As several commenters downblog have so astutely noted, my deviationism on the crucial issue of our times – WHAT IS TO BE DONE IN HONDURAS? – has revealed me as a neocon, a fascist, and a militarist. Probably a misogynist and a theocrat, too. But just to demonstrate that even fascists are complicated, I’ll link to this approvingly.
This is from the extreme right-wing BBC, so take it with a grain of salt:
Honduras TV gets government orderHonduran President Manuel Zelaya has ordered all the country’s TV and radio stations to carry government propaganda for two hours a day.
He says that the short-term measure is necessary because of unfair coverage of his government.
Mr Zelaya recently accused the owners of the country’s news media of exploiting political and social problems in Honduras to get rich.
He won elections in November 2005, but has poor relations with the media.
Last month, Mr Zelaya unsuccessfully tried to get Congress to ban the publication of reports on violent crime – a massive problem in Honduras.
Military tactics?
However, in this latest measure he has imposed his will on the country’s media outlets.
From Monday, 28 May, hundreds of TV and radio channels will be forced to broadcast simultaneous interviews with him and with government ministers.
The aim, said Mr Zelaya, was to allow them to explain a series of projects and measures which are underway, and in so doing counteract what he called misinformation about his government.
The country’s main journalists’ union immediately called on the president to revoke his decision, in which he has employed special powers rarely used by democratically-elected governments.
The union compared the move to the military governments which ruled Honduras until the early 1980s. …
But you know journalists’ unions – buncha reactionary running dogs…
Seriously, despite being a fascist and all, I have no side in this dispute, but could we all chill with the instant canonization of obscure political figures none of us knew anything about a week ago?
I’m no scholar on Honduras, to say the least, so I’ll assume the basic facts regarding recent events are in accord with this opinion piece calling for ousted President Manuel Zelaya’s reinstatement:
Zelaya’s fatal mistake was in organizing a de facto referendum to test the idea of allowing him a second term. Honduras’s Constitution explicitly forbids holding referendums — let alone an unsanctioned “popular consultation” — to amend it and, more specifically, to modify the presidential term. Unsurprisingly, the president’s idea met with resistance from Congress, nearly all political parties (including his own), the press, the business community, electoral authorities, and, crucially, the Supreme Court, which deemed the whole endeavor illegal.Last week, when Zelaya ordered the armed forces to distribute the electoral material to carry out what he called an “opinion poll,” the military commander refused to comply and was summarily dismissed (he was later reinstated by the Supreme Court). The president then cited the troubling history of military intervention in Honduran politics, a past that the country — under more prudent governments — had made great strides in leaving behind in the past two decades. He neglected to mention that the order he had issued was illegal. …
Now the Honduran military has responded in kind: An illegal referendum has met an illegal military intervention, with the avowed intention of protecting the Constitution.
I’m no fan of military coups, or, well, militaries period. But is a military that doesn’t reflexively obey the chief executive the worst thing in the world?
Yes, I understand that there’s a long history of military dictatorship in Latin America, so this sort of thing immediately provokes justified worry. But if the executive of a country is behaving lawlessly, if he flagrantly ignores the constitution, courts, and legislature, then who, exactly, is supposed to rein him in, and how? In modern nation-states, the military and police hold the overwhelming balance of physical force. Any attempt to check or remove an executive, for reasons good or bad, ultimately rests on either the executive’s willingness to obey the law or the armed forces’ willingness to disobey him. I wish it weren’t that way – after all, I’m a fringe lunatic who wants to abolish the state entirely – but it is. You can’t just sprinkle constitution dust on an out-of-control president and make him behave.
Look, steroidal executives in both dictatorships and democracies have traditionally viewed standing armies and police forces as their personal gangs. Witness Andrew Jackson’s reputed sneer in the wake of the Supreme Court’s pro-Cherokee ruling in Worcester v. Georgia (1832): “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!” Whether Jackson actually said that or not, his actions demonstrated his belief that he who has the guns is the law. Gosh, wouldn’t it have been a tragedy for the Army to disobey that democratically elected president!
