There is something strange and karmic about Vaclav Havel passing away at virtually the same moment as the last U.S. combat troops passed over the Iraqi border into Kuwait. What kind of synchronicity is it, this odd capstone connecting the end of two eras of brutality? If Havel’s rise in Czechoslovakia marked the true success of the West in the Cold War, what can we make of the condition of Iraq and its relationship to the Arab Spring? What kind of stirrings are afoot, and what will remain of the political landscape of the Middle East that has now begun the same kind of breakup as we saw in Eastern Europe twenty-odd years ago? Unlike the Soviet Union, the U.S. hasn’t been destroyed as it has navigated, sometimes facilitating, sometimes thwarting, the relaxation of the political straightjacket it has imposed or tolerated in its semi-colonial possessions.
Soviet-style communism was defeated and discredited, along with the imperialistic/colonial policies emanating from Moscow. This is different from what we are seeing in the Arab world, where the inspiration for revolution is rooted in the founding principles of our country, including self-determination, human rights, and representative democracy. Even our international role has been upheld, however unevenly. Iraq will willingly maintain military and diplomatic ties with the United States. The same is probably true in Egypt. Libyans literally owe their freedom to the intervention of the West, and will probably build strong ties to Europe.
Yet, we have left Iraq not entirely on our own terms, and certainly with a lingering sense of shame and an earned degree of resentment and outright hostility.
Even so, the best aspirations of American ideals are on the rise in the Middle East, as though the people there have learned the value and correctness of our creed just well enough to turn them against us and demand the same rights for themselves that we take for granted. That the exercise of those rights can be an inconvenience or worse for our elites makes this moment unusually poignant. The death of Vaclev Havel reminds us of the fall of the USSR, which should also remind us to be humble in times such as these. Yet, our best ideals are made of sturdier stuff than those of the Soviets. Or, let us hope.
Watching the Republican presidential candidates debate, we can see that our better ideals are not looking so sturdy at the moment.
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The Soviets were the occupying power of the East bloc of nations in Europe, the Iron Curtain. There was a yearning for freedom and idealism of the West. In Iraq, the US Armed Forces were the ugly occupiers, no flowers when the troops reached Baghdad and no love fort hem today. You can’t compare the two era.
See the rest of my comment in diary form – How ‘Shock and Awe’ Ended.
By going into Iraq and taking assets out of Afghanistan, we ended up losing both wars. Pakistan has been all messed up and is no ally of the US. From my personal experience, the hate of German occupation 1940-1945 has lasted half a century for the Dutch people. It takes several generations for hatred to escape from mind and heart.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Oui, the military occupation phase may be over, but that doesn’t mean the United States has left Iraq, or that Iraq has its sovereignty restored. There is an imperial fortress on the Tigress river, complete with 15-20,000 heavily armed Americans ready to “protect American interests in Iraq”.
Let’s also not forget that there are imperial combat troops waiting in nearby countries to go back into Iraq “just in case they have to”.
Now an embassy is an “imperial fortress.” Hokay.
Funny how you didn’t mention that bases-that-we’d-never-abandon. The ones we handed over.
complete with 15-20,000 heavily armed Americans
No, 15,000 is the total number of Americans, including diplomats, cooks, aid workers and security contractors. The number of security contractors will be between 3500 and 5000. In a nation of 32 million people.
By way of comparison, we have 15,000 active-duty military personnel – just active-duty troops – in Italy.
The only way to conclude that Dawa Party leader Nouri al-Malaki’s government hasn’t had its sovereignty restored is to declare it as an act of faith.
Never use a passive construction with these words. Always say something like “Soviet-style communism was defeated by internal resistance” or “Kennan was right.”
Don’t want to feed the “Reagan won it for us” nonsense.
Duh. I used a passive construct. Say:
“Internal resistance defeated Soviet-style communism.”
Good point about a very annoying media habit.
I’d say “Soviet-style communism fell when it failed to deliver on its promises of justice, freedom, and equality.”
Actually, more to the point was Gorbachev’s canning of economic planners without any gradual transition. Without price controls, prices rose, but wages, enterprises still themselves operating as before, did not. Inflation, which would worsen under Eltsin, did Gorbachev in.
I thought more to the point than an individual decision by one government about domestic economic policy, it was intellectuals like Vaclav Havel, and workers like those in Solidarity who brought about the end of Soviet-style communism in Eastern and Central Europe.
The Soviet Union did not collapse with the Iron Curtain. That was two years later. The economics are fundamental. In E Europe, the system didn’t deliver because it was an occupation. In the USSR the system stopped delivering even the basic necessities. In Russia, that’s why people not simply opposed the system, but why people who might have defended it didn’t.
