Arabs across the region are ready for life after the autocrats. If the west remains reticent, they will look elsewhere for support The protests in Cairo are now in their third week, and despite everything that has happened in the furious, violent yet ultimately hopeful 15 days in the Egyptian capital, the bond between President Mubarak’s regime and his western allies, the US in particular, appears if anything to be strengthening. Of course, old habits and instincts forged over three decades of mutual strategic interests are not going to crumble overnight. President Obama and Senator John McCain have both been at pains to stress how Mubarak has been a friend to the US and an ally on the questions of Israel-Palestine and Islamist movements. Now, after days of policy being made on the hoof – one minute saying Egypt was stable, and the next calling for change – Washington seems to think that they and Mubarak are out of the woods. As a western journalist who’s lived and reported from the region, the world view and belief that goes into forging this notion is perhaps the most shocking aspect of this whole crisis. The reason is the stark and utterly different ways in which the anti-regime protests in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen are perceived and analysed in the Arab world and in the west. We may all be watching the same live pictures from Tahrir Square or downtown Tunis but they are seen to mean two entirely different things. In every corner of the Arab world there is the open appreciation that this is a moment in which the world has changed. The Arab governing consensus of the last 50 years is shattered and there is no going back – regardless of what formula, compromise or brokered timeframe is arrived at for “a managed transition”, to use the oft-repeated diplomatic euphemism of the moment. And yet switch on most mainstream western TV channels or open the newspapers and there is still a lot of umming and aahhing: will the Muslim Brotherhood come to power? What about stability in the region? How should the west now deal with rulers who were for so long its allies? How should the west help to bring about transitional bodies, etc … It sometimes seems that it’s not just the autocrats who aren’t getting the message of “GAME OVER”; many western governments and analysts don’t seem to get it either. Hindsight is a wonderful thing at such moments, yet you would be hard pressed to find many people who have lived and worked in the Middle East as journalists, diplomats or businessmen for any length of time in the past three decades who would be completely surprised at the social and demographic changes that have produced this political convulsion. The revolutions taking place now in the Arab world, and those that will inevitably happen in the coming months and years have been 30 years in the making. The Arab world has been undergoing irreversible social change in this period that the west and Arab rulers just ignored. One incredible statistic sums this up: two-thirds of the 350 million people in the Arab world are under 35. This is a new generation that does not see its own society and the world in the same way that many in the west do. I was in Tunisia during the overthrow of Ben Ali and western analysts were telling me that Tunisia was a one-off and that a country such as Egypt was completely different, with a too-strong security apparatus. Now, analysts are saying that the Egyptian example simply cannot happen in Yemen (because the society is too tribal), that it can’t happen in Syria because Bashar al-Assad is not as reviled as Mubarak, and so on. This generation of young Arabs have grown up in a period where an independent, brave and global Arab media has developed. They are all able to see and empathise with each other’s lives: Egyptians know how Jordanians live, Yemenis know how Algerians feel. That wasn’t true 20 years ago. Young Arabs see the repression, corruption, dashed aspirations and youth culture that is emerging from Iraq to Morocco – and what’s more they are able to communicate about it. These aspirations, demands and ambitions are universal. They all watch Arab Pop Idol, they all follow their own hip-hop artists rapping about poverty and corruption … and yes, they’re all on Facebook. Globalisation has also meant that millions of Arabs from places such as Syria, Egypt, Algeria have migrated, worked and experienced life abroad, and they have seen things they want to have back in their own homelands. This isn’t just about the buzzwords of democracy, human rights and free and fair elections. It is about hard-nosed calculations of where our interests in the Middle East lie in the next 30 years. Make no mistake, while this new emerging generation in the Arab world aspires to the western ideal of an open and free life, they have grown up in societies and economies where slowly but tangibly, countries such as Russia, India, South Africa and most prominently China are starting to do business and woo the young entrepreneurs, bureaucrats and diplomats of the Arab world. A question that has been asked in a whisper around the Middle East in the past five years has been: why always wait around for the west when we have the Chinese knocking on our doors, who don’t make us jump through one hoop after another. Just look at where China