And what if a year ago, then-president George W. Bush had said to hell with the 22nd Amendment and decided to hold a referendum on whether he should be allowed a third term? Many American lefties are convinced that Bush stole both the 2000 and 2004 elections, so I know they wouldn’t have tolerated such a proposal for a heartbeat. But even if you don’t believe Bush stole those elections (and I don’t), and even if you think he stood little chance of winning his referendum, there would have been more than enough reason to oppose such a move. It’s the kind of thing that sets a terrible precedent, you know.
UPDATE: Just so there’s no confusion, I’m less interested in the specifics of the Honduras case than in the general issue of the “cult of the presidency.” But the Honduras case is interesting, because, as far as I know, there are no allegations of outside meddling (certainly not by the U.S. government, which supports Zelaya), and the military appears to have relinquished control to the civilian government immediately. So why, when a president flouts the lawful demands of every other branch of the government and gets unceremoniously canned, do we automatically call that “undemocratic”? At which point in a democratically elected executive’s illegal power-grabbing do we decide that it’s OK for the people or their other elected representatives to act forcefully? Why always side with the executive?
Was the “Good War” – World War II – Unnecessary?
Sure would mess up a lot of people’s favorite slogans if it was…
The Future of Freedom Foundation’s Anthony Gregory reviews Pat Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World in three parts.
President Obama issued his statement on the United Nations International Day in Support of Torture Victims.
I wonder if Obama’s ghostwriter was wearing hip boots when this statement was put together.
The opening of his statement could have been recycled from the George W. Bush years: “Torture is contrary to the founding documents of our country, and the fundamental values of our people.”
Obama declares that torture “surrenders the moral authority that must form the basis for just leadership. That is why the United States must never engage in torture, and must stand against torture wherever it takes place.” (He neglected to mention that the U.S. is also obliged to never release any photos documenting torture – unless the torture was committed by foreign governments who were not allied to the U.S.).
Obama declared: “My administration is committed to taking concrete actions against torture and to address the needs of its victims… My budget request for fiscal year 2010 includes continued support for international and domestic groups working to rehabilitate torture victims.”
Well now ain’t that just dandy.
Spending U.S. tax dollars for private groups aiding torture victims supposedly compensates for Obama’s coverup of the evidence of U.S. government torture and his de facto pardon of all the torturers and torture policymakers.
A piece we ran in Viewpoints yesterday, “Iran’s Election Drama More Elaborate Than You Think,” indicated that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a former member of the Revolutionary Guards. This was incorrect (see this for details). We regret the error.
On a less clear-cut matter, I received the following e-mail from Halliburton’s PR department:
FOR YOUR IMMEDIATE ATTENTION
The article, “Where are they now?” by Philip Giraldi, posted June 23 on Antiwar.com, incorrectly states that Halliburton is a military contractor. [Editor's note: Giraldi's offending sentence was "Cheney headed defense contractor Halliburton after his stint at the Defense Department under George H.W. Bush."] Halliburton has never been contracted for services by the U.S. government, particularly none of the logistics support services frequently discussed in the media today.
To confirm, Halliburton is not a military contractor. Halliburton is one of the world’s largest providers of products and services to the energy industry, and serves the upstream oil and gas industry throughout the lifecycle of the reservoir – from locating hydrocarbons and managing geological data, to drilling and formation evaluation, well construction and completion, and optimizing production through the life of the field.
You will note that all of the government services and engineering and construction businesses have been and remain with KBR. To confirm, KBR and Halliburton are completely separate and independent of each other. Halliburton separated KBR from the company in April 2007 ( http://www.halliburton.com/public/news/pubsdata/press_release/2007/corpnws_040507a.html ).
We respectfully request you make this correction immediately.
