No One Will Play With Americans

I wish I could sit down and have a chat with Thomas Friedman today.  He seems upset and confused about the unpopularity of America in the world.  He warns us (the world) that we’d be in considerably worse shape if American power wasn’t available:

Perfect we are not, but America still has some moral backbone. There are travesties we will not tolerate. The U.N. vote on Zimbabwe demonstrates that this is not true for these “popular” countries — called Russia or China or South Africa — that have no problem siding with a man who is pulverizing his own people.

So, yes, we’re not so popular in Europe and Asia anymore. I guess they would prefer a world in which America was weaker, where leaders with the values of Vladimir Putin and Thabo Mbeki had a greater say, and where the desperate voices for change in Zimbabwe would, well, just shut up.

Uh, Mr. Friedman, “moral backbone” you say?!

Friedman’s comments remind me of that old canard about dissent: if you don’t like it here, go somewhere else.  Friedman is saying, if you think we’re bad, check out the others.  At this moment in time, I don’t care too much about “the others”, the bad actors who behave so badly they make America look good.  Perhaps the biggest problem this planet has at the moment is that America has squandered whatever moral authority it might have had.  It has squandered it in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It threatens to squander it in Pakistan and Iran.  It has squandered it at home, amongst its own citizens.

Nor can I think of any country other than the US that can claim both the power and the requisite ethical standing.  Britain lost it shortly after 9/11.  It took a only a bit longer for Canada to collapse at the feet of its powerful neighbour.

Sure Robert Mugabe is “worse than” George Bush.  But how can Friedman believe that an American President ought to command a following in the world simply because he isn’t as bad as one of its worst dictators?

Mugabe appears to have wrested power from his people in brutal fashion.  Dissent is repressed.  No doubt people are being detained, tortured and killed.  In sharp relief to the citizens of that country, the American people have willingly granted their President authoritarian power.  He can now detain and torture innocent people along with those merely not yet proven guilty.  He can detain them seemingly endlessly and without meaningful judicial review, and I say this despite the decision of the Supreme Court in Boumediene – because it seems to me unlikely that detainees will be released even after habeas corpus review.  Now the American President  can spy on his own people without accountability, without regard to any law. 

There is some general moaning and groaning in the US about all this.  And not much else.  But for those hysterical, hand-wringing leftwing traitors … whose voices are studiously ignored.

In the rest of the world, we are only beginning to understand the consequences of America’s loss of moral authority.  The American people are victims of their own passivity.  The suffering that this will bring upon them will not be as desperate as that of the people of Zimbabwe.  Sudan.  The Democratic Republic of Congo.  Iraq.  Afghanistan.  Guantanamo Bay.  And more.  Not for quite awhile.

And what Glenn Greenwald said.

UPDATE:  The US is not always so uncomfortable keeping company with Russia and China:

The moral center of humanity slowly asserts itself. Only the most powerful are too afraid to join.

You may have missed the news: At the end of May, 111 nations, including, at the last minute, Great Britain, showing the world the power of an unleashed conscience, agreed to an international ban on cluster bombs, surely one of the cruelest and, given the nature of war today, most unnecessary weapons in modern arsenals.

Among those not endorsing the treaty and MIA at the conference in Dublin where it was debated were Russia, China, Israel and, to the surprise of no one, the United States of George Bush, that increasingly isolated moral rump state of which so many are so ashamed. Indeed, the treaty is widely seen as a “diplomatic defeat” for the U.S., so identified is the Bush administration with the sanctity of its WMD.

Desperation & Anger

The Calmative Before the Storm:

Ours is a social system spinning wildly out of control. Wherever one glances, the political-economic-ecological crises engulfing late capitalism are insolvable in terms of structural reforms that might mitigate the system’s approaching zero hour. Call it the proverbial band-aid over gangrene syndrome; a plethora of terminal “fixes” that fix nothing.

During periods of extreme crisis, ruling class elites and the technocratic “wizards of armageddon” who serve them – bankrupt authoritarians without authority – harbor a not-so-secret longing for “magic bullets” that will put things right.

Thus, the quixotic crusade by politicians, military planners and corporate grifters out to make a buck to discover what they hope will be an antidote to the spreading virus of desperation and anger gripping the planet as the alleged “beautiful world” promised by neoliberalism morphs into an unlimited–and endless–low-intensity “war on terror” waged against the world’s poor.

–  Tom Burghardt

Clarifying Obama

On Barack Obama and Cynthia McKinney:

This is how Obama uses his impressive language skills: to lure constituencies that seek peace into the maelstroms of war; to assault the integrity of language itself with his relentless tinkering with meanings, until finally, his original peaceful promises turn into their warlike opposites.

