Monthly Archive for January, 2011

Political protests continued throughout Egypt yesterday and today, though in smaller numbers due to a violent crackdown by security forces. The government has banned public gatherings and has arrested thousands, deploying baton-wielding riot police, tear gas, and plainclothes officers. Nonetheless, even larger demonstrations are planned for tomorrow after Friday prayers.

Looking at the above scene, we all of course hope for the citizens of Egypt to beat back a dictatorship that has given them nothing but thirty years of immiseration and brutal repression. But beyond this abstract solidarity and this instinctive recoiling from clear injustice, are there other reasons Americans should care?

Yes, because American taxpayers directly underwrite this injustice, and directly sponsor the ongoing oppression.

Since 1979 the U.S. has given Egypt $1.3 billion in unconditional military aid every year, and hundreds of millions more in annual economic assistance. That’s over $60 billion of U.S. taxpayer money straight into Mr. Mubarak’s pocket. Some of the military aid goes to modernizing Egyptian army forces and equipment. That army, lavished with patronage and perks, is given monopolistic control over broad swathes of the domestic Egyptian economy, and is in turn deeply loyal to the Mubarak regime. But since Egypt faces no real external military threat, much of the military aid is diverted to buttress Mubarak’s brutal domestic security apparatus, which has been especially busy this week beating and tear-gassing its own citizens.

How are we to feel about that? Secretary Clinton, after an initial anemic statement on Tuesday in which she helped propagandize for the regime by declaring it “stable,” came out much more forcefully yesterday:

We believe strongly that the Egyptian government has an important opportunity at this moment in time to implement political, economic and social reforms to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.

That’s pretty strong stuff, in the world of diplomat-speak anyway. But what happens when Mubarak, alas, decides to let this “important opportunity” pass? What happens when he has bloodied enough faces to demonstrate once again that he cares not a whit about the “legitimate needs and interests” of his people?

What is most infuriating is the total contempt on display here by the Egyptian government. There has been no attempt by Mubarak to conciliate, or even acknowledge the people’s grievances. Mubarak’s reptilian Interior Minister has merely issued a statement that preposterously blames all the unrest on their eternal bogeyman, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Mohamed ElBaradei, erstwhile head of the IAEA and a current leader in the opposition movement, notes in the NYT that it is in fact the country’s youth that is propelling the current protests. Egypt is famous for a disillusioned and disenfranchized citizenry that has grown resigned and apathetic toward its seemingly hopeless political plight. But ElBaradei notes that the nation’s youth is more politicized and angry than ever before.

“It was the young people who took the initiative and set the date and decided to go,” said an admiring ElBaradei of the recent protests.

Here, again, is the real tragedy which lays bare this regime’s disregard for anything beyond its own short-term survival. These brave young protesters are disproportionately urban, modern, educated, and technologically savvy. In short, they represent any realistic hope that Egypt has for a future of growth, prosperity, development, innovation, and cultural vitality. By disregarding their legitimate grievances, the regime shows its utter disdain for the very future of its own country. This is not surprising, of course, but it is appalling anew.

While Hillary Clinton’s strong words of support for democratic change is nice to see, our decades-long sponsoring of this vile regime gives us no credibility to criticize its behavior. The only lever we have is all that U.S. taxpayer money, which has done nothing but helped the regime perpetuate its power. There has never been a credible threat to condition any of our military aid on real political reform, or on assuring that the above scenes of brutality do not occur. That would be unduly interfering in Egypt’s internal affairs, we are told. But of course, we are interfering now, just on the wrong side.

Savvy commentators like to point out that if the Mubarak regime falls, the only large-scale opposition movement waiting in the wings is the Muslim Brotherhood, who harbor foreign policy objectives that are rather less amenable to U.S. interests. And so, the argument goes, we better be careful what we wish for when we call for democracy in Egypt. I once had some residual sympathy for this line of thought, but no longer. The reality is that no one knows how free and fair elections would turn out. There’s never been one. As the Egyptian government has deliberately set up the Brotherhood as the only real and semi-tolerated opposition group in the country—all the better to scare western governments into unconditional support for the status quo—more liberal forces have never had the chance to organize and coalesce into a viable movement. Were they given this political space to operate unfettered, who knows how they’d do?