has got a foothold recently – it’s an oil producer in Iraq and Sudan, it has huge interests in Iran and it’s heavily engaged and drilling for oil in Ethiopia. I’ve even met Chinese businesspeople and technicians in northern Pakistan, and on a beach on the Red Sea in northern Somalia, barely three hours’ sail from Yemen. China is gaining firm footholds in the region, and will continue to do so unless we realise that the game is completely and utterly over for those leaders we have relied on for the past 30 years. This new generation will not forgive us for continuing to hanker after aged autocrats whose time is clearly up, instead of going after this new generation who will rule this region. From the Arab perspective, it sometimes looks and feels like the US and its European allies are losing their Middle East hegemony in a fit of absentmindedness. William Hague is right to be one of the first (if not the first) foreign ministers of a major western power to go to Tunis and meet the still embryonic government taking over from the Ben Ali regime. But it’s not just about making these gestures after the event – the whole Arab world has to know that we too are now looking towards the region’s future, rather than trying to shore up its past. Our interest now is to be seen as being a committed friend and supporter of the aspirational movement that is emerging on the streets of Arab capitals. If we drag our feet or seem reticent, we will lose credibility and currency with the new rulers that will undoubtedly emerge in the coming months and years. The strategic cost to us by dithering will be seismic in the long run – and to the benefit of countries like China. Egypt Middle East Tunisia Protest United States US foreign policy Rageh Omaar guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …The budget defiict, meanwhile, is expected to rise to an unprecedented $1.5 trillion in the president's proposed FY2012 budget. The Hill reports : President Obama's budget director Jack Lew in a Sunday opinion piece outlined some off the “tough choices” Obama is willing to make to cut spending in his 2012 budget request due out on Feb. 14. The piece details cuts that affect initiatives dear to the president: programs to help the poor and to clean up the Great Lakes near the president's home state of Illinois. The cuts are relatively small, however, in the larger scheme of things. In total, the $775 million in detailed cuts fall far short of demands by congressional Republicans and will do little toward tackling the deficit, which is estimated to be $1.5 trillion this year by the Congressional Budget Office. The cuts are in addition to a five-year spending freeze which the administration says will save $400 billion over the next decade. The piece goes on to detail the administration's complaints about how hard it was for Obama to make these cuts to programs he cares about. But how can we expect him to confront the massive fiscal problems facing the nation when he gets emotional about trimming 0.0005% of a single year's budget shortfall?
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Thousands of protesters, including first-timers, gather in Tahrir Square in Cairo as demonstrations aimed at forcing out President Hosni Mubarak continue into a third week
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http://www.youtube.com/v/evvl4NLsfpQ?f=user_uploads&app=youtube_gdata Original post: Alexandriavideo
Continue reading …The above video comes from Nicole’s post called: Harold Ford Jr. And His Fellow Republicans Advocates for Cuts to Social Security I know times are tough, but this couldn’t happen to a bigger jerk: The Democratic Leadership Council, the iconic centrist organization of the Clinton years, is out of money and could close its doors as soon as next week, a person familiar with the plans said Monday. The DLC, a network of Democratic elected officials and policy intellectuals had long been fading from its mid-’90s political relevance, tarred by the left as a symbol of “triangulation” at a moment when there’s little appetite for intra-party warfare on the center-right. The group tried — but has failed — to remake itself in the summer of 2009, when its founder, Al From, stepped down as president. Its new leader, former Clinton aide Bruce Reed, sought to remake the group as a think tank, and the DLC split from its associated think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute. — The DLC is already showing signs of disrepair. Its website currently leads a Harold Ford op-ed from last November, titled, “Yes we can collaborate.” It lists as its staff just four people, and has only one fellow. Recent tax returns weren’t immediately publicly available, but returns from 2004-2008 show a decline in its budget from $2.6 million to $1.5 million, and a source said funding further dried up during the financial crisis that began nine months before Reed took over… I wish this was the end of this bullshit, but it’s not. The truth of the matter is that the DLCs function has been taken over by Third Way . Nobody needs to fear that the centrists aren’t going to be well represented in the Democratic Party. They run the place. If you forgot what Ford brings to the table, here’s a taste. We have enough phony Democrats on hand. I’m sure he’ll land on Wall Street somehwere.
