Even pharaohs have bad days

The powerful have many tools, but they don’t control the weather. The episode that started in Tunisia and has now spiraled out of control throughout the Middle East is one of those rare but regular historical events that remind us how fragile their grip can be.

Looking back at the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-1990, we can now see how those ruined economies and hollowed-out societies led by a discredited ruling elite made the region ripe for a series of quick shoves over the precipice once people lost their fear. But who at the time would have predicted that stable regimes led by brutish crews versed in repression and accustomed to crushing dissent would simply collapse?

If Tunisia was the region’s Poland, Egypt is its USSR. Alarm bordering on panic is now easily detected from Morocco to the Gulf Emirates, and no wonder: if Mubarak can be brought down by an inflamed populace, who among us is safe?

Democracy in the Arab world is like Christian brotherhood: to be praised in theory and promptly postponed for later. Although Obama’s team have been fairly decent so far in responding to the Egyptian uprising, it would be a mistake to think that the US is deeply enamored of the idea that the Arab masses suddenly should have more to say about their affairs than the pro-western elites who have been deciding for them.

Stephen Walt, a Harvard professor who enraged the Israeli lobby by writing a book about its excessive influence here, writes, ‘The United States has no idea how to deal with a Middle East where the voice of the people might actually be heard’.

Israelis and their backers are fond of pointing to the Jewish state as the only democracy in the region in comparison with the autocratic rulers in states surrounding them. But not surprisingly, Israeli commentators play a different tune when democracy actually threatens to appear elsewhere. The Israeli paper Ha'aretz says its government is urging others to soften criticism of Mubarak and quotes an anonymous senior official: ‘The Americans and the Europeans . . . have to make their friends feel that they’re not alone. Jordan and Saudi Arabia see the reactions in the West, how everyone is abandoning Mubarak, and this will have very serious implications’.

A columnist in the Jerusalem Post said it’s not a matter of ‘Egypt sneezing and Israel catching a cold—rather, this is a matter of Egypt having a heart attack’. Another called the Egyptian events ‘the worst disaster since Iran’s revolution’.

The paper said the prospect of revolutions throughout the region will make Israel even less likely to agree to peace terms and strengthen its conservative and reactionary tendencies. They could be describing Russia’s last Leninists, insisting that the system will still work, perhaps with some adjustments here and there.

Meanwhile, rain—hopefully not including frogs—is predicted.

Egyptians march, US reporters stumble [Updated]

We don’t expect our TV reporters to speak Arabic or know much more than where Egypt is situated on a map, but the low level of basic sophistication about political upheavals on the part of our overpaid ‘journalists’ is shocking. I suppose if you have been groomed for years to know what to say when you spot Kim Kardashian emerging from a nightclub, it’s kinda tough to figure out weird things like revolutions in the streets.
The Arab world may be experiencing its Berlin moment, as one Egyptian surmised, but in contrast with that time when U.S. reporters openly sympathized with the East Europeans masses in revolt, now the Egyptian people frequently appear as an afterthought. There are only two topics that seem to get our reporters’ adrenalin flowing: ‘chaos’ and the danger of an Islamist takeover that might threaten our interests.

‘Chaos’ is a highly charged and misleading term, but check how often it is used when one tunes in to the latest news. Dictatorship always say they stand between ‘order’ and ‘chaos’, so the term instantly marks one’s bias about the outcome.

For example, we never heard that Czechs, Poles or Hungarians were throwing their countries into ‘chaos’ in the 1990s—although surely the crumbling communist parties eagerly accused them of doing so. But now when Egyptians rise up against three decades of dictatorship, we hear of nothing else. Unconsciously perhaps, our media are trumpeting their own fears and eagerness for someone we like to come in and settle things down.

There is plenty of evidence that the ‘chaos’ may not be the result of mass action at all but a deliberate policy to scare the population into supporting a crackdown. The Guardian reports that a Human Rights Watch observer witnessed the arrest of two active-duty police officers engaged in looting—highly significant given that the police have withdrawn completely from any attempt to maintain order.

