As the Obama administration continues to treat the U.S.-taxpayer-financed dictator Hosni Mubarak with kid gloves, media outlets like Salon have rightly pointed out that our support of undemocratic tyrants is not limited to Egypt. It has become more the norm than the exception. The question is: why? Why are we, a supposed beacon of democracy, so invested in so many dictatorships?
Obviously, there are many answers to that question. Some of it has to do with imperial aspirations, as taboo as that is to even mention. Some of it has to do with good ol' fashioned Big Money lobbying, as I showed yesterday. And some of it has to do with what Dr. Martin Luther King identified in his Riverside Church speech: We back dictators over democracy because we "refuse to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments" -- profits often guaranteed by dictators where they wouldn't be so guaranteed by popularly elected governments.
As powerful as these motives are, however, there is still one other factor at play: addiction.
Dictators are, in a way, like a drug. We start out backing them, perhaps thinking it will be a momentary alliance, just like a person might take a single hit from the pipe. But then, the subjugated population begins to revolt, just like the body begins to revolt without the drug. So we start intensifying our support for the dictator to keep the increasingly restive population down, just like the addict starts to consume more drugs to prevent the body from going into a more painful withdrawal.
This cycle of addiction then snowballs (to badly mix metaphors). The more angry the subjugated population becomes at the dictator and us for backing him, the more we feel an urgency to help prop up the dictator for fear of an ever-more powerful backlash against that dictator and, by extension, us. It's like the addict thinking the only way to survive and mitigate pain is to keep upping the dosage.
Of course, the only way to truly fix the problem is some sort of intervention -- to break the cycle on our own terms, rather than effectively overdose. Instead of, say, unendingly backing dictators like the Shah of Iran until the repression creates the condition for a catastrophic fundamentalist revolution (overdose), we should be looking for ways to proactively break this addiction cycle completely as a way to avoid such catastrophe.
That's what the Egypt protests still (amazingly) provides us right now -- a way to break that cycle without helping to further create the conditions for catastrophe. Right now, we have an out -- protests in the street still give us a fleeting opportunity to back away from our addiction to dictatorship (in this case, the Mubarak dictatorship). Incredibly (and thankfully), despite our 30 year backing of Mubarak, it doesn't seem like we are at that overdose point yet -- that point of, say, an Iran-style revolution based on raw anti-American anger. And indeed, if we are truly worried about an Iran-style conflagration in Egypt, the best way to try to avoid it isn't to back the dictator creating such a backlash - it's to stop backing the dictator.
Certainly, there will be unpleasant moments if we finally decide break our dictator addiction -- just like its painful for the junkie to go cold turkey, we may feel uncomfortable with newly democratic governments choosing to do things we don't like. But if we continue taking more hits of Mubarak's dictator drug, we will be doing our part to guarantee that much more painful overdose, because we will be further aligning ourselves with the regime the subjugated Egyptian populace so despises. And more generally, if we perpetuate this cycle of dictator addiction by continuing to so forcefully back all those other dictatorships around the globe, we will be helping guarantee other overdoses in the future.
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Rhonda Roumani: Revolution on the Nile is 60 Years in the Making
After Citizens United, elections will soon be window dressing to help us keep up the appearance of Democracy while corporate backed candidates from the Right will overwhelm their opponents with money and slick advertising. These autocrats identify with the despots of the world because they are in controlling the world just as they intend to do.
Egypt became most crucial when the U.S. was able to broker the Israel - Egypt peace treaty which set a cornerstone for the influence the hegemonic partners of Israel and U.S. in the Middle East. While these partners became addled with the success of the stability Mubarak supplied, it is now quite apparent that it is the stability of the jigsaw puzzle that matters over who in person provides it, as long as it is provided.
U.S. foreign policy concentrates much more on the maintenance, continuance, and stability of regimes in the furtherance of imperial design. If this means a new leader, as it may in Egypt, that leader will meet the specs. After that, if an undesired result flowers despite the imperial power's bag men engineering, our true addiction will come to the fore.
It isn't 'America' that has the addiction. Americans have their own personal addictions
which will rarely include what the leaders in other countries are labeled--despot, dictator,
ineffective, corrupt or just fear-based.
That addiction is the ego trip of becoming a politician and all that that entails-waving
to the crowd, being sought after for an opinion by the media, an occasional television
appearance, thinking one is the focus of most of the country, knowing a little about a lot
of subjects, performing grandly for the next election, the validity of oneself by who they
stand next to on the podium, thinking a country 'belongs' to them, etc.
It all goes hand in hand with being a politician, whether here or abroad, whether of a
populous state or country or of a small town of 1500 souls or a small, local, organization
that hands out meals to the homeless.
America's addiction is 'possession', denoted in many phrases tossed out like beads at
Mardi Gras--my son, my children, my church, our friend, our interests, our ally, our course
of action, etc.; and seen almost everyday whenever one encounters that clerk, that telephone
voice or that figure of authority that runs their lives 'by the numbers' and has no recourse
available to them whenever a new idea doesn't fit their 'by-the-numbers' code book.
There are those who admire despots, tyrants, and dictators...and often wish that our nation would declare "the great experiment" of representative Democracy failed, so that one can be appointed.
It's not a new sentiment.
Back in the 1780's, members of the New England delegation actually invited Prince Henry of Saxony to become "King of the United States."
In the 1930's, the leader of Moral Re-Armament (the forebearer of The Moral Majority) actually expressed the opinion that if Hitler would have "turned Christian," all of the world's problems would be solved overnight.
Mussolini's "ability" to make the streetcars run on time, run the street people off of Rome's streets, and ensure hot water in all Italian hotel rooms were often highly admired here in America...who also wished for the same to "happen here."
Plus, you had folks like Henry Ford, Charles Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, Ezra Pound, and Breckenridge Long (Secretary of Sate in Roosevelt's Administrations) who were admirers of Hitler...and were not too keen on our political system to begin with.
As a nation, we need to vigilant about such folks...even today. For such folks are not necessarily found in the "lunatic fringe" of American Politics.
--RKJ
True but also back in the days of the cold war, dictators, rightly or wrongly, were considered the lesser of two evils. Most dictators of that era came in a far second when compared with our former ally, Josef Stalin, so working with them or staging coups to put them into power were minor considerations when faced with a world where communism seemed everywhere. Of course after the Wall fell our need (or addiction) for dictators should have ended but it didn't and that says a lot about our often flawed foreign policy stemming from that era. What's happening in Egypt now can be considered blowback or just another case of the chickens coming home to roost.
Furthermore, these dictators provide stable support of our policies in a volatile region (whose local populations often differ in opinion with our geo-political needs) for decades. It has been effective for the last 30 years. But, in our naivete, we have focused on the short term gains from these policies and, in our myopia, not realized the long tern consequences and unsustainability of these policies.
We cannot except a people to suffer indignity and injustice indefinitely. Eventually, they will stand up for their innate human rights. That volatile point can place our interests in irrevocable danger, which should have made us choose a different path at some point over the last 30 years. But, as an alcoholic is blind to their problem, we are blind to the inherent fallacies of our support of unjust autocracies.
Unpopular position that you want to sell to a foreign populace? Get Pres_____ to issue a public statement and tell him we'll sent him some more CIA operatives to "train" his police and military. They are easy to control politically, but they are human rights nightmares.
Our nation has always loved them and backed them, and only when our political interests were in conflict(Quadafi, Marcos, Hussein, Pinochet, Noriega) with their ambitions did we turn our backs on them.