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Amr Moussa, a career diplomat, has style, charisma and the common touch, say those who know him Amr Moussa , the former Egyptian foreign minister and current secretary general of the Arab League , knows public opinion appreciates his style and charisma, and since the start of the upheaval in Cairo he has made it increasingly clear that he wishes to play a part in a possible political transition. In an interview broadcast by the news channel Al-Arabiya, he went so far as to offer his services to the cause. Moussa, 74, is a typical high-ranking Egyptian official. He started as a career diplomat at a time when his country was still the undisputed leader of the Arab world. He was appointed ambassador to India in 1983, then moved to the UN, taking over from Ahmed Asmat Abdel Meghid, who had just been appointed foreign minister by President Hosni Mubarak. The same pattern was repeated in 1991 when Mubarak gave him Meghid’s job at the head of the Egyptian diplomatic service, one of the most efficient in the region. Ten years later, Moussa took over from Meghid at the head of the Arab League. During his time at the foreign ministry, in a plush building on the banks of the Nile, Moussa earned considerable respect. Under his guidance Egypt brought its policy back into line with other Arab nations, after being ostracised following the Camp David accords in 1978 and the subsequent signature of a separate peace treaty with Israel. Moussa combines the unique experience of normalised relations (at least until October 1994 when Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty) with a degree of criticism regarding Israeli policy, which has contributed to his popularity. He tried (unsuccessfully) to make Egypt one of the arbitrators of the 1993 Oslo Accords [on settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute], alongside the US. When Mubarak decided to put him in charge of the Arab League, which is headquartered in Cairo not far from the foreign ministry, some Egyptian commentators concluded that the president was trying to sideline a public figure who was becoming uncomfortably popular. Certainly the League is a much less attractive post, paralysed as it is by the countless divisions within the Arab world and sometimes even in competition with the powerful Organisation of the Islamic Conference (set up by Saudi Arabia for precisely that purpose). “Moussa combines several assets,” says an Arab diplomat who knows him well. “He has the experience, a very solid international address book and bags of charisma. He also has the common touch, much more than someone like Mohamed ElBaradei, who is typically upper middle class.” Moussa was born in 1936, the same year as the new vice president, Omar Suleiman, so he can hardly embody the future. But he could well play a key role in the coming transition. This article originally appeared in Le Monde Egypt guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …WaPo Reviews Rumsfeld Memoir…Right Next to 110-Page Rumsfeld Torture Fantasy
February 8, 2011 No Comment
Few people really pine for the opportunity to read an 815-page memoir of a former Secretary of Defense. But in Tuesday's Washington Post, the front of the Style section matches a book review of Donald Rumsfeld's new memoir Known and Unknown as equal with…a 110-page Rumsfeld torture fantasy concocted for the small magazine company McSweeney's. The title over both was “Two Shots of Rummy.” In his review, novelist and former reporter Dan Fesperman suggested that the leftist “literary guerrilla action” is more authentic about Rumsfeld: It is tempting at first to dismiss ” Donald ” as a mere literary guerrilla action, a publication-day ambush by two clever writers whose narrative voice, to their credit, may sound more authentically like Donald Rumsfeld than the former defense secretary's memoir. If you were to cast this stunt as a war movie, co-authors Eric Martin and Stephen Elliott would be the wily tricksters who don fake uniforms to slip behind enemy lines, speaking the language like natives and clearing all checkpoints until they vanquish the opposing general with his own diabolical weaponry. The premise of their novella is this: What if Rumsfeld, who oversaw the creation of America's most elaborate system of extralegal imprisonment and interrogation since, well, maybe forever, what if he were captured and hooded one night and thrown into the maw of this same system, and then subjected to its pains and indignities, from Bagram to Guantanamo Bay? Yes, The Washington Post considers