Informed Comment

Interview with Juan Cole by Ricky Martínez

(These are the English notes of the interview rearranged in pyramid form; they were translated and published in a different sequence in Spanish at La Prensa of Panama City). Many thanks to Mr. Martinez for a wide-ranging conversation!

RM: How is Syria different from Libya?

Syria is different in so many ways… first of all, it’s not clear that a majority of Syrians necessarily want the government gone of at least that they would prefer the rebel forces to the government. Syria is a much more diverse country than Libya, in Syria you have 10-14% Christians, another 10-14% Shiites, and you have a large sector of urban, middle-class, relatively secular Sunni Muslims, and together they could easily form the majority of the country. And while they may not like the more authoritarian aspects of the Ba’ath government, they might prefer a secular government to a religious one. Many of the rebels, as things have developed, are invested in a Muslim Brotherhood, or even some of them have affiliated themselves with Al Qaeda. So I don’t think the moral clarity is apparent in Syria in the way that it was in Libya.

Secondarily, there is no UNSC authorization for the use of force in Syria, and I would have opposed a Libyan intervention if the UN hadn’t authorized one. I think international law is very important, I think the one thing that was wrong with Bush’s invasion of Iraq was that there was no UNSC authorization. If you undertake a military operation at a large scale in the Middle East without the support of the world, then it’s probably doomed to failure.

So there’s no authorization –Russia and China don’t want an intervention— and then Syria’s geography is not like Libya’s, the tanks are not out on desert roads, they are inside the cities, you couldn’t take out the artillery and the tanks without risking hitting apartment buildings with these large bombs and killing a lot of innocent civilians.

So, for all kinds of reasons I don’t think that an intervention in Syria is wise. I deeply regret the daily massive loss of life, and I wish there were a way for the international community to stop this carnage, but I feel helpless, I just don’t see a way.

RM: You were speaking about the importance of international law. Do you really think it’s possible to control the anarchy that exists at a supranational level?

JC: Historians who study the development of international of law and international treaties are not typically cynical. They find that even when there’s reluctance to abide by international law, that it’s claims are often consequential. Even though governments routinely disregard it or break it, international law still has a lot of weight in world affairs, and you can tell this because even the governments that do contravene it, deny that they have done so, they’re embarrassed about it, they get pressured… I’m not entirely sure that without international pressure, without the weight of international law, that the apartheid regime in South Africa could have been made to fall. And I think that the fact that George W. Bush went to Iraq without international law on his side meant that a lot of countries –France and Germany— were unwilling to help him, and he lost a lot of international support, and that was one of the reasons why he failed.

I understand why there would be cynicism about international law because it is often disregarded. But I think it often also has weight, and over time forms a point of pressure that does have consequences.

RM: The whole world is talking about the NSA scandal. How bad is it? Should we be worried?

JC: Well yes, I’m worried! I’m alarmed… of course, this is not in fact a new revelation, we’ve known about this for some time. Government surveillance is a problem, it violates basic norms of democracy when it is carried out without a warrant, without evidence of laws been broken.

On the other hand, they can’t actually surveil everybody. It’s impossible to monitor everyone. Technically, this information that they’re gathering is not that they’re watching you or me –- well, they might’ve been watching me —- but most people are not singled out for surveillance. It’s data mining, they’re looking for macro patterns, for certain kinds of connections, but the thing that displeases me it’s not that they’re spying on everybody at the time, it’s that the potential for abuse it great. And I don’t believe there’s probably sufficient oversight to forestall abuse. So, if a politician has a friend in the NSA and wanted the reputation of his rival to be destroyed by illegal surveillance, I think that’s something that can happen, and if it can happen it probably will happen. So that’s what I’m worried about, the politics of reputation coming out of this destruction of the whole idea of privacy.

RM: You wrote in Engaging the Muslim World that the world is facing the twin crisis of energy scarcity and climate change. How do you see the world reacting to them?

JC: As I suggested several years ago, solar energy is the only real, ultimate solution to these two crisis. The world is still growing population-wise, more and more people in Africa and Asia and the rest of the world are aspiring to a modern life rather than a village, agricultural one, and all of this makes the demand for more energy burgeon. Hydrocarbons simply could not possibly provide the kind of energy that is going to be demanded even over the next 50 years. Moreover, hydrocarbons cause very dangerous climate change which could destabilize our climate and our world.

My policy prescription would be to have a global massive program of solar installations. Solar panels have now come down in price to where they are competitive with hydrocarbons. They can be supplemented by wind and geothermal. But my frustration is that I see this change over to solar energy as urgent, as something we should try to do over the next 10 years, and most governments that pay any attention to the issue talk about having 50% renewable energy by 2050. To prevent debilitating climate change that’s way too late.