Obama’s modus operandi is consistent and, especially after his recent flurry of policy reversals, transparent to all who care to observe him dispassionately. He is a word-hustler, a slickster, a politician/actor who has always been eager to serve the global aims of the very rich. That’s why, back in the summer of 2003, while a candidate for the Illinois Democratic U.S. senatorial nomination, he had to be pressured (by Bruce Dixon and me) to have his name removed from the corporatist Democratic Leadership Council membership list. And that’s why, five years later, he stripped off his anti-NAFTA clothing to announce on CNBC, the businessman’s cable source: “Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.”

America and Iran, America in Iraq

From Suzanne Maloney, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Brookings Institution:

Of the many American illusions and delusions surrounding this war, the Administration’s calculations with respect to Iran were among the most wildly off base. Instead of generating a liberal, secular democracy whose reverberations would drive out Iran’s clerical oligarchs, the disastrous Bush policies fostered a sectarian Iraq that has helped empower Iranian hardliners. Rather than serving as an anchor for a new era of stability and American preeminence in the Persian Gulf, the new Iraq represents a strategic black hole, bleeding Washington of military resources and political influence while extending Iran’s primacy among its neighbors.

How the Iraq War Has Empowered Iran

See also, Black Hole in Bush’s Brain:

In spite of the problems these policies have created for us and the world (including the deadly fuel inflation ignited by the chaos), and the devastating human toll taken so far, the Cheney wing of the co-presidency continues to pursue every possible avenue for expanding the failed war into a regional conflagration, which could only be settled with nuclear weapons. The bulldog drive to crush all opposition that has characterized every move of the Bush White House, is once again ignoring reality to envision a new America-dominated world order that can only be built upon the ruins of the demolished old order. If only some situation could be created which would provide the perfect pretext that would justify pushing the button on Iran. Would we be correct in judging Cheney to be a super-patriot, or is he really a secret neo-communist, hoping to forcefully overthrow the world order and enthrone his elitist neocon proletariat and their corporate state as a world dictatorship?

thanks to wood s lot

 

Wish I’d Said This

From an expanded version of a talk given to University Democrats at the University of Texas at Austin on April 16, 2008:

It may seem odd to talk of sorrows around race and gender in politics when we are a few months away from being able to vote for a white woman or a black man for president of the United States. When I was born in 1958, any suggestion that such an election was on the horizon would have been laughed off as crazy. In the first presidential campaign I paid attention to as an eighth-grader in 1972, Shirley Chisholm – who four years earlier had become the first black woman to win a seat in Congress – was to most Americans a curiosity not a serious contender. Today, things are different.

Today Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s battle for the Democratic Party nomination suggests progress. Though the pace of progress toward gender and racial justice may seem slow, we should take a moment to honor the people whose struggles for the liberation of women and non-white people have brought us to this historic moment. If not for the vision and courage of those in the feminist and civil-rights movements there would be no possibility of a contest between Clinton and Obama, and the debt we owe those activists is enormous.

 […]

What are the sorrows to which I’m referring? I don’t mean the disgust and distress that many of us feel when we read the blogs, listen to talk radio, or watch cable TV news – places where some of our fellow citizens and journalists wallow in the sexism and racism that still infects so much of this society. I don’t mean the ways in which, even in polite liberal circles, Hillary Clinton is scrutinized in ways no man would ever be. I don’t mean the ways in which, even in polite liberal circles, Barack Obama’s blackness is examined for either its inadequacies or excesses.The attacks on Clinton because she is a woman and Obama because he is black should make us angry and may leave us feeling dejected, but for me they are not the stuff of sorrow. We can organize against those expressions of sexism and racism; we can mobilize to counter those forces; we can respond to those people.

Remembering the radicals

My sorrow comes from the recognition that the radical analyses of the feminist and civil-rights movements – the core insights of those movements that made it possible when I was young to imagine real liberation – are no longer recognized as a part of the conversation in the dominant political culture of the United States. It’s not just that such analyses have not been universally adopted – it would be naïve to think that in a few decades too many dramatic changes could be put into place, after all – but that they have been pushed even further to the margins, almost completely out of public view.

For example, when I talk about these ideas with students at the University of Texas it is for some the first time they have heard such things. It’s not that they have rejected the analyses or condemned the movements, but they did not know such radical ideas exist or had ever existed. These students often do not know that these movements did not simply condemn the worst overt manifestations of sexism and racism, but went to the heart of the patriarchal and white-supremacist nature of U.S. society while at the same time focusing attention on the imperialist nature of our foreign policy and predatory nature of corporate capitalism. The most compelling arguments emerging from those movements didn’t suggest a kindler-and-gentler imperialist capitalist state, but an end to those unjust and unsustainable systems.

The irony is that Clinton and Obama, who today are viable candidates because of those movements, provide such clear evidence of the death of the best hopes of those movements. Those two candidates have turned away from these compelling ideas so completely that neither speaks of patriarchy and white supremacy. These are not candidates opposing imperialism and capitalism but candidates telling us why we should believe they can manage the system better.

Atlantic Free Press

 Robert Jensen  here