Even our international role has been upheld, however unevenly. Iraq will willingly maintain military and diplomatic ties with the United States. The same is probably true in Egypt.
It helps when we have the largest embassy the world has ever known in Iraq. And Egypt? We are still supplying the army with teargas and such. Which isn’t going over so well with the people.
That is not an embassy, it is an imperial citadel.
No, it’s a Death Star.
No, wait…a Portal to Hell.
Not just the last combat troops; the last troops of any kind.
We abandoned the bases. We have no military presence of any kind in Iraq.
Yay!
No “advisors”?
None.
The shiites and islamists won’t stand for it. And the Obama administration is certainly not going to press the case. They won before even taking office. Best of all, they got Bush to do their dirty work for them.
It’s like that Futurama episode about Bender and God. “When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”
Interesting that you speak of “Shiites” and an “islamists” as if they are two distinct things. Suggests your knowledge of the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular are rather limited.
Interesting that you speak of “Shiites” and an “islamists” as if they are two distinct things.
No, not really. Among Iraq’s Sunnis, the secularists have been much more willing to accommodate an American presence than have the Islamists.
I understood his point immediately. This suggests that your knowledge of Iraq leaves something to be desired, that you did not.
Nope. None.
There are zero (0) American military personnel in Iraq. They have all been withdrawn.
I know this is considered an impossibility based on certain ideological constructs. It isn’t supposed to be possible the the United States would leave a country it conquered. It isn’t supposed to be possible for “the MIC” to “allow” us to abandon bases we spent so much money building. It isn’t supposed to be possible for “the American Empire” to leave without leaving behind a force to project power throughout the region. It isn’t supposed to be possible that Barack Obama has the strength, determination, or inclination to follow through on the complete withdrawal he promised.
Which means that those constructs need to be revised.
But but but… Obama is the caver-in-chief… or… Dems are the same as Republicans… I mean… FDRLBJbullypulpitmakemedoitRahmpublicoption… does not compute… ::brainmelt::
Chew on this:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/obama-iraq-eternal/
Operative word is “military”. None of those folks are military. Spencer Ackerman is correct about the war not being over (especially from the point of view of the Iraqis). But the uniformed military is out. For Ackerman, that creates a problem of inexperience.
I am pleased as Punch that the troops are leaving, and credit the President for this. That said, it is the United States that he is President of, and the US doesn’t really leave countries. This article makes that clear, and while it may be true that they aren’t DOD they certainly are military, small “m”.
Very well said – thanks. However, I would not give Obama so much credit for removing the troops (Military with large M). His administration tried very hard to negotiate a deal to keep troops and bases in Iraq, but Maliki couldn’t bend on that if he hoped to save his neck (and I am no fan of Maliki and his gang, so please do not assume I am giving him credit either).
I find it very difficult to project too much into Obama’s mind. I am fairly sure given how he observably operates that he would have felt that to unilaterally withdraw all “military” without an effort to keep some would have been seen by far too many here in the US as cutting-and-running. I wouldn’t assume that he was disappointed that his effort in that regard failed. He seems to think that there is a logic to the system and that he works within it in a relatively leftward direction. To work outside the logic of the system to him is to diminish one’s capacity to effect change at all.
Remember, this is the US. We’re dealing with a messed-up system.
His administration tried very hard to negotiate a deal to keep troops and bases in Iraq
He “tried very hard” right up to and including refusing to drop what he knew was a poison-pill demand for immunity from local prosecution, and condition that American troops stationed in other countries throughout the world don’t have.
But he was really trying hard. There isn’t actually any evidence of this, of course, but it’s just gotta be true. Otherwise, a simplistic, one-dimensional analysis of global affairs would be proven inadequate to explain America’s actions, and we can’t have that.
I’ve never seen any evidence that Hurria, to whom you responded, has a simplistic view of world affairs. He by and large has an accurate one from my perspective, though we might quibble on some details.
I’m not bothered by the existence of an embassy.
I’m not bothered by the existence of security guards at that embassy.
I’m not bothered, even, by an alliance between our countries.
I wanted the war ended. It was.
I wanted the occupation ended. It was.
I wanted no bases from which we would be “projecting power” throughout the region. There are none.
I wanted no military personnel left in the country. There are none.
Nor only has American military presence in Iraq been rolled back to the status quo ante, it has been rolled back quite a bit further than where it was before the war.
This is an extraordinary, incredibly rare accomplishment. Anyone who purports to adhere to any kind of anti-imperialist principles should sit up and take notice, not cast about for excuses for why they weren’t really wrong about the withdrawal happening.
