Freedom's Unsteady March: America's Role in Building Arab Democracy (by Tamara Cofman Wittes)
On May 1st 2008, FOREIGN POLICY & SABAN CENTER FOR MIDDLE EAST POLICY organized an event at the Brookings Institution to discuss the new book, then, of TAMARA COFMAN WITTES. Brookings Senior Fellow Tamara Cofman Wittes argues in her new book Freedom’s Unsteady March: America’s Role in Building Arab Democracy (Brookings Institution Press, 2008) that democracy promotion in the Arab world remains an essential component of any strategy to achieve long-term American goals in that critical region. In November 2009, Tamara Cofman Wittes became deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs at the U.S. Department of State. She was at Brookings from 2003 to 2009.
TAMARA WITTES: When I began writing Freedom’s Unsteady March four years ago, as Martin said, I set it up as a two-part argument. First, why the United States should promote democracy in the Arab world, and then how. Now, at the time, I thought the why part of the argument would be pretty uncontroversial, but the how might be very useful. After all,......READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT
Selected Reviews
"[Freedom's Unsteady March] is an intelligent and thorough analysis that may help guide the next administration through the extreme challenge of furthering US interests in the Middle East. " Dierdre Sinnott, Foreword Magazine
"Freedom's Unsteady March is billed as a "realist's guidebook for democracy promotion." Wittes does not shrink from acknowledging the failures of the Bush administration in this area. But she attributes these failures to a halfhearted effort rather than the inherent unachievability or inadvisability of the objective." Eva Bellin, Foreign Affairs
"We ultimately need allies who share our values—not just our interests. In FREEDOM'S UNSTEADY MARCH, Tamara Cofman Wittes forcefully and articulately reevaluates how we can encourage liberalization in the Middle East. It is a welcome contribution to the ongoing foreign policy debate." Lee Hamilton, president, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
"FREEDOM'S UNSTEADY MARCH is a definitive assessment of one of the central foreign policy challenges of our era. Not trapped in the Beltway straightjacket of either cheering for or sneering at President Bush, Wittes provides compelling arguments for why the United States should foster democratic change in the Middle East, and then offers creative yet sober ideas for how to promote democracy more successfully. Wittes knows intimately both Washington and the Arab world, knowledge which grounds her arguments in solid research and prudent judgments. It should be required reading for anyone seeking to help make U.S. foreign policy in the next administration." Michael McFaul, professor of political science, Stanford University
"The author contends that democratic reform in the Arab world is neither a luxury nor a pipe dream, but a necessity. In this compact, lucid book about the recent democracy project in the Arab Middle East, Tamara Cofman Wittes provides an incisive, critical account of the Bush administration’s democracy promotion policy. Despite its commendable objective, it was underfunded, bureaucratically contested, and ideologically entangled. Wittes concludes with a passionate plea to hold firmly to that policy objective but to serve it better." Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Egyptian democracy activist and chairman of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies
Creative Destruction Triology - By F. William Engdah
I- Egypt's Revolution: Creative Destruction for a 'Greater Middle East'?
February 5, 2011Fast on the heels of the regime change in Tunisia came a popular-based protest movement launched on January 25 against the entrenched order of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. Contrary to the carefully-cultivated impression that the Obama Administration is trying to retain the present regime of Mubarak, Washington in fact is orchestrating the Egyptian as well as other regional regime changes from Syria to Yemen to Jordan and well beyond in a process some refer to as "creative destruction."
The template for such covert regime change has been developed by the Pentagon, US intelligence agencies and various think-tanks such as RAND Corporation over decades, beginning with the May 1968 destabilization of the de Gaulle presidency in France. This is the first time since the US backed regime changes in Eastern Europe some two decades back that Washington has initiated simultaneous operations in many countries in a region. It is a strategy born of a certain desperation and one not without significant risk for the Pentagon and for the long-term Wall Street agenda. What the outcome will be for the peoples of the region and for the world is as yet unclear.