It’s certainly true that the MB would play a large role in any future democratic Egyptian government. But it is long past time that we give up our misplaced fear of nonviolent Islamist groups that agree to abide by democratic outcomes. As much as I loathe their platform, the Brotherhood has met this criteria for many years. It contains within it both conservative and reformist strains, and the U.S. should be preparing to navigate this future landscape with a view toward ensuring our interests within it, rather than just handing the money over year after year and hoping everything stays quiet.

Our unconditional taxpayer support for this regime is no longer justifiable on any of the old grounds. The regime guarantees neither domestic nor regional security or stability, and has done precisely nothing in thirty years to advance Arab/Israeli peace. It impoverishes and brutalizes and stands against the aspirations and well-being of its people, and our government should end our complicity in this depraved state of affairs; this sordid sponsorship, done in our names, with our money.

Among watchers of Middle East politics it is often wondered: Is the main problem with Arab regimes that they are too strong, or too weak?

The "too weak" case: Authoritarian Arab regimes have no popular legitimacy and often fail at the most basic tasks of modern governance: they cannot deliver economic prosperity or stability, they can’t provide adequate access to education, to healthcare, to infrastructure, to food and clean water; their fecklessness engenders feelings of desperation and cynicism and hopelessness and ennui among the populace, and not surprisingly such societies are saddled with the compounding effect of massive brain drain and capital flight.

But of course, Arab regimes are too strong as well. They preside over a brutal suppressive internal security apparatus; they often have oversized militaries; they use intimidation and arbitrary jailing and torture to repress political rights, rights of expression, religion, press, and association. The opposition to their rule is often fragmented, weak, disorganized, and fearful. The regimes directly or indirectly control much of the domestic economy, and use this control to steer resources and rents to preferred powerful constituencies, who in turn have a stake in protecting the regime status quo.

As the saying goes: "Neither bread nor freedom."

The extraordinary events in Tunisia have buttressed the "too weak" thesis. The material and psychological crisis of a generation was personified by one man and one unimaginably desperate act of self-immolation. Within a month, a twenty-three year dictatorship, thought to be one of the most competent and stable in the region, was over, and the dictator was left shopping around like a supplicant for a country in which to live out his ignominious exile.

This first-ever popular overthrow of an Arab tyrant has sparked solidarity protests and demonstrations throughout the region, including further acts of self-immolation in Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia. Regional governments are now scrambling to defuse popular resentment and stave off a revolutionary critical mass. Algeria is purchasing more wheat to prevent bread shortages; Kuwait just announced that it is giving every citizen $3,500 to help with rising prices; Egypt has cancelled planned economic reforms that would have cut public subsidies.

Egypt, the most populous Arab nation and the cultural heart of the region, is now embroiled in protests across the capital and throughout the country. Today saw violent clashes in Cairo between riot police and thousands of protestors.

But one can never be optimistic about the prospects of bottom-up reform in Egypt. The protests today look to be dominated, as usual, by young urban cosmopolitans, and however many tens of thousands have participated in this recent wave, it is a miniscule slice of Egypt’s 80 million people. Even if this escalates further, the Egyptian regime has no qualms about using overwhelming brute force to quell unrest; and as a last resort, Egypt’s army, as Middle East expert Blake Hounshell reminds us, contains "more than a million men at arms, well-equipped and presumably well motivated to protect their significant interests across the country."

At Foreign Policy, Steve Heydemann puts in another important point for the "too strong" contingent:

Arab regimes have often been criticized as sclerotic and archaic; they are neither. Over the past two decades, they have confronted and overcome a wide range of challenges that have caused authoritarian governments to collapse in many other world regions. […]

They have absorbed and survived the shock of the political transformations of 1989, the democratization of Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Through trial and error, they have developed strategies for managing pressures for political reform and fending off the democracy promoters of the West…They have learned how to control Islamist political participation, regulate new media technologies, and broker new divisions of labor between state and market in pursuit of economic development. […]

In the process, they have insulated themselves from a Tunisia-like scenario.

