama proudly proclaims that he is still willing to play the role of both goat and goat herder:

But greater political participation by Islamist groups is very likely to occur whatever we do, and it will be the only way that the poison of radical Islamism can ultimately work its way through the body politic of Muslim communities around the world. The age is long since gone when friendly authoritarians could rule over passive populations and produce stability indefinitely. New social actors are mobilizing everywhere, from Bolivia and Venezuela to South Africa and the Persian Gulf. A durable Israeli-Palestinian peace could not be built upon a corrupt, illegitimate Fatah that constantly had to worry about Hamas challenging its authority. Peace might emerge, sometime down the road, from a Palestine run by a formerly radical terrorist group that had been forced to deal with the realities of governing.

 If such a brilliant theoretician as Fukuyama has finally noticed this now, is it not conceivable to him that the same neocons who recognized that the "root cause" of terrorism was the lack of democracy would also have recognized these obvious conclusions at the same time?


Such a lame conclusion from so bold a critique of the policy makers whose policies are now trumpeted by their opponents as their own!!!


It is really hard to tell whether Fukayama is a goat herder pretending to be a goat, while leading the flock back to support for the inevitable and obvious results of undermining the pro-US autocracies or whether he is as stupid as the goat as he appears to be.


Either way it is utterly clear that a ruling class which cannot even discuss grand strategy coherently with its own theoreticians, let alone its opinion leaders, is thoroughly moribund.


I think that's the key to understanding why the backlash against region change has been so impotent up to now. Most of the poor dear gentlemen still don't understand that they are being lied to,  and those that do know that also understand that their capacity for policy analysis and decision making is so limited that they deserve it.


As for the class that should be challenging for power, it's also still bewildered and confused and has no confidence that it could rule better than these sheep and goats. But at least it knows both that it is being systematically lied to and that it doesn't make much sense to seek to govern without having actually figured out how the world works.


The people won't mobilize behind the paleo-conservatives in trying to roll back region change and they won't be impressed by the hypocritical Wilsonian "certain realism" advocated by Fukuyama either.


The policy makers of the ruling class are doomed to having to continue ruling without a social base with which they can even discuss policy with until such time as the working class gains enough confidence to relieve them of that burden.

Arthur's post (about Fukayama's article) points to what is perhaps the central problem not only in discussions about the war in Iraq but also in discussions about developing a program that goes beyond simply supporting the neo-con project to democratize the world.

That problem is the lack of a grasp of the importance of serious strategic thinking.

Arthur writes at the end of his post:

As for the class that should be challenging for power, it's also still bewildered and confused and has no confidence that it could rule better than these sheep and goats. But at least it knows both that it is being systematically lied to and that it doesn't make much sense to seek to govern without having actually figured out how the world works.

I don't think "the class that should be challenging for power" is aware at this point that it could challenge for power and that is because it hasn't  "actually figured out how the world works".  It's a chicken and egg situation - if there was a real  leadership that had figured this out, then the notion of challenging for power would be on the agenda.

Meanwhile the level of consciousness is just that those in charge are evil, lying bastards.  This doesn't take people very far and without any sort of leadership it leads mainly to bewilderment and conspiracy theories.

In order to understand what's going on in the world it is vitally necessary for people to exercise their imaginations and try to see the siuation from a ruling class perspective.  What problems does the ruling class face in today's world and what would it make sense (from their perspective) for them to be doing about it?

This only goes part of the way because it's also necessary for people to realise that the ruling class isn't a single hegemonic monster but consists of different groups  with conflicting short term interests.  The people who rule the world are a living entity and there are struggles within that class as to how best to do the job.

Without a grasp of "ruling class politics" it's just impossible to really make sense of the world in any deep way, hence the "bewilderment" and people falling into the trap of gunning for the more reactionary  elements of the current ruling class. 

At the moment very few people think in terms of "winning", the  mentality  is  simply to oppose  rather than to think in terms  of  which  side  is pushing things in a better direction and which side  is holding things back.   There's very little sense  of  how history  is unfolding  -  of  the  historical necessity  which is  driving the current ruling class conflicts. 