“It isn’t supposed to be possible the the United States would leave a country it conquered.“
The United States has not left Iraq.
.
… leaving just 157 military trainers at the US embassy, in a country where there were once nearly 170,000 troops on 505 bases.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."You are wrong. There are somewhere between 15-20,000 heavily armed mercenaries in Iraq serving the interests of the United States. You may not count those as troops, but troops they are.
Did you gather this from your first-hand experience in the Green Zone?
Or are you just taking through your hat?
The security guards – whose number you can’t get right – just gotta be “troops” performing military missions.
Because otherwise, you’d have to acknowledge being wrong about something.
It is not so different. The internal resistance in Eastern Europe was always based on ideas of self-determination, human rights, and representative democracy. As is the internal resistance to US domestic and foreign policy here at home.
US foreign policy from 1781 onward has been the contradiction between the principles it offered at its founding and the realities of a self-consciously rising empire. Other people accept the first and reject the second for exactly the same reasons Americans opposed British imperial rule.
Those Arab dictators who are in the process of being deposed are puppets of the two sides in the Cold War, which after twenty years is unwinding in the Arab world–exactly and precisely because the US concern about al Quaeda became the same kind of Cold War mentality that allowed the US (or Russia) to exert power over those Cold-War-era relationships.
What provoked the Arab Awakening and allowed it to take place was the economic weakness of those imperial powers exactly as the economic consequences of that weakness were impoverishing those Arab countries.
And Iraq has still not had that sort of governmental awakening that unites the people across all sorts of divisions against a corrupt puppet government.
The only questions at the moment are (1) how much al-Maliki will be a US puppet, (2) how much he will be an Iranian puppet, and (3) how draconian he will be in seizing and securing power. And (4) has the US learned how to move beyond a sense of exceptional entitlement to behave as one among many national powers.
In 1991, the United States was the world’s sole superpower. Over 20 years of folly, the US destroyed that political power, the military power that supported it, and the economy that allowed it to maintain power. In short, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and now Obama (at least in his first term) blew it. The restraint or ambivalence Obama has had in his policies with regard to the Arab Awakening have been the saving grace. In Tunisia, Egypt until recently, and Libya, the US has played a constructive role. In Yemen and Barhrain, not so much. In Morocco and Jordan, it is hard to separate what the US would have wanted to see from what the monarchies negotiated. Syria’s not our client; we have little we can do or mess up there. And Russia is becoming more worried.
The question remains, does the US really think that other nations should have self-determination, human rights, and authentic representative democracy if it means telling transnational corporations and the IMF to go to hell.
On this subject an examination of Wilson’s Presidency is really crucial.
Why Wilson and not John Polk, or even Thomas Jefferson (Louisiana Purchase, and all that)?
Wilson seems pretty conflicted about empire, just like Jefferson was about slavery. He did it, but rationalized his own responsibility over against his public statements. If anything, Wilson represented a discomfort with imperialism that would through Roosevelt create the end of de jure imperialism after World War II and leave us with de facto imperialism, cloaked in one ideology or another and the pretense of “friendship”. American “democracy”, Soviet “socialism”, even India’s “nonalignment”.
I think because Wilson is the one who presided over a newly ascendent United States in world affairs–Britain’s influence waning–with the idea that people who weren’t white couldn’t manage their own affairs.
The Soviets had “ideals” up the wazoo — human rights, equality, justice all spelled out in painful detail on paper and in speeches. The only little hitch was that they were entirely ignored in practice. Now Russia has adopted American capitalist “ideals” with predictably toxic results. For their sake, and the rest of the world, one can only hope that the “ideals” they’ve latched onto are not so sturdy.
Isn’t a little jingoist to attribute the Arab Spring’s engine to “the best aspirations of American ideals” as if they never had any of their own, and as if ours, if you’re talking about the Declaration and the Constitution, were all pretty much invented in Europe and beyond? If they were our exclusive intellectual property, how come Canada, among others, does such a superior job of carrying them out? I know it’s the season to be jolly and all, but hubris doesn’t fit very well under the tree.
No, it isn’t jingoistic to attribute the Arab Spring’s engine to the best aspirations of American ideals. Nor is it wrong or egotistical to give the West credit for the Enlightenment and Enlightenment ideals that gave rise to individual rights, human rights, the ideal of self-determination, and the essential right to representative government. Nor should we in any way downplay the international norms that now predominate and are used to critique our own shortcomings. We built that infrastructure and bankrolled it and protected it in spirit and with force.
