We’re saddling up for a firewood safari, but I just caught this piece by Jeff Sparrow in Counterpunch on my way out the door.
He pretty succinctly dismantles the current atmosphere of trying to interpret the riots arising from the release of that pathetic movie outside of the wider context of US intervention in the Muslim world, a frame of reference crystallized perfectly in Hillary Clinton’s words quoted therein;
‘Today, many Americans are asking — indeed, I asked myself — how could this happen?’ said Hillary Clinton after the riots in Libya. ‘How could this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction? This question reflects just how complicated and, at times, how confounding the world can be.’
The echoes of George Bush’s infamous query ‘Why do they hate us when we’re so good?’ suggests nothing whatsoever has been learnt from the last decade and the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Worth a read. It’s not long.
“‘Koran discovered with coffee cup stain on the front cover, US marines deployed to all Starbucks franchises.’
“The quip, retweeted by celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins, exemplifies the belligerent incomprehension with which so many…have responded…”
Interesting. Hadn’t been aware of Dawkins’s response.
Anyway, there’s always a lot of truth to the “chickens are coming home to roost” argument. Especially in US foreign policy. But the world is just so much richer than that.
Good article Gunny – better than the spin that we have been subjected to in the media these past few days.
I assumed Hilary Clinton’s remark was completely meant for home consumption. She knows very well how it happened, why it happened, who was doing it for what ends. That whole business about ‘how could they treat us like that?’ was disingenuous to the max. The lesson that hasn’t been learnt is that if you pretend you don’t know why stuff happens, then you end up boxed into a corner by your own population, because they pretended to believe you. or worse, they sincerely believed you.
I agree with everything in the article except the implication that Hillary Clinton is the least bit mystified by what happened. I’m a little less sure about Why do they hate us when we’re so good? but I still can’t quite bring myself to believe that Bush wasn’t purely playing to the American public. I’m absolutely sure that Clinton was.
Of course, that’s a more serious accusation than Sparrow’s, but I don’t believe I’ll get much argument about it.
I see Bluth and I are on the same page; I’ll see if I can do something about that.
I think I’ll go in for a little—what did someone call it? “Empire Fetishism” or something?
You can Google around for all this, but Sparrow, in a way, has gawn and been and done what he’s accusing others of . . . It’s not actually clear that the Sepoys were ever given cartridges greased with pork or beef fat, though the British soldiers were. But they thought they were.
And just to complicate matters more, there was a certain amount of Hindu v. Muslim prejudice and animus mixed in as well. But there were all kinds of other reasons, pay and terms of service which were causing resentment too, among them. And actually, at the time, it was the East India Company running things along with various local Indian rulers. It was the Sepoy rebellion and the East India Company’s reaction to it that actually led to the demise of the Company and the imposition of Crown rule. nothing is that simple, is it?
Oh . . .and If I remember rightly (can’t recall the numbers, but they must be all out there somewhere) I think even at the height of colonial rule, the British had, in India, (which of course then included Pakistan) a number of soldiers in proportion to the population which was tiny in comparison to the numbers the US put into Iraq or Afghanistan.
*Cough* Just saying . . .
(I remember now, it was ‘Empire Excuser’ wasn’t it? The East India Company was, I suppose, the multinational of its time; only with its own army. Just as Ron Paul suggested things should be in the future. And, in a way, it’s what the US military is now anyway: subcontracted to the US multinationals and oil companies, only not paid for by the shareholders.)
Squirrel,
And they say understatement is dead.
Re the East India Co/US military contractor parallel: from what I (may) have (mis-) learned, it kind of worked the other way around in India, no? East India Co on top, government/army subordinate? (Which truly would fit the Paulian model…) Not so? It’s not too late for me to kneecap some of my teachers…
So can we take it as written that Clinton, speaking those words, was lying and knew it? I refuse to accept that she’s not enough of a foreign minister, that she’s so ignorant of the foreign minister’s role in speaking to the public, to not even try to lie at a time like this.
The public lies of foreign ministers have probably spared the world as many wars as their private truths have started; there are reasons why even the most totalitarian governments have kept their diplomats far away from their ministries of truth. When tensions between Pottsylvania and Acornland have risen dangerously and the public’s blood is up in both countries, President Fatale and Prime Minister Squirrel sit down together and exchange the most overt and detailed threats and demands. After several hours of this, just before the banquet in their honor (folk dancers from both countries have been brought in to emphasize the quotidian aspects of the event) they appear together in the garden out back, shake hands gravely and pretend to listen intently as their foreign ministers lie their heads off. “In these difficult times…a full and frank exchange of views…notable progress on several fronts, although difficult issues remain…pledge to continue their efforts for peace…” And the gray beards of the press know exactly how to parse each cliche, which after all is why they were uttered in their time-honored forms, without the slightest hint of improvisation or improvement.
But this is a new kind of lying. Not a new one for governments, hell no: a new one for diplomats in their public, peacetime role. And the most innovative part of it is the way it speaks to only one of the several publics who ought to have been addressed. There was nothing in those words for anybody but the generalized American on the street: no comforting signals to her counterparts in Egypt or Libya, no promises to continue the hard work already begun so auspiciously blah-blah-according-to-the-formula-blah-blah-blah. Nothing at all except pandering, calculated flabbergasting, designed to console the generalized domestic audience but guaranteed to inflame everyone else.
This is not the historical role of the diplomat, except in time of war. And I don’t buy that Clinton slipped into wartime mode by accident or ignorance. I think it was a purposeful message and was probably understood quite clearly in Cairo and Tripoli. But that aside, the fact that its deliberate belligerence stood no chance at all of being appreciated in the country that delivered it is the most worrisome part of it, at least to me.