Kind regards,
Diana Gabriel
Senior Manager, Public Relations
Halliburton
Well, this is a little like complaining that the sentence “Hirohito ruled Imperial Japan” is inaccurate because Japan no longer has an empire. At the time that Cheney headed Halliburton (1995-2000), Kellogg Brown & Root (now KBR) was a subsidiary of the company, and it sure as hell was a defense contractor. As Gabriel notes, Halliburton only split with KBR in 2007, after 44 years together.
But just to avoid any confusion about Halliburton’s present status, we removed the offending modifier “defense contractor.” Also, Japan is no longer an empire.*
*But it was one when Hirohito became its emperor.
“Who is at the helm? The way Iran is acting up, and what about weather catastrophes? Hopefully no decision has to be made.”
- South Carolina state Sen. Jake Knotts (R-Lexington), Tuesday, on then-missing Gov. Mark Sanford
Looking at Margaret and Jason’s close monitoring of the continued bloodshed in Iraq– something like 300 Iraqis dead in bombings since last Monday — it’s becoming clear that nothing short of a nuclear bomb dropped on the Green Zone will get administration officials and their supporters in the Washington military establishment to acknowledge that something is really wrong in Baghdad.
There is obviously an agenda , and that agenda is to let the Iraqis have their holiday over our supposed departure on June 30. As I have written, and as Erik Leaver and Daniel Atzmon suggest today, there are a lot of smoke and mirrors engaged here and no one really knows how many U.S troops and private contractors will remain in trouble spots like Baghdad and Mosul after the end of the month.
But this is just one thread of the agenda. The integrity of the Surge Narrative is vital, and any sense that the stability gained in the last year is beginning to dissolve will put a lot of assumptions about the so-called “population-centric” Petraeus Doctrine (”clear, hold and build”) into serious question. That is probably why speakers at the big Center for A New American Security confab were pretty adamant that the recent violence is the mark of al Qaeda “remnants,” and definitely not a reanimated Sunni insurgency. No surprise that retired Gen. Jack Keane, known as the “godfather of the surge” for his work in writing the “plan for success” with Frederick Kagan at AEI and the “new” counterinsurgency manual with Petraeus in 2006, was on hand to suggest we don’t “overreact” to the recent bombings in Iraq.
“The security situation in Iraq is truly a good one,” Keane asserted from the dais of the Willard Continental Hotel ballroom on June 11, a day after a car bomb ripped through a market, killing 30 people in Nasiriyah. Sure there were spates of violence, but “that doesn’t justify the troop presence we have.”
Maybe not. A lot of us don’t think a six-year occupation was justified in the first place. But that seems to be beside the point right now. People like Keane and the aforementioned administration officials are bent on playing down the heartbreaking, relentless fragility of a people we deemed necessary to liberate and manipulate to our own geopolitical ends. But yet everyday the violence gets worse and the civil and political situation remains well, a basket case. Rather than suggest, perhaps, the Surge fell short of its exalted goals and gloried, storied distinctions, they will ignore what is right in front of their faces. Political expediency still reigns. If anyone thinks it will be any different for the people of Afghanistan (our other war) a year from now, I have a market to sell them in Adhamiyah.
National Review’s Rich Lowry:
A major irony in Bush’s policy is that Iran appears to be much better primed than Iraq for a transition to democratic government (although Iraq is managing it anyway). It hasn’t been devastated by sanctions and war the way Iraq was; its faux elections let people at least exercise their democratic muscles; and the country has a relatively well-developed civil society. [my emphasis]
Just give it some time, Rich!
More seriously, Lowry’s comment does cut to the core contradiction of the neocon position on Iran. The same people who so self-righteously hold themselves up as champions of the slain Neda and protectors of innocent Iranians want nothing more than to ramp up sanctions (which, as Fred Kagan forthrightly admitted, will have the immediate effect of killing innocent Iranians) followed in all likelihood by military strikes (the destructive effects of which should need no explanation.) The fact that war with Iran would likely consolidate the hardliners’ power and snuff out the opposition similarly does not seem to factor into the thinking of these courageous defenders of the Iranian people.