And, no, none of this is our intellectual property. It’s our gift to mankind. We ought to be more serious about maintaining these ideals here at home, precisely because we essentially created them and began the example that people are now emulating in their own way in Tunis and Baghdad and Cairo and elsewhere.
You know, you can be critical of America without shortchanging us. You can call us to live up to our ideals rather than cynically taking away our right to espouse them.
You might do well to plow through Horkeimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Among other things, it’s best to see the Enlightenment as a discourse about “reason” rather than “freedom.” Of course, discussion of freedom was there, but it was a freedom that, once won became itself constraining in new ways.
I didn’t use the word freedom, although I suppose it is somewhat implied.
As for reason, it seems that we decided to beg the question by asserting in a tautological fashion that we self-evidently endowed with certain inalienable rights by our Creator. I’m fine with that, but it’s far more an assertion of freedom than logic or reason. Of course, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are not synonymous with The Enlightenment, but they, along with Declaration of the Rights of Man, are the most important political consequences of The Enlightenment, and the most valuable heritage of the movement.
Those ideals are what we bestowed for all humanity, and it’s those ideals that at play on the streets of the Middle East, as people demand their human and political rights.
To be clear, I have no problem with the Declaration of Independence and think it to have had an overwhelmingly positive impact taken by itself on this country and the world insofar as it has had an impact.
I tend not to see expressions of ideals as causal in world events. Most often, things happen because of people’s experience in their relationships with other people. Language like that in the Declaration does have an effect because it can give people a tool to express what they have experienced but do not yet have the language for. Then, that language can allow movements to coalesce, because now they can speak to each other with words that provide a forward momentum to their actions.
There is a lot of good in US history and its presence in the world, and that needs to be built upon while the negative both acknowledged and ended. The idea of American exceptionalism needs to be discarded, but you didn’t express that idea at all. Particularism I can go with, exceptionalism no.
I tend not to see expressions of ideals as causal in world events.
Seconded.
It’s certainly legitimate to say that the Arab Spring uprisings were consistent with American ideals, and that we should recognize a fraternal brotherhood with them, but to claim that American ideals are the “engine” goes too far.
Also, I did a lot of study in European History. Not to suggest your base of knowledge is lacking there, because you are obviously well-informed. That said, there’s a different discussion in the European field group than in the US field group. Looking at Frederick the Great or Catherine the Great and seeing their projects–rationalization of government, not liberalization–clarifies that aspect of the Enlightenment, an aspect that makes itself more felt in our economy, here in the US, than our government. That rationalization becomes, at a point, constrictive rather than liberating.
About Russian capitalism. The ideals of capitalism are ignored in Russian now as much as the ideals of human rights, etc., were ignored in the Soviet era.
Ideas of self-government, rights of man, and the like are in the DNA of America’s self-understanding from the beginning. And revolutionary movements until 1848 looked to the US and France for their ideas in inspiration about freedom and justice. America spent much effort after World War II promoting those ideas even as it became the successor to the British Empire. But the ideas got embraced even as the empire was resisted. A good part of the anger at the US is exactly because people bought into the ideas and when they started to put them into practice they were viewed as enemies. Especially national self-determination. So the extent to which the US ignored Arab self-determination and promoted a secularizing, pro-Christian or pro-Israel agenda fired up Islamist parties, Arab nationalists, and folks sympathetic to the Palestinians seeking self-determination from being puppets of a US policy.
The ideas are a complex fusion of many traditions as diverse as the Six Nations Confederacy democratic governance; Irish, Scots, and Scotch-Irish nationalist self-determination; French anti-monarchism; English parliamentary ideas. These fired up modernizers, liberalizers, and secularists.
The Arab Awakening occurred when these two aspects of American empire formed a coalition to rid themselves of a puppet regime enriching itself from its relationship with Western transnational corporations. A coalition that was enabled by those government’s failure (and the failure of the transnational corporations) to deliver on promises of economic development. If fact things were getting worse.
I would not brag too soon about how Canada does stuff; they are saddled with Stephen Harper.
“we have left Iraq not entirely on our own terms…“
You haven’t left Iraq.
And Kim Jong Il dead as well. Heart attack. From shock at the US pulling out of Iraq? If only it had come sooner….
Cesaria Evora died today as well. She was such a beautiful person and singer.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/obit/story/2011-12-18/cesaria-evora-dies/52048198/1
I think the really amusing thing as that Kim Jong-Il’s death eclipses them both.
“That the exercise of those rights can be an inconvenience or worse for our elites makes this moment unusually poignant.”
Eh, I’m hearing increasingly worrying stuff about the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The exercise of those rights might still turn out to be far far more than an inconvenience to western elites.