It’s certainly true that periods of sharp unrest and civil demonstration are not new to these countries, and their leaders have become expert at defusing such situations through a combination of demoralizing force, and tangible but ultimately toothless reforms.

However this current unprecedented regional wave of dissent plays out, Middle East expert Marc Lynch sees something fundamentally different this time around:

There seems to be a renewed energy and sense of possibility, one which is clearly being understood by Egyptians as part of a broader Arab narrative of a collective popular uprising against economic conditions, political repression, and corruption.

More broadly, it’s astonishing how much is now in motion in Arab politics after such a long period of seeming stagnation. There’s a vivid sense of an era coming to a close and an uncertain new vista opening.

I sincerely hope he’s right. And I hope that the months and years to come will see other Arab despots cowardly skulking out of their country under cover of darkness, scrambling toward exile; they themselves denied the dignity and freedom that they refused their people for so long.

Last week, Secretary Gates expressed concern that China’s civilian and military leadership may be operating at cross-purposes. On Monday a followup piece spelled out the larger trend of diffusion of power across the Chinese system, as rival centers of authority see their interests as increasingly diverging:

President Obama’s top advisers have concluded that Mr. Hu is often at the mercy of a diffuse ruling party in which generals, ministers and big corporate interests have more clout, and less deference, than they did in the days of Mao or Deng Xiaoping, who commanded basically unquestioned authority.

Of course, it’s still a one-party state, so we shouldn’t get too enamored with this "diffusion of authority" theme. But it sure seems that China has a few distinct loci of power within its ruling structure, each increasingly intent on pursuing independent, and at times incompatible, interests. Reading the NYT piece you get the idea that this is a lamentable development from both an American and Chinese perspective. Brent Scowcroft frets, "There is a remarkable amount of chaos in the system" which makes it hard to predict China’s policy shifts. And throughout the article we learn that poor Mr. Hu "lacks the commanding authority of his predecessor," and "it is unclear how firm his grip is," since, after all, "he has never seemed to fully consolidate power." Why? Because, "Mr. Hu is the most constrained Chinese leader in modern times." Just constrained? "Mr. Hu also may be the weakest leader of the Communist era." Ok ok we get it. 

Poor guy. It sounds like Hu’s decade in power—what with all his weakness and loose grips and constrained authority and all the chaos—must have been a complete disaster for the Chinese economy and for China’s global standing. Basically a lost decade, right?

With President Hu Jintao at the helm, China has become a $5 trillion industrial colossus, a growing military force, and, it sometimes appears, a model of authoritarian decisiveness, navigating out of the global financial crisis and sealing its position as the world’s fastest rising power.

Oh that’s right, it’s been China’s greatest decade since the Ming Dynasty. So perhaps it’s a good thing that Hu doesn’t have the cult-of-personality skills of Chairman Mao; and that China no longer seems interested in imbuing its political leadership with inerrant superpowers. Even though it engenders Scowcroft’s dreaded "chaos," a Chinese political system that must finely calibrate and be responsive to pressures from multiple rival power centers, while not exactly Jeffersonian, seems to reveal at least the incipient hints of a proto-democratic character. A more banal, and realistic, claim may be simply that a one-party state is quite a bit better than a one-person state. And a one-party state that has incentives to please various assertive and disparate interests is better than one that doesn’t have to bother. Better for its international "rivals" and better for growth prospects at home.

As Chinese economic and educational development continues, more and more citizens will be in a position to enter and become stakeholders in these rival power centers, and even create new power centers. Will this exacerbate existing tensions within the system? If economic growth slows, will China be able to manage and assuage these disparate interests without loosening its vice grip on political power? Stay tuned for the next thirty years and find out.