I have to say one of the reasons for which governments and the public are dragging their feet on this issue is that so much of our economy and our lives are wrought up with hydrocarbons that those companies employ a lot of people and have a lot of political clout, so they obfuscate the issue, they try to cast doubts on the by now quite solid findings of the climate scientists, or they try to drag their feet with regard to the policy, but if more governments in the world put in feed-in- tariffs and gave incentives for the installation of solar panels, and made it a priority to get this change over to renewable energy as quickly as possible we could avoid the worst outcomes that are facing us. If we go on like we are, we will have probably a 3-4 foot sea level rise in this century. Countries like Egypt and Bangladesh could be flooded. Storms in the Caribbean could become more frequent and more powerful –warm water feeds these hurricanes. You could have long storms and not short ones…

We’re playing with fire here, we really are in danger of inflicting massive damage on our world. And as I said, I’m frustrated that this danger, which is undebatable scientifically, is not being given the urgency that is requisite by most countries of the world.

RM: What’s going on with the US right now? [Some talk about it having become a totalitarian society.]

JC: I wouldn’t call it a totalitarian society just because I think there are still multiple powers and I think there’s still a place for popular mobilization. It’s certainly the case that about half of the American economy is dominated by about 2000 corporations, and that much government policy and legislation is dictated and very heavily influenced by those 2000 corporations.

But it should be remembered that often the corporations themselves have disputes, and that’s an opportunity for the public to leverage one against the other. A lot of the corporations and the US government were not very happy about the rise of the internet, especially what is called ‘net neutrality’. As things now stand, the way the internet is designed, anyone in the world who is on the internet has equal access to my blog, they have the same access to it, for the same price, that they have to corporate sites. Many of the corporations wanted to have the internet scaled so that it was easy and inexpensive to reach corporate sites, but difficult and expensive to reach an individual site like my own. So there was an attack on the principle of net neutrality. And Google and other internet companies that are quite large and powerful, and who depend on net neutrality for their profits, intervened on this debate and so saved net neutrality.

I just gave that as an example where corporate interests are not universal among the corporations, there are fights amongst them, and the internet activists –the bloggers and so forth— were able to rally and get Google on our side, so at least for the moment we have fought off this threat to net neutrality. And net neutrality in turn is what allows movements like the Tahrir Square in Egypt, or what’s going on in Turkey today… social media allows people to know about the protests because the official media were intimidated into not reporting it.

So, I don’t want to be overly optimistic, because these corporate interests are very powerful, and they do have disproportionate weight in government deliberations and legislation, but I also don’t want to give up hope, and I think individuals, the public, NGOs, civil society, still are diverse enough and in the aggregate have a great deal of power and it can find ways to find allies, at some point maybe with the corporations for certain kinds of political work which are of progressive nature, so a little bit more optimistic, I think.

RM: As a historian, do you see between the post-Cold War world and the post-9/11 world in terms of protest movements?

Keep reading Syria, NSA Spying, Popular Mobilization and History: Cole Interview in La Prensa (Ricky Martinez)

Posted in CIA, Domestic Surveillance, Energy, Environment, History, Human Rights, Islam, Islamophobia, Libya, Syria | Leave a Comment

Next Media Animation (a Taiwanese subsidiary of a Hong Kong firm) satirizes the Snowden/ NSA surveillance scandal by cartoon (English subtitles):

Posted in Human Rights | 1 Comment

The political reality of the United States in the world is that of blowback. Blowback is a term of art in the intelligence community for what happens when a covert operation goes bad and comes back to bite you on the ass. The US spent the 1980s encouraging Muslim radicals to engage in ‘freedom fighting’ against the leftist government of Afghanistan, and that policy certainly is implicated in the creation of al-Qaeda. We have been suffering with lack of security ever since. And what would have happened if Washington had just left the Communist government in place? Wouldn’t it have gone the same way as the former Communist regime of Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan? Which of you feels threatened by those former Soviet Socialist Republics?

The policy of deliberate deployment of torture by US officials, in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib (Iraq) and Bagram (Afghanistan), as well as black sites in Poland and elsewhere, during the past decade, has spawned a whole new wave of blowback.

The US is not responsible for terrorism against it, and the terrorists are horrible human beings. But let’s just say that a more responsible US foreign policy would make less trouble for the rest of us.

A bipartisan panel found, while the attention of the US public was elsewhere, that there is indisputable proof that the highest US officials of the Bush administration are implicated in torture, that torture was deployed systematically, and that there is no evidence that it ever yielded any useful intelligence about terrorist plots against the US. The Panel argues that the Guantanamo prison must be closed (many of the inmates now there have never been charged or tried and many have been cleared for release, but are not being released. Many are on debilitating hunger strikes that the US media barely cover.)

Jon Stewart, as usual, covers the story most trenchantly:

Posted in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, Human Rights, Uncategorized | 35 Comments

The selection of the new pope was carried out by a conclave of elderly men, and the only candidates were men. The new pope is a staunch social conservative who opposes women’s ordination as priests and women’s right to control their own bodies and limit family size, key issues for women’s health and well-being. It is no wonder that the church hierarchy is so tone deaf on women’s issues, since its highest counsels are all-male.

