Friday, May 20, 2011

A day of mourning: Past and present.....Lamis Andoni

Sunday May 15 witnessed the killing of 20 Palestinians who were demonstrating inside the Occupied Territories or trying to cross the Israeli "borders" with Lebanon and Syria - but it's not the first time that the Israeli army has shot at Palestinian refugees trying to return to their homeland.

Although the Palestinian marchers were staging a symbolic return to their homeland on the 63rd anniversary of their dispossession (an-Nakba), many of their ancestors had made real attempts to physically go back to their homes, and were shot or killed by the Israeli army in the process.

In the years that followed the 1948 Nakba ["catastrophe"] - and those following the occupation of the rest of Palestine in 1967 - many Palestinians crossed the barbed-wire fences to see their homes, or spend time in the orange groves - few succeeded, and scores of others were killed.

The revival of a strong collective movement worldwide affirming the right of Palestinians to return to their homeland is partly inspired by the Arab revolutions which empowered Palestinians, particularly young Palestinians, to challenge the Israeli denial of their national rights.

Many of the young people taking part in the Nakba marches around the world have never even been to Palestine, yet they refuse to give up or forget. They joined hands with the older generation - still carrying the keys to their homes - in a moving, even deadly, show of renewed determination to reclaim their rights and restore their identity.

The movement, which has its roots in more than a decade of activism, is a strong expression of rejection of the Oslo negotiations - something Israel has used to not only expand its colonisation of Palestinian lands, but also to put an end to the Palestinian refugees' right of return.

Wizards of Oslo
Right from the outset of the Oslo process, Israel pushed for an agreement that involved Palestinian acceptance to end all their legal and legitimate rights.

Thus when Israel - and for that matter the United States - talk about a two-state solution, they are essentially talking about establishing a Palestinian entity that lacks real sovereignty, in exchange for Palestinians giving up their historic claim to all their land.

Israel views the right of return as the biggest threat to its continuity as a Zionist state that maintains a Jewish identity through racist laws and deeds.

Israeli leaders refuse to take responsibility for the exodus they caused in 1948, driving out Palestinians from their homeland, while also refusing to take responsibility for their continued policies of dispossession, confiscation and demolition.

Most non-Arab Israelis are afraid to face their original sin of deliberately expelling the native Palestinian population in order to make room for Jewish immigrants, which started a process of uprooting a nation and planting a new identity.

Not that the Palestinians need to prove that the state of Israel, as it stands now, was a result of their own dispossession. In their memoires, Israeli leaders from Moshe Dayan to Yitzhak Rabin - who decades later opted for peace, but was assassinated by a Jewish extremist - have all documented and recorded their own role in the forced expulsions of Palestinians in their memoirs.

Acknowledged and justified
Even leading Israeli historians, after decades of denial of Palestinian accounts, presented new evidence of the political intent and details of the expulsion operations, themselves vindicating the Palestinian narrative.

The revelations, no matter how unequivocal the evidence, shook neither the Israeli leadership nor a society that has become convinced that the continuity of the Zionist project is tied to the denial of Palestinian nationhood.

Zionist historian Benny Morris, who wrote the ground-breaking book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947/1948, even justified the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948. "Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here [in Palestine]," he said in a shocking interview in 2004.

Morris, who documented massacres - and even rape - committed in 1948 to ensure David Ben Gurion's idea of "transfer" of the Palestinian population, warned against "acceptance of guilt"[PDF] by the state of Israel, which could validate Palestinian demands:

    On the macro-level, there is no question that there would never have been a Palestinian refugee problem had there been no Zionist movement. If Jews hadn't started buying up land and pushing Palestinians off the land, and then in 1948 and again in 1967, pushing out Palestinians, there would be no Palestinian refugees. And on the micro-level, there were many specific instances in 1947 - 48 in which Israel took military steps that caused Palestinians to be expelled. But this cannot translate today into acceptance of political guilt that would lead to a "return" [of Palestinians].

Morris and other Zionist intellectuals have argued that Israel should not take responsibility for its role in 1948, even if the Palestinian leadership waived the Palestinian right of return, since future generations of Palestinians would use such an act to reclaim their rights.

But if Morris has no moral qualms about such discriminatory statements that reflect a mentality of Israeli supremacy, Israel will still have a problem, not only because of Palestinians who won't forget, but also because the right of return is based in international law and United Nations resolutions.

United Nations General Assembly resolution 194 in particular has called for the right of return of the Palestinian refugees and for reparations, while in 1967, UN Security Council resolution 267 reiterated the right of return for refugees from both the 1948 and 1967 wars.

In contrast, the Israeli Law of Return, which allows any Jew - including converts to Judaism - to live in Israel, and even in illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank, is based on a racist exclusionary notion that denies Palestinians from the same right.

But Israel does not base its policies on international laws but on exercising its military supremacy and aggression. However, there is a limit to what military power can do, and Israel has so far failed to force the Palestinians to give up the right of return.

The ongoing struggle
Israel understands that the Palestinian right of return lies at the heart of its conflict with the Palestinians, but it does not want to address the Palestinian issue as that of a legitimate struggle for self-determination, human rights and nationhood. Instead Israel has been dealing with the Palestinians as a population that happens to be in its midst as if by accident - and that needs to be separated and controlled, if not expelled and eliminated.

Israel has failed and will continue to fail. If anything, Israeli attempts, including stipulations that Palestinians practically surrender through negotiations, have not only backfired but triggered a revival of the Palestinian struggle for the right of return.

In fact, from the very beginning, the Oslo process served as a catalyst for Palestinians to organise around the right of return as a reaction to Israel's rejection of that particular right.

New generations of Palestinians, brought up under the years of the failed Oslo accords, understand that the Palestinian right of return is the crux of the struggle for their independence.

Movements for the right of return started appearing in the late 1990s, making it the most common dominator among Palestinians in exile and inside Palestine in the 21st century.

If the marches on the 63rd anniversary of the Nakba show anything, it is that just as those in the wider Arab world are awakening to their human rights and freedoms, the Palestinians - especially the new generation - are now courageously reclaiming their rights, and those of their ancestors. It is a new era, where, though Israeli firepower may still kill individuals, it will never kill the idea that is manifesting into a renewed Palestinian revolt.

Lamis Andoni is an analyst and commentator on Middle Eastern and Palestinian affairs.

Obama: Leadership in the passive voice.......Robert Grenier

While introducing President Obama at the state department on Thursday for his much-anticipated Middle East speech, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton asserted that "America's leadership is more essential than ever". This anodyne phrase reflects a traditional view of America's role in the world, faithfully delivered by a reliably conventional thinker. Unfortunately for the secretary, however, the man who followed her to the podium quickly gave the lie to such conventional sentiments. For however one might characterise the leadership role of the US in Obama's political cosmology - and there are many positive ways to do so - "essential" is not a word which readily comes to mind.

In making his second sweeping policy address to the Muslim world, and the first since the outbreak of widespread popular democratic uprisings in the region, this self-consciously progressive US president immediately made clear that he did not intend to be left on the wrong side of history. Eager as always to distinguish himself from his predecessors, he asserted that "…after decades of accepting the world as it is in the region, we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be".

The president's use of the word "pursue" in this context may have conveyed greater meaning than he intended. Indeed, for all his high-minded, pro-democracy rhetoric, replete with allusions to America's history and its championing of universal human rights, one came away from the president's speech with the clear idea that although the US would be standing with democratic forces, its place would be not in the vanguard, but in the rear - not leading the charge, but supporting and reinforcing progress as and when it occurred.

