[Mb-civic] On Democracy and Hamas and George

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0131-20.htm

Published on Tuesday, January 31, 2006 by the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer
Democracy Isn't For Our Friends Only
by Robert Fisk

      Oh no, not more democracy again! Didn't we award this to those
Algerians in 1990? And didn't they reward us with that nice gift of an
Islamist government -- and then they so benevolently canceled the second
round of elections? Thank goodness for that!

      True, the Afghans elected a round of representatives, albeit they
included warlords and murderers. But the Iraqis last year elected the Dawa
party in Baghdad, which was responsible -- let us not speak this in
Washington, D.C. -- for most of the kidnappings of Westerners in Beirut in
the '80s, the car bombing of the (late) emir and the United States and
French embassies in Kuwait.

      Now, horror of horrors, the Palestinians have elected the wrong      party.
They were supposed to have given their support to the pro-Western,
corrupt, absolutely pro-American Fatah, which had promised to "control"
them, rather than to Hamas, which said they would represent them. And,
bingo, they have chosen the wrong party again.

      Result: 76 of 132 seats. That just about does it. What are we to do
with people who don't vote the way they should?

      In the 1930s, the British would lock up the Egyptians who turned
against the government of King Farouk. Thus they began to set the
structure of anti-democratic governance that was to follow. The French
imprisoned the Lebanese government, which demanded the same. Then the
French left Lebanon.

      But we have always expected the Arab governments to do what they  were 
told.

      So today, we are expecting the Syrians to behave, the Iranians to
kowtow to our nuclear desires (though they have done nothing illegal) and
the North Koreans to surrender their weapons (though they actually do have
them, and therefore cannot be attacked).

      Now let the burdens of power lie heavy on the shoulders of the   party.
Now let the responsibilities of people lie upon them. We British would
never talk to the Irish Republican Army. But in due course, Gerry Adams
came to take tea with the queen. The Americans would never speak to their
enemies in North Vietnam. But they did. In Paris.

      No, al-Qaida will not do that. But the Iraqi leaders of the    insurgency
in Mesopotamia will. They talked to the British in 1920, and they will
talk to the Americans in 2006.

      Back in 1983, Hamas talked to the Israelis. They spoke directly to
them about the spread of mosques and religious teaching. The Israeli army
boasted about this on the front page of the Jerusalem Post. At that time,
it looked like the Palestine Liberation Organization was not going to
abide by the Oslo resolutions. There seemed nothing wrong, therefore, with
continuing talks with Hamas. So how come talks with Hamas now seem so
impossible?

      Not long after the Hamas leadership had been hurled into southern
Lebanon, a leading member of its organization heard me say that I was en
route to Israel.

      "You'd better call Shimon Peres," he told me. "Here's his home
number."

      The phone number was correct -- proof members of the hierarchy of  the
most extremist Palestinian movements were talking to senior Israeli
politicians.

      The Israelis know well the Hamas leadership. And the Hamas  leadership
know well the Israelis. There is no point in journalists suggesting
otherwise. Our enemies invariably turn out to be our greatest friends, and
our friends turn out to be our enemies.

      How terrible to speak with those who have killed our sons. How
unspeakable to converse with those who have our brothers' blood on their
hands. No doubt that is how Americans who believed in independence felt
about the Englishmen who fired upon them.

      It will be for the Iraqis to deal with al-Qaida. This is their   burden.
Not ours. Yet throughout history, we have ended up talking to our enemies.

      We talked to the representatives of the emperor of Japan. In the  end,
we had to accept the surrender of the German Reich from the successor to
Adolf Hitler. And today, we trade happily with the Japanese, the Germans
and the Italians.

      The Middle East was never a successor to Nazi Germany or Fascist
Italy, despite the rubbish talked by President Bush and British Prime
Minister Tony Blair. How long will it be before we can throw away the
burden of this most titanic of wars and see our future, not as our past,
but as a reality?

      Surely, in an age when our governments no longer contain men or    women
who have experienced war, we must now lead a people with the understanding
of what war means. Not Hollywood. Not documentary films. Democracy means
real freedom, not just for the people we choose to have voted into power.

