It’s ironic that a country that wages war in the name of democracy gets nervous when democracy actually breaks out. Jeff Cohen put it this way on the Truthout blog: “One of the mantras on U.S. television news all day Friday was: Be fearful of the democratic uprisings against U.S. allies in Egypt (and Tunisia and elsewhere). After all, we were told by Fox News and CNN and Chris Matthews on MSNBC, it could end up as bad as when ‘our ally’ in Iran was overthrown and the extremists came to power in 1979.”
As Cohen explains, the history of the U.S.’s foreign policy is a story of machinations in which democracy was sacrificed to other goals: guarding our oil supply, fighting an often exaggerated threat of communism. Talk of Iran on the news usually goes no farther back than the taking of American hostages there in 1979; it leaves out of account the way Americans and Britons subverted an emerging democratic government in Iran in 1953, pushing the people into the hands of extremist religious leaders who offered the only refuge from the Shah and his notorious secret police.
Why did we do that? Because the Iranians who were taking power in 1953 were tired of seeing Iran’s oil industry controlled by the British and wanted to nationalize it. With plans for an interstate highway system in the works in the U.S., our side wanted a guaranteed flow of affordable oil.
In Afghanistan, the U.S. carried out a proxy war against the Soviet Union by covertly sponsoring local guerrillas who in some cases joined the Taliban, and importing jihadists who eventually swelled the ranks of al Qaeda. In Iraq, the U.S. backed the notoriously repressive but anti-communist, secularist Saddam Hussein until he went out of their control by invading Kuwait.
The point Cohen and others have raised concerning the revolution in Egypt against president (read dictator) and U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak is that U.S. foreign policy seems to place little value on democracy. But another thing these litanies of foreign policy blowback make clear is that our foreign policy is monumentally short-sighted—a series of crises resolved by measures so myopic that they set us up for the next crisis.
As the Egyptian people struggle against our repressive ally and the revolutionary movement that began in Tunis seems poised to spread even farther, it’s a good time to remember remarks by President Kennedy in 1962, when African countries were throwing off colonialism: “Wisdom requires the long view. And the long view shows us that the revolution of national independence is a fundamental fact of our era. This revolution cannot be stopped.” Can our foreign policy makers sit back, look at the broad picture, and do better than solve one problem in a way that makes the next one inevitable?