Of course, in promising economic and other support to fledgling democracies in Tunisia and Egypt, Obama was citing the easy cases. In others, where the democratic aspirations of the people are being resisted with violence, the president's ardour was far less pronounced. Nearly sounding apologetic, he was at pains to stress, yet again, the highly exceptional circumstances which led to US support for armed international intervention in Libya.

Assad the bashful reformer?
And regarding Syria, having apparently pushed forward targeted sanctions on the Assads just in time for his speech, Obama struck a tone which bordered on the absurd. Having denounced the Syrian regime for choosing the path of "…murder and…mass arrests", he nonetheless addressed the bloodied Bashar al-Assad as though he were some potential, but mysteriously bashful reformer:  "He can lead that transition [to democracy], or get out of the way." As my son would say:  "As if."      

Regarding the Gulf monarchies, where current US policy toward the Arab Spring is most clouded in contradictions and apparent hypocrisy, the president was careful not to say too much. To his credit, he did repeatedly cite Bahrain. Making clear that the US has other interests in the island and is committed to its security, Obama nonetheless stressed that "mass arrests and brute force" are inconsistent with the universal rights of Bahrainis. If Bahraini democrats were looking for a real champion in Washington, however, this speech made clear that where other, more narrow US interests intrude, US advocacy on their behalf will be limited to suggestions that the Bahraini government "create conditions for dialogue".
Indeed, this should surprise no one. All countries need to counterbalance competing interests, and the US, as a global power, is no exception. The president should at least get credit for having the good grace to admit that "…there will be times when our short-term interests don't align perfectly with our long-term vision for the region". 

In the context of that long-term vision, if the Obama administration has any thoughts concerning the manner in which history is likely to treat absolute monarchies in the region without internal reform, this speech suggests that it is keeping those views to itself. Again, far from staking out a position regarding a long-term, mutual interest in political reform among the kingdoms and advocating for it, US policy is more likely to take on a nagging, nanny-like posture. In short, the counter-revolutionaries in Riyadh, Amman and elsewhere will not have been pleased by what they heard in the president's speech, but likewise will they know that they have nothing to fear - until the day their own people turn on them.

US-led peace process is dead
But if we see in the regional stance laid out by Obama a clear tendency toward post-imperial deference, nowhere is he more passive than on the issue of Israeli-Palestinian peace. Making it clear that "the status quo is unsustainable", Obama nonetheless makes it just as clear that he will exert no pressure on Israel to move toward a solution, and will actively work to stymie any Palestinian effort to exert pressure for a settlement outside a moribund bilateral process.  

Rather than actively promote his own peace plan, the president instead passively recounts what "everyone knows" regarding the necessary components of a negotiated solution, as though the US had no real stake in the outcome beyond a sense of wounded altruism. Indeed, if there were any doubts as to whether the so-called US-led peace process were finally dead, this speech should put an end to them.

Traditionalists no doubt will complain that Obama is passing up a chance at real leadership in a region vital to US interests, and poised to make real progress along lines which naturally engage core US values. Others will embrace his approach as consistent with the need to rebalance a situation in which the US has become both economically and militarily overstretched. 

Whatever one's view of America's rightful place in the world, however, it is clear that - for now at least - the US cannot escape the burden of leadership. But it is just as clear, given the reinforcement of this speech, that while Obama's United States will continue to lead, it will seek to do so in the passive voice.
 
Robert L Grenier is chairman of ERG Partners, a financial advisory and consulting firm. He retired from the CIA in 2006, following a 27-year career in the CIA's Clandestine Service. Mr Grenier served as Director of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) from 2004 to 2006, coordinated CIA activities in Iraq from 2002 to 2004 as the Iraq Mission Manager, and was the CIA Chief of Station in Islamabad, Pakistan before and after the 9/11 attacks.

Obama's speech: Stuttering into the future? ....Mark LeVine

President Obama is known as an eloquent and even gifted orator. Yet in the two years since his Cairo speech the difference between rhetoric and vision on the one hand, and reality and "strategic interests" on the other, has become all to clear.

So it's not surprising that few people had high hopes for his speech to the State Department today about US policy towards the Middle East and North Africa in the wake of the uprisings across the region.

The tone and cadences of the President's speech left no doubt about the different world we inhabit today versus two years ago. If you watch the speech, his voice was louder and more melodic then, his language a bit more folksy and confident.

Today it was much more reserved and humble; more of a commentator on events rather than a shaper of them. This despite the fact that the purpose of the speech was precisely to outline a new vision for America's role in the region's transitions.

The President grounded his talk in recent history, recounting the story of the Tunisian fruit vendor Mohammad Bouazzizi who lit himself on fire to protest his humiliation and lack of chance to earn a decent living.

This was clearly both to educate Americans who are coming late to the Arab revolutionary winter and spring and tell the Muslim world that he understands the "sparks" that reflect the frustration, humiliation and lack of dignity of the majority of the region's peoples. But recognising sparks and helping fuel the fire of real freedom are two very different things.

I argued in my last column that the raid that killed Osama bin Laden demonstrated President Obama's the courage to kill, but not to lead. I wish I could say I was wrong after today's speech, and it's hard not to sympathise with the enormity of the task President Obama is facing.

But his language suggests that whatever his desires for the region, he feels powerless actively to reshape the status quo, not merely in the region itself, where he rightly argues that the people need to lead the way, but here at home, where the entire national security apparatus is geared to continuing the status quo.

Words vs deeds

Indeed, right in the middle of Obama's speech I received an email of a just published AP article describing a "vast" secret new US-Saudi security alliance that is taking shape in the sands of Arabia; the very same sands into which Secretary of State Clinton argues the region will sink if its leaders don't change.

How can the US push for democratisation, economic reform, human rights and an end to corruption when at the very moment the President is speaking about these issues his military and security officials are doing their best to prop up the very system against which he is arguing?

The harsh choices the President faces, the pressure of duplicity and the hypocrisies in which they have forced him to engage, became evocatively clear during his speech when he began talking about Bahrain. Obama is a seasoned orator and most of this speech was delivered without pause or mistake.

But when he turned to Bahrain suddenly the President uncharacteristically stuttered. It was the most obvious "tell" that he was playing a hand that was much weaker than what he was making it out to be.

The discussion of Bahrain came right after he declared that Yemeni President Salah "must follow through on his commitment to transfer power." These fairly strong words, however, were not backed up by a statement of what the President intends to do if Mr. Salah refuses to heed his wishes, without which admonishments mean little.

Will the US reduce its level of security assistance and aid to his government? If not, and if there are no other sanctions, what reason is there for him to comply until he feels the moment is right?

Turning to Bahrain, Mr. Obama explained that "we recognise that Iran has tried to take advantage of the turmoil there, and that the Bahraini government has a legitimate interest in the rule of law."

This was the first sign of trouble, as there is very little evidence of Iran attempting to "take advantage" of the turmoil in Bahrain in any meaningful sense, while the trouble with Bahrain's government is precisely that it has displayed little if any interest in the rules of any law aside from the law of power and privilege for the Sunni elite.

When the President followed by arguing that "the government must create the conditions for dialogue, and the opposition must participate," he ignored the fact that uprising began in Bahrain in good measure because the government refused to enter into an honest dialogue. Treating the two sides as if they each have an equal role in the "turmoil" is a gross mis-statement of the relations of power between them, a mistake Obama made more than once in his speech.

It's interesting to contemplate why the President stuttered during this section. Perhaps Bahrain was a late addition to the speech, against the wishes of his national security team (who managed to keep Saudi Arabia, the most repressive regime in the region, out of the speech).

Or perhaps he was thinking of the doctors and nurses who've been arrested and tortured merely for treating injured protesters, or the jailed, beaten and killed activists, or journalists, who suffer increasing harassment and worse with each new day, and realised how empty his words will ring in Manama if they are not backed up by a very real "Or else..."

