All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Got a good show lined up for you today.
Mohamed Sahimi will be here.
As I announced yesterday, this week is Humiliate and Discredit and Expose the Mujahideen-e-Khalq Week on Anti-War Radio.
Yesterday, we had Trita Parsi.
Tomorrow, we'll have former CIA and DIA counterterrorism officer Phil Giraldi on the show.
But today, we'll be talking again with Mohamed Sahimi from the University of Southern California and also a writer for antiwar.com as well as PBS Frontline's Iran Bureau, which has a lot of really great journalism there.
But right now, we're going to turn to Brendan O'Neill.
He is the editor of Spiked Online over there in rainy old England.
And I want to ask him all about this great piece that he wrote on the Arab Spring, Arab Summer now, I guess, Syria and the Hole at the Heart of the Arab Revolt.
It's at spiked-online.com right now.
And you can find it in the Viewpoint section at antiwar.com today as well.
So, hey, tell me about these riots, you know, the ones in England before we get to the ones in Syria.
Yeah, the ones in England, I'm afraid, are not nearly as exciting as the ones in Syria.
These are not political riots for democratic rights or freedom or greater liberty.
They're basically just an outpouring of rage by very isolated sections of society.
And the vast majority of Britain just think the riots are a waste of time.
Well, and what's it about?
It's just, you know, I guess I read somewhere the cops kill the unarmed guy, something like that?
Yeah, it was ostensibly triggered by the police shooting a man.
He wasn't unarmed, actually, he had a gun.
He was a young black guy who they shot and killed.
And the riots were triggered by that.
But as to what they're actually about in political terms, not very much.
It looked to most people just like looting, opportunistic looting, the smashing of shops, the burning down of local property.
And in fact, what's happened now is that many of these local communities have set up what they call riot cleanup operations, where communities are getting together to clean up, to sweep up the streets, to fix windows, to repair shops.
So it's not a very politically substantial outburst of violence.
It is more just a screech of alienated rage, which is really causing pain in the ears of most normal British people.
Oh, well, that's too bad.
Yes.
Well, good luck with that.
Yeah, thank you.
At least it's not hot like Texas there.
That'd make the whole thing a lot worse.
Yeah, that's true.
Well, I kind of wish there'd be some riots here, but I would hope they'd be more like the ones in Syria.
Well, not as deadly, but to the same end.
Although your article here, Syria and the hole at the heart of the Arab revolts, paints a pretty sad picture of the Arab Spring as it turns to late summer here.
Yes, I'm worried about how the Arab Spring is going.
I mean, firstly, I think it is one of the most exciting political events of recent times.
It was a long time coming.
The really surprising thing, I guess, is that it didn't happen earlier and that these people didn't rise up against their oppressors and dictators, many of whom were Western backed, but they didn't do that earlier on.
So it's a very positive development.
It's a very democratic leap forward.
And I think it's already had a positive impact in some of these communities because it's really raised people's political consciousness and you can't really turn the clock back on that.
But at the same time, I'm worried about the kind of stuck in a rut nature of the Arab Spring, where it just seems to be rolling along very slowly.
It seems to be losing its dynamic and losing its spirit and kind of not sure of where to go next.
And I think that is largely down to the fact that unfortunately the rebel groups and the rebel sections of society and the people taking part in the uprising don't have a clear strategic or ideological view of where they want to go next.
And that absence of ideological drive, that absence of political coherence is starting to undermine the Arab Spring.
Right, well, you say in the article, the real crisis is anyone who ever had a claim on power in the Middle East, all of them have lost it.
The American empire is falling to the wayside.
The Arab regimes are old and decrepit.
And as you say, have been in some cases at least pretty easily pushed over.
And that's a hell of an example for everybody else.
But the people themselves, they don't have their act together.
As you're saying here with the dissent in Syria for anything different.
In fact, I mean, I know very little about Syria really, but from what I understand, there's still a lot of groups that, and identified by the group who support Assad.
And it's basically, you know, the same old, you know, ethno-religious factions pitted against each other and that kind of thing.
Well, yeah, I think what there is in the whole, in virtually the whole Arab world, there is what I called a triple crisis of authority.
So you have firstly the crisis of the Arab regimes themselves.
