Category: Government

Obama makes up foreign policy on the fly. Obama ignored the Green Movement in Iraq in 2009. Now it’s time to provide the Green Movement in Iran with secure texting technology so they can communicate without the prying eyes of the regime. Let’s provide Iranian workers with a strike fund — hard cash so they can sustain a strike. And it’s certainly time for a free trade agreement with Iraq.

And how about the Wall Street Journal stepping up to the plate by making it easy for freedom seekers to read the WSJ in Arabic?

The following is from the Wall Street Journal, 2-19-2011:

‘The city of Chicago is famous as the home of improv, so maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a President from Chicago would devise his foreign policy on the fly.

And so it has been, from the war in Afghanistan to the Guantanamo detainees to the trade agenda to the fall of the House of Mubarak. But now that the rest of Arabia appears to have caught the Tunisian freedom bug—and as a longstanding U.S. ally in Bahrain opens fire on peaceful demonstrators—maybe it’s time for the Administration to do more than merely react to events.

Where to begin? We suggest dusting off a copy of George W. Bush’s second inaugural address.

That speech, widely derided at the time as unrealistic and over-reaching if not outright utopian, had as its signature argument the line that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

But Mr. Bush also made an important distinction between “the rulers of outlaw regimes”—think of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or North Korea’s Kim Jong Il—and “the leaders of governments with long habits of control.” Toward the former, Mr. Bush warned, citing Lincoln, that their days were numbered. Toward the latter, he advised: “To serve your people you must learn to trust them. Start on this journey of progress and justice, and America will walk at your side.”

Wherever he is now, Hosni Mubarak might well be wondering whether he wouldn’t have been wiser to take Mr. Bush’s advice, rather than doing everything he could to spurn and belittle the freedom agenda. Ditto for Tunisia’s deposed dictator, Jordan’s nervous king, Yemen’s and Algeria’s reviled presidents and perhaps also the dangerously out-of-touch House of Saud. As for Bahraini King Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifa and the rest of his ruling family, they may soon rue the day they lost whatever legitimate claims they had on their little kingdom by choosing repression over reform.

Then again, President Obama might also be wondering why he was so quick to junk his predecessor’s calls for freedom now that it is again in vogue (minus, of course, the Bush name). Though the President offered a nod to democracy in his now-forgotten Cairo speech in June 2009, he offered no support for Iranian demonstrators after that month’s fraudulent elections. He was also silent after Mr. Mubarak forbade international monitoring of last year’s rigged parliamentary vote. On a visit to Manama in December, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described Bahrain as a “model partner” for the U.S. and praised the kingdom’s “commitment . . . to the democratic path.”

Now that the Administration has been conscripted into the freedom agenda, one place to start is for Mr. Obama to meet publicly with dissidents from places like Libya, Syria and Iran, as Mr. Bush did in Prague in 2007, to lend a Presidential seal of approval to their struggle. That doesn’t mean forsaking democracy and human-rights activists in pro-American regimes. But it does emphasize the distinction between protest movements in totalitarian states—in which the U.S. has a clear interest in the overthrow of the regimes—and those in authoritarian systems, where the American interest is to press aggressively for political reforms.

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Reuters

Protesters stand at the base of the Pearl Roundabout.
.In that latter respect, it behooves the Administration to warn families like the Al-Khalifas of the consequences the U.S. and the West will impose if the shooting doesn’t stop. The decision this month by the Swiss government to freeze Mr. Mubarak’s bank accounts is a particularly good lesson for authoritarians everywhere.

It would also help if the Administration could be more forthright in supporting Iran’s Green movement, which has demonstrated in recent days that it remains capable of mounting large-scale protests in the teeth of the regime’s apparatus of repression.

Such support need not be merely rhetorical. The State Department and Congress could fast-track the regulatory approvals needed to provide the Green movement with secure texting technology, so they can communicate without the prying eyes of the regime. The CIA could provide Iranian workers with a strike fund—hard cash smuggled into the country to allow Iran’s workers to sustain a strike—thereby replicating the conditions that brought down the Shah.

The Administration could also assemble prominent exiled leaders of the Green movement to sign a declaration of principles against the regime. That declaration could in turn be used to launch a human-rights campaign in the U.S. and Europe to support the movement inside the country.

Beyond Iran, the Administration might consider reviving its moribund trade agenda in the Arab world. In 2003, the Bush Administration proposed a Middle East Free Trade Area Initiative and signed free-trade agreements with Oman, Jordan, Morocco and Bahrain. But the last time the U.S. signed any kind of trade agreement with Egypt was in 1999. The only kind of deal the Obama Administration has signed was a Trade and Investment Framework agreement with Libya last year. Could we not at least negotiate a free trade deal with Iraq?

We do not mean to suggest some economic determinism here. The case of Bahrain, in particular, shows that relatively enlightened economic policy is no substitute for a lack of political freedom. All the more so when sectarian differences between ruler (Sunni) and ruled (75% Shiite) are added to the mix. Bahrain ranks first in the Middle East and 10th in the world on the Heritage Foundation-Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom, and its living standards are high. But as people become more prosperous, their frustrations with repressive governments usually grow.

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Events in the Middle East are now unfolding at such a pace that none of these initiatives would likely have a direct impact in the short term. The influence of the U.S. cannot be decisive in what are, ultimately, domestic dramas. But that doesn’t relieve the U.S. of the obligation to press its political values, and doing what it can to tilt the direction of these revolutionary upheavals in a genuinely liberal direction.

The Obama Administration has squandered its first years of Mideast efforts on a combination of symbolic gestures like the Cairo speech and pointless diplomacy with the likes of Iran and Syria. It’s time it recognize that the real prize, and the best foundation for U.S. interests, is freedom.

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