Wouldn't it be better to stop enabling dictators rather than bombing them when they turn evil?

Is it true that when all you have are bombs, everything starts to look like a target? The U.S. has a long history of supporting (giving money, weapons and training) to brutal dictatorships, and then having to turn our own military upon them later on. Maybe George Orwell was prescient in the book 1984 when he wrote about shifting alliances between world powers causing them to rewrite history books to justify warring against former allies. But it's ludicrous, wasteful and immoral to be propping up a government in one moment, and the next moment launching war against it in the next. But, it's happened time and again.

The current examples are Libya, Yemen, perhaps Bahrain, and this strained relationship with Pakistan. The most curious of those is Libya which was the subject of an article on Alternet.Org a couple months ago, which I posted on facebook, prompting a rather interesting exchange among some of my friends, which I've been meaning to write up ever since, and somehow even two months later the ideas are just as poignant as they were two months ago.

The article: Instead of Bombing Dictators in Libya and Around the World, Stop Selling Them Bombs It was written shortly after the wave of Facebook-fueled-Arab-protests-leading-to-toppled-Arab-governments landed in Libya, and rather than allow a popular uprising to topple his government Muammar Gaddafi responded with guns and tanks and airplanes turned upon Libya's own citizens. The "world community" responded with denunciations which over the course of a couple weeks turned into Western forces militarily supporting the "rebels" in Libya with cruise missles, and other air support, but no western boots touching Libya soil.

If your only memory of Libya is hearing them blamed for the Lockerbie bombing (an airplane that had an on-board bomb which blew up while the plane was above Lockerbie Scotland), or maybe being part of GW Bush's Axis of Evil, maybe you're confused to hear me describe them as a western ally. Fact is that a few years ago they foreswore their nuclear program and in exchange became allied with the Western conglomerate of countries. That put Libya on the gravy train of receiving Western assistance, including military assistance.

When President Barack Obama announced "we" would not "stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy, and ... where innocent men and women face brutality and death at the hands of their own government," the weapons being used by Gaddafi's troops had been sold to him by Western powers. Yes Obama's statement was eloquent and moving, but the hypocracy is poignant.

From the Alternet.Org article:

In 2009 alone, European governments -- including Britain and France -- sold Libya more than $470 million worth of weapons, including fighter jets, guns and bombs. And before it started calling for regime change, the Obama administration was working to provide the Libyan dictator another $77 million in weapons, on top of the $17 million it provided in 2009 and the $46 million the Bush administration provided in 2008.

And:

Meanwhile, for dictatorial regimes in Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, U.S. support continues to this day. On Saturday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even gave the U.S. stamp of approval to the brutal crackdown on protesters in Bahrain, saying the country’s authoritarian rulers “obviously” had the “sovereign right” to invite troops from Saudi Arabia to occupy their country and carry out human rights abuses, including attacks on injured protesters as they lay in their hospital beds.

The article went on to say Yemen "has received more than $300 million in military aid from the U.S. over the last five years" and it's not just the Yemeni government carrying out atrocities in Yemen, "one American bombing raid last year taking out 41 Yemeni civilians, including 14 women and 21 children". Further "The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute documented that Washington accounted for 54 percent of arms sales to Persian Gulf states between 2005 and 2009."

In other words, the U.S. is spending a lot of money supporting these dictatorial Arab governments, supplying them arms, and currently we see (in some cases) those arms being used against the civilian populations.

The article concludes "The U.S. government need not drop a single bomb in the Middle East to help liberate oppressed people. All it need do is stop selling bombs to their oppressors." Amen, for the record I agree completely.

Now, let's turn to the debate my friends had because they really captured three different points of view:

• me) we support the system as it is, warts and all, therefore because we don't join together to act to change the system that makes us responsible;
• Tony) yeah the system is flawed but our creeps are better than their creeps so that makes us okay;
• Bart) they aren't our creeps at all, and it's out of our hands because the real decisions are made by people who aren't responsible to our approval ...

Let's take Tony's position first. Nothing personal Tony, but I disagree of course. His argument is that for example Muburak (one of "our creeps") willingly stepped down while Gadaffi (never one of "our creeps") is mowing down civilians. Uh.. One of the factoids surrounding Egypt is their use of torture against their civilians and the 30+ years of military rule under emergency laws. Egypt is one of the countries to which the Bush Administration outsourced torture during the "extraordinary rendition" program. Torture is not something to be dismissed as "enhanced interrogation", torture is illegal. I found this article and am sure more could be found: WikiLeaks: Egyptian 'torturers' trained by FBI; The US provided officers from the Egyptian secret police with training at the FBI, despite allegations that they routinely tortured detainees and suppressed political opposition.

