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It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Again, top headline, Al Jazeera is reporting that the colonels are defecting and fleeing Libya and going to Malta instead of launching airstrikes on the protesters in Tripoli.
Maybe this is really the beginning of the end of the Qaddafi regime.
Well, here to discuss that and a great many other things is Rashid Khalidi, professor of Arab studies at Columbia University.
He's the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies and was president of the Middle East Studies Association.
He's the author of Sowing Crisis, American Dominance in the Cold War in the Middle East, and The Iron Cage, the story of the Palestinian struggle for statehood.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
I'm well, thanks.
So this is a pretty exciting time, I guess.
I may live in interesting times, as they say.
It seems like from Morocco, even as far as China, there are popular protests and uprisings of various degrees of strength and success.
But it looks like virtually in every case, it seems to be a very kind of just liberty-based thing.
It's not a Marxist uprising.
It's not an Islamic uprising.
It's basically for economic and political freedom, basic little-D democratic values.
That is basically right about what is happening throughout the Arab world and also in Iran and in another part of the Middle East that is not Arab.
The two words that you hear the most often are freedom and dignity.
Right.
So in other words, as Lou Rockwell pointed out in one article, he said that in Egypt, some of the signs and some of the chants of the protesters or some of the quotes they were using were actually directly from our Declaration of Independence and from Thomas Paine.
Well, those are universal ideas now, and they've been spread all over the Middle East.
For well over a century, I mean, there were schools and establishments that were spreading American ideas back in the 19th century in some parts of the Middle East.
And so they're pretty well established and certainly among the youth who are completely open to, you know, a lot of them have internet access.
A lot of them know a little bit of foreign languages.
These are very common ideas.
The most striking thing about it is, as you say, it is mainly a small-D democratic revolution from from one end of the Arab world to the other.
And it's all pretty straightforward stuff.
Social justice, dignity, freedom, democracy, jobs, I mean, just ordinary things that you would imagine ordinary people living in difficult circumstances would be asking for.
And that's precisely what pretty much everybody is demanding from one end of the region to the other.
Well, aside from that, my second favorite thing is the irony of all of this.
As Justin Armando points out in his article today on Antiwar.com, in Iran, where everybody knows the CIA is doing their very best to support not just the so-called democratic opposition, but even terrorist groups like Jandala and Mujahideen al-Khalq, the regime is strengthened by that and can write off publicly accused all of their opposition of just being CIA lackeys or whatever.
So nationalism works against us or against freedom, where in the rest of the countries where the governments are actually our puppets, then the people see it that way.
And it's much easier for them to, you know, get away with overthrowing them when Mubarak says, oh, well, you know, foreigners are behind this uprising.
Everybody laughs and says, no, foreigners are behind you.
Come on.
Because Nafis Khan said the same thing on television last night.
These are all agents of foreign powers.
And he said the same thing to the universal, I'm sure, disbelief of Libyans, who know perfectly well who's rising up.
It's themselves.
Iran is particularly complicated, exactly as you say, because with some of these terrorist groups that the United States has been supporting, whether in the Baluchi Southeast or coming across from Iran or Iraq, rather, or wherever they're coming from, there actually are such groups.
The United States is actually supporting certain kinds of particularly nasty opposition groups.
And that undermines the real opposition to this pretty awful regime in Tehran, because they can plausibly point to this.
In fact, I was reading something today where the regime said, you know, the Mujahideen are going to, you know, snipe at people so as to provoke this, that, and the other.
Now, that just may be regime propaganda.
But the fact that there is such a group and that it has such widespread support in the West gives a little credence to this regime propaganda, which is just not the case, as you rightly point out, in most of the Arab world.
Everybody knows that the United States is behind almost all of these regimes.
Even Libya has been sort of enfolded since Condoleezza Rice went there, has been enfolded into the American embrace.
And if they're not getting arms from the United States, they're getting them from our European allies.
So, the tear gas is American.
The advice is sometimes French or Italian.
But it's, you know, clear that those are regimes backed by the West.
And people know that, and from Morocco right across the Bahrain.
Well, now, when it comes to D.C. politics, you think, I mean, it seems to me, and I could be wrong about this, and I don't want to be, it seems like Obama can't tell the king of Bahrain, kill them all.
Like, basically, if the people of Bahrain are going to overthrow that government, Obama can't intervene and stop them.
And he's got to probably do his best to forbid the king from going that far, right?
And so then, what do we do?
We lose our base for the Fifth Fleet, and there's a major conflict here between the American government's needs and what it looks like on Al Jazeera, and how far they can actually go.
And I mean the empire's needs, not the people of the United States, obviously.
Well, I think in the case of both Bahrain and in the case of Egypt, where the United States has enormous strategic interests, or rather, the way in which our foreign policy is portrayed by Washington, there are enormous interests.
The administration apparently did strongly tell the governments not to use force.
In the case of Egypt, I don't think it had very much impact.
I think the Egyptian military may have looked at the $1.3 billion in military aid that the United States has sent every year for the last, since 1979.
But I think they mainly were looking at their self-interest as an institution, and that's why they didn't shoot at the people.