Yet while the ultimate outcome of defiant street protests in Cairo and across Egypt and the Islamic world remains unclear, the broad outlines of a US covert strategy are already clear. No one can dispute the genuine grievances motivating millions to take to the streets at risk of life. No one can defend atrocities of the Mubarak regime and its torture and repression of dissent. No one can dispute the explosive rise in food prices as Chicago and Wall Street commodity speculators, and the conversion of American farmland to the insane cultivation of corn for ethanol fuel drive grain prices through the roof. Egypt is the world's largest wheat importer, much of it from the USA. Chicago wheat futures rose by a staggering 74% between June and November 2010 leading to an Egyptian food price inflation of some 30% despite government subsidies.
What is widely ignored in the CNN and BBC and other Western media coverage of the Egypt events
is the fact that.........................Read the full article
II- Libya in Washington's Greater Middle East Project
l, March 26, 2011For those who do not believe in coincidence, it's notable that on March 19, 2011 the Obama Administration ordered the military bombing attack on Libya, ostensibly to create a 'no fly zone' to protect innocent civilians and on March 19, 2003. The No Fly strikes were begun under US command with suspicious haste following the UN Resolution. To date the attacks have been led by US, British and French air forces and warships. A storm of Tomahawk cruise missiles and GPS-guided bombs has rained down on undisclosed Libyan targets with reports of many civilian deaths. No end is in sight at present.
Eight years earlier to the day, the Bush Administration began its Operation Shock and Awe, the military destruction and occupation of Iraq, allegedly to prevent a threat of weapons of mass destruction which never existed as was later confirmed. The Iraqi invasion followed more than a decade of illegal No Fly Zone operations over Iraqi airspace by the same trio—USA, Britain and France. Far more important than any possible numerology games a superstitious Pentagon might or might not be playing is the ultimate agenda behind the domino series of regime destabilizations that Washington has ignited under the banner of democracy and human rights across the Islamic world since December 2010.
With Washington's exerting of enormous pressure on other NATO member states to take formal command of the US-led bombing of Libya, no matter under what name, in order to give Washington a fig leaf that would shift attention away from the Pentagon's central role via AFRICOM in.....Read the Full Article
III- Humanitarian Noe-colonialism: Framing Libya & Re-framing War
3 May 2011The most remarkable facet of NATO's war against Libya is the fact that "world opinion," that ever so nebulous thing, has accepted an act of overt military aggression against a sovereign country guilty of no violation of the UN Charter in an act of de facto neo-colonialism, a 'humanitarian' war in violation of basic precepts of the laws of nations. The world has accepted it without realizing the implications if the war against Gaddafi’s Libya is allowed to succeed in forced regime change. At issue is not whether or not Gaddafi is good or evil. At issue is the very concept of the civilized law of nations and of just or unjust wars.
The Libya campaign represents the attempt to force application of a dangerous new concept into the norms of accepted international law. That concept is what is termed by its creators, “Responsibility to Protect.” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has stated that the justification for the use of force in Libya was based on humanitarian grounds, and referred to the principle known as Responsibility to Protect, “a new international security and human rights norm to address the international community’s failure to prevent and stop genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”i An American President, Barack Obama, has invoked this novel new concept as justification for what is de facto an unlawful US-led military war of aggression and acquisition.ii Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as Presidential candidate in 2008 said about the concept: "In adopting the principle of the responsibilty to protect, the United.......Read the full article
Myanmar: Sham Democracy For The People
Written by Nile Bowie (copied from the Nile Bowie Blog)
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| Myanmar's opposition movement is heavy on rhetoric and low on substance |
Riding on the back of the Obama Administration’s recent foreign policy ‘successes’, such as the extrajudicial execution of Muammar Gadhafi and the announcement of a permanent US military presence in Northern Australia, It appears yet another foreign funded opposition movement is gaining favorable momentum towards American interests. Although the countries newly elected civilian government has released thousands of political prisoners and made tremendous reforms towards political censorship in recent months, this will not be enough to appease the Western investors who have stood behind Myanmar’s highly touted and magnanimous opposition party.