It's not just Egypt but there are plenty of other examples. One was that guy in Iraq we demonized and toppled his government a few years ago. A few years before that the U.S. was selling him arms, Donald Rumsfeld was shaking his hand, in the name of supporting Iraq in their war against Iran. But the same stuff the U.S. sold to Iraq was in turn used against their own population and then later was used as one of the lame excuses for the illegal invasion of Iraq whose purpose was to topple that government.

Pakistan is a weird example. We have treated them as an ally, but at the same time their head of nuclear weapons development was actively selling nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea, Libya and other countries. At the same time Osama bin Laden was living in a luxury home in a military town in Pakistan, a curious location to find a man who was supposed to be hunkered down in a tent in the mountains shaking in his boots every time a drone aircraft flew overhead.

In other words - the history of this is not good, and to my mind creeps are creeps period. Hurm.. that may be a bit extreme because there are degrees of creephood and creeps can reform themselves. But, paying someone to be your creep doesn't mean they'll always be your creep. They may have changing alliances of their own which throws them out of favor with you. Or your changing alliances may convert them into an enemy.

Bart's position is rather pragmatic and I find it rather compelling. Basically the system is rigged against us little people. The system is run by the elites who have whatever agenda and they're acting to protect their business interests or whatnot, and our concerns don't enter their minds. They're playing global power games moving chess pieces around without realizing what the effects are.

Bart talked about "special interests" lobbying for particular government actions or policies. That it's the special interests skewing the results with these power games. Tony's response was "Is there any power structure that isn't surrounded by special interests?" He asked us to compare the Soviet era brutal governments, or North Korea's "communist fun house" against "our creeps". Those are great points.

As interesting as those examples are, I don't buy it. Where I stand is something akin to moral responsibility. Unlike Bart, I'm not willing to wash my hands of responsibility just because some elite is doing this without my approval.

Just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq a series of anti-war protest rallies were held under the them of "Not in My Name". The idea is that it was recognized after the Sept 11 2001 attacks, that the Elites were going to use that as an excuse to launch an endless war against the military tactic known as Terrorism. How can you fight a war against a military tactic? Ludicrous. Anyway, 10 years later and it's obvious that indeed we're facing an endless state of war so that the military industrial complex can keep selling armaments. But the point of raising the "Not in My Name" meme is that the Elites doing this are doing it in our name. That is, the wars are being conducted under an assumption of approval and pretension that they're doing it for us for our benefit, when in reality they're doing it for their power games. The problem is there's no effective way of voicing disapproval and in any case half the country is in a state of delusion believing the lies spouted by the likes of Fox News.

To me it's clear - I'm participating in the system, even if the system is a charade. That puts responsibility for the system partially on me because. Because I disagree with the system as it stands what happens if I sit back into a cozy lifestyle offered to me? That's worse than being responsible, it's being irresponsible, especially when the system is causing such egregious political and environmental harm around the world. It's one thing to be dumb and ignorant about the harm our lifestyle is causing, it's another thing to know about it and do nothing.

Those "Not in my Name" protests asked us to say "You are not going to wage endless war in our name". That sort of stand is the beginning of taking responsibility for a different outcome than passively allowing the elites to run roughshod over the world.

Devolving Empires and the rise of Empires

This article, The Once and Future Republic of Vermont, reminds me of a story I read once about the devolution of European countries. It was published during the 1980's in CoEvolution Quarterly magazine (which later became Whole Earth Review). The article discussed various of the old regions of Europe which have their own language, culture, memories and aspirations, and they suggested these were the chief characteristics of what we call a "nation". The map was published in 1982 and I've had it in storage for a long time, though looking at it now it's very interesting because of the changes Europe has undergone during that time.

The map shows the then-current national boundaries of European countries, and the regions within each where local independence movements were active. Some of these independence movements are quite well known and have had a history of bloodshed, while others have been very much less known. The modern countries of Europe were an artificial creation following the French Revolution where local cultures were thrown together to form larger countries.

In what was then Yugoslavia they show flags for Slovenija (Slovenia), Hrvatska (Croatia) and Kosovo as well as the names Serbia, Bosnia, Hercegovina and Montenegro. These names should bring back some memories due to the wars during the 1990's which split apart Yugoslavia into several independent countries.

