Photo by Timothy Kaldas from Tahrir Square, Cairo, on January 25, 2011.

There has been a lot of blame heaped on Obama for his rather cautious remarks about the Egyptian uprising. Nicholas Kristof is pleading with him in the Times today to do more. Secretary Clinton has certainly been driving me up the wall all this time with her ice-queen persona and creepy evasiveness in responding to direct questions; Biden has been characteristically uncouth. But Obama’s delicate middle path, though, seems to me quite appropriate. He has not insisted that Mubarak step down, but has made clear that violence against the protesters will not be tolerated. He has affirmed the democratic aspirations of the Egyptian people and made clear that a just transition of power should be imminent. His administration has even indicated that it is reevaluating its aid relationship with Egypt, as if to attach consequences to these demands. That’s about it, though. He hasn’t demanded that Mubarak step down.

As someone filled with hope and excitement by recent events in Egypt, I find myself wishing that my president would go further. I’ve heard Egyptians wishing he would too. But I think this is a wish worth resisting. American presidents aren’t the good guys here, and it’s a mistake to ask that one should pretend to be. Obama stands atop a government that has spent decades supporting undemocratic regimes in the name of its short-term interests, and the bizarre interests dictated by those policies will probably suffer with Mubarak’s departure. Like the Wikileaks incidents, these protests are a force of truth that stands firmly against the US government’s practices of deception. The Egyptians have caught American Empire with no clothes, and it’s beside the point to ask that we flex a bit to look good naked.

Really, what is at stake is a whole habit of thinking about how things get done in the world. For the last decade, when you wanted “regime change,” you called up the US. Our military provided it, while destabilizing a region, tanking the domestic economy, and inventing perverse new meanings for the word “victory” in the process. Now, say the Egyptian people, that era is over. Change comes from below, from the governed, and through largely-peaceful protest. This is how real democracies are born. And it’s a whole lot cheaper.

Speaking of which, it’s time to end the massive economic aid meant more to prop up Egypt’s military and its alliance with Israel than the well-being of its people. It’s time to start imagining a world in which the US is doing less, not more. Get used to it: we’re not the heroes here (though we did invent Facebook and Twitter). We’re a large part of why Mubarak managed to hold on to power as long as he did. In the future I hope that those kinds of policies change, and that I will be prouder of how my country carries itself in the world. But for now, victory is for the Egyptians, not for us.

I wrote a few days ago about the growing political momentum in the US Congress around finally cutting defense spending. It seems that this is well-founded in public opinion. The New York Times reports that, based on its recent poll about cutting government entitlements,

Nearly two-thirds of Americans choose higher payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security over reduced benefits in either program. And asked to choose among cuts to Medicare, Social Security or the nation’s third-largest spending program — the military — a majority by a large margin said cut the Pentagon.

According to the poll data, 55% of respondents would be willing to cut defense spending, compared to 21% for Medicare and 13% for Social Security. Democrats are somewhat more likely to favor such cuts (66%), Republicans are somewhat less (42%), and independents are right at the average (55%).

To learn more, I turned to Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, who for years has been working to show the US government how to end its addiction to defense spending while reframing how we think about our security. She explained to me that this new momentum has been in the works well before the Tea Partyers showed up in Congress, and that because of it her work has been gaining traction:

The game changer has been bipartisan deficit reduction fever. Barney Frank was the visionary. Summer before last he pulled together what we wound up calling the Sustainable Defense Task Force to say what could be cut and why. The president’s deficit reduction commission adopted our $100 billion annual figure, and some of our recommendations.

However, she warns us to be suspicious about Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s language of military “cuts”:

Secretary Gates has tried to head off real cuts mostly by selling rearrangements of his own budget, and increases smaller than the ones he’d previously promised, as cuts.

The newly-empowered Republicans in Congress, Pemberton says, are divided. Committee chairs like Buck McKeon (Armed Services) and Paul Ryan (Budget) have been resisting actual cuts to military spending. “But,” she adds, “a lot of tea partiers, libertarians, and some in the Republican leadership are saying: everything on the deficit reduction table.”

In this way, the Tea Party could be a good thing for demilitarization. Pemberton is concerned, however, that talk of deficit reduction can be tricky business; what we need now isn’t just reduction but reinvestment. We need to make sure that the jobs lost by arms-makers can be picked up by a new green economy.

We’re still not having the right kind of conversation, even if we’re getting closer. Many in Congress hope that the Pentagon will somehow be able to do more with less. “Actually,” says Pemberton, where the military is concerned, “the real missing debate is about how to do less.”

In a recent TED talk, Nobel Laureate Jody Williams—who won the Peace prize in 1997 for her efforts to eradicate landmines—argues that “peace is defined by human (not national) security and that it must be achieved through sustainable development, environmental justice, and meeting people’s basic needs.” While that may not be a particularly novel idea to readers of this blog, Williams leacture is worth watching for the great women peacemakers she highlights to show who is leading the way toward this vision of peace.

