[R-G] Obama Shares Bush's Goals

[Anthony Fenton]

Obama Shares Bush's Goals
by Hossein Derakhshan
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/derakhshan240908.html

Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, has adopted the  
rhetoric of change which has captured the imagination of many  
Americans and non-Americans around the world.

But when it comes to the foreign policy, there are enough reasons to  
remain sceptical.  Will he adopt a foreign policy with objectives  
which differ from those of George Bush, the current US president, or  
will he merely change Bush's strategies and tactics?

Some, like French political theorist Raymond Aron in his book The  
Imperial Republic, hold that the US is essentially founded on two  
principles -- Empire and Republic.  Its foreign policy, from the  
start, has therefore consistently been torn by the tensions between  
Empire and Republic.  In 1903, Beckles Willson made a similar argument  
in his book The New America: A Study of the Imperial Republic.

National Endowment for Democracy

At the height of the Cold War, in 1983, Ronald Reagan, the late US  
president, ordered the establishment of the bi-partisan, private, and  
non-profit National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

"We must work hard for democracy and freedom, and that means putting  
our resources -- organizations, sweat, and dollars -- behind a long- 
term program," Reagan said in its inaugural speech.

"I just decided that this nation, with its heritage of Yankee traders,  
we ought to do a little selling of the principles of democracy,"  
Reagan added.

NED's brief history shows that Reagan's notion of selling principles  
of democracy was in fact the practice of funding opposition groups in  
unfavorable states to destabilize and ideally topple their governments.

These governments would then be replaced with US-allied local  
politicians who in many cases had already risen to fame through the  
work of NED-funded local human rights, labor, or democracy NGOs.

Coups

This has long been one of the main missions of the US intelligence  
organizations such as the CIA.

In fact, NED admits on its own website that what it is doing now was  
being done by the CIA: "When it was revealed in the late 1960's that  
some American PVO's [or NGOs, as they're called today] were receiving  
covert funding from the CIA to wage the battle of ideas at  
international forums, the Johnson Administration concluded that such  
funding should cease, recommending establishment of 'a public-private  
mechanism' to fund overseas activities openly."

The most famous example of NED's work came as a coup against Hugo  
Chavez, the Venezuelan president, in 2002.  But this eventually failed.

In Eastern Europe, however, NED's attempts have been more successful.   
In the past few years, Ukraine and Georgia's 'Orange and Rose  
revolutions' have effectively transformed the two countries into the  
most faithful American allies in Russia's backyard.

NED's funding and consultants, along with funds and support from  
similar American organizations such as George Soros's Open Society  
Institute, largely contributed to their metamorphoses.

In fact, as reported in 2004 by the Guardian, NED and its subsidiaries  
such as the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National  
Democratic Institute (NDI), as well as United States Agency for  
International Development (USAID), Open Society Institute (OSI), and  
Freedom House, were involved in financing and organizing those  
campaigns in Serbia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia.

Since 9/11, NED has expanded its operations in the Middle East and has  
slowly and quietly been training and expanding networks of pro- 
American civil society and human rights activists, journalists, and  
labor unions.

"Our future and the future of that region are linked," Bush said in a  
speech on the 20th anniversary of the establishment of NED.

NED in Iran

NED's interest in Iran was initiated in 1995 in the form of a  
fellowship program.

Among the first group of Iranian Fellows was Haleh Esfandiari, whose  
research was focused on women's issues in Iran.

She later became the director of the Woodrow Wilson Center's program  
on the Middle East and kept close contact with Iranian women's NGOs.

In 2007, she was detained and charged with "conspiring against the  
Islamic Republic of Iran," but was released on bail after three  
months.  Interestingly, Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden were among  
the senior US politicians who called the arrest unjust and explicitly  
demanded her release.

Around the same time of Esfandiari's detention, Kian Tajbakhsh,  
another Iranian-American was also detained, charged, and freed on bail.

The ministry of intelligence said he was identified with the help of  
Esfandiari as the representative of the OSI in Iran.  OSI later  
confirmed in a statement that Tajbakhsh has been indeed a consultant  
to the organization in Iran.