The Empire of the city: the three city states (Vatican City, the City of London & Washington D.C)
Google’s Revolution Factory
The Alex Jones Channel Alex Jones Show podcast Prison Planet TV Infowars.com Twitter Alex Jones' Facebook Infowars store
Tony Cartalucci
Infowars.com
February 12, 2011
Alliance of Youth Movements: Color Revolution 2.0
In 2008, the Alliance of Youth Movements held its inaugural summit in New York City. Attending this summit was a combination of State Department staff, Council on Foreign Relations members, former National Security staff, Department of Homeland Security advisers, and a myriad of representatives from American corporations and mass media organizations including AT&T, Google, Facebook, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and MTV.
http://allyoumov.3cdn.net/f734ac45131b2bbcdb_w6m6idptn.pdf
One might suspect such a meeting of representatives involved in US economic, domestic and foreign policy, along with the shapers of public opinion in the mass media would be convening to talk about America’s future and how to facilitate it. Joining these policy makers, was an army of “grassroots” activists that would “help” this facilitation.
Among them was a then little known group called “April 6″ from Egypt. These Facebook “savvy” Egyptians would later meet US International Crisis Group trustee Mohamed ElBaradei at the Cairo airport in Februrary 2010 and spend the next year campaigning and protesting on his behalf in his bid to overthrow the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
The Alliance of Youth Movements mission statement claims it is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping grassroots activists to build their capacity and make a greater impact on the world. While this sounds fairly innocuous at first, even perhaps positive, upon examining those involved in “Movements.org,” a dark agenda is revealed of such nefarious intent it is almost difficult to believe.
Screenshot from Movements.org’s supporters page.
Movement.org is officially partnered with the US Department of State and Columbia Law School. Its corporate sponsors include Google, Pepsi, and the Omnicon Group, all listed as members of the globocrat Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). CBS News is a sponsor and listed on the globocrat Chatham House’s corporate membership list. Other sponsors include Facebook, YouTube, Meetup, Howcast, National Geographic, MSNBC, GenNext, and the Edelman public relations firm.
Movement.org’s “team” includes Co-Founder Jared Cohen, a CFR member, Director of Google Ideas, and a former State Department planning staff member under both Condoleezza Rice and Hilary Clinton.
Founding Movements.org with Cohen is Jason Liebman of Howcast Media which works with mega-corporate conglomerates like Proctor & Gamble, Kodak, Staples, Ford, and government agencies such as the US State Department and the US Defense Department, to create “custom branded entertainment, innovative social media, and tardeted rich-media campaigns.” He was also with Google for 4 years where he worked to partner with Time Warner (CFR), News Corporation (FoxNews, CFR) Viacom, Warner Music, Sony Pictures, Reuters, the New York Times, and the Washington Post Company.
Roman Sunder is also credited with co-founding Movements.org. He founded Access 360 Media, a mass advertising company, and he also organized the PTTOW! Summit which brought together 35 top executives from companies like AT&T (CFR), Quicksilver, Activison, Facebook, HP, YouTube, Pepsi (CFR), and the US Government to discuss the future of the “youth industry.” He is also a board member of Gen Next, another non-profit organization focused on “affecting change for the next generation.”
It is hard, considering these men’s affiliations, to believe that the change they want to see is anything less than a generation that drinks more Pepsi, buys more consumerist junk, and believes the United States government every time they purvey their lies to us via their corporate owned media.
While the activists attending the Movements.org summit adhere to the philosophies of “left-leaning” liberalism, the very men behind the summit, funding it, and prodding the agenda of these activists are American’s mega-corporate combine. These are the very big-businesses that have violated human rights worldwide, destroyed the environment, sell shoddy, overseas manufactured goods produced by workers living in slave conditions, and pursue an agenda of greed and perpetual expansion at any cost. The hypocrisy is astounding unless of course you understand that their nefarious, self-serving agenda could only be accomplished under the guise of genuine concern for humanity, buried under mountains of feel-good rhetoric, and helped along by an army of exploited, naive youth.
What we see is not a foundation from which all activists can work from, but a foundation that has a very selective group of activists working on “problem spots” the US State Department would like to see “changed.” Sudan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Eastern Europe, Venezuela, and even Thailand - where ever protesters and movements are working to undermine governments non-conducive to corporate America’s agenda, you will find Movements.org supporting their efforts.
The April 6 Movement of Egypt is one of them, and their role in the apparent success of the US ousting of Hosni Mubarak that may see their man Mohamed ElBaradei in office is a perfect example of how this new army of prodded youth will be deployed. It is color revolution 2.0, run directly out of the US State Department with the support of corporate America.