Now comes the sharp intervention from Egypt’s ruling Muslim Brotherhood that the draft statement of 57th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women is incompatible with the Brotherhood’s understanding of Islamic law. Interestingly, the Vatican also voiced objections to the document, as did the Russian Orthodox Church via the government of Vladimir Putin.

The Brotherhood statement objected to the following points:

1. Women’s right to reject marital rape
2. equal inheritance rights for women
3. equality of men and women within the family
4. allowing women the choice of mate (implying that Muslim women could marry non-Muslim men), abolition of polygamy and dowry
5. Depriving men of the right of unilateral divorce and giving discretion to judges as to whether to grant a divorce; equal sharing of communal property after divorce.
6. Removal of restrictions on women’s travel and work that depend on permission of their male guardian
7. Right of a woman to marry another woman.
8. legalization of abortion and provision of free contraception
9. equal rights for illegitimate children with legitimate ones, and civil rights for adulterous wives
10. Equal rights for gays

While the religious forces in Italy, Egypt and Russia may have differed somewhat on which of the draft principles they most opposed, all three underlined that they are partriarchies and that patriarchy as a form of government is alive and well and maybe even strengthening in much of the world.

The Brotherhood’s reading of Islamic law is mindless fundamentalism and literalism, often involving an ignorance of medieval Muslim beliefs and practices (in the area of abortion, e.g., or toleration of forms of homosociality).

Like the new pope, the Brotherhood considers gay rights an abomination. When he was archbishop of Buenos Aires, Pope Francis said of Argentina’s gay marriage law, “”Let’s not be naive, we’re not talking about a simple political battle; it is a destructive pretension against the plan of God. We are not talking about a mere bill, but rather a machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God.”

Egypt’s National Council for Women rejected the Brotherhood statement and insisted that full rights for women is, too, compatible with Islam.

Posted in Egypt, Human Rights, Uncategorized | 24 Comments

Bill Moyers interviews Susan Crawford on the virtual monopoly on internet provision held in the US by a few companies, who overcharge those who can afford their rates, exclude the poor, and give us slow, crappy service compared to more advanced and enlightened countries where being slaves of the corporations is frowned upon.

The blurb for the show:

“Susan Crawford on Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair
February 8, 2013

Susan Crawford, former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation, and author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, joins Bill to discuss how our government has allowed a few powerful media conglomerates to put profit ahead of the public interest — rigging the rules, raising prices, and stifling competition. As a result, Crawford says, all of us are at the mercy of the biggest business monopoly since Standard Oil in the first Gilded Age a hundred years ago.

“The rich are getting gouged, the poor are very often left out, and this means that we’re creating, yet again, two Americas, and deepening inequality through this communications inequality,” Crawford tells Bill.

Producer: Jessica Wang. Editor: Sikay Tang. Associate Producer: Lena Shemel.”

Posted in Human Rights, US politics | 9 Comments

A military judge has found that Bradley Manning, who released large numbers of low-classified State Department cables to Wikileaks, was illegally punished while in the brig at Quantico, when he was denied exercise and kept on ‘suicide watch’ (chained and naked) against the counsel of his psychiatrist. Although Manning did nothing more than Daniel Ellsberg (who released the Pentagon Papers during Vietnam, which were published by the New York Times), and although Ellsworth and the Times were held harmless, Manning faces life imprisonment. Ellsworth notes that all of the dirty tricks deployed against him by the harassing Nixon administration are now actually legal.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks explains:

Manning should be released, given that he was kept in conditions that the world court at the Hague would probably find met the definition of torture, and there was very substantial misconduct on the part of the government.

Here is a reprint edition of my January, 2011, comparison of Bradley Manning to Mohammed Bouazizi, the young man who sparked the Tunisian revolution and the Arab Spring:

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Bradley Manning and Mohamed Bouazizi

Activists David House and Jane Hamsher tried to visit Pfc. Bradley Manning, who stands accused of leaking classified US government documents, at Quantico on Sunday. They allege that while still outside the base, they were given a run-around, threatened with having their car towed, and then essentially detained for two hours, until the 3:00 pm end to visiting hours arrived. They were not on the base, and House is on an approved visitor list. They were trying to see Manning, whose health they say has deteriorated because of the harsh terms of his detainment, and to deliver to the base commander a petition with 40,000 signatories asking that the terms be eased.

The suspicious behavior of the authorities at Quantico raises the question of why they were trying to keep House from seeing Manning on Sunday. What had been done to their prisoner that they didn’t want coming out?

Manning’s treatment as though he were a terrorist contrasts to the lionization of other kinds of dissident. If it is true that Manning turned State Department documents over to Wikileaks, then he played a small role in the Tunisian Jasmine Revolution, which overthrew the brutal and grasping dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, whom the US government had been coddling and the French government actively supporting. Ben Ali’s cruelty to political prisoners is now emerging, as they are being released and telling their story.

Keep reading Wikileaker Bradley Manning "Illegally Punished," 4 months off Life Sentence

Posted in Human Rights | 4 Comments