I give basically no credence to the "China is a looming threat" genre of political punditry. My basic view, from a recent post:

[T]he global economy is not a zero-sum game, and the continuing ascendancy of developing countries like China and India does not herald a dystopic American future blighted by decline and decadence. Instead this global growth represents both the greatest poverty- and privation-alleviation scheme in human history as well as a massive economic opportunity for those producers and innovators who stand to benefit from world markets that are expanding exponentially in size. […]

[W]e should never fail to recognize that there can indeed be more than one world creativity hub, and several global crossroads, and multiple complementary junction points; and in fact it is this arrangement that holds the greatest potential to maximize human well-being.

All that said, this NYT piece contains a very worrisome tidbit embedded in the middle. First, the set-up:

In a show of force that seemed aimed at the United States and visiting Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, China apparently conducted the first test-flight of its new stealth fighter jet on Tuesday, only hours before Mr. Gates was to meet with President Hu Jintao. […]

Mr. Gates said he directly asked Mr. Hu why [the test-flight] was conducted during a three-day trip that is meant to smooth over rocky relations between the United States military and China’s increasingly assertive armed forces.

Mr. Hu replied, Mr. Gates said, that it “had absolutely nothing to do with my visit.”

So far, a bit of brinksmanship from a growing and assertive world power. Unfortunate and immature and provocative perhaps, but certainly within the boundaries of "acceptable" realpolitik. But here comes the worrisome part:

Asked if Mr. Gates truly believed that, Mr. Gates said yes, but acknowledged he had questions about whether the Chinese military was acting independently of the political leadership. “I’ve had concerns about this over time,” Mr. Gates said.

A senior American defense official traveling with Mr. Gates said the secretary and his aides were surprised that Mr. Hu appeared to be unaware of the test flight when Mr. Gates raised it with him.

Wow, we’ve had "concerns about this over time"? As well we should!

China has a rather inscrutable state-party-military fusion political system. But President Hu Jintao is chairman of both major military decision-making bodies: the Central Military Commission of the People’s Republic of China (a state organ), and the Central Military Commission of the Communist Party of China (a party organ). If he doesn’t know what’s going on, that is indeed a frightening portent, coupled as it is with long-standing U.S. concerns about the secrecy of China’s military expenditures.

I’m not getting alarmist here, and maybe Secretary Gates was just trying to save face by insisting that he couldn’t possibly have been deliberately snubbed by President Hu. But really, just what we need is another power in Asia where military and civilian leaders operate at cross-purposes; which, needless to say, tends to have disastrous consequences for regional and world stability.

In the wake of the attempted Giffords assassination, there has been a predictable debate on whether the climate of violent political rhetoric may have “caused” or “contributed to” the attack. In Slate, Jack Shafer writes in defense of inflamed political rhetoric, which he says acts to channel political discord away from street violence and toward healthier, more passive expressions:

For as long as I’ve been alive, crosshairs and bull’s-eyes have been an accepted part of the graphical lexicon when it comes to political debates. Such “inflammatory” words as targeting, attacking, destroying, blasting, crushing, burying, knee-capping, and others have similarly guided political thought and action. Not once have the use of these images or words tempted me or anybody else I know to kill. […]

Only the tiniest handful of people—most of whom are already behind bars, in psychiatric institutions, or on psycho-meds—can be driven to kill by political whispers or shouts. […]

Our spirited political discourse, complete with name-calling, vilification—and, yes, violent imagery—is a good thing. Better that angry people unload their fury in public than let it fester and turn septic in private.

I largely agree with this. Look around the world. Any society in which citizens cannot criticize their leaders in public is almost definitionally a tinderbox of corruption, capricious law, and low-boil social and political unrest. The pressure release valve afforded by liberal speech rights and a functioning electoral process should never be underestimated, despite the occassional nutjob brushing a thin veneer of political grievance over his otherwise unhinged psychosis.