That's the most obvious crisis.
All of them have been stand exposed as illegitimate, cut off from their people, undemocratic, illiberal, with nothing to offer those populations.
You know, right from Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Jordan, everywhere else, you know, these regimes at last.
They have been exposed as kind of completely illegitimate and lacking moral and political authority.
That's the first crisis, which is a good one.
The second crisis is the crisis of America's imperial clout.
And what the Arab string really shows is that America seems increasingly incapable of determining affairs in the Arab world, in the Middle East and beyond, you know, not for want of trying, you know, I'm sure that America would like to move things in a certain direction, but it seems increasingly incapable of doing that.
And in fact, you have people like Hillary Clinton and others, basically tail ending events, responding to events as they happen, trying to make some moral mileage by condemning the right people and praising the right people, but really looking like spectators, not knowing what's going on, not really knowing how to direct it.
You know, one democratic congressman described it as unbelievably inept, the way in which America has developed its strategy towards the Arab uprising.
And so that's the second crisis.
And that's a fairly good crisis.
It's not one that we should necessarily get worried about, you know, the less influence America has in the Arab world, the better, but it does have a destabilizing impact because it sends mixed messages to rulers such as Assad, on the one hand, telling them to rein in and stop being violent, but on the other hand, telling them that if they reform, then they might be okay.
So it's a bit destabilizing.
And then the third crisis, which in my view is terrible one, is the crisis of the radical opposition, the crisis of the rebel movements who seem incapable of defining what they want, how they're gonna achieve it, and creating new political groups to express those goals.
So that's the third crisis, and that's the most worrying one for anyone who believes in democracy and progress in the Arab world.
All right, well, we'll have to hold it right there as we go out to this break and come back and develop these ideas a little bit further.
It's Brendan O'Neill, editor of Spiked Online.
Find this new one in the viewpoint section today at antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Scott Horton, I'm talking with Brendan O'Neill.
His website is brendanoneill.co.uk, and also he's the editor of spiked-online.com.
And now we're talking about the meaning, I guess, of the revolution in Syria, and I wanted to focus on what you said about the impotence of the Americans in this case, particularly.
It really seems like they don't know what to do with this.
They got uprisings of one sort or another from Morocco to Pakistan, and they're on the wrong side of all of these, even including Syria, really, right?
I mean, they don't wanna see Assad go.
They don't know what to do there.
Yeah, well, that's absolutely correct.
They're on the wrong side of a lot of these uprisings.
You know, the uprisings are, many of them are against people who America has worked with and nurtured and supported over many years.
I mean, it would be Assad and the Ayatollahs in Iran are the only exception, right?
Yes, but even then, that's true, but even then, you know, America has been giving a kind of olive branch to Assad in recent years, which I think is one reason why they are really torn on the Syria thing.
On the one hand, they want to condemn him, and they have condemned him, and they've also imposed certain kinds of sanctions, but on the other hand, they are so terrified of what will happen if Assad falls.
They're so worried about, you know, what they consider to be these slightly crazy Muslim people who might create another Islamic theocracy.
They're so haunted by the nightmares of Iran in 1979 that they are just gripped by fear about what will come next.
So partly, America is just drawn to the option of stability, you know, just keeping things stable, keeping things ticking over.
So I think a part of Washington would quite like it if Assad just managed to quell the dissent and then made some concessions and enacted some reforms, and then hopefully everything will get better.
Obviously, that would not be satisfactory for the people of Syria, who just want him and his political system to be gone.
So America's in a really difficult position because it can't influence events in any meaningful way.
It must be seen to condemn this kind of violence because, you know, it's seen as not being the American way, but at the same time, it's so desperate for stability in that region, and particularly in Syria, which links to every political, ethnic, cultural conflict in that region, that it just is desperately hoping that someone will manage to enforce some kind of stability.
Well, you know, there's also the problem that the governments in the area are armed.
You know, the Syrians have been, you know, rolling tanks into Hama, and you look at the oppression in Bahrain and Yemen.
These guys aren't giving up without a fight, and it seems like, as you're saying, with the people unable to, you know, have a cohesive idea about what they're actually fighting for other than, I mean, you know, in Egypt, it was pretty clear they wanted, you know, an end to torture, some fair trials, maybe some elections that meant something, you know, maybe open the border with the Gaza Strip a little bit for trade, right?
