03/10/11 – David Bronwich – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
Our next guest is David Bromwich.
He's an editor of a selection of Edmund Burke's speeches on Empire, Liberty, and Reform, and co-editor of the Yale University Press edition of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty.
He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the Huffington Post.
He's got a new one at Tom Dispatch right now, which I presume will be running on AntiWar.com tomorrow.
Superpower bypassed by history, the embarrassments of Empire.
Welcome back to the show, David.
How are you doing?
Very good to be here.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Now, you're a professor of literature at Yale too, right?
Yeah, that's my main job.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
That didn't make the cut in your bio there.
Well, whatever.
I mean, this is the kind of political or analytic piece that I write that relates indirectly to the work I do teaching.
But yeah, I thought I would mention those books instead.
Okay, there you go.
All right.
Well, so I like this.
This is what I've been yelling about for a couple of weeks now.
America's on the wrong side of really kind of American Revolution-style revolutions going on over there in the Middle East.
Yeah, I mean, I think that Egypt has no precedent.
I don't know what it will end up as.
But the discipline and the mass organization, which was nevertheless a careful organization all the way through, and the use of nonviolence, but the very canny and resourceful use of self-defense when they were attacked by the hired thugs of Mubarak.
I mean, all those features of this, I think it's right to call it a revolution, are remarkable.
I don't know that they have a precedent in the American Revolution, which was not nonviolent, or really in any other I can think of.
But, you know, one can't say where it will lead yet.
And all these countries of North Africa and the Arab world where there are stirrings now more generally are different from each other.
It is interesting that they're turning away from the generation of autocrats that has held sway there for 50 years.
And I think that the general reaction in the U.S.
I talked about the reaction of the administration, Obama, Clinton, and others.
But I think the general reaction in the U.S., too, is bewilderment and a certain kind of embarrassment.
Because, you know, we talk about democracy a lot.
We talk about freedom a lot.
But here we are with military and financial investments on the wrong side, as you say, on the side of the autocrats.
Well, you're certainly right that all these revolutions are very different from the American one.
I just meant by that that, you know, they're not the kind of thing that Frank Gaffney would have, you know, fear-mongered about over the last decade or whatever, that the crazy Islamist al-Qaeda terrorists are going to take over.
And it's not a CIA-manufactured, you know, pretend thing like the revolution against Mossadegh in Iran in 1953.
This is a real bottom-up revolution for liberty, for at least representative government.
Yes, I think that's right, and bottom-up in the sense that it was a movement that showed mass action all the way through.
But it was not just, so to speak, the bottom of society.
It was not just the unemployed, not just people who were desperate or wretched.
You had, you know, people of all walks of life, really, and the army and the army itself playing a significant role simply by not agreeing to crush the people at a couple of key moments.
So, you know, it's exhilarating to think about.
It's what one felt about, you know, Czechoslovakia in 1967 and what many people felt about countries in Eastern Europe in the 80s.
But here we have it, potentially, in a much larger region, and where Americans have not been taught to expect it, as you say.
Frank Gaffney has fantasies about many things, but he would never have thought of this, you know.
Yeah, well, that's the whole thing, right?
It's not a Marxist thing.
It's not an Islamic thing.
It's all different walks of life, as you say.
You know, middle class and working class and dire poverty all together in the same square.
And what they want is an end to the emergency law, the ability to hold an election that really means something, you know.
An end to the torture, an end to the Gaza blockade.
You know, pretty reasonable stuff.
That seems to be it.
That's what I take from the Egyptian movement at least, and that's the one I've been following more closely than the others.
What they want, if you had to give it a name, is self-government, and they have not had that.
And it is what we, it's the ideal that we in America profess.
Well, it's not over yet by a long shot, David, but I've been talking with this guy, Ahmed Elassi, and he's an Egyptian-American who was raised here but has been living back in Egypt for the last ten years, and he's been participating in this thing.
His sister and his brother-in-law are activists, and he's been there, like, you know, throughout the big three weeks and ever since in the follow-up, and he was saying that the protest movement generally is pleased, finally, with the new prime minister and with the new foreign minister, and that things seem to be going their way for now.
Obviously, it's an uphill battle that they still have to fight, but it's not like they all went home after Mubarak left.
They seem to really be sticking with it.
I guess we'll see how it goes after Friday prayers tomorrow.
Yeah, that is good to hear, and that, of course, energy of democratic participation is what is so essential in keeping the public spirit of democracy going after the first success of an insurgency.
I mean, if it belongs just to a vanguard, if it belongs just to a party or sect, and the mass of the people laps back into waiting to be led, then you've had the event, but without the succession to the event of a new form of government.
So, yeah, I'm glad to hear that I don't have contact with any such person.
Yeah, he was saying they still are very much in touch with their belief that they can do it.
They just prove to themselves that they can.
So, you know, they have the taste of victory on their tongue still, and apparently they're not going to let go of it.