It would be strongly recommended that readers go to Movements.org themselves and explore the website, in particular the 3 summits they have held and those that were in attendance. Everyone from the RAND Corporation to the Council on Foreign Relations comes to “prod.” Movements.org truly is a new tentacle for manipulating and undermining the sovereignty of foreign nations.
2008 Summit New York City .pdf
2009 Summit Mexico City .pdf
2010 Summit London
http://www.infowars.com/googles-revolution-factory/
Egypt's "Facebook Revolution": Looking Under the Lamp Post?
The "Facebook Revolution" narrative of the Egyptian rebellion is everywhere.
A few examples: Jared Cohen calls digital media an "accelerant" (>>); Don Tapscott (>>) writes that the protests are "Enabled by social media"; Fox News says that Facebook has "Turned Our Entire World Upside Down: Right before our eyes we see Facebook's effects" (>>); Micah Sifry writes at CNN that "Without the relatively free arena of online social networking sites and tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, young Egyptians like Ghonim could not have built the resilient and creative force that finally toppled Hosni Mubarak." (>>)
Most compellingly, here is high profile Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim:
Narratives matter. We use them to make sense of the world, and we use that understanding to make decisions. Narrative is "the simple order that consists in being able to say: 'When that had happened, then this happened.' We like the illusions of this sequence, its acceptable appearance of causality: it has the look of necessity." (Frank Kermode, "The Sense of an Ending", p127.)
So is the Egyptian rebellion a "Facebook Revolution"? There are reasons to think the narrative is exaggerated…
I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him… I'm talking on behalf of Egypt. This revolution started online. This revolution started on Facebook. This revolution started in June 2010 when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians started collaborating content. We would post a video on Facebook that would be shared by 60,000 people on their walls within a few hours. I always said that if you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet. If you want to have a free society just give them the Internet." (>>)and also: "This is the revolution of the youth of the internet, and now the revolution of all Egyptians."
Narratives matter. We use them to make sense of the world, and we use that understanding to make decisions. Narrative is "the simple order that consists in being able to say: 'When that had happened, then this happened.' We like the illusions of this sequence, its acceptable appearance of causality: it has the look of necessity." (Frank Kermode, "The Sense of an Ending", p127.)
So is the Egyptian rebellion a "Facebook Revolution"? There are reasons to think the narrative is exaggerated…
The easiest people to talk to
Most obviously, it is much easier to talk to English speaking participants than non-English speakers. English speakers are far more likely to be part of the one-fifth or so of the country that has access to the Internet. (World Bank Development Indicators). And it is easy to contact people over the Internet, so we hear from people who are on the Internet. It is easy to follow Twitter feeds, so we hear Egyptian tweets.
The easiest story to tell
It isn't just the sources, though. The Facebook Revolution narrative is an interesting story to tell to a contemporary Western audience. For us, a story built around the familiar yet novel world of Facebook and social media is an easy way into the Egyptian rebellion. How many of us know much about the specifics of Egypt's history, its recent past, or the economic sources of discontent? It is a much quicker and lighter story to say "look at the Facebook page." We can even go and look at it ourselves (>>). Talking about strikes is more likely to lose an audience.
So every time prominent activist Wael Ghonim is mentioned, he is described as a "Google executive Wael Ghonim" even though he has explicitly said that "Google has nothing to do with this" (>>). Do we hear the employer of any of the other leaders? April 6 Movement founders Asmaa Mahfouz, Ahmed Maher and Ahmed Salah are commonly described as "activists". It is possible to track down Maher's occupation as a "civil engineer", but with no employer. The discrepancy is glaring, and so Google gets to be associated with the uprising, adding to the digital tone of the story.
So every time prominent activist Wael Ghonim is mentioned, he is described as a "Google executive Wael Ghonim" even though he has explicitly said that "Google has nothing to do with this" (>>). Do we hear the employer of any of the other leaders? April 6 Movement founders Asmaa Mahfouz, Ahmed Maher and Ahmed Salah are commonly described as "activists". It is possible to track down Maher's occupation as a "civil engineer", but with no employer. The discrepancy is glaring, and so Google gets to be associated with the uprising, adding to the digital tone of the story.