Or else... what?

And that is the basic problem with Mr. Obama's speech. He rightly declared that "we need to speak honestly about the principles we believe in with friend and foe alike," but talk is cheap, and the President knows this. Actions matter, not just in Libya where thousands have died, but in other countries where the numbers are lower but the impact equally as dire for the future of democratic reform.

Mr. Obama tried to explain the disconnect between vision and reality by declaring that while "it is the people themselves who must determine [their future]... there will be times when our short term interests don't align with our long term vision." But our "short term interests" have in fact lasted for more than half a century. If they are short term, what does he consider long term?

He continued that the "US opposes the use violence and oppression against the peoples of the region. [We] support a set of universal rights, include free speech, free of religion, of peaceful assembly, equal for men and women under the rule of law, the right to choose one's leaders... And we support political reform that can meet the needs of ordinary people across the region." But again, if the support is limited to rhetoric or is inconsistent then it is empty and will be seen as such.

Perhaps hypocrisy is the necessary handmaiden of diplomacy and realpolitik. Yet the President seemed at times to be trying to convince himself, or more likely the American foreign policy, security and economic establishments whose interests he must reflect, of the importance of supporting the rights of the millions taking to the street across the region: "The failure to speak to the aspirations of ordinary people will allow suspicion to fester that the United States only pursues its interests at their expense," Mr. Obama warned his audience, before declaring that core American interests pursued by America are  "not hostile to peoples hopes but central to them."

Yet if this were so, then our "short term interests" would be much more closely aligned to theirs, and to the vision Mr. Obama was trying to articulate in the speech. But of course they are not, and that is what make is so hard for him to articulate them in a way that does not sound hypocritical.

"Through moral force of non-violence the people of the region achieved more change in six months than terrorists have in decades," he rightly declared. But this change was, according to his own logic, against the short term-and long term, if truth be told-interests of the United States (or at least of those with the power to represent themselves as protecting those interests).

The question that Obama didn't answer was how the long term vision would actually, at the level of policy and action, become short term policy?

Going backwards with the Peace Process

Of course, few countries embody the "or what?" problem Mr. Obama faces better than Israel, one of the three main subjects of his speech. Mr. Obama clearly had an almost impossibly thin tightrope to walk upon here, as any possible substantive remark he could make would alienate either Israelis and their American supporters, or the tens of millions of Arabs watching his speech in the region.

And he tried to appeal to both at the start, by bringing the suffering of the two peoples into the same context. "For Israelis, it has meant living with the fear that their children could get blown up on a bus or by rockets fired at their homes, as well as the pain of knowing that other children in the region are taught to hate them. For Palestinians, it has meant suffering the humiliation of occupation, and never living in a nation of their own."

Touching words, but hardly balanced or even accurate. It is true that Israelis worry about losing children to terror or to rockets. But what of the fear of Palestinians of losing children and loved ones in the rubble from American-made helicopters and war planes used by the IDF?

The numbers are so skewed against Palestinians in this regard that it is an act of historical vandalism to counter pose the death of Israeli children against Palestinian "humiliation," as if Palestinians haven't died in far greater number by Israeli bombs and rockets, or suffered the pain of institutionalized hatred against them on both sides of the Green Line that has been far more traumatic than what Israelis suffer because of the animosity directed against them in the Arab world.

The President immediately followed up with another false equation, comparing the continuation of Israeli settlements with Palestinians walking away from talks, when it was in fact that former that caused the latter.

Indeed, most every remark that the President made about Israel and Palestine was substantively wrong: his arguments that Palestinians-not merely one party or group, but the collectivity of Palestinians-continue to "delegitimize Israel" and are "denying the right of Israel to exist" is false.

And his warning that Palestinian attempts to obtain a declaration at the UN recognizing their statehood is merely a "symbolic action to isolate Israel" betrays a gross misunderstanding-or at least mis-statement-of Palestinian intentions, which reflect a justifiable lack of hope at the US ever supporting with actions rather than words the establishment of a Palestinian state.

One could argue that in this speech the President did just that, specifically by stating plainly that the US supports the creation of a Palestinian state "with borders that should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps... in a sovereign and contiguous state."

This statement, which in fact has long been official (if for a long time, unstated) US policy, was part of a larger plan the President outlined, where by the two sides would address "territory and security" issues first, producing an agreement that would "provide a foundation to resolve those two issues in a way that is just and fair, and that respects the rights and aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians."

For Obama, the two most difficult issues, Jerusalem and the right of return, would be dealt with later. But here too the plan is striking in its basic failures of logic and historical awareness.

First, no Palestinian state could come into being unless, at the very least, Jerusalem was resolved, with its borders redrawn so that the majority of the Eastern part of the city would become the capital of a Palestinian state.

So what he is calling for, in effect, is precisely the flawed stages model that doomed Oslo-that is, the belief that starting with more easily resolved issues and, as confidence builds, addressing "final status" issues, was the best path towards peace.

All this model did was allow Israel to create more facts on the ground that made peace harder, not easier to achieve once there was no possibility of delaying final status talks any further.

And now President Obama seems to want to divide final status issues into yet another subdivision, of semi-final and really final status issues (tell that to Basem and Naji Tamimi, peace activists who have been jailed by Israel to pressure other inhabitants of their village Nabi Saleh from protesting against the occupation. An email about their plight from Jewish Voices for Peace arrived in my inbox literally as Obama was outlining his new plan for negotiations).

Indeed, the plan laid out by Obama is essentially the strategy advocated by the Israeli right: a phased solution on which actual final conclusion of the conflict is postponed into some mythical future when conditions are "right."

Palestinians would never buy this, and rightly so. And as the clashes last weekend by refugees along Israel's borders shows (but which Obama must have missed), they are not about to let the refugee questions drift in the wind much longer either.

It's the economy, or is it?

The final main focus on the President's speech was his offer of large-scale aid to the countries of the region that are engaging in democratic reform. Obama naturally is focusing most of his initial aid on Tunis and Egypt, given their vanguard role in the democratic openings.

It is here that the President's logic seems strongest: no one can deny that economic considerations, in particular rampant poverty and lack of job opportunities, have been one of the root causes of the uprisings in the Arab world, and will doom any move towards democracy if they don't address fundamental economic problems at the same time.

Nor can one find much fault with his desire to help young people receive better education and open up economies for greater trade, but there is a basic structural flaw in Obama's fou-point plan for helping to improve the region's economic performance.

First, asking the IMF and World Bank to take the lead to "stabilize and modernize" the economy is a bad idea. These two institutions have a very bad reputation across the region (and the developing world more broadly), and rightly so.

They have at almost every turn encouraged policies that harmed the population of Arab countries while encouraging greater concentration of wealth and greater corruption. For most people in the developing world, including the Arab world, "stabilisation" and "modernisation" are code words for screwing the poor while modernizing the elite's ability to exploit and police them.

Telling the Arab world that the IMF and Bank are coming to help them is a lot like telling someone in a burning house that you're sending the arsonist who set the fire to lead the fire brigade charged with putting it out.

Second, Obama's offer to relieve Egypt, for example, of its large debt is little more than a repeat of the reward Egypt and other countries received after the 1991 Gulf War for participating on the US side. Without a major structural change so that Egypt and other countries can have a greater redistribution of wealth, will only allow for more borrowing by the elite whose costs will be passed onto the rest of society.