The neo-con position is that they have to take the risk of destabilizing the Middle East, even if this results in "anti-American democracies" - the price of maintaining stability and the old regimes would be far too high.   This is a radical position, opposed by the likes of Kissinger and many others in the old gurad military establishment. And it looks like being an intense and on-going battle.

I doubt that the neo-cons were ever under the illusion that the democratic revolution in the Middle East would be a smooth process. But how could they ever have got started on such a bold venture if they'd said at the outset how messy and difficult it would be?   There has never been a bourgois revolution that wasn't  an immense upheaval - and during which there weren't intense struggles being the radical and conservative aspects of the bourgoisie. 

Fukuyama argues that "the democratic impulse" arises from "modernity" rather than vice versa:

What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern — that is, technologically advanced and prosperous — society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.

This is an amazingly mechanistic argument which completely ignores history.  How "modern" was France in 1789?  Modernity and democratic revolution are two aspects of the same thing, not separate developments.


Later in his article he goes on to say:

By definition, outsiders can't "impose" democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.

Apart from the patronizing suggestion that the people of the Middle East are too backward for democracy and actually prefer to live under fascist dictaorships, he neglects to mention that previous US policy of supporting the continuation of tyranny in the Middle East has always been the real imposition on the Middle East.  Take that away and conditions are obviously "ripe" for the democratic impulse to flourish.  And we can see that happening now.  What really worries people like Kissinger et al is that the situation is "unstable" and the new democracies will be "anti-American".

The neo-cons are at least smart enough to see that even anti-Amarican democracies will be better than a continuation of the old situation and have realised that there must be real democracy and not the imposition of some form of gradual pro-American "democracy" as a result of behind the scenes meddling and careful manipulation to prevent "instability".

 

On keza's "chicken and egg problem", I was struck by this in Fukuyama's article:

New social actors are mobilizing everywhere, from Bolivia and Venezuela to South Africa and the Persian Gulf.

 Traditional US policy has been to try to suppress this by "hard" military force. Vietnam was a major breakthrough leading to "soft" reformist tactics for a while, but that too imploded with 911 and even Mr "End of History" has to acknowledge that:

The age is long since gone when friendly authoritarians could rule over passive populations and produce stability indefinitely.

 Unfortunately the age has not yet gone when the bourgeois dictatorship in advanced capitalist societies can rule "democratically" over passive populations. The new "social actors" have not yet begun to mobilize in our parts of the world.


Yet even "opinion leaders" take the view that "those in charge are evil lying basrards".


Convincing the rest of us that there is nothing we can do is now the central preoccupation of political and cultural discourse. That can hardly produce stability indefinitely and the current passivity of the populations must be rather brittle.


One consequence of the bewilderment and confusion on the left is that democratic "region change" in the middle east when it's acknowledged as having happened and having been a good thing will in itself only reinforce the idea that "they" are more suited to rule than "we" are since "they" got it right and "we" remained bewildered and confused.


The pseudo-left and the conservative "opinion leaders" will be discredited further but that in itself won't produce the self confidence for new actors to emerge.


We need to get across the fact that the "doom and gloom" spread by conservative opinion leaders and the pseudo-left is precisely what rulers need the ruled to believe in order for tnem not to emerge as social actors and challenge them for power. That includes explaining that the bewilderment and confusion is partly induced by the deliberate tactics of the Bushies in lying about WMDs etc to keep their own apparatchiks off balance - and partly by the collapse of revolutionary communism leaving the field open for all sorts of alien gibberish to be accepted as "the left".


But more fundamentally, social actors cannot step on the stage without a clear aim.  And the aim of overthrowing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat requires an "intentional stance" that does not and cannot develop spontaneously from the day to day concerns of people who "only work here".


We live in countries that already have democracies and in which the working class is both literate and the overwhelming majority. Yet the elementary demand for confiscation of the means of production from the tiny minority that owns the world is not even a matter for discussion in the program of any party seeking mass support.