Of course, any act against the United States government is an act of terrorism. Just read the first graf of this Jeff Stein blog post:
He may yet turn out to be the avatar of Iranian democracy, but three decades ago Mir-Hossein Mousavi was waging a terrorist war on the United States that included bloody attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut.
So he was waging this terrorist war on the United States. In Beirut. Beirut, Lebanon. And what were these Americans doing? Oh, just minding their own business:
[W]hy were American and French troops in Beirut in 1983, the mid-point of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war (1975-1990)?
Israel’s 1982 Invasion of Lebanon
On June 6, 1982, Israel, led by gen. Ariel Sharon, invaded Lebanon. The goal was to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization’s operation in Lebanon, where it had established itself as a full-fledged state-within-a-state: The PLO controlled most of West Beirut and most of South Lebanon.
Israel’s invasion was brutally, tactically efficient but strategically disastrous. In 18 weeks, according to the Red Cross, some 17,000 people, most of them Lebanese civilians, were killed in the invasion. The PLO was routed. But Israel created a power vacuum in its place. That vacuum was immediately filled by a new Shiite militia in South Lebanon receiving weapons and money from Syria and Iran, a group that called itself the Party of God, or Hezbollah.
Meanwhile the PLO agreed in August 1982 to exit Lebanon. To ensure a safe exit, the United States, France and Italy sent a multinational force to Beirut. By August 30, Yaser Arafat and the PLO were out of Beirut. Some 6,000 PLO fighters were evacuated, mostly to Tunisia. The Multinational force was gone by Sept. 10. Four days later, the U.S. and Israeli-backed Christian Phalangist leader and Lebanese President-Elect Bashir Gemayel is assassinated at his headquarters in East Beirut.
From Blunder to Massacre
On Sept. 15, Israeli troops invaded West Beirut, the first time an Israeli force enters an Arab capital, supposedly to maintain the peace. The invasion did the opposite. Israel bused dozens of Christian militiamen to the southern suburbs of West Beirut then unleashed the militiamen—many of them from villages that, several years earlier, had been the scene of massacres by Palestinians—into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. The militiamen’s orders were to find remaining Palestinian militants hiding in the camps.
But there were no such laggards. Israel knew that the Christian militiamen would attack civilians. Which they did, for two days and nights, under Israeli supervision. To enable the killings at night, Israeli forces launched flares into the night sky.
The Multinational Force Is Asked to Return
In the wake of the massacre, the Lebanese government of Amin Gemayel, brother of Bashir, asks the multinational force to return to help ensure peace. The Marines, the French paratroopers and the Italians land in Beirut again on September 24.
At first the American forces acted as objective peacekeepers. But gradually, the Reagan administration gave in to pressure by the Gemayel government to take its side against Druze and Shiite Muslims in central and southern Lebanon. American troops, welcomed with rice and roses in the Shiite slums of Beirut, slowly became pariahs in Shiites’ eyes. Mistrust turned to outright belligerence once American forces used their firepower to shell Druze and Shiite positions in the mountains surrounding Beirut.
Continue
Daniel Halper writes in The Weekly Standard today:
On “The Early Show” this morning, Obama said that “what we can do is bear witness and say–to the world that the, you know, incredible demonstrations that we’ve seen is a testimony to–I think what Dr. King called the–the arc of the moral universe. It’s long but it bends towards justice.”
Perhaps this is so, but Martin Luther King didn’t “bear witness” to the civil rights movement in America–he was a courageous participant. Obama now has a choice: Will he be a courageous participant or a weak witness? Will he declare that the elections in Iran were rigged, or will he continue to say that he does not know?
As Halper is probably aware, there is one fairly significant difference between King’s relation to the civil rights movement and Obama’s relation to the current protests in Iran. King was, indeed, a “courageous participant” in the civil rights movement, but he was an American and a leader of the movement itself. Obama, by contrast, is neither an Iranian nor a leader of the Iranian protest movement — rather, he is the leader of a rival power that has a fraught history with Iran.