It is ironic that the hated, feared and highly politicized Egyptian police force immediately stopped doing any actual policing when they were most needed. (Residents of the Bronx would not be surprised.) If something similar had happened in Poland during the rise of Solidarity, I suspect the western news media would have sniffed it out quite easily.

The other howler is the worried concern expressed by the blathering heads that ‘Muslim parties’ will seize the opportunity to take over as in Iran. One wonders if these breezy Chatty-Cathys with their permanent, aerobic smiles ever read an article in a magazine.

But ignorance reigns even in the supposedly informed circles of our governing poobahs. Wikileaks exposed a hilarious cable from a Tunisian diplomat acknowledging that the ousted kleptocrat there was a disaster but at least acted as a bulwark against ‘al-Qaeda’ elements in the Magreb. That’s like praising the Gambino family for keeping us safe from gypsies.

However, it does reflect the concern in the White House and among the European allies about what will follow Mubarak and especially their fear that a nasty crackdown that might temporarily save the dictator would set the stage for a far worse outcome down the road. British Foreign Secretary William Hague said it like this:

‘It is important for [Mubarak] to initiate that transformation and that broadly based government, and that is what we would like to see. That is far preferable, of course, to Egypt falling into the hands of extremism or a more authoritarian system of government’.

You get the idea despite the willfully ignorant line about a ‘more authoritarian system of government’. Excuse me? More than that of Mubarak?

Meanwhile, tanks massing in the central square is an ominous reminder that the army can still decide to save Mubarak at the cost of many, many deaths.

[update] Everything I am trying to say was just expressed much more eloquently here.

Days of rage [UPDATE]

Egypt is not Tunisia, said many knowledgeable persons when facile parallels began to be suggested about the upheavals of recent days in the two countries. At first, I agreed with the skepticism, but two things suggest that the original theory of revolutionary dominoes may be closer to the mark.

This is from The Independent (London) of today:

In one of many astonishing scenes earlier, thousands of anti-government protesters wielding rocks, glass and sticks chased hundreds of riot police away from the main square in central Cairo, and several of the policemen stripped off their uniforms and badges and joined the demonstrators.

If those scenes become common, Mubarak is finished.

Meanwhile, the Cairo stock market is down 16% in two days. All these are signs of a remarkably fragile regime with few ideas of how to shut off the unrest. While blocking Twitter and cellphone service may complicate the protest movement, it also could simply speed things up and force people into more effective organizing routes. And while crashing the Internet and phone service helps the repressive forces, it also prevents any work from getting done in the entire country, which means that time is on the side of the people if they can maintain the disruptions.

[update] Robert Gibbs is now (3.00 pm Friday) refusing to say that the U.S. supports Mubarak’s permanence in power. Contrast this cutting-loose of Mubarak with Carter’s bitter-end backing of the Shah of Iran.

How rife is 'rife'?

The AP ran a story last week about corruption in the Global Fund, the huge UN-sponsored agency that tackles AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, and the story landed in dozens of big media outlets around the world. As often happens, the headlines featured an easily understood corruption narrative but missed the real story.

The easy shots were way up in the first paragraphs: millions misused in several African countries, donated anti-malaria drugs appearing for sale in secondary markets, falsified records, money spent on government vehicles instead of care, cash simply disappearing from accounts without a trace. All of which seems to justify the headline, ‘Fraud plagues global health fund’.

Except that it doesn’t. In fact, the Global Fund has been such a strict auditor of its quite generous grants that the inspection teams are sometimes accused of an overly prosecutorial approach. Theft and embezzlement clearly occur, but the GF has a far shinier record than its peer development agencies in rooting out corrupt practices and sometimes forcing countries to send the money back.

A development officer from a UN agency dealing with the Caribbean once told me that his bosses expected a certain amount of skimming from international cooperation projects and that if it didn’t exceed 15 or 20 percent, no one would say much. They considered it the price of doing business—the business of international aid—just as Exxon Mobil or Lockheed would understand the need to keep a bunch of Saudi princes well stocked in Gucci loafers.