The map shows Alba (Scotland) which recently established its own Parliament to give itself a little distance from the Parliament of England. It shows Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and other regions of the former Soviet Union which are now devolved into separate countries. It shows Euskadi, the Basque Lands, which have been in revolt against Spain, and which were probably responsible for the train bombings in Madrid a couple years ago. It shows Wallonia and Flanders, the two regions which together make the modern state of Belgium. It shows Ulster, popularly known today as Northern Ireland, which was colonized in the 1600's by Protestant English and has for over 300 years been an English "garrison" against the "defiant Irish". I'm sure the Irish probably see this differently.

I recently visited Brussels Belgium and the first thing I learned was how Belgium is actually two countries. The Taxi driver taking me from the airport to my hotel was a Wallon, from the southern half of Belgium, and very proud of his ancient Celtic roots.

In the Middle East similar nation-building processes led to local cultures being torn asunder through the creation of modern countries. Consider the Kurdish peoples, who had formerly been Kurdistan, a region spread over land now divided between at least Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Iraq and Syria were artificially formed by the French and British following the dissolving of the Ottoman Empire following World War I.

The current problems in the Middle East likely stems as much from the artificial creation of those modern countries as from any other effect. The local cultures are not able to have their own significance. The Kurds are just one example of this, where Kurdistan is split among several countries leaving the Kurds themselves a minority in each of the countries who occupy the land from which Kurdistan might be created.

Are, on the other hand, these regional cultures occupying truly distinct blocks of land? For example consider Tibet, which China claimed as a region of China. Tibet was attacked by China in the 1950's, its government deposed, the leader of that government now living in exile, and the Chinese government has been encouraging the immigration of ethnic Chinese into the land that was Tibet. The same pattern happened in the old Soviet Union where ethnic Russians immigrated into each of the Republics of the Soviet Union such that Russians became significant minorities in each region. In other words it seems each of these regional cultures actually lives in a land of mixed cultures.

One of my spiritual teachers talked about this process of the global culture.

In the past a given local culture might be isolated enough from its neighboring cultures that the people "over there" might seem foreign or strange etc. More primitive transportation technology, such as horses or other livestock, makes it difficult to visit your neighbors. Especially when geographical boundaries like rivers or mountain ranges get in the way. Vermont, for example, was divided from the rest of the U.S.A. by the Green Mountains which let them be independent enough to form their own Republic for a few years. The difficulty of going from place to place meant each local region had an opportunity to create culture differently from their neighbors.

Today transportation technology has progressed such that we can travel around the world in a few hours, and the improvements of communication technologies has meant instantaneous global communications.

This means that we are in each others laps on a global scale. In the past separate cultures could evolve in relative isolation, they could develop cultural practices that might seem strange (or worse) to their neighbors. The differences could be enough to cause conflict. But those differences wouldn't matter too much because transportation and communication was difficult enough that the cultures might not come into contact often enough for the differences to be seen often enough to inflame the potential conflict to any great degree. Still, these differences have led to massive wars all throughout human history.

Today everybody can see everybody else in a depth that we cannot ignore the cultural differences between each of these local regions. Those cultural differences are causing conflicts all over the globe.

I wonder if the rise of large-scale regional governments such as the European Union gives an opportunity for local regional governments to reassert themselves. For example with a strong European Union what value is there for Spain to continue as an independent country, why shouldn't it dissolve into Catalonia, Andalusia, the Basque Lands (Euskadi) etc? Similarly with France, Germany, England, etc? Each were formed by gluing together local cultures which are to this day proud of their individual heritages even after centuries of being ruled by other governments. Perhaps the European Union can be an overall governing authority for Europe as a whole, erase the individual nation-states, and give each local region its own local authority.

Perhaps the same could occur across the globe since each geopolitical region has its own process happening. The European Union began over 50 years ago as a trade zone for Europe, and has grown to become a sort of European government. In the Americas is the NAFTA, and there are other regional trade organizations such as APAC. The United Nations is perhaps being positioned as a global government down the road.

And at the same time as these global organizations are being built there are reactionary movements resisting them. In Scotland, which I visited in 2006, they proudly use the Scottish Pound for their currency, eschewing both the English Pound and the Euro. There are many American Conservatives who have been disdaining the movements towards globalized governments. Just think of the negative reaction to various National Parks having been named United Nations World Heritage sites.