orsino:
"It would be dangerous to fail to take into account the undying enmity we've created and amplified in the Islamic world by killing, maiming and paupering so many, while supporting authoritarian rule there and elsewhere."
About the whole US "spreading democracy" in the Middle East thing...though I don't believe for one minute that this is true, and the continued US support to many brutal dictatorships (Egypt, Saudi, and non Mid-East places like Uzbekistan) shows this, I do think that we maybe will see some changes in US policy which will fool some into thinking that they support democracy.
Increasingly in the Middle East we're seeing protests against the very dictatorships the US supports (e.g. see this story on anti-Mubarak demonstrations in Egypt at
http://beirut.indymedia.org/ar/2004/12/2038.shtml ), and I get the feeling the days of many of these regimes are numbered, and will begin to buckle under popular pressure in the not too far future.
Is it possible that America realises this, and is worried that the region will be taken over by popular movements who would put a stop to American plunder of the region's resources? Thus, will they attempt to hijack these popular movements? I get the feeling this may already be happening in Iran. I've also heard people suggest that one reason they went into Iraq is that they realised Saddam's days were numbered, and wanted to get in there before a genuinely popular, internal revolt took place.
Personally, I think the invasion of Iraq was "over-engineered" - i.e. it had a multitude of causes - oil, domination over the region, preservation of the dollar, the eroding of sanctions, the awful possibility that the weapons inspectors might give Iraq a clean bill of health bringing the nightmare prospect of US and British firms being shut out of all those lucrative contracts Saddam would be signing with anybody but the yanks and Brits if the Security Council lifted sanctions, Israel's amen corner - take your pick.
Iraq has served as a sort of giant petri dish since Saddam stepped over the border into Kuwait. There's been the DU experiment, the sanctions experiment, and the regime change experiment. The latter one went a bit wrong - what the US wanted to do was install a government of exiles and they'd probably have done just that if there had not been internal disagreements within the US administration about Ahmed Chalabi. I think it was Richard Perle who said the big mistake was not turning over the keys of Iraq to Chalabi and the INC immediately. I'm sure there are Iranian and Syrian (and Egyptian and Lebanese) Chalabis waiting in the wings.
The US does want democracy in the middle east but it's of a very specific kind. One of form and not substance where most people's participation is restricted to voting every few years for one or more parties all with the same agenda - rather like the UK and US. Meanwhile, the US-backed elites consisting largely of exiles with a few co-opted nationals get on with the real business of running things.
Chomsky and Herman's "The Political Econonmy of Human Rights" and what they write about the Vietnamese willing to work with the US still rings true:
"In Vietnam the legendary corruption of "our" Vietnamese....always presented to US imperial offialdom a puzzling contrast to the apparent honesty...of the Vietnamese enemy. The explanation was always simple - the Vietnamese willing to serve the United States were "denationalised", that is, they had lost touch with their own culture, and were essentially rootless mercenaries. The Vietnamese elite had a deep contempt for their own people and were quite prepared to co-operate with a "superior" culture and power in destroying their own society. The world-view of this elite was formed out of its own institutional interests, increasingly tied to the largesse of the external power...."
Has anyone read William Robinson's "Promoting Polyarchy", which deals precisley with these issues?
The US began to worry about giving unconditional support to dictatorial regimes in the 1980's. The first reason for this was that they were worried the weakness of many of the regimes that they had supported and, just as you say, were scared that regimes that replaced them would be geniunely democratic and hostile to US (corporate)interests. For example, the popular movement that replaced the regime of Samoza in Nicaragua was broad based, uniting workers, professionals and peasants and committed to socialist policies. US policy makers realised that they should not have provided last ditch support to Samoza, but should have attempted to influence the opposition and divide the elite leadership of the movement from it's popular base. Faced with a similar challenge to another corrupt client regime in the Phillipines, the US did just that. US planners were able to control the transition to democracy and ensured that the regime that replaced Marcos did not challenge the fundementals of the "free market" system. This task was made easier (and more urgent) by the emergence of a business class with links to international capital and which opposed the old regime, whose corrupt clientist nature was no longer in tune with the needs of globalised capital. Robinson calls this system of power "polyarchy".
Similar processes have ocurred, with varying degrees of success around the world since then. Sometimes, the US found it impossible to establish a suitably organised neo-liberal elite to take the reigns of power - where that happened (eg Haiti) the US went back to the old way of doing things - pure state terror. In other parts of the world, such as the middle east, the US hasn't even tried to organise the transfer to polyarchy. There may be various reasons for this. Firstly, the oil wealth of countries such as Saudi Arabia has removed the need for normal economic development and as such no business class has come into being to challenge the royal families. Secondly, states such as Iraq and Syria are innately difficult to govern (as the imperial powers who created them intended) and not conducive to polyarchic government. Thirdly, US determination to maintain control over oil supplies over and above other economic considerations has led to a presumption in favour of dictatorship rather than polyarchy, as has the general level of conflict in the region.
Is this changing? To some extent yes. Countries like Lebanon and Egypt have seen challenges to their existing governments and they may have a neo-liberal business class capable to taking power. In Lebanon, there seems to be a neo-liberal group opposed to Syrian power in the country, so it is not at all suprising that it should attract US support.
The situation is very different in Iran, which is isolated from globalised capital. There is no indigenous elite group which might exercise power in a manner beneficial to US interests. The US obviously wants to bring down the regime but I doubt it has any real idea who would excercise power in a "democratic" Iran. To see these problems in action we need only look west to Iraq.
The US's problems in Iraq are caused mainly by the fact that, isolated from globalised capital, no business class could develop under Saddam. Instead, Iraq's business class was in exile. The US has attempted to graft this exiled business class back onto the Iraiq body politic with no success so far. Consequently, power can only be excercised direct from the barrel of a gun.
