Juan Cole dissects Bush's record in the Middle East

Juan Cole is a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan. During the course of George Bush's "War on Terror", Cole has maintained a blog - Informed Comment - which provides a daily commentary on events in the Middle East and the effects of US policy there, as well as occasional pieces on the religious, political and cultural history of the region.

I started reading Informed Comment shortly after the US invasion of Iraq and have long regarded it as the best political blog on the internet. Cole knows the region, knows the history and knows the languages, so while directing you to the most important bits of news from the English language media he can also draw on local sources to give you the full picture, and placing these events into their proper overall context.

This morning, Cole responds to Bush's speech of yesterday on US Middle East policy of the last 8 years. He notes the pressures that have been exerted on him personally and professionally since 2001 by the US Republican-Zionist hard-right to shut up and stop challenging their simplistic, confrontational, Manichean view of the world. And then he goes through the speech more or less line by line, exposing the contradictions, the omissions and the falsehoods that make up Bush's account of what he has done to the Middle East during his disastrous reign. While its an informal blog post, its still as good a review of this episode of modern history as you're likely to find anywhere.

Here's Cole's response to Bush on Iraqi democracy:

"Bush boasts [that], ' When Saddam’s regime fell, we refused to take the easy option and install a friendly strongman in his place. Even though it required enormous sacrifice, we stood by the Iraqi people as they elected their own leaders and built a young democracy.'

Oh, give me a break. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith were, too, going to install a strongman, i.e. Ahmad Chalabi. They didn't only because they couldn't (an Iraqi insurgency started up and the religious Shiite parties flexed their muscles). Then Paul "Jerry" Bremer was going to hold phony 'caucus-based elections' that would restrict the electorate to pro-Bush elements on unelected provincial councils. That fell through because Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani shot it down and there were massive demonstrations in Baghdad and Basra in January, 2004, against it. Then Bush put in Ayad Allawi, an ex-Baathist strong man, as appointed prime minister in the lead-up to the elections, and tried to give him the advantages of incumbency in hopes of throwing the election to him. Bush and his cronies tried as hard as he could for a secular strong man, but they were just defeated by Sistani and the religious parties that had been in exile in Tehran. Bush lauds the surge and the Status of Forces Agreement without seeming to realize that they are contradictory policies. The troop escalation was intended to allow the US to maintain bases in the long term in Iraq. But the SOFA expels US troops by 2011. So, again, Bush was defeated by Iraqi popular political forces."

After covering democratization, Israel-Palestine, Iran, Iraq and more, Cole's final summing up gets it right on the money:

"Bush turned the United States into an aggressor nation. He kicked off an orgy of violence in Iraq that has probably left a million dead. He destroyed entire cities. He left millions of widows and orphans, and millions more displaced. He lied, he destroyed habeas corpus at home and abroad, he tortured. It is too soon to know if American democracy will ever really recover from [his] lawless regime."

While Cole is aiming at the right-wing in his own country, what was particularly galling here in the UK was the Bush administration's ability to find de facto allies not just on our own right wing, but in the centre and even amongst some who claimed to be on the centre-left. Put aside the "liberal interventionists" who adopted without serious question the assumption that US power - US military power - was some uncomplicated force for good in the world which could be entrusted with the liberation and welfare of the Iraqi people. Put the intellectual cheerleaders aside and just take the Labour government. The history of Labour is a series of successes and betrayals, and you expect both. But the winter and spring of 2002-2003 was New Labour's single darkest hour; a chilling encapsulation of its self-serving moral drift. I recall at the time being reminded of Neil Kinnock's excoriating speech at the 1985 party conference denouncing what he saw as the betrayals of the Militant tendency. A paraphrasing of that speech emerged in my mind which seemed to sum up what had happened under Blair and what had brought us to that fateful juncture. Try this:

"You start with an abandonment of any principles that present a barrier to your career, and this is then dressed up in the virtuous finery of "what works", never minding who your policies work for: the privileged, you, or the people who rely on you. And you climb up the ladder sticking to that, attacking lone mothers, asylum seekers, all those you were supposed to defend. And you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour government, a Labour government, supporting a hard-right US administration as it resurrects old-style imperialism, and joining an illegal, aggressive war that goes on to claim hundreds of thousands of lives".

To prevent further betrayals in the future, and thereby perhaps prevent more imperial killing abroad, Britain needs a few more of its own Juan Coles in the academy (which is not to say that we don't already have some very fine examples) . With his blog, his column in Salon magazine, and his regular media appearances, Cole has probably done as much as any single US academic to provide an enlightened, intelligent and humanitarian challenge to the callous aggression of the Bush White House. He has dedicated himself to speaking truth to and about power, and as such has fulfilled the proper societal role of an academic, an intellectual and a liberal (if that last word is to retain its true meaning). One hopes that Cole's efforts continue long into the Obama presidency, since real scrutiny and popular pressure will likely be needed stop the new administration drifting into the realms of Clintonism.