The words “irresponsible,” “reckless” and “dangerous” have been thrown around so much in connection with the Wikileaks release of State Department cables that I’m surprised the Daily Show hasn’t yet made one of its patented sound bite montages. Picture it, one right after the other: White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senator John Kerry, Senator Joe Lieberman and numerous other US politicians, all saying the same three words.

What we have here are a lot of angry people who all got the same talking points memo. Then there’s Sarah Palin (who demanded Wikileaks founder Julian Assange be hunted down like Osama bin Laden) and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (who called for whistleblower Bradley Manning’s execution). Too far? I would like to think so, but it seems not. The mainstream press has reprocessed it all into a convenient meme that has most Americans believing Wikileaks is a disreputable hack media outfit that’s endangering our security.

As journalist Pierre Tristam noted:

It’s an indication of how willingly the American public has swallowed the lies and assumptions of the national security state as necessary  that more people instinctively agree with the government’s defense of secrecy than applaud the whistle-blowing. It’s a variation of the Stockholm Syndrome: captives coming to the defense of their captors. In summer, when Wikileaks made public almost 100,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan, 66 percent of those questioned in a Gallup poll declared the release “wrong.” Curiously, when CBC, the Canadian news agency, polled Canadians about the latest leak, 85 percent were in favor. Naturally: the world prefers to be better informed, for once, about how the United States exercises its power.

The belief that Wikileaks is somehow a threat to US security is not founded in any fact. As McClatchey Newspapers reported on Monday, even “US officials conceded that they have no evidence to date that the release of documents led to anyone’s death.”

Meanwhile, the documents themselves certainly reveal US complicity in the deaths of innocent people. One cable describes a meeting where Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh told Gen David Petraeus that: “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” essentially revealing that the US (not Yemen) had carried out a missile strike in Yemen last year that killed dozens of local residents.

Amazingly, this revelation has been used as an example of a “negative consequence” of the Wikileaks release by—as NPR wrote in defense of US government interests— “providing more fodder for al-Qaida’s recruitment efforts in Yemen and abroad.” Former Assistant Secretary of State James Rubin has been making the rounds to further hammer this point home. On Tuesday’s Colbert Report, Rubin said:

In general, diplomats have to resolve problems by resolving an issue privately and that might include allowing a leader to say something publicly that is different than what they say privately. So we might have to allow a hypocrisy in an Arab country if it’s going to get the job done.

In short, Rubin is saying our security is contingent on lies—lies that allow us to bomb other countries, killing innocent people, under someone else’s name. As journalist Norman Solomon recently pondered, “what kind of ‘national security’ can be built on duplicity from a government that is discredited and refuted by its own documents?”

Read the rest of this article »

I couldn’t help but be impressed by the students from Northern Secondary School in Toronto who protested the hiring of a police officer for their school, and wonder why there doesn’t seem to be resistance to such efforts in the US.

One student eloquently argues that there is “no community accountability for the decision” to bring police into the school because it was not democratically made and that students were not consulted. It’s hard for me to imagine many American high school students formulating such an argument or even raising a fuss.

Any thoughts as to why this might be? Is this school unique? Perhaps the students have a great teacher who gave them a sense of their political agency. Has there been more opposition to the increased police presence in our schools in the US that I’m not aware of?

When I went in high school – in a small town in central Illinois – we didn’t have to contend with cops or metal detectors to enter the building, and except in the most extreme circumstances, that’s the way it should be.

Having grown up in the Washington, D.C. area, I watched as the “war on terror” turned the streets of D.C.’s federal district into a maze of barricades, permanently parked police cars, and inexplicable no-go zones. It may be government by the people and for the people, but the people can’t get anywhere near.

I’m also a bicyclist, raised to idolize the city’s fearless bike couriers. I’ve put my bike and my body in those streets, removing one more murderous car from the congestion and a few more pounds of CO2 from the air. In return, in the name of order and hurry, I’ve been pulled over by cops and hit from behind by an impatient taxi. Security means insecurity. Transporting myself sanely means risking my life.

At 3QuarksDaily, a powerful essay by Sam Kean tells of the death of an elderly woman, a writer on a harmless bicycle, in a collision with a large military truck supposedly providing security for a diplomatic summit.

[T]he Nuclear Summit security situation showed that mentality isn’t just silly—it actually causes danger, it actually introduces hazards. Again, heads of state obviously need some protection, like bodyguards; but it was just as obvious to anyone who tried to get within a mile of the Convention Center last month that security had spilled over into paranoia. To the point that military personnel were so worried about getting their trucks into the proper place that they crushed a 68-year-old woman on a bicycle five blocks from the nearest point you could have spit on the Convention Center.

Read the rest at 3quarksdaily.