It doesn't seem like it.
We'll see how it goes.
So, you know, I thought that you really did a great job in this article of going through, going back over, revisionist history in real time for us here, the first couple of weeks of this thing breaking out in Tunisia, and then especially in Egypt, what the reaction of the administration is.
And, you know, talk about embarrassment.
We're not embarrassed of being on the wrong side of this thing.
I'm embarrassed of the way that these people have acted, you know what I mean, in trying to play both sides of this game.
It's ridiculous.
It's like the Three Stooges up there.
If you mean Clinton, Obama, and this man, Frank Wisner, yeah, perhaps so.
I mean, I think this is what you're saying, too.
It's not exactly that one can regret the U.S. did anything wrong.
From that point of view, I think that Obama's instinct not to do anything, and, in fact, those instincts come a little too naturally to him, but in this case, not to do anything was right.
It was to let the success of the revolution belong to the Egyptian people themselves.
But, of course, our investment was in the dictator Mubarak, and we had, therefore, to keep switching back and forth, saying we wanted the people to get some of what they wanted, but we didn't want Mubarak to go too fast, and Mr. Wisner, whose father helped to found the CIA and who was a Bush administration person way down deep and whose law firm has handled arbitration and litigation for Mubarak, he wanted Mubarak to have quite a while still in power.
So you got these mixed messages, and the odd thing to me, and I think a lot of other people, was looking at after a while, you get down to the 10th, 11th day, and you see that that crowd is no ordinary crowd, it is millions of people in the major cities of Egypt, that there was no attempt at any sort of contact with the crowd or anything other than a sort of vague presiding, you know, we must say something, so we will say something, cautious and on both sides, but no real stance.
Yeah, Hillary Clinton made it a point to call for restraint on the side of the protesters.
You know, don't get too carried away here, we got to have time to work out a way to keep our torture runner up, Omar Suleiman, and figure out a way to make him the dictator.
Alright, I'm sorry, I always force myself the last word on this show, I don't know why.
Hang right there, we'll be right back after the break, and let David Bromwich talk more.
Alright y'all, it's Antiwar Radio, I'm Scott Horton, I'm on the line with David Bromwich.
He's the editor of a selection of Edmund Burke speeches on Empire, Liberty, and Reform.
He writes for the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the Huffington Post.
He's got one at TomDispatch.com, it'll be running at Antiwar.com soon enough, I promise.
And you know, it's funny David, some of us have been warning for years, that hey, all empires fall, and if you go overextending yourself, you're going to fall.
And now, here we are falling.
And it is, it's embarrassing, isn't it?
America as the defeated Redcoats, being driven from the battlefield, they're puppets overthrown all across the region.
And the Redcoats are carrying a lot of excess baggage, And the Redcoats are carrying a lot of excess baggage and equipment in their wagons, because they've brought it overseas, and they don't know what to do with it now, and it's loading them down, and it's made them face harder obstacles.
You're talking about Israel, right?
I'm talking about any empire, defining it in a way as a national enterprise that feels it has to have foreign commitments almost anywhere, that it has to have a foreign policy that deals with every country, and that it has to have military power that would be capable of intervening anywhere, and that would tempt, you know, the power to intervene anywhere.
So, I mean, I guess if there's a thought behind the piece that you mentioned on the embarrassments of empire, it's that, you know, this is the nature of the game.
You are loaded down.
You are literally embarrassed by the burdens you're forced to carry.
And, you know, one trait that illustrates it in the official reactions in Washington, and again, I mean to focus on the administration, but not to single them out, it's the Washington reaction in general, is these strange collective mood swings between, you know, we must back up our assets because Egypt under Mubarak is so important, and that's where we send people for renditions, and that's what keeps the tunnels closed in Gaza, and that's, you know, on our negotiating side against Iraq and so on.
We've got to keep him in because the next person might be much less reliable.
On the other hand, you know, what does our empire stand for but its own roots in democracy?
Therefore, it looks something in bad faith for us not to be siding with the democratic mass who are protesting against this autocrat.
And you can see the swing, you know, writ large in the way Washington has moved from thinking we should go very slow in severing ties with Mubarak.
You know, Obama and Clinton were speaking for all of Washington when they said that.
Watch out, you know, don't move too fast.
We don't know what these so-called democratic protesters are really about.
They might not be reliable.
It's not since that prolonged 16-day, 18-day demonstration succeeded so amazingly.
Now it's moved to we must be activists.
We must be on the side of all the rebels who, you know, turn against the autocrats and try to overthrow them because otherwise, you know, we're going to be lost in the shuffle.
Yeah, even that's just in Libya.
You can't include Yemen and Bahrain and Saudi in that one.
Absolutely, I agree.
You can't guess what's going to happen in the next possible engagement.
But at least for my part, I feel it about the Libyan rebels.
I know much less than I knew about the Egyptian demonstrators.