It is fairly obvious that the level of “participation” that would be desirable, or effective, for a homegrown civil society leader would be different from that of a rival foreign leader. But to illustrate this obvious fact more sharply, consider the following thought experiment. In 1963, as King delivers his famous speech to the March on Washington, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev delivers a public message of his own to the protesters. “We would like to tell these brave voices of freedom,” Khrushchev says, “that they have the full support and solidarity of the USSR. The Soviet Union and the United States Communist Party are ready and willing to perform any measures within our power to help our American brothers and sisters obtain their rights from this oppressive regime. And although Dr. King pretends that he holds no hostility toward the American capitalist system of government itself, and wishes only to secure the ideals of the American founding for all of its citizens, we all know that he and his supporters really yearn for complete regime change in Washington. We in Moscow will do whatever it takes to help you achieve this goal.”
Let us ignore the question of Khrushchev’s intentions here: whether he is motivated by genuine sympathy and desire to aid the civil rights marchers, or a more cynical hope of destabilizing a rival government, or a narcissistic and self-righteous wish to take credit for the marchers’ achievement in order to feel better about himself and appease his domestic critics. (And before anyone gets up in arms about “moral equivalence,” let me note than I am not equating Obama’s America and Khrushchev’s Russia, merely noting that Obama and Khrushchev occupy structurally similar positions as leaders of distrusted rival powers.)
Let us focus only on a simple tactical question: would Khrushchev’s statement aid the civil rights movement? Would it be welcomed by King and his associates? Why or why not?
Like Justin, I’m pulling for Iran’s Greenies. No, Mousavi’s worldview and goals aren’t radically different from Ahmadinejad’s; if they were, his candidacy wouldn’t have been approved by the clerics. Nor are the people out in Tehran’s streets good little junior Americans, much less state-hating libertarians like me. But the protesters strike me as decent people with understandable grievances, and Mousavi does have a different temperament than Ahmadinejad, which, as Obama has demonstrated in the last week, actually matters sometimes. (For the first time since the inauguration, I’ve had reason to be relieved that that one beat the other one, because at least the former, while dedicated in principle to all the same fundamentals as the latter, isn’t an impetuous hothead. Obama may yet decide to bomb Iran into compliance with pristine Chicago election standards, but – and I truly hate the phrase “X would have been worse” – Allah only knows what McCain, who combines all the worst traits of a hormone-addled adolescent and a mean old fart, would have done by now.)
In addition to having a better temperament, Mousavi hasn’t yet been fitted for his custom-made caricature. If he miraculously ends up becoming Iran’s president, it will take America’s Mideast hegemonists a few months to affix the Haji Hitler mask to Mousavi’s unfamiliar visage, which may be enough time to head off new sanctions or an Israeli air strike. Moreover, it will be difficult, though hardly impossible, for all the establishment commentators who have made a secular Bodhisattva of Mousavi to take it all back when he, unsurprisingly, protests the U.S. encirclement of his country and insists on Iran’s rights to nuclear energy. In fact, if the mullahs were crafty chess masters, they would invalidate the election results – regardless of who actually won – and install Mousavi immediately. This would be an enormous boost to their domestic credibility (they could blame all the fraud on Ahmadinejad), and it would leave their international critics speechless – again, at least for a while.
But, sadly, that probably won’t happen, so it’s best for those who want peace to emphasize the primacy of negotiations with the Iranian government over the proper composition of that government. And to those who suddenly know, know, KNOW everything about Iranian politics and society: please acquire some self-awareness and humility. A lot of you guys knew, knew, KNEW everything about Iraq seven years ago, and we see the glorious dividends of your omniscience today. If you sincerely want to help your newfound friends in Iran, your first priority should be making sure that our own government (or the one in Jerusalem that it funds and backs to the hilt) doesn’t out-murder the Basij a thousand times over with bombs and missiles.