By contrast, Bernard Rivers, who tracks GF affairs fulltime at his Global Fund Observer, estimates that corruption-related losses to the GF run to about 1% of its total outlays. While infuriating (1% of $13 billion is a lot of money), he notes that it hardly means the GF is ‘rife with fraud’ as many news articles alleged based on the AP account. Commentators on Fox immediately ran with the idea that the GF was a hopeless pit of corruption as it fits the driving right-wing narrative that public health and all public action is pointless and wasteful (except war-making, of course).

Stealing from the Global Fund is also rather risky, compared to stealing from, say, your clients if you work for Goldman Sachs. Thirteen people in Mali have been arrested on GF-related charges, and the health minister suddenly resigned. Countries have been forced to pay back misused monies or face exclusion from future grants.
Rivers argues that the GF can do a lot more to exercise vigilance over its grant-making so that corrupt practices are stymied before reaching grotesque levels. Local review bodies could have more authority to intervene early on, for example, without establishing a permanent external watchdog that would offend any country’s pride.

But a granting agency that saves an estimated 4,500 lives a day of people who would otherwise face a horrific death and that is trying hard not to be complicit with corrupt practices could reasonably expect a tad more circumspection and rigor from the world’s news media and its reporters looking for a good story. Let’s see the scribes go after the grants handed out by Gates, USAID and the European ‘development’ agencies with equal spunk and see if those outfits end up called ‘rife with corruption’ at the first sign of trouble.

Republicrat consensus builds

Obama had a few red-meat phrases last night—borrowed from the Republicans who hate his guts—about regulations that ‘put an unnecessary burden on businesses’, to go with his call last week to eliminate ‘outmoded, ineffective, insufficient or excessively burdensome’ ones.

Curiously enough, the very same day early leaks from the report of his Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) pointed to—guess what?—as the underlying cause of the 2008 bank panic and subsequent mega-recession: WEAK AND INEFFECTIVE REGULATION of the financial industry.

How perfect: the experts blame the banks and the banker-captured regulatory system while our president, who appointed them, ignores all that and insists that banks and businesses should be freed from ‘government overregulation and higher taxes’.

This is clearly a dangerous Stalinist about to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The litany of accusations against top-level bank executives and virtually the entire financial governance system of the nation in the FCIC report is breathtaking:
-Greenspan failed to perform his regulatory duties as Fed chief and enabled the housing bubble, allowed his ideological blinders to trump the data sitting on his lap;
-Clinton ceded to the banker wishlist and deregulated the dangerous derivatives markets (for which Larry Summers was chief cheerleader before going to work for Obama);
-Geithner had no idea that Citigroup and Lehman were teetering even though his job was to oversee them;
-the SEC did nothing while huge banks went over the edge on borrowed cash;
-Paulson and Bernanke napped throughout (why even mention Bush?);
-two Federal bank regulatory agencies blocked states from reining in excessive and abusive lending practices;
-AIG executives didn’t know what the fuck was happening in their own company.

And on and on. Basically, the report says that all those geniuses educated at Harvard and MIT and who belong to the elite clubs featured in The Social Network turned out to be a herd of clueless dufuses. This doesn’t say much for Obama’s clarion call to improve ‘education’ (whatever that means nowadays) as a way to remain competitive in the world.

Misreading Lincoln

The thoughtful Garry Wills wrote in the New York Review of Books that Obama’s Tucson speech merits comparison with the stirring words of Abraham Lincoln, and many others have echoed this praise of healing words at a troubled time. I dissent.

That Obama struck a proper note and expressed decent sentiments in the memorial speech is beyond debate. His use of the platform to remind people of the need for civil discourse that is actually civil and not murderous was entirely appropriate and seems to have cooled the violent rhetoric of the teabagger wing for now as white people with grandchildren suddenly feel vulnerable to random political violence. We’ll see how long it lasts.