And I suspect that Obama, Clinton, let alone all the people who are urging much stronger, you know, people like, well, I read today a column by Nicholas Kristof.
You can read things like it by Anne-Marie Slaughter and lots of counsel on foreign relations types.
You know, put it in an O5 zone.
They don't know who they're backing in this.
They don't know the exact character of these rebels.
They're about to move on a civil war, and yet they're compelled to do it because that's the imperial stance.
We have to be seen doing something.
So, gee, whoever is against Gaddafi, who was our man in Libya the day before yesterday, whoever is against him we must now side with.
It seems to me just a very strange alternation, but it's in the nature of the game of empire, which, you know, the people who govern us are still playing.
Well, it's funny to me that they're not embarrassed to talk to their friends, you know, the White House and, you know, their team.
They're not embarrassed to talk to the reporters at The New York Times and The Washington Post and explain how they're scrambling to try to get the dictators of Bahrain and Yemen and the other states on the Arabian Peninsula especially to reform and moderate and acquiesce some so that you don't lose power.
Whatever happens, we don't want you to lose power.
They continue on this kind of day-by-day cataloging that you have in your article about, you know, how far they weren't willing to go in terms of the Egyptian revolutionaries.
It's the very same thing going on in the rest of the region right now, and they don't even know that they're not supposed to be saying outright to The Times, yeah, we're working really hard on supporting our King Hamad, you know.
Well, it's interesting.
By they, you mean the government and the forces around the government of the U.S.
The Obama team, as they call them.
Yeah, well, you know, it shows the extent to which the idea that we're an empire and have to have commitments to stability far from our own shores because, you know, the cement of the empire is all of these ambiguous alliances.
It shows the extent to which they trust that to be a public and understood fact.
They've never used the word empire.
But on what other understanding could these, you know, assertions make any sense at all?
So, right, we have to keep the whole region in stable concert with our intentions.
And, of course, it's hard because of the size of the mistakes, the size of the catastrophes we got ourselves involved in in Iraq and Afghanistan and now Pakistan.
Well, you know, one of the things that I was thinking when I was reading this article, again, everybody, it's called The Embarrassments of Empire.
It's at TomDispatch.com by David Bromwich.
And I was thinking, you know, thank goodness that Mike Huckabee's name is Mike Huckabee because otherwise we could be in deep trouble with a guy like that.
He would have the support of the entire Christian, right?
And also in domestic policy, he's really sort of a Christian socialist type.
He's not, you know, a typical kind of right-wing extremist on domestic policy issues if you look at him in his sales pitch.
And he seems like kind of such a nice guy or whatever.
I could totally see the American people going for him if his name wasn't Huckabee.
Thank God for that because you quote him saying the Israelis ought to just kick all the Palestinians out of the West Bank, basically, right?
Well, it's not.
He doesn't just say that.
He says they ought to increase the number of settlers.
They ought to have more and more settlers.
They ought to settle all that region as rapidly as possible.
And, of course, that's part of the Christian Zionist theology.
All this is to be done not for the sake of the Jews, but so that things can happen in Jerusalem that will betoken the second coming.
It's not a friendly theology to the Jews.
It's quite other than that.
But, you know, Israel accepts whatever help it can get.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if a guy named Obama could be elected president.
I'm sorry to say perhaps somebody named Huckabee also could.
But I don't profess to understand what his politics adds up to at all.
It's populist in some ways, but it's careful not to defy the sort of statist, business Republican consensus either.
So, yeah, I mean, it's indicative, again, of imperial politics that somebody who's like him, not yet quite a serious national figure, you know, almost two years away from the next election, feels he should be sounding off on Middle East policy and taking a controversial stand in favor of a right-wing Israeli coalition government.
I mean, he knows very, very little about these things.
But to have opinions on such subjects is part of running for office at the head of the empire.
Yeah.
I wonder, is the complete lack of Barack Obama, his ability to influence the government of Israel to do what he wants at all, is that part of the fall of the empire, or has it always been like that?
I mean, were they able to stand up to Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr.the same way that Netanyahu just tells Barack Obama, yeah, whatever, go jump in a lake, pal, I don't care about you, which is my rough translation of his policy.
Well, there is one important moment, as I count it.
Israel didn't get so very closely tied to the U.S. as the power of the Israel lobby has made it possible to be, really, until the 1970s.
But there have been exceptions to the efficacy of the influence of Israel on the U.S., even just concerning that region alone.
One was Eisenhower during Suez.
And there's the bumper music.
I always do that.
Sorry, it's kind of a long question, but it's a long article and a great article.
I urge everybody to read it.
It's called The Embarrassments of Empire.
It's at TomDispatch.com.
Probably by the time most of y'all hear this, by way of podcast, it'll be at AntiWar.com and Tom Englehart's column there.
Thanks very much for your time, David.
You're very welcome.
David Bromwich, everybody.