You might ask Chilean President Salvador Allende what he thinks about US democracy promotion—if he hadn’t been killed in a CIA-backed coup in 1973. (cc photo: Sebastian Baryli)
Sometimes the thing we call “media bias” isn’t about what a given piece of journalism explicitly says about the world; it’s more about the assumptions that must be taken for granted. Question those assumptions and the whole thing starts to fall apart.
Today’s New York Times (2/25/14) has a piece about whether or not the Obama administration is as committed to a policy of “democracy promotion” as the Bush administration had been.
To anyone familiar with US history of inhibiting and undermining democracies, or its long-standing alliances with resolutely antidemocratic countries, the whole concept must seem rather absurd. But in order for this story to make any sense, you must on some level accept the premise that support for democracy in other countries is an important US value.
“Mr. Obama has not made global aspirations of democracy the animating force of his presidency,” the Times‘ Peter Baker writes. The administration has discussed a strategy of keeping some distance from pro-democracy movements, which doesn’t sit well with some:
To some critics, though, that justifies a policy of passivity that undercuts core American values.
“The administration’s Ukraine policy is emblematic of a broader problem with today’s foreign policy—absence of a strategic vision, disinterest in democracy promotion and an unwillingness to lead,” said Paula J. Dobriansky, an undersecretary of State for Mr. Bush.
The Times also elicits comments from Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis, “who advised the Bush White House as speechwriters worked on the former president’s January 2005 inaugural address promising to combat tyranny abroad.”
Of the comparison between Obama and his predecessor, Obama supporters “say he has increased spending on projects that encourage democratic reform in places like Africa and Asia while directing money to support changes in the Arab world.” According to Baker:
For Mr. Bush, the focus on spreading democracy preceded his decision to invade Iraq, but it was inextricably linked to the war after the failure to find the unconventional weapons that had been the primary public justification. The goal of establishing a democratic beachhead in the Middle East began driving the occupation, but it became tarnished among many overseas because of its association with the war.
To Baker, this continued as Bush was “setting a ‘freedom agenda’ for his second term,” the evidence for which was evidently a speech where Bush “declared it his policy to support democracy ‘in every nation’ with ‘the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.'”
It take an enormous amount of nerve to cast Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq as the starting point for a policy of democracy promotion, especially considering that US policy during the post-invasion occupation was fervently opposed to Iraqi elections (Extra!, 6/05).
Hugo Chavez (Photo: Bernardo Londoy)
It might have made more sense to consider just a few of the available counter-examples. But again, doing this would start to make the basic point Times article seem absurd.
The reaction to the 2002 coup against Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez might be seen as an expression of the White House’s actual views about democracy—which was to cheer on the coup plotters. (The Times, as it happened, had the same impulse—Extra!, 6/02.) The Obama administration was faced with a similar situation in 2009 when a coup removed left-wing Honduran President Manuel Zelaya; the administration’s response was, at best, weak.
These are actual tests of a superpower’s faith in democracy, and the record would not suggest that supporting or promoting democracy was particularly important in either case.
As the Bush White House ramped up its rhetoric about democracy promotion, Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment (National Interest, 3–4/07) wrote that Bush’s rhetoric had little to do with its actual Mideast policy. “Even at its peak in 2004–05,” Carothers said, “this push for change among America’s autocratic friends in the region was nonetheless relatively weak.” And election outcomes that ran counter to US elite interests seemed to signal a retreat from even the pro-democracy rhetoric. Carothers concluded that “the notion that the universal pursuit of freedom constitutes George Bush’s global compass is an enormous illusion.”
Noam Chomsky (cc photo: Agencia Brasil)
Carothers is often cited by author and critic Noam Chomsky, often to make the point that even establishment historians admit that official rhetoric should not be confused with actual policy. But the critique of US policy should go much deeper; Chomsky (5/4/05) pointed out that Bush’s nomination of John Negroponte as director of national intelligence sent a clear signal about democracy promotion:
The arc of Negroponte’s career ranges from Honduras, where as Reagan’s ambassador he oversaw the Contra terrorist forces’ war against Nicaragua, to Iraq, where as Bush’s ambassador he briefly presided over another exercise in alleged democracy development–experience that can inform his new duties to help combat terror and promote liberty. Orwell would not have known whether to laugh or to weep.
Chomsky closed that column with this observation:
For Washington, a consistent element is that democracy and the rule of law are acceptable if and only if they serve official strategic and economic objectives. But American public attitudes on Iraq and Israel/Palestine run counter to government policy, according to polls. Therefore the question presents itself whether a genuine democracy promotion might best begin within the United States.
Does the United States need to do some democracy promotion here in the United States? Now that might be a more interesting piece to read in the Newspaper of Record.
