Editor’s Note: Phyllis Bennis is an internationally recognized expert on the Middle East, a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, a founder of United for Peace and Justice, and the author of Before and After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis (New York, Olive Branch Press).
PA: Can you talk about the "wave of democracy" in the Middle East that is supposed to have occurred as a result of Bush’s war on Iraq?
PB: Well, you read about it as a result of Bush’s war on Iraq. It’s not democracy because of Bush’s war on Iraq. The opposition movements in places like Egypt and other places around the region have been in place for a quarter of a century or more. The notion that the Egyptians started worrying about democracy once Bush invaded Iraq is the worst kind of arrogance of this illegal US invasion. These are long-standing movements.
What is true is the invasion did change the political dynamics in the region. It made some regimes that have long been dependent on US largesse – both political and economic – to at least go through some motions of listening to some of the democratic movements in their countries. If that continues, obviously it’s a good thing. There is no indication that it will, because there is no indication that the Bush administration has any intention of actually changing its position vis-à-vis these regimes. For example, in Egypt, where there’s been an active opposition movement for a quarter of a century, many political prisoners are still in prison being tortured, being disappeared, etc. The Bush administration came out in defense of one such prisoner who was rapidly released. That was Ayman Noor, whose political party (it is a new party), is an important part of the opposition in terms of the fight around civil and political rights. It also cannot be ignored that his party stands for business interests, free trade, it’s pro-business, pro-American, pro-privatization of the Egyptian economy, even though it does play an important role on the political right side of things.
The US has not made any move to condition the $2 billion a year it sends in direct aid to Egypt on acceptance civil and political rights.
So it’s not surprising that that was who the Bush administration endorsed as their political prisoner poster child. They said nothing about the hundreds, maybe thousands, of political prisoners that have been languishing in Egyptian prisons for a very long time. Whether there’s any intention of actually holding the Egyptian regime accountable for those denials of civil and political rights, we don’t know. The US has not made any move, for example, to condition the $2 billion a year it sends in direct aid to Egypt on acceptance of civil and political rights. If they did that would be a good thing, but there is not indication that they intend to do that.
PA: If the war didn’t really spark a "wave of democracy," what are the roadblocks to democracy and peace?
PB: There are the same roadblocks that have been there all along: repressive regimes that are backed by the United States and that have no intention of moving toward democratization. They’re either oil rich, in which case they depend on the US for arms, or they don’t have oil and they are poor, have a lot of people and depend on the US for economic aid. So as long as those regimes remain in place…
The US is trying to impose a Middle East free trade zone that will bring Israel into the equation, all of that is designed to keep the region under US economic as well as political control.
What’s needed is different kinds of regimes in those countries. How it will come about is going to be different in different places. [Take] the so-called Cedar Revolution in Lebanon for example and the great amount of attention we saw and the great adulation given by the Bush administration to this set of demonstrations by people against the Syrian presence, which has been a long-standing sentiment among most Lebanese anyway. But it was matched by a much larger demonstration that was not calling for Syria to stay, instead saying that the relationship between Syria and Lebanon whatever it is should be determined by Syrians and Lebanese and not by Washington. It was a very explicit challenge to the US control, domination and threats that were at the root of that earlier demonstration. So we didn’t hear as much about that one.
The class difference was very evident. The demonstration that opposed US intervention was overwhelmingly, aside from being larger, made up of poor people. It was much more traditional. The first demonstrations in downtown Beirut, all the men were in tight t-shirts with cell phones clamped to their ears along with young students in Western clothes. The demonstrations in opposition to Bush’s policies were made up of people from south Beirut, which are the poor suburbs, mostly Shia and a lot of Palestinians. That is where the refugee camps are. It was much more traditional. You didn’t see a lot of cell phones; you didn’t see a lot of rich people.
So the challenge is a very complex one after generations of both economic and political disempowerment at the popular level, long-standing movements that have been suppressed, arrested, jailed, tortured by regimes that are overwhelmingly in debt to the US or its allies. It’s a very fraught moment, because what we now have are two major occupations in the region posing as democracy or democratization under way. We have not only the Israeli occupation of Palestine but the US occupation of Iraq that are being touted as democratization. This it’s very serious set of challenges. There’s no easy recipe for what it’s going to take.
PA: Is the US using the Iran issue to weaken the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty?
