Dear USA,
Oh, you have an Office for Middle East Transitions now?
How ’bout this: Leave us the fuck alone. We dont want your counterrevolutionary, imperial, siphoning-off-riches-for-Western-financial-institutions, creating-markets-for-the-MilitaryIndustrialAgriOilComplex meddling in our affairs. We dont want your aid or your debt. We dont want your teargas or your tanks. We dont want your fertilizers or your GMOs. We’ll take twitter, facebook and google though; they’re kind of neat and dont come with debt attached.
How about instead of poking your noses in our business, you figure out why you have the worst health and education levels in the developed world? Or why you have expanding income disparity and growing third-world poverty? Or why your corporations dont pay taxes while shipping your jobs abroad? Or, for that matter, why after you bailed them out with trillions of your tax dollars, the executives are raking in billions while you’re freaking out about what source of debt you’re going to default on first? Credit Card? Mortgage? Car Loan? Or the whole national shebang? Or why institutionalized human rights abuses keep being uncovered under the watch of the troops that have been fighting a stupid war for a decade? Or why you can’t muster the willpower to transition to renewable energy and instead are building the KXL pipeline that will actually ship oil from Canada, over your land and then off to the rest of the world, with nary a drop for you? Or why you’ve gradually given up so many of the liberties and values that made you the shining light of freedom and progress that the entire world looked up to? How about you work on all that?
By the time you’re done, we’ll probably have figured our own business out. In fact, I’m pretty sure you wont have gotten anywhere by the time we’re done. I mean, even the messianic Obama couldnt do anything to get you out of your corporate-beholden, two-parties-that-are-actually-the-same, stuck-in-the-babyboomers’-sixties-culture-wars hole. Maybe when we’re done here, we’ll set up an Office for Transition in the USA. Maybe. But we know pretty well by now how much trouble it is and it causes to meddle in others’ business. So maybe we can just meet for coffee and hang out. Or, there’s always Skype (we’ll take that too, it’s also neat).
Sincerely,
a purportedly-backwards-towel-headed-ignorant-atriskofIslamofascism-ay-rab-no-longer-in-need-of-benevolence
Cairene's Nilometer 
such fun! and well on the mark insightful. Wow … more strength to your pen, which is mightier than any sword.
Go for it, but I don’t think your anger will get you very far.
The U.S. does not have a monopoly on “counterrevolutionary, imperial, siphoning-off-riches-for-Western-financial-institutions, creating-markets-for-the-MilitaryIndustrialAgriOilComplex”. Yes, there is corruption and it is bad. So, what? It’s not like that’s new or even particularly American. Show me a source of power and I’ll show you an someone trying to manipulate it at the expense of others. It is not desirable but it is normative.
The U.S. has problems and it is trying to work them out in its own dysfunctional way. I’m the first to admit that it has problems, but it is trying to work them out. Democracy is neither simple nor easy. Frequently it’s ugly.
I would also point out that all those cool technologies you mention can trace their ancestry back to the “MilitaryIndustrialAgriOilComplex” you so despise. The Internet traces its lineage back to a U.S. Department of Defense research project. It doesn’t get much more military or industrial than that.
I commend your therapeutic venting. I would also suggest that you take a bit of that emotional energy and pause for a moment of introspection. Why did it take so long for the “Arab Spring” to arrive? Why did it take thirty years of suffering to overthrow home grown kleptocrats? If your mind turns immediately to foreign conspiracies, you do disservice to the many people who have fallen and continue to fall striving for change. Foreign conspiracies did not help any of the fallen or falling regimes.
In the end, it’s important to recognize that people and their governments are very different entities. People sit down and have coffee all the time. Governments don’t. There’s too much power and prestige involved. Governments and people sometimes do have coffee, but never as equals. The power differential is too great. Perhaps your letter is addressed to the wrong audience? Would you write it differently if you were inviting an individual American to have coffee?
Thanks John for your response. I think you missed the humor that was supposed to be rolled into the post. But since you took the time to write all that, I will take a few moments to respond:
The fact that I had to note that we wanted those things, i thought, was indication that i recognized the contradiction, and was making a joke of it.
Nothing is particularly US about counterrevolution or the dynamics of power. After all, it has only been around for 300 years. The only reasons that the US matters is that it is for the time being the reigning superpower and it is constantly meddling in others’ affairs for the sake of its corporate empire (case in point: the office that instigated this whole rant). It’s by no means a monopoly, it’s just the strongest.
History is contingent and complex. There is no single reason why it took “thirty years of suffering” (i will ignore the fact that that figure is meaningless as it discounts the continuity of historical processes, as if Mubarak’s rise was a sudden switch). But there is no doubt that the US played an intentional part in supporting the suppression of Egypt’s people and what would probably be their popular will. It continues to do so as we speak (write?).
I’m sorry, but i do not accept the rhetorically cheap line of “doing disservice to those who have fallen”. Those who have fallen are all the more inspiring because of the odds that they were up against. What change has happened, happened in spite of the US and other counterrevolutionary forces’ best efforts.