Finally, trying to gear up MENA economies to compete in a world market as largely export-oriented economies is going to prove a near impossible task. How can these countries compete with China and Southeast Asia, which have even lower production and labor costs, and where it is precisely the corruption and lack of democracy and accountability that enable them to be "competitive" in the global production market. Without leveling the global economic playing field in terms of labor and environmental rights, all joining the system will do will be to push wages down even further

Moving beyond easy histories

The President ended his talk with some eloquent historical analogising, explaining that while Americans might find the upheavals in the Arab world unsettling, "our own nation was founded through a rebellion against an empire.

Our people fought a painful civil war that extended freedom and dignity to those who were enslaved. And I would not be standing here today unless past generations turned to the moral force of non-violence as a way to perfect our union - organizing, marching, and protesting peacefully together to make real those words that declared our nation: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

These are noble words, and it would in fact be a wonderful thing if the United States supported a non-violent rebellion against empire. But of course, that would in essence mean a rebellion against itself, and mean ending the support of all the region's regimes that are using American weapons, aid, and support to suppress the peoples whose lives they control.

The end of an era in West Bengal and India....Sumantra Bose

The world's longest-serving elected communist government has come to an end in eastern India.

The Left Front (LF), a coalition dominated by by India's largest parliamentary communist party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), had governed West Bengal, India's fourth most populous state - population 91 million, electorate 56 million - uninterruptedly since 1977.

During these 34 years, the LF won seven consecutive state elections in West Bengal, an unparalleled feat in India's democratic history. Throughout, the LF never won fewer than two-thirds of the 294 seats in West Bengal's legislative assembly (the state's parliament), and its dominant party, CPI(M), invariably won a simple majority of the seats on its own.

With a vengeance
If the longevity of LF rule in West Bengal is without parallel in independent India, the end too has been startlingly ignominious. In just-concluded state elections, West Bengal's people have voted the LF and the CPI(M) out of power with a vengeance.

From 235 seats in the previous assembly, elected in 2006, the LF tally has fallen to 61 seats. The CPI(M), which won between 170 and 190 seats in most elections since 1977 and strode the state's politics like a colossus, has been reduced to just 40 seats. The vast majority of the CPI(M)'s leading figures, including the state's chief minister, have lost in their constituencies.

The big winner is the Trinamool ('Grassroots') Congress, a "regional" (that is, West Bengal-specific) party formed in 1998 as a breakaway from the state's Congress party, which was until then the main opposition to the LF. Trinamool Congress has won 184 seats, a resounding majority. Its parent party, the Congress, now reduced to a junior ally of its splinter, has won 42 seats, and the new government in West Bengal commands a three-fourths majority in the state's legislature.

Trinamool Congress is an important example of the "regional" or state-specific parties that have come to dominate the politics of many of India's states over the past two decades, as Congress has declined and the other "national" party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has failed to realise its ambition of emerging as the new fulcrum of India's democracy.

The regional parties also determine who governs at the political centre, New Delhi. Since 1996, in a sharp departure from the previous tradition of single-party Congress governments at the centre, India has been governed by polyglot coalitions. From 1998 to 2004 the ruling coalition was led by BJP and since then by Congress. Both parties have depended on regional allies to cobble together parliamentary majorities.

West Bengal's Trinamool Congress is synonymous with the powerful personality of its founder and supreme leader, a 56 year-old woman called Mamata Banerjee. Of humble social origins - she was born and raised in a slum district of Calcutta, where she still lives - Banerjee is a charismatic populist par excellence. She represents a genre of politicians who increasingly define the shape of India's politics - a leader with a formidable mass base in one large state of the 28 states of widely varying populations that comprise the Indian Union.

Some of the other exemplars of this genre are also women. Mayawati, who is about the same age as Banerjee and like her has been active in politics since the early 1980s, heads the government of Uttar Pradesh ('Northern Province'), India's most populous state, a vast sprawl across the Indo-Gangetic plain of northern India. Mayawati belongs to the Dalit (literally, 'oppressed') community, a label for the formerly "untouchable" castes.

Another exemplar is Jayalalitha of the deep-south State of Tamil Nadu. A one-time star of Tamil cinema, Jayalalitha too has been a politician since the 1980s. She has just led her party to a massive electoral victory in Tamil Nadu and is poised to take over - though unlike Banerjee, not for the first time - as that large state's chief minister.

Hegemonic rule
Like all hegemonic regimes, the extraordinary longevity of LF and particularly CPI(M) primacy in West Bengal was built on a complex dialectic of coercion and consent - to borrow from the framework of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci.

LF and CPI(M) hegemony in West Bengal was rooted in the turn of a sizeable element of the Bengali intelligentsia to communist and socialist ideas after India's independence. The mass base came primarily from strong party organisations developed among the peasantry, particularly poorer peasants.

The Left Front usually won just under half the popular vote during its three decades in power, a proportion magnified into commanding legislative majorities by the 'first-past-the-post' system. But it had majority support among the poorer sections of society, including Muslims (over a quarter of the electorate) and low-caste and tribal communities. The 'pro-poor' image was the LF's greatest asset.

The problem was that the image and rhetoric did not translate into policies that substantially improved the lot of the poor over time. After implementing a modest land reform programme during its first decade in power, the LF lapsed into a pattern of governance marked by lethargy and ineptitude. It still kept winning elections, however.

The well-organised CPI(M) cadre network continued to deliver electoral success in the absence of a strong grassroots competitor. Over the past two decades this cadre network resorted increasingly to strong-arm and malafide methods to win elections, including intimidation of ordinary people as well as outright fraud ('rigging' in the local parlance).

West Bengal's system of decentralised government in rural areas (the panchayat system) steadily degenerated into an oppressive mechanism of party control.

As the consent of the people eroded, coercion grew and became a habit with CPI(M) officials in many locales of West Bengal.

The terminal damage to the shrinking democratic basis of LF hegemony in West Bengal happened in 2006 and 2007, when the CPI(M)-led government attempted to acquire peasant lands in two rural areas, the intention being to set up automotive and petrochemical plants owned by Indian and foreign big business on these lands.

The clumsily-handled acquisition process triggered an intense backlash from small-holding peasants in these two areas. The government responded to the protests with violence, using not just police but armed party cadres.

This backfired spectacularly. The communists' recourse to lethal violence against opposition activists and ordinary villagers - particularly the use of party goon squads - was the last straw.

Shocking images of protesters being shot dead and other brutalities were beamed into urban and rural homes across the state by privately owned television channels broadcasting in Bengali, the regional language. Anger spread throughout West Bengal and the sparks in two rural hotspots ignited a prairie fire that has now consumed India's most durable political dispensation.

Winner-takes-all...for five years
The mistakes of 2006-2007, seized upon by Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress to launch a sustained campaign of agitation and protest, catalysed events that led to the demise of communist power in West Bengal. But the rot had been accumulating for two decades. The events since 2007 simply capped growing popular disillusionment with a moribund government and laid bare its dysfunctional character.
West Bengal's communist rulers committed a cardinal error over decades, not years: Do not take the demos for granted, and do not provoke the poor, who comprise the majority of society, beyond a point.
Any hopes CPI(M) local organisations may have harboured of 'rigging' the polls came to nothing as India's national Election Commission, an independent and competent body, stepped in and ensured fool-proof security arrangements for free and fair elections.

In the Middle East and North Africa, the people have to resort to insurrection to remove regimes entrenched in power for decades. India's democracy means that West Bengal's people could endorse the cry for paribartan (change) by popular vote.

Nor are the losers utterly finished. Despite the heavy defeat, the Left Front has polled 41 per cent of the popular vote even in this election (the victorious Trinamool Congress-led opposition combine got 49 per cent). In other words, the vanquished retain a formidable if reduced mass base and can aspire to make a comeback in five years' time if the new government stumbles and the new opposition are able to reform and rejuvenate themselves.