PB: Yes. It’s doing its best to undermine the NPT overall. Certainly using Iran is a part of that. But, as we know, John Bolton, the nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, cut his teeth on trying to undermine treaties including the NPT. This could be a moment of great strengthening of the NPT. The real solution for the Iran issue regarding nukes should be the same as for all other signatories to the NPT, which is that the non-nuclear states should sign onto the optional protocol, which allows for quicker and more intrusive inspection by the IAEA if there are suspicions about violations, but only if and dependent on nuclear weapons states – the five that are signatories – agreeing to implement Article 6, which requires them to move toward full and complete nuclear disarmament.
The whole notion of the NPT was designed to be a two-way street. It wasn’t just an agreement by most of the world that they wouldn’t try to get nuclear weapons. It was an agreement by most of the world that they would not try to get those weapons in return for an end to the nuclear threat of the Big Five.
Other countries are doing the exact same thing as Iran in terms of enrichment like Brazil, South Africa, South Korea and other countries that the US, at least at this moment, is not challenging on this issue. Recently a US official even said explicitly that what Iran is doing is authorized under international law, meaning the NPT. It’s not in violation, but we’re not going to allow it anyway. So the problem for the US is not that Iran is violating the NPT, but that the US doesn’t like the NPT and wants to impose it one-sidedly as a much stricter limitations on non-nuclear states, while absolutely refusing to even consider implementation of its own obligations under NPT.
PA: Is the administration trying to get away from restrictions on US power, or do they want to pursue a new nuclear agenda?
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PB: The answer is both. They want to restrict any restrictions on them, and they want a new, more strict regime that they can impose on everybody else. So they want international law, but not to apply to them. It’s like the old Melean dialogues between the Athenians and the Meleans. The Athenians said, "There’s democracy for us, but democracy only exists among equals." The implication is for us there is democracy, for you there is a different set of laws – the laws of empire.
PA: With the recent release of the WMD commission report on the Iraq fiasco and the Pentagon’s self-serving report on torture, is the Bush administration getting away with all of this stuff?
PB: So far, yes. The problem is that the manipulation of fear that has characterized this administration since 9/11 has worked sufficiently that there is still unease among the press to adequately cover the significance of these things. There’s significant refusal in Congress to challenge. For instance, in this recent WMD commission, it’s all very interesting to read about, but the bottom line is that as long as their mandate was not to include the question of how the White House actually manipulated and used the information, there are limits on how valuable it is. It’s kind of a ho-hum issue. It ignores the whole point of the WMD question.
PA: And the peace movement seems to have gotten quiet…
PB: Absolutely wrong! The peace movement is working in local areas rather than focusing on the massive amount of energy and money that is required for having one big giant demonstration in New York. Instead if you look at what happened on March 19th at the time of the second anniversary, for instance, there were demonstrations in over 750 cities in the US. Most of them small: 20 people holding signs on an overpass or 200 people marching in front of the local post office because that’s the symbol of the federal government. But in 750 cities across the country people were mobilizing around that anniversary. We held a teach-in on the 24th on the 40th anniversary of the first teach-in held at the University of Michigan during the Vietnam War. We are getting hundreds of requests for copies of the DVD of that teach-in so that others can do their own teach-in.
The peace movement is rooting itself in the fabric of US society as opposed to something that emerges once or twice a year in a giant demonstration somewhere.
PA: Given the administration’s propensity not to listen to the popular majority, are we going to have to rely on the developments in the world in order to stop him?
PB: It’s a combination. If we look at this notion of there being a second superpower to challenge the US drive toward unilateralism, militarism and empire, that second superpower has at its root mobilized public opinion acting in the streets and elsewhere and that includes the United States. We can’t afford to sit back and say well, it’s kind of hopeless here, so we’re going to have to wait for our friends and colleagues and counterparts around the world. We have to be at the centerpiece of that. When I travel abroad, people are saying, "We need to hear from you in the United States what the demands are. What are the weak points of this administration? What do we focus on?" But we also have to recognize that the second superpower is not just people marching in the streets, it’s also the whole issue of people who are able, because they are marching the streets to convince their governments to make the kinds of changes that are required. When those governments change, like we saw in the run-up to the war where the uncommitted six in the Security Council stood defiant of the US demands, then we can see the United Nations being reclaimed to stand defiant and be part of the solution rather than part of the problem of US domination on a global scale. There’s a lot of work to be done. Our work here to change the administration can’t be based solely on our assessment "are they listening to us today." It’s "are the American people hearing us?" Because it’s going to be the American people as a whole that are going to have to be mobilized to change this trajectory into one that is going to make us all safer not only in this country but in the whole world.