I also don’t accept the cheap and dismissive “conspiracy theory” line. There are conspiracies. In fact, the vast majority of things we are/were shushed about b/c they were supposed to be conspiracy theories are being revealed to be true whenever secret government and corporate files emerge to the public. Thank you wikileaks and others.
Finally, of course i recognize the difference between people and their governments. The point of bringing up coffee is to build human relationships as equals. I’ll have coffee with regular people any day (In fact, i do all the time; i’m in grad school in the US). The government, on the other hand, can go fuck themselves.
Anyway, the whole point of this post was that since America has all of those problems that you recognize, maybe it should focus on those instead of poking its nose in our business (forming a new state dept office, etc). It was meant to be funny-angry, which i thought was evident.
Sorry, I did miss the humor.
The thirty years was just a convenient number reflecting the tenure of some of the deposed regimes. Your point on its arbitrariness is well taken as are comments about the U.S. role and the complexity and contingency of history. My question is to what extent the U.S. should shoulder blame. There is blame to go around, to be sure.
Rhetorically cheap? Maybe. But it doesn’t negate the point that I was making that there is blame to go around both domestically and abroad. Focusing on externalities belies the historical complexity we both acknowledge. I strongly disagree with your suggestion that the change we witnessed/are witnessing is in spite of the U.S.’s and other counterrevolutionary’s “best efforts.” We have not seen the U.S. actual exert itself to any significant degree in any of these situations. If one looks at Bahrain and Yemen where the US has remained largely and conspicuously silent, there we find revolutionary movements struggling the most. Had the US chosen to act in a counterrevolutionary way during the Arab Spring, the outcomes I suspect would be very different and much bloodier.
I don’t dispute that there are conspiracies. I’m strongly against government secrecy. However, I find that people like to blame conspiracies because people hate inexplicable events. I’m simply reluctant to ascribe blame without better evidence.
Be glad you can tell the government what you think.
On your final point let me ask a question. If the whole world had decided to stop poking its nose into Egypt’s business during the revolution, would there be more or less violence? Would the protestor’s be more or less likely to succeed? Bear in mind I’m arguing for wholesale indifference. No sanctions. No restrictions. The state freely exerts internal power because its an internal matter. I’d suggest that things would be bloodier and worse for the people of Egypt. I understand how difficulty this kind of counterfactual is and also understand how many years of preceding events led to that point, but you have to start (or rather stop) at some point. If governments went cold turkey on exerting international influence, lots of people all over the world would die in short order. As bad as our current system is, simply withdrawing is an even more frightening alternative.
I dont think i have ever claimed that there is any one cause of anything. But it’s not always useful to address everything at the same time.
This was not the space for an academic exposition on all the ways in which a certain global regime, in which the US is central, seeks to promote and perpetuate a certain mode of organization. It was supposed to be funny.
Maybe i’ll write about that in the future. But others have already done so. Check out the critiques of neoliberalism and debt on Jadaliyya.
Your comments on Yemen and Bahrain betray a lack of awareness of the dynamics that include the US. That’s Saudi Arabia’s back yard. So the USA let’s them deal with the trouble (using US materiel). On the other hand, Libya is a bit too far off for KSA, so NATO help one side (the more pliant, and soon to be indebted, one), so they can get better oil concessions from people less likely to go batshit and cut off Europe’s low-sulfur supplies.
While global moral pressure and attention no doubt played an important role, I would argue that the reasons the Egyptian military didnt open fire on its people are much more explainable by internal features than external government influence.
That’s not to say at all that anyone ever wanted global indifference. We (or, I) believe in a better future for all humanity; and that the problem is global; and that we must learn from each other and work together. As People. And we are doing that. We learned from Latin America and Eastern Europe; Spain learned from us. US activists are explicitly learning from Egypt and Spain in the call for “Occupy Wall St” on 17 Sept.
What this post was all about is: we want the governments and corporations to leave us the fuck alone. We want to be in charge of our own destinies.
The people are cool. And always welcome. As long as they’re not jackasses.
I respectfully disagree. KSA and the USA certainly disagreed over Egypt and Bahrain. KSA is/was certainly angry over US handling of Egypt. I am aware of the long term strategic partnership between the USA and KSA. Working in Doha, I’m all too aware of local conditions. As someone who conducts research on US national security policy, I’m also very familiar with how the US government actually crafts policy. While accepting non-intervention is a kind of intervention, the US could have intervened in a number of different ways and chose not to. The Egyptian military did not open fire, the internal security forces did to some degree but acted in a far more restrained manner than they might have in the absence of external pressure.
“What this post was all about is: we want the governments and corporations to leave us the fuck alone. We want to be in charge of our own destinies.”
My original point is while this is a noble and even admirable sentiment, it is hopelessly naive and unrealistic. Only people without value and posing no threat are ignored by governments and corporations. In our interconnected world, being in charge of our own destinies is a convenient fiction. You stated earlier that you are in grad school in the US. You must acknowledge how precariously contingent your own destiny is on the whims, decisions and evaluations of others.
Well, you’ve nitpicked the hell out of something that was supposed to be humorous. Now I’m bored of this conversation.
You’re entitled to your perceptions on the USA. I guess we’ll just have to wait till the documents get wikileaked.