That is the nature of democracy. Democracy is not a winner-take-all game, and alternation in power between rival contestants is normal. In that sense, the 34-year communist era in West Bengal will go down as one of the great anomalies of India's democracy.

Sumantra Bose is professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Contested Lands: Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus, and Sri Lanka.

Western media fraud in the Middle East.......Nir Rosen

Too often, you consumers of mainstream media are victims of a fraud. You think you can trust the articles you read - why wouldn't you? You think you can sift through the ideological bias and just get the facts. But you don't know the ingredients that go into the product you buy. It is important to understand how knowledge about current events in the Middle East is produced before relying on it. Even when there are no apparent ideological biases, such as those one often sees when it comes to reporting about Israel, there are fundamental problems at the epistemological and methodological level. These create distortions, falsehoods and justify the narrative of those with power.

In discussing the manners in which the Western intelligentsia and media depict the Middle East, the French intellectual and scholar Francois Burgat complained that two main types of intellectuals tasked with explaining the "other" to Westerners dominate. Firstly, there is what he and Bourdieu, another philosopher, describe as the "negative intellectual" who aligns his beliefs and priorities with those of the state, and centres his perspective on serving the interests of power and gaining proximity to it. And secondly, there is what Burgat terms as "the facade intellectual", whose role in society is to confirm Western audiences with their already-held notions, beliefs, preconceptions, and racisms regarding the "other". Journalists writing for the mainstream media, as well as their local interlocutors, often fall into both categories.

A vast literature exists on the impossibility of journalism in its classic, liberal sense with all the familiar tropes on objectivity, neutrality, and "transmitting reality". However, and perhaps out of a lack of an alternative source of legitimation, major mainstream media outlets in the West continue to grasp to these notions with ever more insistence. The Middle East is an exceptionally suitable place for the Western media to learn about itself and its future, because it is the scene where all pretentions of objectivity, neutrality towards power, and critical engagement have faltered spectacularly.

Framing the 'other'
Journalists are the archetype of ideological tools who create culture and produce knowledge. Their function is to represent a class and perpetuate the dominant ideology instead of building a counter hegemonic and revolutionary ideology, or narrative, in this case. They are the organic intellectuals of the ruling class. Instead of being the voice of the people or the working class, journalists are too often the functional tools for a bourgeois ruling class. They produce and disseminate culture and meaning for the system and reproduce its values, allowing it to hegemonise the field of culture and since journalism today has a specific political economy, they are all products of the hegemonic discourse and the moneyed class.

The working class has no networks, that applies too to Hollywood and television entertainment and series; it is all the same intellectuals producing them. Even journalists with pretentions of being serious usually only serve elites and ignore social movements. Journalism tends to be state centric, focusing on elections, institutions, formal politics and overlooking politics of contention, informal politics, social movements.

Those with reputations as brave war reporters who hop around the world, parachuting into conflicts from Yemen to Afghanistan, typically only confirm Americans' views of the world. Journalism simplifies, which means it de-historicises. Journalism in the Middle East is too often a violent act of representation. Western journalists take reality and amputate it, contort it, and fit it into a predetermined discourse or taxonomy.

The American media always want to fit events in the region into an American narrative. The recent assassination of Osama bin Laden was greeted with a collective shrug of the shoulder in the Middle East, where he had always been irrelevant, but for Americans and hence for the American media it was a historic and defining moment which changed everything. Too often contact with the West has defined events in the Middle East, but the so-called Arab Spring with its revolutions and upheavals evokes anxiety among white Americans. They are unsettled with the autogenetic liberation of brown people. However, the Arab Spring may represent a revolutionary transformation of the Arab world, a massive blow to Islamist politics and the renaissance of secular and leftist Arab nationalist politics.

But the American media has been obsessed with Islamists, looking for them behind every demonstration, and the uprisings have been often treated as if they were something threatening. And all too often, it just comes down to "what does this mean for Israel's security?" The aspirations of hundreds of millions of freedom-seeking Arabs are subordinated to the security concerns of five million Jews who colonised Palestine.

There is a strong element of chauvinism and racism behind the reporting. Like American soldiers, American journalists like to use the occasional local word to show they have unlocked the mysteries of the culture. 'Wasta' is one such word. One American bureau chief in Iraq told me that Muqtada al-Sadr had a lot of wasta now so he could prevent a long American presence. 'Inshallah' is another such word. And in Afghanistan it's 'pushtunwali', the secret to understanding Afghans. Islam is also treated like a code that can be unlocked, and then locals can be understood as if they are programmed only through Islam.

Arab culture and Islam are spoken of the way race was once spoken of in India and Africa, and it is difficult to portray Arabs and Muslims as the good guys unless they are "like us" as in Google executives and other elites who speak English, dress trendy and use Facebook. So they are made to represent the revolutions while the poor, the workers, the subalterns, the majority who don't even have internet access let alone twitter accounts, are ignored. And in order to make the revolutions in Tunisia and especially Egypt seem non-threatening, the nonviolent tactics are emphasised while the many acts of violent resistance to regime oppression are completely ignored. This is not just the journalists' fault. It is driven by American discourse which drives the editors back in New York and Washington.

I've spent most of the last eight years working in Iraq, and also in Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen and other countries in the Muslim world. So all my work has taken place in the shadow of the war on terror and has in fact been thanks to this war, even if I've laboured to disprove the underlying premises of this war. In a way my work has still served to support the narrative. I once asked my editor at The New York Times Magazine if I could write about a subject outside the Muslim world. He said even if I was fluent in Spanish and an expert on Latin America, I wouldn't be published if it wasn't about jihad.

Seclusion and narrow narratives
It is important to understand the environment journalists inhabit, the interlocutors, translators and fixers they rely on to filter and mediate for them and the nature in which they collect information, accounts and interviews. One of the popular myths about reporting in Iraq is that journalists stayed in the Green Zone, the walled off fortress neighbourhood that housed the American occupiers and now houses the Iraqi government along with some foreign embassies. This is not true. Throughout the occupation, almost no journalists actually inhabited the Green Zone. They stayed in green zones of their own creation, whether secure compounds or intellectual green zones, creating their own walls. The first green zone for journalists was the fortress around the Sheraton and Palestine hotels in Baghdad, which was initially guarded by American soldiers and later by Iraqi security guards. The New York Times soon constructed its own immense fortress, with guard dogs, guard towers, security guards, immense walls, vehicle searches - so too did the BBC, Associated Press, and others, then there were was the Hamra hotel compound where many bureaus moved until it was damaged in an explosion in 2010. CNN, Fox, Al Jazeera English had their own green zone, though freelancers like myself could rent rooms there. And there is one last green zone which is a large neighbourhood protected by Kurdish peshmerga, where middle class Iraqis and some news bureaus live.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with staying in a secure compound. Foreigners are often targeted in conflict zones and authoritarian countries. You want to go to sleep at night without wondering whether men will kick down your door and drag you away, or whether you should go to sleep with your clothes on so that if a car bomb hits you wont be caught sleeping naked under a pile of rubble. You want to eat decent food and have running water, constant electricity, internet access, conversations with colleagues. A journalist doesn't have to live like an impoverished local. But the less local life you experience, the less you can do your job, and this is what readers need to understand. The average person anywhere in the world goes to work and comes back home. He knows little about people outside his social class, ethnic group, neighbourhood or city. As a journalist, you are making judgements on an entire country and interpreting it for others, but you don't know the country because you don't really live in it. You spend 20 hours a day in seclusion from the country. You have no basis for judgement because to you, Iraq is out there, the red zone, and the pace of filing can make this even harder.