In the case of Bahrain, I think the advice actually may have had some impact.
It sounds like Washington did tell them, as you suggested, you can't shoot them all down.
And the Bahraini regime pulled back, partly because they're divided among themselves, it appears, but partly because I think they would have realized they would have unleashed an even more, you know, fearsome volcano.
I think, though, that this whole strategic issue opens up a whole bunch of questions that we should be asking ourselves.
Why do we need these bases precisely?
Against what?
The United States went and fought a Cold War against a superpower that was nuclear armed back in the day, with no bases in this region.
It was an over-the-horizon military presence, mainly in the Indian Ocean.
And as anybody who's older than, I don't know what, 20-something will remember, the United States, quote-unquote, won the Cold War.
Now, against no discernible enemy, the United States has bases right across the Middle East and into Central Asia.
There's absolutely no reason for this, except to provoke people, and that's precisely what it does.
So I think that should open up a whole bunch of questions in Washington.
Why do we need this archipelago of bases, especially in this region?
And secondly, I think that the linkages with some of these regimes, which is supposed to have brought stability, has actually brought brittle, fragile, weak regimes that are now toppling, almost like dominoes.
I mean, it's quite astonishing, even for somebody who's an expert on the region and knows the languages and has traveled there, to see how quickly once, you know, quite fearsome regimes are now really, really crumbling almost before our very eyes.
Well, you know, the outside intervention, it seems to me, you know, by the American politicians, it's almost like they're interventions in the economy.
It creates bubbles and distortions in how much power these local groups have.
Say, for example, the princes that run Saudi Arabia, you know, their power is inflated far beyond what it would naturally be, like Karzai in Afghanistan, something like that.
So then, without us, they just crumble.
And then, but as we discussed, like in the case of Bahrain, America can only push them so far because the excuse of our entire empire is that it's for your own good.
We can't just outright, we can support Mubarak torturing people a few at a time, but not outright massacring them in Tahrir Square, right?
And there's a big line there.
Yeah.
The other good thing here is that American public opinion has gotten in on the conversation.
I mean, for whatever reason, the mainstream media has started actually reporting some reality out of the Arab world.
I mean, this is a region that has been systematically demonized in the mainstream media and in American political discourse for decades.
They're animals, they're barbarians, they're Islamic terrorists.
If they're not held down by torturers and cattle prods, they'll rise up and eat us all.
The Islamic bogeyman is coming.
It was a children's fairy tale.
The people believed it.
Now, real news is coming out and American public opinion is getting involved.
Right.
Well, and that's such an important point to look at an Egyptian on TV and does he look like a terrorist to you?
Clearly not.
You know, he looked just like my neighbors to me.
Anyway, hold it right there, everybody.
It's Rashid Khalidi, professor at Columbia, author of a great many books.
It's Anti-War Radio.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Some reports have it that Qaddafi has fled to Venezuela.
The Venezuelans are denying it.
And the British foreign minister says he thinks maybe so or something, I think is as confirmed as we know right now.
But one thing is clear is that there is a revolution on in Libya, a violent one now, at least violent from the side of what's left of the state there.
But numerous reports have it that, you know, many different cities have basically fallen.
Sections of the military have mutinied and refused to fight.
Then again, there are also numerous reports of airstrikes on the protesters in Tripoli and in other places.
What do you think is going to happen here in Libya?
Well, it does look like the regime may be going down.
I don't know.
I heard some reports about army units mutinying and senior commanders going over to the revolutionary side or defecting.
The problem with Libya is that it's a country where civil society and the institutions, you know, of the country have been pretty much decimated over a very long period of time.
Italian colonialism, a backwards monarchy, and then this horrible regime for the past 41 years have left sort of a desert in terms of institutions within society that can stand up to the state.
And you have tribal divisions and regional divisions and stuff, all of which was cultivated by the regime.
Is the populace armed there?
Not a lot.
Not a lot.
I guess the tribes have some weapons out in the desert, but not very much.
No, there's a pretty much a monopoly of certainly heavy weaponry.
But it's not like Yemen where everybody has a gun.
It's most of the population in the city simply isn't armed.
No.
Well, and the protesters have really followed the Egyptian-Tunisian model, which is, you know, just the Gandhi model or whatever, right?
Massive civil disobedience, basically general strike, and we insist and we're not going anywhere.
Yeah, and a willingness to sacrifice themselves.
I mean, a quite remarkable degree of courage.
In Egypt, it took a lot of courage.
And in Tunisia, because the security forces were brutal and ruthless.
But in both cases, they knew early on that the army wasn't going to shoot.
And that made an enormous difference.
In Libya, they knew that some elements of the army, first of all, the security forces were probably even more ruthless than in Tunisia and Egypt.
And secondly, they knew that the army would shoot and they really didn't have anything to shoot back with.
It was just, you know, their bare chests against whatever the regime could throw at them.
And so the reports I've been seeing on Arabic satellite television, different channels, are of quite serious casualties, especially in the cities in the east, but now also in Tripoli in the west.
Well, that's the thing.
I mean, if Gaddafi can hold his military command together, then they can win against, you know, the people who are basically just soft targets.