Its been well worth while reminding people of the hymn of praise for the capitalist revolution in the Communist Manifesto. But the central point was that the communists always and everywhere raise the "property question" to the forefront and we have "a world to win".

Arhure wrote:

But more fundamentally, social actors cannot step on the stage without a clear aim.  And the aim of overthrowing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat requires an "intentional stance" that does not and cannot develop spontaneously from the day to day concerns of people who "only work here".


We live in countries that already have democracies and in which the working class is both literate and the overwhelming majority. Yet the elementary demand for confiscation of the means of production from the tiny minority that owns the world is not even a matter for discussion in the program of any party seeking mass support.


Its been well worth while reminding people of the hymn of praise for the capitalist revolution in the Communist Manifesto. But the central point was that the communists always and everywhere raise the "property question" to the forefront and we have "a world to win".

If we are going to chuck around expressions like "dictatorship of the proletariat"  we need to say something about what they mean (likewise with "dictatorship of the bourgoisie").

For most people, the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" conjures up images of the stagnant, oppressive social system which we were glad to see the end of in Eastern Europe.  Precisely what this term means in the sense you are using it needs to be spelled out. What  form would a dictatorship of the proletariat take in an advanced industrial society with a long tradition of bourgoies democracy like our own.

What is inspiring about it?   How would it work in practice? 

keza: In advanced industrial societies with a long tradition of parliamentary democracy like our own the traditional form of class dictatorship is parliamentary.

The content of bourgeois dictatorship/bourgeois democracy is that "they" rule with parliament a mere talking shop for decisions taken in their boardrooms and clubs.

The content of proletarian dictatorship/proletarian democracy is that "we" rule.

The forms of proletarian dictatorship/proletarian democracy can only be speculated about in advance of an actual revolutionary situation but one plausible speculation in the absence of civil war is that the "traditional" forms would be preserved - eg with revolutionary parties dominating parliament and a bourgeois minority opposition the main decision making would be outside parliament in the workers councils and party organizations.

Stalin mentioned that there was nothing in the forms of the British constitutional monarchy inherently inconsistent with proletarian dictatorship.

The issue is which class rules and does its rule determine what is "lawful" (ie dictatorship).

One important reason for the lack of enthusiasm for spreading (bourgeois) parliamentary democracy in the middle east is widespread awareness that parliamentary democracy at home is merely the form in which "they" run things while "we" only work here. There are less illusions about that now than when reformist parties had a real social base for parliamentary cretinism.

Confusion with East European police states was spread by lemmingist vanguards but there was never the remotest possibility that a revolutionary working class would tolerate allowing those fuckwits to play any more role in politics during a revolution than they do now, let alone putting up with them actually exercising state power. If necessary they would have to be forcibly suppressed but its hard to imagine a scenario in which they would be a threat to anybody.

Checkout what happened to the East European police states.

The bourgeoisie has no reason to take them seriously. Why should we?

BTW I recently saw an item about a trial in the 1960s in which a judge asked the defendant for an explanation of these strange terms "bourgeois dictatorship" and "proletarian dictatorship" that were being flung around in court.

The report said the explanation was along these lines.

Bourgeois dictatorship means people like you decide whether people like me go to gaol. Proletarian dictatorship is the other way around.

Doesn't imply there is no parliament and no courts - just different types of politicians, laws and crimes

Don't you remember?

Regime change is a ridiculous and failed idealogy. There have been so far 4 attempts at regime change since Sept 11. The first was against the Taliban, eventhough there is still no proof that they had anything to do with Sept 11. And it is debatable whether the opportunist braggart Osama bin Ladin had anything to do with it. This led to a flawed election which installed a western puppet in Kabul. However, to combat the remnants of the Taliban, the idiotic military and political leaders of the west came up with the stupid strategy of backing drug dealing warlords, who in turn are now flooding western cities and towns with heroin. Now five years later Afghanistan is populated by western troops without a clear military strategy.

The second stupid attempt at regime change was obviously Iraq. No WMD were found and the illegal invasion has successfully radicalized 1,000s of young muslims.