Most mainstream journalists have since 2004 treated reporting in Iraq like a military operation: going out on limited missions with a lot of planning, an armoured car, a chase car for backup, in and out, do the interview and come back home to their own green zone. Or they would more often just make the trip to the actual Green Zone, where officials are easy to meet and interview, where you can enjoy a drink, socialise with diplomats and feel macho because you live in the red zone. But in their artificial green zone, they are still sheltered from life - from Iraqis and from violence.

They did not just hang out, sit in restaurants, in mosques and husseiniyas, in people's homes, walk through slums, shop in local markets, walk around at night, sit in juice shops, sleep in normal people's homes, visit villages, farms, and experience Iraq like an Iraqi, or as close as possible. This means they have no idea what life is like at night, what life is like in rural areas, what social trends are important, what songs are popular, what jokes are being told, what arguments take place on the street, how comfortable people feel, or what sorts of Iraqis go to bars at night. Hanging out is key. You just observe, letting events and people determine your reporting. They also did not investigate, pursue spontaneous leads, develop a network of trusted contacts and sources. Dwindling resources and interest meant bureaus had to shut down or reduce staff, and only occasionally parachute a journalist in to interview a few officials and go back home.

Finessing the social fabric
And since they don't know Arabic, they literally cannot read the writing on the wall - the graffiti on the wall -whether it is for the mujahedin, for Muqtada Sadr, or for the football teams of Madrid or Barcelona. It means that if they talk to one man, the translator only tells them what he said and not what everybody around him was saying, they don't hear the Sadrist songs supporting the Shia of Bahrain, or hear the taxi driver complaining about how things were better under Saddam, or discussing the attacks he saw in the morning, or the soldiers joking at a checkpoint, or the shopkeeper cursing the soldiers. In fact they don't even take taxis or buses, so they miss a key opportunity to interact naturally with people. It means they can't just relax in people's homes and hear families discuss their concerns. They are never able to develop what Germans call fingerspitzengefuhl - that finger tip feeling, an intuitive sense of what is happening, what the trends and sentiments are, which one can only get by running one's own fingers through the social fabric.
A student of the Arab world once commented that any self-appointed terrorism expert must first pass the Um Kulthum test - meaning, has he heard of Um Kulthum, the iconic Egyptian diva of Arab nationalism whose music and lyrics still resonate throughout the Middle East? If they hadn't heard of her, then they obviously were not familiar with Arab culture. In Iraq an equivalent might be the Hawasim test. Saddam called the 1991 war on Iraq "Um al-Maarik", or the mother of all battles. And he called the 2003 war on Iraq "Um al-Hawasim", or the mother of all decisive moments. Soon, the looting that followed the invasion was called Hawasim by Iraqis, and the word became a common phrase, applied to cheap markets, to stolen goods, to cheap products. If you drive your car recklessly like you don't care about it, another driver might shout at you, "what, is it hawasim?" If you don't make an effort to familiarise yourself with these cultural phenomena, then just go back home.

Relying on a translator means you can only talk to one person at a time and you miss all the background noise. It means you have to depend on somebody from a certain social class, or sect, or political position, to filter and mediate the country for you. Maybe they are Sunni and have limited contacts outside their community. Maybe they are a Christian from east Beirut and know little about the Shia of south Lebanon or the Sunnis of the north. Maybe they're urban and disdainful of those who are rural. In Iraq, maybe they are a middle class Shia from Baghdad or a former doctor or engineer who looks down upon the poor urban class who make up the Sadrists. And so in May 2003, when I was the first American journalist to interview Muqtada Sadr, my bureau chief at Time magazine was angry at me for wasting my time and sending it on to the editors in New York without asking him, because Muqtada was unimportant, lacking credentials. But in Iraq, social movements, street movements, militias, those with power on the ground, have been much more important than those in the establishment or politicians in the green zone, and it is events in the red zone which have shaped things.

You don't understand a country by going on preplanned missions; you learn about it when unplanned things happen, when you visit a friend's neighbourhood for fun and other neighbours come over. You learn about it by driving around in a normal car, not an armoured one with tinted windows. That's when Iraqi soldiers and police ask you to hitch a ride and take them towards their home. A few months ago, soldiers at a checkpoint outside Ramadi asked me to give one of their colleagues a ride to Baghdad. He was from Basra. In addition to the conversation we struck up, what was most revealing was that a soldier outside Ramadi felt safe enough to ask a stranger for a ride, whereas before he would not have even carried his ID on him, and that a stranger agreed to take a member of the security forces. I've since given rides to other Iraqi soldiers and policemen.

Class politics
Over the last year, there have been a slew of articles about whether the Iraqi security forces are ready to handle security for themselves, but these have all been based on the statements of American or Iraqi officials. Journalists have not talked to Iraqi lieutenants, or colonels, or sergeants, they have not cultivated these sources or just befriended them, met them for drinks when they were on leave, sat with them in their homes with their families.

So the views of the Iraqi security forces, the Iraqi soldiers and policemen who man checkpoints and go on raids, are not written about. Meeting with them also lets you understand the degree to which sectarianism has been reduced in the security forces, while corruption and abuses such as torture and extra judicial killings remain a problem. And just travelling around the country since 2009 would reveal that yes, Iraqi security forces can maintain the current level of security (or insecurity) because they have been doing it since then, manning checkpoints in the most remote villages, cultivating their own intelligence sources, and basically occupying Iraq. The degree to which Iraq remains heavily militarised has not been sufficiently conveyed, but since 2009 Iraqi security forces have been occupying Iraq, and the American presence has been largely irrelevant from a daily security point of view.

And then there are the little Abu Ghraibs. The big scandals like Abu Ghraib, or the "Kill Team" in Afghanistan, eventually make their way into the media where they can be dismissed as bad apples and exceptions, and the general oppression of the occupations can be ignored. But an occupation is a systematic and constant imposition of violence on an entire country. It's 24 hours of arresting, beating, killing, humiliating and terrorising, and unless you have experienced it, it's impossible to describe except by trying to list them until the reader gets numb. I was only embedded three times over eight years - twice in Iraq for ten days each, and once in Afghanistan for three weeks.

My first embed in Iraq was in October 2003, six months after I first arrived. I was in the Anbar province. I saw soldiers arresting hundreds of men, rounding up entire villages, all the so-called military aged men, hoping somebody would know something. I saw children screaming for their daddies while they watched them bloody and beaten and terrified, while soldiers laughed or smoked or high-fived or chewed tobacco and spit on the lawn, as lives were being destroyed. I know one of the men I saw arrested died from torture, and countless others ended up in Abu Ghraib. I saw old men pushed down on the ground violently. I saw innocent men beaten, arrested, mocked and humiliated. These are the little Abu Ghraibs that come with any occupation, even if it's the Swedish girl scouts occupying a country.

Many journalists spent their entire careers embedded, months or even years, so multiply what I saw by hundreds, by thousands and tens of thousands of terrorised traumatised families, beatings, killings, children who lost their fathers and wet their beds every night, women who could not provide for their families, innocent people shot at checkpoints. Then there are the daily Abu Ghraibs you endure when you live in an occupied country, having to navigate a maze of immense concrete walls, of barbed wire, waiting at checkpoints, waiting for convoys to go by, waiting for military operations to end, waiting for the curfew to end, military vehicles running you off the road, fifty calibre machine guns pointed at you, M16s pointed at you, pistols pointed at you, large foreign soldiers shouting at you and ordering you around. Or maybe in Afghanistan, the military convoy runs over a water canal destroying the water supply to a village of 30 families who now have no way to live, or they arrest an innocent Afghan because he has Taliban music on his cell phone - like many Afghans do - and now he must make his way through the Afghan prison system.