Well, the thing that the only hopeful sign in this is that the military does not look like it's holding together.
I mean, that may may not be the case.
He may manage to pull it out.
I really don't know.
We're all too far away.
And they've succeeded in cutting off information to a higher degree than the Tunisian or the Egyptian governments did before they fell.
So it's a little harder to tell.
But you're right.
If the army holds together, you might have a China outcome where the military will basically drown the revolution in blood or drown the uprising in blood.
Otherwise, however, it may be that the army will simply lose its nerve or enough of them will say we don't want to kill our people, that the regime will fall.
Yes.
So there's this Robert Fisk article in The Independent that had a picture of these young men in Bahrain, basically more or less in the Tiananmen Square post, standing in front of a tank unarmed, facing it down.
And I just thought, you know, you think about how iconic that picture is from Tiananmen Square of an unarmed man facing down his own government's tank being used against him and his comrades and so forth.
And how, you know, here we are, the U.S. on the wrong side of this.
That's our tank that this guy's facing down.
Right.
You're absolutely right.
Another iconic image was of American supplied riot gear, including these water firing cannons being used in Cairo.
And there was an enormously evocative picture of a man standing up to one of these water cannons.
It was it was it was not a tank.
It was it was, you know, a security forces armored vehicle with a water cannon on it.
But it was truly, I mean, inspiring to see this man doing it in Bahrain.
They actually I mean, it's not over, but that willingness to sacrifice and that courage in the face of, you know, live fire from the security forces has won the day for the moment.
I mean, they have taken over this square, which they've labeled the Hayes Square, meaning Liberation Square, named after the one in Cairo.
And the government has for the moment at least backed down.
So, you know, it's going to be a seesaw thing.
It's not over by any means in Bahrain.
But again, the courage of these people is quite amazing.
I mean, you've had, you know, mainstream media reporters like Nick Kristoff actually there and he clearly has been deeply moved by what he's been saying.
Well, you know, the war party is going to say, in fact, I think they already are saying, which is that, oh, but the majority in Bahrain is Shiite.
And so they're going to fall into the hands of the Iranians and then we'll have to have a nuclear war.
You know, if people in this country cannot shake off that old fairy tale, then we really are in for bad times.
I mean, the people who are peddling that nonsense are so discredited.
You would think that having never predicted anything correctly from Iraq through Iran to this situation in the Arab world, people would just tell them where to go.
But unfortunately, they just have such a hold, certainly on the Republican Party and on a chunk of the Democratic Party and on the media, that you keep seeing these people.
These are people, as I keep saying, they couldn't find their way from the airport to a Hilton in any Arab capital without a minder.
And we keep getting them on television.
I mean, it is truly nauseating.
They know nothing.
All they want to do is peddle the idea that this is a region that's hostile to us and we have to hold it down by force.
I mean, that's not that's not information.
That's not news.
That's a ridiculous ideological position and it should be treated as such by the media.
OK, here's a fanatic who wants to do some crazy stuff and we'll give him two seconds.
And meanwhile, let's really listen to what's happening in the region.
From people who know the language have been there can tell us something intelligent.
You're getting a little bit of that in the mainstream media, but not not enough by any means.
Well, I mean, for me, keeping the TV on to the cable news channels in America is just fun for the contrast between what I'm seeing on Al Jazeera English live stream.
I mean, here I'm watching right now tens of thousands of people marching in the streets.
And on the other channel is Alan Greenspan's wife talking about a royal wedding coming up over in England.
You know, it's simply there for the comic relief.
There are sources and I noticed that with my own students and kids everywhere, they're live streaming the BBC, they're live streaming Al Jazeera English.
There's 15 sources that they have, you know, French television, if you can understand French, almost anything is better than the American mainstream media.
And you can do what you yourself were just doing.
We do it all the time.
We put we put Al Jazeera on in Arabic and then we listen to the NPR or any any mainstream source.
And it's just not in the same league in terms of simple information.
And you're just not you're not being informed.
And you're sometimes being badly informed.
And then you get these talking heads talking nonsense.
All right, well, is there is there an outlet where you write regularly?
I found a column or two at salon.com.
Yeah, the only thing I've had recently is that piece in salon.com.
I write and you know, I do different stuff.
I I've written a piece in Spanish for Vanguardia, which was translated into Spanish.
I I've given interviews to a whole bunch of papers that none of us ever see.
I mean, one in in Slovakia, one in in Turkey, you know, that kind of thing.
I just gave an interview to a messenger on Rome.
So, you know, it doesn't get back here, unfortunately.
A lot of the stuff I'm doing, I'll be doing something in the Times of India, which is the largest English language newspaper in the world in a couple of days.
Unfortunately, no, I don't have a regular outlet.
All right.
Well, I really appreciate your time and your insight on the show today, and I'll be keeping an eye out.
I'm glad you're covering it.
It's a very, very important story.
There's a world historical event that we're seeing unfolding before our eyes in the Arab world.
Absolutely.
Well, thanks again for your time.
A great pleasure.
Everybody, that's Rashid Khalidi, professor at Columbia.
Check out the promise of real democracy in Egypt at salon.com.
We'll be right back with Jonathan Landay after this.