The third attempt was when the US, European Union and Israel ganged up on the democratically elected government of Hamas and imposed strangling sanctions, despite the fact that Hamas had kept to a ceasefire for 18 months, and despite numerous bloody provocations from Israel. This showed the world the basic hypocracy of western interventionism, especially to the Muslim world. The kidnapping of the Israel soldiers in Gaza was in retialiation for the kidnapping of a doctor and his brother a day before.

The result of the the third attempt led to a show of solidarity from Hizballah, which led to a attempt by the fourth strongest power to try and bomb Lebanon to bits. This was also a proxy war encouraged by the United States, which is a lead up to the next stupid attempt at regime change, the target either Iran or Syria.

A clever way to practise regime change would be for western democracies to quit arming regimes like Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, and see how long those regimes last before their own people topple those governments. That is called self determination.

"Regime change is a ridiculous and failed ideology". Think about that for a moment. Where does it lead anyone, any time (not just since 11 September 2001)? Where would it have led the South African people in their fight against the apartheid regime? The Vietnamese in their struggle for regime change in the South of their nation? And, since 2001, where would the Afghan and Iraqi people be, without regime change? The answer is fairly obvious: the Taliban would still be in power and so would Saddam (as the old guard of the US foreign policy thinkers wanted).

 

Hizballah is a force within the Lebanese parliament precisely because of the rippling effect of regime change. With the Syrians out, the Lebanese people can rule their own country through an electoral process that has returned a small proportion of Hizballah representatives.

 

In Palestine, the 'regime change' strategy, or democratization, resulted not in Hamas's eradication but in their election to power. The Bush administration - and everyone else - said the elections were free and fair (as indeed they were in Lebanon and Iraq and Afghanistan). Bush now makes loud noises and punishes the elected government but the fact is that it remains the elected government only because of the overthrow of the ancien regime of the region. Bush supports Fateh - Arafat's party! And the Israeli government knows the implications of all this too: which is why they will be starting to withdraw from the West Bank in the near future.

 

The autocrats running Saudi Arabia and Egypt are far more frightened by Condoleeza Rice's warning that the US will no longer support tyranny, as they did for the past 60 years, than they are by Hentyler's belief that "regime change is a ridiculous and failed ideology".

 

Hentyler: you are way to the Right of Bush and Rice. (And that doesn't imply that they're on the Left! It's just that History continues to pass you by).

 

Barry

 

 

 

"..where would the Afghan and Iraqi people be, without regime change?"   Good question.

The President of Afghanistan cannot leave Kabul without a heavy guard. The people of the rural regions have been betrayed by the big promises of the west and have returned to opium production to survive. They are now looking for support from the Taliban because western troops want to eradicate their only means for survival. Meanwhile, Europe is being swamped by cheap heroin.

The United States continue to bomb villages of suspected Taliban. Woman don't have any rights outside Kabul. The west has no military strategy, and soldiers are being killed for reasons they don't understand. The Pakistan secret services are supporting the Taliban. Should we introduce regime change to Pakistan?

Women are still wearing veils, and the president has begged the west many times for help, but western policy ensures that Afghanistan remains a 'failed state'.

As for Iraq, this regime change has been nothing but a massive plundering raid by some of the biggest multinationals which are close to the Bush regime. It doesn't really matter who the Iraqi people vote for, Iraq is under US and UK economic and military control.

I have read my history books, especially the British Empire and their many successful attempts at regime change. History is repeating itself.

By your own argument, you acknowledge that the people of Kabul - Afghanistan's capital city with a population of about five milllion people - would still be under the control of the Taliban were it not for the US-led, UN-endorsed, military action that led to the Taliban's defeat. Yes, it takes time to overthrow feudal remanants, even in the C21st, and it's not an easy path. But your path would have kept the Taliban in power.

 

The same applies to Iraq and the Baath (fascist) regime.

 

You are a text-book example of pseudo-leftism: everything is doomed. Regime change is failed, cannot succeed. Once upon a time, you might have carried a placard with the words: "The end is nigh!".

 

Barry