Underreported players
As people look back for the roots of the rebellion, the April 6 Movement and the We Are Khaled Said Facebook page have received much of the attention. But there are other strands that fed into the protests. The April 6 Movement was created to commemorate an industrial strike, after all, at a textile factory. There have been more than 3,000 separate labour protests in Egypt since 2004 according to a report by the AFL-CIO. The Kefaya movement is considered by some experts to be a central organizer of the January 25 protests, along with Mohamed ElBaradei's organization (two-minute video with Samer Shehata).
Self-Organization?
The technological narrative has also been used to describe the rebellion as "leaderless" and "self-organizing" (see a claim for this by Wikinomics' Don Tapscott here, and an illuminating analysis of the question by sociologist Zeynep Tufekci here). Tapscott takes a strong form of the argument: "Just as people can self-organize to contribute to Wikipedia, the computer operating system Linux, or the world’s biggest library of video content, they can participate in social change and coalesce into revolutionary movements as never before."
(Aside: Does anyone else find the language of "self-organization" insulting to the protesters? It slides too easily into this kind of thing: "much in the same way that slime mould coalesces in a forest and moves towards an emergent common 'goal,' so too do simple-message-connected crowds of people coalesce to move towards a common, emergent goal without the overt direction of an explicit leader." So brave protesters are like slime mould? Really?)
But of course coordination and leadership is not necessarily going to be obvious to Western eyes. As David Kirkpatrick writes in the New York Times: "They are the young professionals, mostly doctors and lawyers, who touched off and then guided the revolt shaking Egypt, members of the Facebook generation who have remained mostly faceless — very deliberately so, given the threat of arrest or abduction by the secret police."
Some organizing was kept off Facebook on purpose, and so received little attention - like these flyers that Jodi Dean points to. As she says, even Lenin - not exactly known as a networky kind of bloke - agreed that "mass movement and 'professional revolutionaries' are not alternative organizational forms. Each is necessary".
Another counterpoint to this "leaderless protest" story is a fascinating Wall-Street Journal article by Charles Levinson and Margaret Croker, who tell a story (The Secret Rally that Sparked an Uprising) about clandestine meetings of small groups of organizers outwitting the efforts of the police to follow what's going on. Of course, getting such a story requires a lot of interviewing and building of confidence.
But there is a kernel…
(Aside: Does anyone else find the language of "self-organization" insulting to the protesters? It slides too easily into this kind of thing: "much in the same way that slime mould coalesces in a forest and moves towards an emergent common 'goal,' so too do simple-message-connected crowds of people coalesce to move towards a common, emergent goal without the overt direction of an explicit leader." So brave protesters are like slime mould? Really?)
But of course coordination and leadership is not necessarily going to be obvious to Western eyes. As David Kirkpatrick writes in the New York Times: "They are the young professionals, mostly doctors and lawyers, who touched off and then guided the revolt shaking Egypt, members of the Facebook generation who have remained mostly faceless — very deliberately so, given the threat of arrest or abduction by the secret police."
Some organizing was kept off Facebook on purpose, and so received little attention - like these flyers that Jodi Dean points to. As she says, even Lenin - not exactly known as a networky kind of bloke - agreed that "mass movement and 'professional revolutionaries' are not alternative organizational forms. Each is necessary".
Another counterpoint to this "leaderless protest" story is a fascinating Wall-Street Journal article by Charles Levinson and Margaret Croker, who tell a story (The Secret Rally that Sparked an Uprising) about clandestine meetings of small groups of organizers outwitting the efforts of the police to follow what's going on. Of course, getting such a story requires a lot of interviewing and building of confidence.
But there is a kernel…
So yes, I do think the Facebook Revolution narrative is overstated, and that the Egyptian rebellion marks much less of a break from previous revolts than the language of "Revolution 2.0" suggests. I agree with this article in TechCrunch (of all places) that "People, not Things, are the Tools of Revolution". But there is a kernel of truth there, I do admit. Ghosim's quotation at the top of the page is a clear indicator that some young Egyptians feel a sense of identity with Facebook and the Internet: that it is their generation's culture, not their parents and not the authorities. But that's for another time.
http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2011/02/egypts-facebook-revolution-looking-under-the-lamp-post-.html
http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2011/02/egypts-facebook-revolution-looking-under-the-lamp-post-.html
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