it fair to characterize Donald Rumsfeld as a devil, with “diabolical weaponry.” There's no need to edit that for accuracy or sensitivity. Fesperman has worked as am “objective” reporter and foreign correspondent for major newspapers including the Miami Herald and The Baltimore Sun. To all these leftists, Rumsfeld and the terrorist suspects in military custody are moral equivalents: In the opening pages, Rumsfeld snarks his way into our bad graces with the same bristly, self-justifying manner he often employed from the Pentagon lectern. We come upon His Crankiness in a library, doing research for his memoir. When an earnest young man approaches to ask questions, Martin and Elliott capture Rumsfeld's disdain: “Down there in the kid's eyes, Donald sees broad leaves of intelligence but rooted in such soft soil that it might as well be sand. A zen garden. With a few green wisps that will blow flat at the first breath of wind. The world they live in is a blustery place. This is the son of a father who never went to war.” This is all great fun [!], at least for those who might be rubbing their hands together at the idea of his impending comeuppance, but when Rumsfeld meets his wife and some rather louche friends for dinner, love and nostalgia turn him into a bit of a softy. On a family level, at least, he's already eager to make amends. Only after Rumsfeld is kidnapped from his waterfront estate on the Maryland Eastern Shore do the authors' deeper intentions become evident. It is also the moment when, in the wrong hands, the tone of this brief story might easily have become either too preachy (a Scrooge-like Donald seeing the error of his ways after his visitation of horrors) or too empty of humanity in its welter of detail (a chilly field report from Human Rights Watch ). Not that Rumsfeld doesn't get a full-frontal education on the idiocy and futility of the interrogation regime he helped create. He is questioned nonstop, teased with false hope, forced to stand for hours, shackled uncomfortably and besieged 24-7 by noise and harsh lighting. Interestingly, he is neither waterboarded nor sexually taunted, as some inmates have been. It is to the authors' credit that his softer treatment nonetheless comes across as debilitatingly hellish. In this fable, Rumsfeld is made to realize that everyone in Guantanamo was also unfairly suspected of deadly conspiracies. Or, scratch that: Rumsfeld and the Bush team had a deadly conspiracy called the War on Terror. The detainees were only victims. These authors told the National Post in Canada : “We’re trying to get everybody, people on both sides, more in touch with their humanity than they might have been. You don’t want to be a person that wants to see someone getting tortured.” This is how the book came about: “Steve and I worked on this strange little book together called Where to Invade Next . So that was sort of our first collaboration; as fiction writers can do, we tried to take the point of view of a conservative think thank and map out the arguments to why we should invade all these other countries. And so in a weird way when Steve came up with this idea it was this [logical] next step.” The Post assigned PBS Washington Week moderator Gwen Ifill to review Rumsfeld's actual memoir , and unsurprisingly, this liberal pundit defends the media as painfully objective and perfectly accurate, and Rumsfeld as a fantasist. Rumsfeld thinks the liberal media distorts things. So clearly we're going to need a “brand new dictionary” to handle his propagandistic and euphemistic take on the world: In his worldview, the news media and authors who recounted Bush's term in office have distorted almost everything – including the timing of the decision to go to war in Iraq after the 9/11 attacks; the responsibility for holding, interrogating and prosecuting detainees in Guantanamo Bay; and even the handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. History is determined by who gets to define it. So Rumsfeld patiently explains that the Bush administration did not practice “preemption,” only “anticipatory self-defense.” He provides hundreds of his own memos – archived on the Web – to back up his case. They may be exhaustive, but they are still Rumsfeld's interpretation of the world as he saw it. By the time every Bush administration veteran finishes defining and redefining history, surely someone is going to have to come up with a brand new dictionary. Ifill's review is headlined “A defensive man faces the world as he knows it.” The other review is titled “And in an alternative universe, tables are turned.”