Ramin Jahanbegloo, who was a Reagan-Fascell fellow at the NED in 2001  
and continued contributing to NED's Journal of Democracy, was detained  
in 2006 (according to the Iranian Fars News agency over his ties with  
NED) and was charged with acts threatening the state.

The Iranian ministry of intelligence, reported by IRNA, stated at the  
time that the Woodrow Wilson Center's activities and program related  
to Iran were sponsored and financed by the Soros Foundation (or Open  
Society Institute) which had played a key role in the 'color  
revolutions' in the former USSR republics in recent years.

Obama and NED

While Obama objects to military intervention, he is, like Bush, a big  
supporter of the kind of activity that NED is doing -- and  
interestingly enough, more avidly than Bush.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Obama said that he would  
"significantly increase funding for the National Endowment for  
Democracy (NED) and other non-governmental organizations to support  
civic activists in repressive societies."

He promised to "start a new Rapid Response Fund for young democracies  
and post-conflict societies that will provide foreign aid, debt  
relief, technical assistance and investment packages that show the  
people of newly hopeful countries that democracy and peace deliver,  
and the United States stands by them."

Joseph Biden, Obama's running mate is not much different.  In an  
article for Washington Monthly in 2005, he criticized Bush for not  
putting his money where his mouth is: "Promoting democracy is tough  
sledding.  We must go beyond rhetorical support and the passion of a  
single speech.  It's one thing to topple a tyrant; it's another to put  
something better in his place."

"The most effective, sustainable way to advocate democracy is to help  
those moderates and modernizers on the inside build democratic  
institutions such as political parties, an independent judiciary, a  
free media, a modern education system, a civil society, non- 
governmental organizations (NGOs), and a private sector," Biden said.

It was the same Joseph Biden in 2002 who, in a ceremony for the NED's  
annual Democracy award, introduced Mehrangiz Kar, a 'reformist'  
Iranian women rights activist who now lives in the US.

Continuity

The similarities between Bush and Obama's view of the American role  
and duty towards the rest of the world might be striking, but for  
those whose concept of history goes beyond searching Google, there is  
no surprise.

In his book, Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky cites John Stewart  
Mill, the British philosopher and one of the champions of the American  
notion of liberty, and shows how the same rhetoric of liberty and  
democracy has been used by the British Empire to justify its attempt  
at hegemony over the world.

Mills describes England as "a novelty in the world" who is committed  
to create an "idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity."

He refers to a selfless country that only acts "in the service of  
others," even though the fruits of its success will be shared "in  
fraternal equality with the whole human race."

Chomsky traces this non-partisan 'altruist' foreign policy in the US  
back to Woodrow Wilson, who served two terms as the American president  
from 1913 to 1921.

"The primary principle of foreign policy, rooted in Wilsonian idealism  
and carried over from Clinton to Bush II is 'the imperative of  
America's mission as the vanguard of history, transforming the global  
order and, in doing so, perpetuating its own dominance'," wrote Chomsky.

In his 1968 book, Woodrow Wilson and the Modern American Empire,  
Norman Gordon Levin, puts this eloquently: "The needs of America's  
expanding capitalism were joined ideologically with a more universal  
vision of American service to suffering humanity and to world  
stability."

Talking to Iran

When it comes to Iran, Obama's tactics indeed look quite different  
from Bush's -- engagement versus isolation.

But their goals are no different; both want to replace the only  
independent oil-rich state in the Middle East with an obedient regime,  
similar to the infamous Anglo-American coup in 1953 when Iran  
nationalized its oil industry.

Obama's tactics are perhaps best articulated by Abbas Milani, an  
influential 'liberal' researcher on Iran who co-directs the Iran  
Democracy Project at the conservative Hoover Institute and is a  
supporter of Obama.

He said to the New Yorker Magazine in 2005 that the Americans should  
talk to Iran "but with the purpose of overthrowing them."
Hossein Derakhshan is a London-based media analyst and freelance  
journalist.  He writes about Iran in a bilingual blog in Persian and  
English at hoder.com which is blocked by the Iranian government.  
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