I mean, it was pretty clear what they wanted.
It was a minimalist type, we can all agree on these things, right?
Sort of a revolution, wasn't it?
It was, but having said that, the interesting thing about Egypt and Tunisia is that even though there have been some changes, even though the heads of those regimes are now gone, there is still a great deal of dissatisfaction amongst people.
It's partly because in Egypt, for example, Mubarak has gone, but Mubarakism is still in power.
You know, his cronies, you know, his military, the people who supported him for years are still in power.
But it's also because I think people in Egypt and other Arab states find it difficult to articulate exactly what they want.
They don't have, and this isn't a problem peculiar to the Arab people, it's a problem across progressive politics these days, which is often that progressive radical people don't have the language to articulate what they want, how they're gonna pursue it, how they're going to enforce it, how they're going to finish off their revolution.
There is a crisis of progressive thought these days, and that crisis is impacting very heavily on the Arab people who don't seem to have the ideological structures to make their wishes come true.
Well, in fact, I guess in Egypt, they probably have their act together better than anywhere, but they still have a giant army to overthrow, and that's not easy.
That's right, and that's a very good point, because obviously the level of the crisis afflicting the Arab people differs from country to country.
In Egypt, there is a fairly better-developed level of civil society.
There are very influential thinkers and writers and activists who were able to get together and push Mubarak to one side, and as you say, there's still a huge uphill struggle for those people, but then in places like Libya, where the opposition was much more dispersed, much less well-developed, it's given rise to a terrible standoff between Gaddafi and the rebels, and it's much more complicated and much more difficult, but the thing that is common to all the Arab uprisings, I think, has been the sad failure of the rebels to articulate, firstly, what they want, and secondly, how they're gonna get it, and the problem there is that it's given the regimes a great amount of leeway to get their houses in order.
So currently, what we're seeing in Egypt and Tunisia, in the places where the revolution was supposedly successful, is actually that the regimes are getting their houses in order.
They're pushing aside the controversial figures, they're making some concessions, some big concessions, but they're basically trying to restore their power to placate the people and to get things back to some kind of normality.
In Syria, it's much more difficult for Assad to do that, but he is exploiting the separateness of the rebel groups, the fact that they're dispersed around the country, the fact that they don't have an overarching ideology or strength, he's exploiting that as a way of trying to divide them and weaken them and defeat them.
So again and again, across the Arab world, we see that the failure of the rebel groups to say, this is what we're doing and this is how we're gonna do it, is giving the regimes a certain amount of scope to rearrange things in their favor.
Yeah, well, actually, this just in from the chatroom, Obama poised to demand Syria regime change, but of course, that begs the question, what's he gonna do about it?
Look at their failure in Libya, they tried to co-opt the revolution there, I guess they made the same mistake I did, they thought the people of Libya would be able to take care of it pretty quick, and they wanted to get on board with that one, make it look like we're on the side of the good guys for a change or something.
Yeah.
I wonder, what do you think they think they're really gonna do in Syria?
Well, I just think they don't know what to do, and so they issue these statements, not even sure that they're gonna have any great impact, and you're right to bring up the example of Libya, because what's happened as a consequence of the ridiculous Western intervention into Libya, is that the democratic initiative of the people has been completely sidelined and defeated, and what we now have is Gaddafi on one side, and this self-selected Libya transitional council on the other side, which has received the blessing of Britain and France and America, and the reason it's received their blessing is because it is made up of largely former Gaddafi cronies who have defected, who say that they want to create a Western-friendly, non-extreme, modern Libya, which satisfies the prejudices of Western governments, so the people who rose up in Libya in the very beginning, the great numbers of people in Eastern Libya who rose up, have been pushed to one side, and the West has kind of elevated this small group of former Gaddafi acolytes, so it's had a really dangerous impact, and I'm worried that any kind of Western intervention in Syria, even at a kind of diplomatic, political level, could also end up removing the initiative from the Syrian people and handing it to Western observers.
All right, well, I'm sorry we have to leave it there, but I recommend everyone go look at this piece, it's great, at spikedonline.com today.
Brendan O'Neill, thanks very much.
Thank you.