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Click here to view this media A portion of Amy Goodman’s interview with Prof. Vijay Prashad , giving background on Obama’s Special Envoy to Egypt Frank Wisner who over the weekend said Mubarak should stay . A decidedly off-script moment for the administration, who quickly distanced themselves from his remarks. VIJAY PRASHAD: Frank Wisner, Jr., had a more steady career in the State Department, was the ambassador in Egypt between 1986 and 1991. During that period, he became very close friends with Hosni Mubarak and, at the time, convinced President Mubarak to bring Egypt on the side diplomatically of the United States during the first Gulf War. Subsequently, Frank Wisner was ambassador in the Philippines and then in India, before returning to the United States, where he became essentially one of the great eminences of the Democratic Party. One of the things he did during this recent period is author a report for the James Baker Institute, where he argued that the most important thing for American foreign policy is not democracy, which they treat as a long-term interest, but stability, which is the short-term interest . So, Frank Wisner, Jr., is seasoned State Department official, a very close friend of Mubarak, a man more committed to stability than democracy, and, yes, an employee at Patton Boggs, where one of the portfolios is for Patton Boggs to lobby on behalf of the government of Egypt. Your piece was called, Professor Prashad, “The Empire’s Bagman.” Talk about who Frank Wisner is, who it is President Obama sent to Egypt, and why the U.S. ambassador to Egypt wasn’t the one who was talking with the government. VIJAY PRASHAD: Yes, the point is a very good one, why Margaret Scobey herself was not in charge of the deliberations. Instead, President Obama turned to Frank Wisner, Jr. Frank Wisner, Jr., has had a 36-year career in the State Department. He is the son of Frank Wisner, Sr., a man very well known at the CIA, who was the operational chief to conduct at least three coups d’état—Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadeq in Iran, and the attempted coup in Guyana. He was also, Frank Wisner, Sr., the man who created Wisner’s Wurlitzer, where the United States government paid journalists to go and do propaganda in Europe and in the rest of the world. Frank Wisner, Jr., had a more steady career in the State Department, was the ambassador in Egypt between 1986 and 1991. During that period, he became very close friends with Hosni Mubarak and, at the time, convinced President Mubarak to bring Egypt on the side diplomatically of the United States during the first Gulf War. Subsequently, Frank Wisner was ambassador in the Philippines and then in India, before returning to the United States, where he became essentially one of the great eminences of the Democratic Party. One of the things he did during this recent period is author a report for the James Baker Institute, where he argued that the most important thing for American foreign policy is not democracy, which they treat as a long-term interest, but stability, which is the short-term interest. So, Frank Wisner, Jr., is seasoned State Department official, a very close friend of Mubarak, a man more committed to stability than democracy, and, yes, an employee at Patton Boggs, where one of the portfolios is for Patton Boggs to lobby on behalf of the government of Egypt. AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Vijay Prashad, a professor at Trinity College. Now, what he said, Vijay Prashad, that he said Mubarak should remain in power, the man who works for the lobbying firm, well known, Patton Boggs, that is working for—that boasts about working for the Egyptian government, now saying that another client of his firm should remain in power. VIJAY PRASHAD: Yes. It’s interesting that in that same speech he mentioned that Mubarak should be able to, in a sense, author his own legacy. I mean, he is probably speaking partly on the basis of this broad policy that he has, which is that stability is more important than democracy, and secondly, partly from friendship. It should be said that the United States government has essentially been chasing events in this period. There are two pillars of U.S. foreign policy that they’ve been trying to maintain at the same time as not lose their credibility in the world. And the two basic pillars, the first one is to maintain Egypt as a close ally in the war on terror. That includes, of course, things like extraordinary rendition, but also includes Egypt carrying America’s buckets in places like the Arab League. The second important pillar is to ensure that whoever comes to power in Egypt, whether Mubarak or a Mubarak successor, will uphold the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979. These are the two principal pillars of U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis Egypt. What the Obama administration, it seems to me, has been trying to do is to ensure that if Mubarak himself cannot carry these two pillars, then some successor, a Mubarak-lite, Mubarak number two, will come in and carry the pillars forward. The United States does not have the best record in, you know, helping its dictatorial friends in the long term. We’ve seen that with Manuel Noriega. We’ve seen that with Saddam Hussein. So, the friendship that Frank Wisner, Jr., has for Mubarak might be a little liability, but broadly put, his attitude towards Mubarak and the Mubarak regime is quite consistent with the broad outlines of the Obama policy and of the State Department.
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As countries like Tunisia and Egypt ask themselves what’s next, one country in the region has fashioned itself as a role model for successful democracy. The reason? Turkey appears – so far – to have successfully married its secular institutions with a majority Muslim society. Al Jazeera’s Anita McNaught has more from Istanbul.
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Most of the world’s past conflicts have inspired protest songs to reflect the spirit of resistance. Now Egypt has its own. Inspired by the resilience of the demonstraters, several notable musicians from North America have teamed up to release a rap song. Omar Offendum, a Syrian-American rapper, was interviewed at Al Jazeera’s Doha studio. Rap video here: www.youtube.com
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