But if you are white and identify with white American soldiers, then you ignore these things, they just don't occur to you. And so they never occur to your readers. Likewise you never think of how your average Yemeni or Egyptian or Iraqi deals with their own security forces on a daily basis because you focus on the elite level of politics and security, and your cars don't get stopped at checkpoints because you have the right badges. You don't get detained by the police because you have the right badge. Until you get beaten up by regime thugs like Anderson Cooper, then you can become a hysterical opponent of Mubarak and crusader for justice. Television reporting is overprotective of the celebrity correspondent - they barely go out, they just embed -and they do their live shots on the street inside their safe compounds, while making the story more about the celebrity correspondent rather than the story. Then they show the "back story" about the journalist and his work rather than the story.

Robert Kaplan, a terrible writer and great supporter of imperialism, said one smart thing by accident when he criticised journalists for not being able to relate to American soldiers, because journalists represented an elite while soldiers come from rural areas, went to public schools, and come from the working class (we're not supposed to use that word because everybody in America thinks they're middle class). But equally they cannot relate easily to the working classes anywhere, and so they gravitate to the elites. Focusing on elites and officials is a problem in general, not just in Middle East coverage. An American official visiting the region warrants articles about the region, but it is not studied empirically in its own context. People in power lie, whether they are a general, a president or a militia commander. This is the first rule. But at best, journalists act as if only brown people in power lie, and so they rely on the official statements of white people, whether they are military officers or diplomats, as if they should be trusted. The latest example is the bin Laden killing, when most mainstream journalists lazily relied on US government "feeds", and they were literally fed an official version that kept on changing, but this is business as usual.

The revolution must be televised
One reason for the failure of journalists to leave their green zones may be a combination of laziness and aversion to discomfort. But in Iraq, Afghanistan, other developing countries and areas of conflict in some countries, you have to leave your comfort zone. You might prefer an English-speaking whiskey-drinking politician over six hours of bouncing along dirt roads in the heat and dust in order to sit on the floor and eat dirty food and drink dirty water and know you're going to get sick tomorrow, but the road to truth involves a certain amount of diarrhoea.

When there are no physical green zones, journalists will create them, as in Lebanon where they inhabit the green zones of Hamra, Gumayzeh, or Monot, which shelters journalists from the rest of the country, giving them just enough of the exotic so they can feel as if they live in the Orient, without having to visit Tripoli, Akkar, the Beqa, or the majority of Beirut or Lebanon where the poor live. Like other countries, Lebanon has a ready local fixer and translator mafia who can determine the price, and allow a journalist who parachutes in to meet a representative of all the political factions, drink wine with Walid Jumblat and look at his collection of unopened books (including one I wrote) and unread copies of the New York Review of Books while never having to walk through a Palestinian refugee camp, or Tariq al Jadida in Beirut or Bab al Tabaneh in Tripoli and see how most people live and what most people care about.

A green zone can be the capital city or a neighbourhood or a focus only on officials, as long as it shields you from the red zone of reality, or poverty, of class conflict, of challenges to your ideology or comfort. In Egypt, even before the revolution, Cairo got most of the media's attention, but during the revolution journalists barely ventured outside Tahrir Square. Egypt is 86 million people - it's not just Tahrir, it's not just Cairo or Alexandria. Port Said and Suez were barely covered, even though Suez was such a key spark in the revolution. In Libya at first everything was new and everybody was an explorer and adventurer, but now the self-appointed opposition leadership is trying to manage the message so you can be lazy and just refer to their statements. Yemen was totally neglected, but when people came, it was almost always just to Sanaa. And Yemen's capital has its own green zone in the Movenpic hotel, situated safely outside the city. Now Yemen is portrayed as if it were two rival camps demonstrating in Sanaa, even though the uprisings started long before (and were much more violent) in Taez, Aden, Saada and elsewhere. Yemen is viewed mostly through prism of the war on terror, through the American government's prism, rather than the needs and views of the people.

But if you spend any time with the demonstrators, you realise how unimportant al-Qaeda and its ideology are in Yemen, so that they don't even deserve an article. And you would do well to remember that even though the Yemeni franchise of al-Qaeda is portrayed as America's greatest threat, AQAP's record is little more than a failed underwear bomber and a failed printer cartridge bomb.

American reporting is problematic throughout the third world, but because the American military/industrial/financial/academic/media complex is so directly implicated in the Middle East, the consequences of such bad reporting are more significant. Journalists end up serving as propagandists justify the killing of innocent people instead of a voice for those innocent people.

There are many brave and dedicated journalists working in the Middle East whose work deserves attention and praise. Some even work for the mainstream media. Too often their independent voices are drowned out by the mass of writers who justify power instead of opposing it. Our job should not be about speaking truth to power. Those in power know the truth, they just don't care. It's about speaking truth to the people, to those not in power, in order to empower them.

This article is based on a speech given at a conference sponsored by Jadaliyya on teaching the Middle East at George Mason University.
Nir Rosen is an American journalist who writes on current and international affairs. He has contributed to The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, among others. His latest book is Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World.

The future of the Arab uprisings......Joseph Massad

A specter is haunting the Arab world - the specter of democratic revolution. All the powers of the old Arab world have entered into a holy alliance with each other and the United States to exorcise this specter: king and sultan, emir and president, neoliberals and zionists.

While Marx and Engels used similar words in 1848 in reference to European regimes and the impending communist revolutions that were defeated in the Europe of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is much hope in the Arab world that these words would apply more successfully to the ongoing democratic Arab uprisings.

In the case of Europe, Marx ended up having to write the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon in 1852 to analyse the defeat of the 1848 revolution in France. He explained how revolutions could overthrow an existing ruling class but would not necessarily lead to the rule of the oppressed. He analysed the process by which Louis Napoleon was able to hijack the revolution and proclaim himself emperor, restoring monarchy to republican and revolutionary France, as his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte had done before him to the glorious French Revolution of 1789.

Since the end of World War I, European powers and the United States have appointed and removed Arab kings at will. Their actions were always taken to ensure the persistence of these dictatorial monarchies, rather than their removal, and to strengthen Euro-American control and hegemony over the region.

The only seeming exception to this rule was the French removal of King Faisal from the throne of Syria in 1919, ending the short-lived Syrian independence, only for the British to extend to him the throne of Iraq, which he assumed that same year, with the inauguration of British rule in that country.
This Euro-American power would include the granting of Abdullah the throne of Jordan in 1921 and the removal of his son King Talal from it, replacing him with his own son Hussein in 1952-53. The French would dethrone Mohammed V of Morocco in 1953 but would restore him again in 1955 when opposition to his removal weakened their control.

The British would remove Sultan Said bin Taymur in 1970 and replace him with his son Sultan Qabus, who was better able, with the help of the Iranian Shah, the Jordanian King, British and American military support, to quell the republican revolution in Dhofar.

Even the palace coup of 1995 by Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani of Qatar to oust his father, Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad al Thani, and replace him, received American support and enthusiasm, as it was carried out to strengthen, rather than weaken, the Qatari monarchy.

Imperialism and orientalism
Since World War II, but more diligently since the mid 1950s, the United States has followed two simultaneous strategies to exercise its control over the Arab peoples across Arab countries. The first, and the one most relevant to Arabs, was based on the early US recognition and realisation (like Britain, France, and Italy before it) that Arabs, like all other peoples worldwide, wanted democracy and freedom and would struggle for them in every possible way.

For the United States, this necessitated the establishment of security and repressive apparatuses in Arab countries, which the US would train, fund, and direct in order to suppress these democratic desires and efforts in support of dictatorial regimes whose purpose has always been and continues to be the defense of US security and business interests in the region. 