The last year and a half has actually demonstrated this rather well. For all the “eliminationist rhetoric” (using Paul Krugman’s phrase) stemming from conservative talk radio and television outlets, distilled and echoed by Republican politicians, and then ingested and absorbed by the base; what has been the result? Well, that base, represented by the Tea Party and its affiliates, worked its ass off these many months cultivating and promoting candidates for office to challenge heretic incumbents in primaries. As we all know, they won many of those primaries, and some even were propelled to office. This is exactly how it’s supposed to work!

It’s undeniable that this election cycle was particularly unsavory in the sheer amount of public vitriol expressed. And though it’s a great thing that we common rabble have a healthy channel by which we can “unload our fury,” it’s not always wise for our political and civic leaders to do the same. Not because rhetorical excess by political leaders leads to violence, but for the reason David Frum has been warning against for months: it leads to bad governance.

When you paint your political opposition as Marxists, Nazis, Fascists, illegitimate Kenyan anti-colonialists, barbarians who want to encircle you in death panels or destroy the American way of life—you make compromise, and therefore responsible governance, near impossible. After all, as Frum wrote last year, “How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?”

Here’s a good example. Dave Weigel points to remarks made over the weekend by Patrick Beck, one of the leaders of Arizona’s Tea Party. Beck expressed his belief that the climate of violent rhetorical excess could have indeed played a role in the Giffords assassination attempt, and that politicians need to do a better job explaining their meaning to their constituents:

“And it really brought home that none of this should be personal. When we talk about Barack Obama, we’ve got to be clear, it’s not personal. When we say he’s destroying this country we are not saying he’s doing it out malicious intent and a desire to cripple us. He has good intentions and he’s wrong. I worry when that gets lost.” […]

Though sort of well-meaning, this illustrates Frum’s point. Even if you temper your belief that the president is “destroying the country” with the qualifier “but not out of malicious intent!”—you’ve still accused the president of the United States of wanting to destroy the country! How then can you turn around and negotiate in good faith with a country destroyer? You’ve boxed yourself in with your rhetoric. Frum again:

If Barack Obama really were a fascist, really were a Nazi, really did plan death panels to kill the old and infirm, really did contemplate overthrowing the American constitutional republic—if he were those things, somebody should shoot him.

But he is not.

If he were those things, if not shoot him, you would at least design a political agenda that looks exactly like Mitch McConnell’s: make as your number one legislative priority the removal of Barack Obama from office, even at the expense of obstructing and distorting the entire machinery of democratic governance. If you believe the worst of Barack Obama, then McConnell’s strategy is a heroic imperative!

I’m not worried about such inflammatory rhetoric because it’ll make a deranged, conspiratorial individual act in a deranged, conspiratorial manner; as Shafer argues, that’ll happen anyway. I’m worried because it meaningfully limits the set of behaviors available to politicians when their constituents have been made to believe the president is “literally at war” with them.

As Frum argued after the health care bill passed, had Republicans decided to cooperate and negotiate with the president in exchange for their support, they could have gotten any conservative whim or folly they wanted into that bill. They could have fought for more stringent cost control measures, or for alternative revenue sources, or even exploded the entire employer-based system as Wyden-Bennett wanted to do. In those dark days after Scott Brown’s election, they could have asked for anything! But since the president is a Marxist-Fascist who literally wants to destroy the country, they boycotted and stonewalled and obstructed, and so the bill passed anyway with no Republican input. Despite their short-term political gain, as Frum said, “Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever.”

In short, Republicans completely blew it. Their embrace of rhetorical excess didn’t lead to the terrible violence this weekend; but it made for myopic politics, and led to (from their perspective) even worse policy. That should induce plenty of soul-searching all on its own.

A few weeks ago I had said I was looking forward to the opportunity of opting out of the airport backscatter irradiation device and receiving my government-issued manual genital massage. No such luck.

Much like James Fallows’ recent experience, I approached the security area at Reagan National Airport and saw that the line forked into two lanes; one lane led to an enhanced scanner and the other to a plain old metal detector. So I just chose the metal detector line. Feeling good about that brilliant evasive maneuver, I soon learned that it wasn’t even necessary. By the time I got to the front, the x-ray scanner machine had been cordoned off, and everyone from both lanes was being funneled through the metal detector.