Any supporter of democracy would of course oppose the putsch attempts by Venezuelan oppositionists and criticize the charade of voting carried out in Honduras last fall. And sanction Bahrain for repressing its citizens calling for democracy — where the U.S. Fifth Fleet is based and autocratic U.S. ally Saudia Arabia is next door.
The “response” to the Honduran coup may have been “weak”
But the complicity in it was robust.
Peter Hart did an excellent job here at providing sufficient counterexamples to the outlandish claim made by Peter Baker’s Times article about how promoting democracy is a value of those in power in America. It is instructive to also provide another counterexample: the Bush administration’s complicity in the coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti in early 2004, approximately one year after Bush’s “democracy promoting” invasion of Iraq began.
I agree with Sena that FAIR did an excellent job here, but I would go further. Obviously, the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower so presciently warned us of in 1961 still calls the tune. Draft-dodger Dick Cheney kept his millions in Halliburton stock while serving as Vice President. The notion that he and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lied us into the Iraq war to spread democracy is laughable.
American media elites interested in democracy promtion could call for a domestic democracy program by pressuring its federal government into suing every one the several states of the United States that sustains a “voter ID law”. It’d be a start.
The importance of Chomsky’s work to understanding systems of control- like the corporate media- and the role of intellectuals in supporting them can hardly be overstated. Almost all of the sources cited in his books- which are extensively footnoted- are the mainstream statist scholarship. The case he makes is as solid a case as can be made in the social sciences.Basically he collects all the important evidence on a point and demonstrates that the doctrinal underpinnings of American power cannot follow logically from the evidence that scholars have collected.
Bringing democracy to the Middle East…….hmm, is that what we were doing for the last 30-40 years?
I also enjoyed Paula J. Dobrinsky’s comment on the “lack of a strategic vision.” What is that vision? It seems to have gotten a bit muddled back with that “Gog and McGog” action.
Actually, that” promoting democracy” item is not doing so well here, or anywhere, as the world seems to have been imPRISMed by the long- eared and saucer- eyed NSA.
To horribly paraphrase a famous foreign leader – “Democracy in America? They should try it sometime.” In each of Obama’s pre-election web campaigns to solicit public opinion, the #1 issue in each was the legalization of Marijuana, supported 19:1 in favor. Obama’s campaign’s response? “Mr. Obama isn’t considering legalization at this time”, or some similar “don’t hold your breath” statement. I wonder how many Americans ask themselves, “why is the lion’s share of my tax money going to support military adventures in the Middle and Near East? Why do we tolerate continuous excuses about the loss of innocent lives at the hands of our armed forces? And exactly how does bombing wedding parties in Afghanistan suppress terrorism?” The Media will not let these questions enter the public arena, because it might cause an avalanche of realization that what our leaders in fact do with our nation’s name and honor and the money of its people, has nothing to do with serving, helping, improving, or building anything, except more and larger military bases and making longer speeches by NSA directors to ignore the fact that they’re breaking the laws against spying (on everyone) every minute of the day — more to the point, the Media do not ask the American people WHAT THEY WANT and the Media do nothing to look into the fact that the public does not GET what it wants even for the asking. To claim that the USA is a Democracy is absurd. There is no accountability between any level of society and the next. We “elect” people on promises and then they do exactly what they want, having little to do with the promises or the actual needs of the population. Nor do the Media exhort us to get involved in self-governance, or remind us that accountability of our representatives is our DUE. And the population cashes its shrinking checks, goes home and watches TV, when what they SHOULD be doing is studying revolution. I’ve said that if the founding fathers in 1765-1776 could have foreseen what would become of the country by 2014, they would have said – “ya know what? It’s not worth it. Let’s just try to pay the crown’s taxes.” The Texas schoolbook commission tried to write Jefferson out of history, and they might be right: who needs to remember someone who called for “consent of the Governed” where the governed was “an informed citizenry”? We seem more concerned with our cellphones than how we’re being financially raped by the government to finance its export of Neoliberal economic policy to the rest of the world at the end of the barrels of “our” guns. Did we vote for that? Were we asked? And yet that’s what the government is doing in our name, as if that is what we wanted. What we really want is socialized medicine, a sound economy, jobs and peace; but we aren’t getting any of that; and “supposedly” nobody seems to care. So let’s write the word “Democracy” out of our textbooks too, as it seems nobody cares much anymore. Too bad – it WAS “a nice idea.”
Fight Back or Be Slaves. Y’all.
Excellent analysis, Arthur. Fortunately, thanks to alternative media, social media, and the Internet, people are waking up, taking off their democracy-colored glasses and starting to see what’s really happening around them (which is why the power elite are trying to put the kibosh on net-neutrality). Rest assured, a revolution (of sorts) is inevitably on the horizon.