These interests consist principally in securing and maintaining US control of the oil resources of the region, ensuring profits for American business, and strengthening the Israeli settler-colony.

Much of this was of course propelled by the beginning of the Cold War and the US strategy to suppress all forms of real and imagined communist-leaning forces around the world, which included any and all democratic demands for change in the region.
This strategy, which was formalised in the Eisenhower Doctrine issued in 1957, continues through the present. The Eisenhower Doctrine, issued on 5 January 1957, as a speech by the US president, declared the Soviet Union, not Israel or Western-supported regional dictatorships, as the enemy of the people of the Middle East.

To neutralise president Gamal Abd al Nasir’s wide appeal across the Arab world, Eisenhower authorised the US military "to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence of such nations, requesting such aid against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by international communism.”

In contrast with its actual anti-democratic policies around the world, the US has always insisted on marketing itself as a force for global democracy. In line with this public relations campaign, the second strategy the US used to advance its anti-democratic policies in the Arab World was the importation of European orientalism, which acquired a central place in post-war US academia.

State Department funding assisted by funding from private foundations would solidify orientalist research that asserted that Arabs and Muslims were incompatible with democracy and that more often than not they love and prefer dictatorial rule and that it would be culturally imperialist for the US to impose democracy on them, leading to the conclusion that it would be best to uphold their dictatorial rulers whose repressive policies, we are told, are inspired by Islam and Arab culture.

Between the billions spent on repressing the Arab peoples and the millions spent to explain academically and in the American media the need to repress them, this two-pronged US strategy in the region since World War II has been coming apart at an accelerated rate since January 2011, a development that continues to cause panic in the Obama White House and manifests in the incessant fumbling of his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who is much despised across the Arab world. 

If president Jimmy Carter infamously declared on the eve of the Iranian Revolution in December 1977 that the Iran of the Shah was "an island of stability in one of the most troubled areas of the world", Hillary Clinton would declare Mubarak’s Egypt as "stable" days before he was overthrown.

Subverting democracy
The anti-democratic US campaign in the region started with the first coup d’état the US sponsored when it overthrew democratic rule in Syria in 1949 and was soon followed by the restoration of the Shah in neighbouring Iran in 1953 in a CIA-sponsored coup that overthrew the government of prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh and suppressed the democratic movement in Iran.

As the US was following similar strategies elsewhere in its expanding empire, especially in Guatemala where it sponsored an anti-democratic coup against the reform government of Jacobo Arbenz and unleashed a wave of terror that murdered hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans for the next four decades, it formalised its new strategy in the Arab world through the Eisenhower Doctrine.

Soon after, the US went into high gear suppressing democracy in the region, starting with intervention in Lebanon on the side of right-wing sectarian forces in 1957, moving to engineer the palace coup launched by the young King Hussein against the democratically elected parliament the same year in Jordan, and proceeding to help the Baath party assume power in 1963 in Iraq and massacre thousands in the process.

The defeat of Nasir in the 1967 war was followed by US support for the most repressive Sudanese regime ever under Jafar Numeiri and the suppression of the revolution across the Arabian Gulf in the early seventies with the assistance of the Shah’s forces and the Jordanian army, which stabilised the region for US oil profits and began the road to secure Israel’s supremacy.

In the meantime, the removal of Arab monarchies from power and replacing them with republics would take place through the mechanism of military coups, which, unlike Euro-American interventions, had much popular support. Beginning with the removal of King Farouk of Egypt in 1952 by the Free Officers, the removal of Arab monarchies would proceed with the overthrow of the Iraqi King and the Hashemite royal family in 1958, the Yemeni monarchy in 1962, and ended with the overthrow of the Libyan monarchy in 1969 by Gaddafi. 

All other Arab monarchies have persisted, with massive American, French, and British financial, economic, military, and security support, despite a number of threats to these thrones over the decades. While only two monarchies survive outside the Arabian Peninsula, which only managed to lose its Yemeni monarch, all other Arab regimes have a republican form of government.

The US-Saudi axis
The ongoing uprisings in the Arab world today, as is clear to all observers, do not distinguish between republics and monarchies. Indeed, in addition to the republics, demonstrations have been ongoing in Morocco, Jordan, Oman, and Saudi Arabia (and more modestly in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates), despite the brutal suppression of the major Bahraini uprising by a combined mercenary force dispatched by the member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council led by Saudi Arabia.

The situation in Arab countries today is characterised as much by the counter-revolution sponsored by the Saudi regime and the United States as it is by the uprisings of the Arab peoples against US-sponsored dictatorial regimes.

While the US-Saudi axis was caught unprepared for the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, they quickly made contingency plans to counter the uprisings elsewhere, especially in Bahrain and Oman, but also in Jordan and Yemen, as well as take control of the uprisings in Libya (at first) and later in Syria. Attempts to take control of the Yemeni uprising have had mixed results so far.

Part of the US-Saudi strategy has been to strengthen religious sectarianism, especially hostility to shiism, in the hope of stemming the tide of the uprisings.

This sectarianism targets not only Iran but also Arab shias in Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and even in Oman and Syria, while simultaneously encouraging anti-Christian zealotry in Egypt. The Sadat and Mubarak regimes encouraged anti-Christian zealots for decades. Part of the ongoing counter-revolutionary efforts is to resuscitate these sectarian forces to break Egyptian unity and bring about chaos.

If the Eisenhower Doctrine insisted in 1957 that the Soviets, not Israel, were the main enemy of the Arab peoples, today the US insists that it is Iran and shiism who are their main enemy. With the US and Saudi-led suppression of the people of Bahrain, the hope is that this American-sponsored sectarian hatred and encouragement of sunni Arab chauvinism would in one swoop render Iran (and not the Arab dictators, their Israeli ally, or their US sponsor) the enemy of Arabs, if not the only enemy of Arabs, and delegitimise at the same time the uprisings in countries with a substantial number of Arab shiites.

The US sponsored this project several years ago with limited success. It would be best articulated by Jordan’s King Abdullah II, who warned in 2004 of a "shia crescent" threatening the region. The US and the Saudis are hoping that it could be more successful today.

The French and the British have continued to play important neo-colonial roles in the region, economically, militarily, and in the realm of security "cooperation". They have strengthened their position by increasing their security and diplomatic "assistance" to their allies among Arab dictators.

The US-supported repression in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, and in the United Arab Emirates goes hand in hand with the Euro-American-Qatari intervention in Libya to safeguard the oil wells for Western companies once a new government is in place.

The hijacking of the Libyan uprising and the defection of Gaddafi's governing elite of politicians overnight to the side of the "revolutionaries" not only casts more than one shadow of suspicion on those claiming to lead the Libyan uprising against Gaddafi's horrific dictatorship, but also on the Western powers who were Gaddafi's major allies in the last decade until their recent defection.

The situation today is one of a struggle between the formidable US-Saudi axis, which is the main anti-democratic force in the region, and the pro-democracy uprisings.

The US-Saudi strategy is two-fold: massive repression of those Arab uprisings that can be defeated, and co-optation of those that could not be. How successful the second part will be depends on how co-optable the pro-democracy forces prove to be.
While it is true that revolutionaries make their own history, as Karl Marx famously put it, "they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past."

Guarding against the co-optation of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions is the hope of all Arabs today.
The US-Saudi axis will use every mechanism at its disposal to do so, not least of which will be the forthcoming elections in Egypt and Tunisia. The great Arab hope is that Tunisia and Egypt will write a new Revolutionary and Democratic Manifesto for the Arab peoples.

The concern and the fear remain, however, that we may end up with less of a Communist Manifesto and more of an Eighteenth Brumaire.

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York.