On my fight home out of Boston Logan, same exact thing. The scanner machine had been cordoned off and inactive by the time I got to the front of the line. I asked the nearby TSA officer why they had just shut off the scanner. He gave a vague answer about it being related to scheduled shift transitions, but then he said it was just random throughout the day. This got me angry. Are these wildly expensive and undignified machines essential for my safety, or are they not? The answer cannot possibly be, “yes, except during scheduled shift changes.” Janet Napolitano says they make us all “objectively safer.” Assuming you can manage to find an airport and a particular security lane which leads to one of these machines (there are only 1000 machines currently deployed, and there are 2200 separate security lanes in the U.S.), why then is TSA insisting on making us objectively “less safe” by switching the machines off throughout the day?

There’s obviously utility in cultivating ambiguity and randomness in your security procedures. And a truly random procedure can be quite effective as a deterrent, if the procedure itself actually works as a security measure. But of course, these machines do not work, so the threat that they might be operational at any time is not a deterrent at all. If there were a smart, dedicated terrorist in any of these lines with me, he wouldn’t care which security lane he was in (though he’d surely chose the least-resistant path, as I did), and he wouldn’t care about the TSA’s inscrutable method of shutting the scanners on and off throughout the day. He would have undetectable explosive material in his anal cavity, or his mouth, and that’s that. Nothing can be done about that, and no official has claimed otherwise.

In her USA Today op-ed in November, at the height of the TSA backlash, Janet Napolitano said that these scanners “represent…a commitment to be one step ahead of those who seek to do us harm.” Notwithstanding the cavity bomb problem which makes nonsense of her statement, there is an impressive amount of wrongness in that tiny quote. First, wouldn’t it be better if she actually were one step ahead, rather than just doing things that represent a commitment to be one step ahead? Second, yes, it would be better, but not by much. How many steps are there on this ladder to perfect security? Since, as TSA chief John Pistole admits, the only perfect security method would be nobody flies, there are an infinite number of steps in Napolitano’s “one step ahead” approach. And the approach is much more aptly described as a one step behind approach. Surely our TSA security evolution shows that we are resigned to playing a game of leap-frog in which the terrorists, not we, jump first, leaving us fumbling to respond and catch up to yesterday’s threats. Liquids, shoes, underwear, toner cartridges. Are we one step ahead? Are we even representing a commitment to be?

Pistole actually seems like a thoughtful guy with an impossible job. Read his full interview with the Atlantic’s Jim Fallows and Jeff Goldberg. He concedes all of the following:

–Another successful airplane attack is inevitable

–As we harden airports and airplanes as targets, it may just displace the terror threat to other public venues

–The gaps in airport security are infinite. Huge majority of airport employees—many with tarmac access—are never physically screened. The snaking security lines are themselves very vulnerable to attack.

–Today’s airport security is an interim solution to a long-term problem. We need a radical change away from inspection of materials and toward inspection of passengers.

–Current TSA workforce does not have the educational and professional skills to manage this necessary transition.

These are interesting admissions, and reflect very consequential policy debates that will be essential in the coming years. My main point here is that it is sad that only the readers of the Atlantic (and this blog) can benefit from them. Why doesn’t Pistole hold a prime-time press conference and explain all this to the American people as if we were adults? Why don’t our leaders discuss the inevitability of the next attack and thereby begin to inure the public against manic overreaction when it occurs? Why don’t they admit that there are yawning gaps in current security procedures, and the only means available to try and fill those gaps often lead to very blunt and imprecise and ineffectual tactical tail-chasing?

Our current architecture of domestic security is a façade of wish-thinking and built upon a systematic infantalizing of the American public; one that insists that security theater is the same as security, and that providing a symbol of being one step ahead is the same as being one step ahead. Our political leaders will indeed be scorned ruthlessly when the next attack occurs, and for their craven avoidance of hard choices, and their abased estimation of the maturity and dignity of the American people, they will have earned it.