But Wills goes further: in his brief article called ‘Obama’s Finest Hour’, Wills argues Obama ‘had to rise above the acrimonious debate about what caused the gunman in Tucson to kill and injure so many people. He side-stepped that issue by celebrating the fallen and the wounded and those who rushed to their assistance’. In this way, says Wills, Obama assumes the mantle of Lincoln at Gettysburg who, rather than blame the South, stopped to praise the dead and urge others to learn from them.

Noble sentiments all, and I wish I could applaud them. However, we seem to be missing a highly salient point when looking to Obama as the great peacemaker soothing the nation’s wounds, a magnanimous leader worthy of comparison to Honest Abe: Lincoln had just spent two years commanding his armies to slaughter the enemy by the tens of thousands.

I do not find this to be a detail of history. Lincoln was not forced to go to war to save the union; he chose it. He faced considerable opposition, too, including violent draft riots here in New York City where the populace rose up against the idea of getting killed for things they cared nothing about, like the fate of black slaves. A more timid president would have sought a ‘middle ground’ to keep the peace and allowed the Confederacy to secede.

Instead, Lincoln declared war. He tolerated General McClellan’s cautious, defeatist approach for a while but eventually tapped Grant and Sherman to kill, burn and pillage their way to victory. Gettyburg came before the serious scorched earth campaigns like Sherman’s march to the sea through Georgia, but while Lincoln spoke movingly of the dead in Pennsylvania and did not recriminate the enemy there, he didn’t flinch from punishing the secessionist armies and ransacking their homes and lands. Lincoln wanted to forgive, but first came triumph in war.

Wills then compares Obama with Henry V at Agincourt whom Shakespeare allows the ‘king’s touch’ that people in medieval times believed to bring healing powers. It would be nice to also recall that Agincourt was a battleground of the Hundred Years’ War and that warfare in the XV century was not exactly a Kumbaya moment for either the winning or the losing side.

This really will not do. It is delusional to claim the mantle of peacemaker when enabling warmongers and to believe oneself noble while doing nothing to halt evil deeds.

To take the historical parallel further, try this bit of Obama-like rhetoric of reconciliation and tolerance from another figure of Lincoln’s times: ‘To the eye of local and sectional prejudice, [the people’s interests] always appear to be conflicting, . . . and the jealousies that will perpetually arise can be repressed only by the mutual forbearance which pervades the constitution’. That was president James Buchanan, who preceded Lincoln and set the stage by his steady concessions to the South for the near dissolution of the republic.

Buchanan said he felt a ‘strong repugnance’ over incorporating the slave territory of Texas into the Union. But he did it anyway convinced that the institution was dying out if the abolitionists would just stop stirring up trouble with their demands. (The ghost of Rahm Emanuel must have hovered nearby.) Despite his constant efforts to mollify the southerners, Buchanan’s presidency ended with the collapse of the union, which he then very even-handedly blamed on ‘intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States’.

Buchanan said the states had no right to secede but also that the Federal Government had no legal right to prevent them from doing so, a lovely formulation that allows one to have one’s moral cake and placidly serve it to guests with monogrammed tea napkins. I fear that Obama misreads history and is headed for a Buchanan-like place in it.

Will Ireland knock over a domino?

When systems become fragile, any unexpected event can set off a chain reaction.

Far wiser heads than mine have not yet rung the alarm bells over Ireland’s billowing political chaos, but the coming week may be rather a surprising one.

The euro has been staggering for a year, and the ‘solution’ cooked up by the banker and political elites in the EU for the European version of the credit bubble cannot succeed unless the much abused workers, students and pensioners remain totally passive. I suspect this will not happen.

Ireland could provide the match in the gunpowder room. The Irish Green Party, headed by one John Gormley [above], has just quit the discredited coalition there, throwing everything into doubt. The government may not survive long enough to sign off on the mass beggaring of the Irish people forced on the country by the European Central Bank.

This careful deal could unravel in a matter of hours, queering the attempt to extend and pretend on Irish and other European debt. Euro bankers then would have to find another way to saddle the populace with the wreckage of their casino financing and insouciant building of massive fortunes for themselves.

Yum, yum, can’t wait.