      And that is the problem in the Middle East.

      Robert Fisk writes for The Independent in Britain.

***

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/opinion/01dowd.html?th&emc=th

Didn't See It Coming, Again
By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Op-Ed: February 1, 2006
Washington

The White House should hire an anthropologist.
Corporations have begun hiring anthropologists to help them improve
product designs and interpret markets. And clearly, the Bush foreign
policy team doesn't understand any of the markets where it is barging
around ineptly trying to sell America and democracy.

The brand value of America has been in steady decline. The state of the
union is sour but the state of the world is chilling, thanks to a
hideously ham-handed Bush foreign policy crew that was once billed as a
seasoned "dream team."

The more the White House tries to force-feed democracy to tempestuous
parts of the world, the more it discovers that you may be able to spin and
scare voters in the U.S., but the Middle East is not so easy to
manipulate. W. believes in self-determination only if he's doing the
determining. Fundamentalists in America like to vote for Mr. Bush, but
elsewhere they're violently opposing him.

It's stunning that nearly four decades after Vietnam, our government could
be even more culturally illiterate and pigheaded. The Bushies are more
obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures
think and react.

One smart anthropologist reinforcing the idea that "mirroring" - assuming
other cultures think like us - doesn't work would be a lot more helpful
than all of the discredited intelligence agencies that are costing $30
billion a year to miss everything from the breakup of the Soviet Union to
9/11 to no W.M.D. to Osama's hiding place to the Hamas victory.

Bush officials keep claiming they couldn't have anticipated disasters -
from the terrorist attacks to Katrina - even when they got specific
warnings beforehand. Busy building up the fake nuclear threat in Iraq,
they misplayed the real ones in Iran and North Korea. In London Sunday,
Condi Rice admitted that all of our diplomats and spies were caught off
guard by the Hamas win. "I've asked why nobody saw it coming," she said.
"It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse."

Instead of paying the Lincoln Group millions to plant fake newspaper
stories in Iraq, the Bush team might try reading real newspaper stories
here. Instead of simply believing any fact that makes him feel
self-important, the president might try reading history.

Like many other presidential candidates I've interviewed, W. said he liked
Winston Churchill. But if he really had read Churchill, he would at least
have understood that the Middle East never turns out the way you expect.
Churchill, who called Iraq "an ungrateful volcano," would not have been
surprised by the new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll showing that close to
half of Iraqis approve of attacks on American forces.

The State of the Union is a non-event. But Bob Woodruff and his cameraman,
Doug Vogt, being blown up by a roadside bomb has forced the media to focus
on what the Bushies try to hide - all the injured and maimed coming home
from Iraq.

Mark Landler's Times piece noted that the ABC journalists came to the
hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, "on a military transport plane carrying 31
wounded soldiers - about a normal daily influx for this hospital."

As Denise Grady wrote in The Times, the survival rate in Iraq is higher
than in other wars, but the wounds are multiple and awful: "combinations
of damaged brains and spinal cords, vision and hearing loss, disfigured
faces, burns, amputations, mangled limbs, and psychological ills like
depression and post-traumatic stress."

The Oilman in Chief lecturing us last night, after five oblivious years,
about being drunk on oil, now that Halliburton and Exxon are swimming in
profits - Exxon's revenues were bigger than the gross domestic product of
either Saudi Arabia or Indonesia - was rich.

A more honest TV moment was Christiane Amanpour labeling Iraq "a black
hole." The "spiraling security disaster," she told Larry King, had robbed
Iraqis of hope, "and by any indication whether you take the number of
journalists killed or wounded, whether you take the number of American
soldiers killed or wounded, whether you take the number of Iraqi soldiers
killed and wounded, contractors, people working there, it just gets worse
and worse."

But, hey, how could the Bushies have known that occupying a Middle East
country - and flipping the balance of power from one sect to another -
without enough troops to secure it could go wrong? Who on earth could
predict the inevitable?


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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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