US and Iran: Exceptionalism, not Imperialism, in Extraordinary Times

Sixty years after the CIA-orchestrated coup d'état that replaced democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh with a military government that effectively allowed Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi to rule as the absolute monarch until the United States could not prevent his overthrow in 1979, a 15-minute phone call broke the 34-year freeze in relations between two very influential players on the global stage. On Friday, September 27, 2013, US President Barack Hussein Obama's call to newly elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani marks a momentous occasion that, in concert with the dramatic saga that brought about the UN resolution on the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons program, should assuage any doubts that Obama is, indeed, creating the change in US foreign policy that the world had expected from him.

Exceptionalism

In his address the UN General Assembly, Obama asserted US exceptionalism – and in a sense, he's right.

By virtue of its military superiority, its economic power, and its cultural influence, it can't be denied that the United States is exceptional. The world has looked to the United States for inspiration and leadership since its constitution became the benchmark for all codified constitutions established by every free republic to come. In 1886, the people of France presented the Statue of Liberty to the United States to celebrate not only freedom as a republican value but also the promise of the expansion of freedom that Lincoln's victory in the Civil War represented. During the two world wars, the Allies in Europe called upon the United States to help them stand up against imperialist expansion. Today, the cultural reach is global, as billions of people throughout the world enjoy the music, entertainment, and technology generated by the United States.

Of course, the idea of exceptionalism is cringe-worthy when used with a sense of arrogance and entitlement; and of course, outside of US borders, the people of the world are fond of neither the insidious way that the US government has used them as pawns in its global power plays nor the annoying way that people from the United States tend treat them dismissively.

But exceptionalism doesn't necessarily have to take on that connotation when simply alluding to the realities that the United States, like every great world power that has had its moment in history, has exceptional qualities that are what brought it to prominence on the world stage and that, since the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been the world's single superpower.

Because isolationism is not an option in today's globalized world, in its role as a world leader, the United States has certain obligations to the international community; and there is some merit to the argument that those obligations include taking on the responsibility of enforcing what Obama called at the UN "a prohibition whose origins are older than the United Nations itself." Of all the atrocities of war, the use of chemicals as weapons of war is the atrocity that has engendered the deepest abhorrence, and it has the longest legacy of societies coming together to prevent it. So, despite all other moral crimes ever committed by the United States, the president's decision to enforce the chemical weapons ban carries exactly the kind of moral authority that the president of the United States should be exhibiting. The wisdom of using bombs to do this is what is questionable, not the mandate for the leader of the international community to enforce its ban.

Thankfully, whether by shrewd plan or sheer serendipity, Obama has succeeded, without using military force, in ensuring that chemical weapons are now far less likely to be used by either the Syrian rebels or the Assad regime. The threat of force by the most powerful military in the universe, combined with dogged behind-the-scenes diplomacy, has brought the much-needed engagement of international actors, and this engagement could lead to real solutions for the people of Syria – a prospect that is all the more hopeful as the opening of relations with Iran brings that country into the process, as well.

Not imperialism

While embracing exceptionalism, Obama rejected the notion of US imperialism in his speech at the UN, at once acknowledging the past and stressing a change in direction when he mentioned "a hard-earned humility when it comes to our ability to determine events inside other countries." He referred to the idea of "American empire" as "useful propaganda," which, he pointed out, "isn’t borne out by America’s current policy or by public opinion" – and again, to a large degree, he's right.

Public opinion in the United States has demanded a contraction of military intervention as well as far more accountability in everything from Obama's drone policy, to NSA spying, to the latest round of free trade agreement negotiations – all of which mark a decided turn away from support for the use of the nation's exceptional power to ensure its own interests whenever and wherever it can with impunity.

Still, the United States has a long ways to go to throw off the yoke of the imperialist bully, especially with the constant drip of NSA leaks inflaming passion against the US government both at home and abroad.

The Snowden Affair has made for good political theater in Latin America, although in reality, it changes little, as the trend away from US influence was already well established. Having failed to progress out of its paternalistic Cold War mentality toward the region, the United States has squandered the opportunity to build stronger economic relationships, leaving a void that other world powers – notably, China and Iran – have been quick to fill. And along with a sea change in attitudes toward drug policies sweeping the hemisphere, Mexico and Central America are beginning to rethink their militarized policing, which will bring a waning of the US' heavy hand in the name of security in the region. The age of US imperialism in Latin America has quietly slipped away.

Surprisingly, it is from the very heart of the Middle East, in the very midst of tumultuous times, in the very birthplace of CIA interventionism, that another sea change is occurring. On June 15, 2013, the Iranian people elected Hassan Rouhani as president with more than 72 percent of the vote. Having been the chief negotiator on Iran's nuclear program for 16 years before resigning under Ahmadinejad's hard-line presidency, he has wasted no time in setting a new course toward easing tensions in the region and opening up diplomacy with the West. At home and at events during his historic visit to New York, such as Rouhani's talk before the Council on Foreign Relations, he has continually stressed the danger of extremism, pledging to establish Iran as a stabilizing influence in the troubled region – particularly in regard to Syria and Afghanistan.

While pointing to the source of suspicion and mistrust that has haunted Iranians over the past 60 years – US imperialism at its worse – Rouhani, like Obama, has made it clear that he is determined to move forward. Like Obama, he faces great challenges from the opposition within his own country. But, with the will of the people solidly behind him, through his program of moderation and confidence building, these two world leaders now have the extraordinary chance to usher in a new age of international cooperation.

Javier Sicilia Speaks Poetry to Power

Mexican poet and founder of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity Javier Sicilia was in New York City on Friday, 7 September, where he made a short speech that's referencing of several other popular poets before getting to the inventors of peaceful revolution – King and Gandhi – or any mention of the movements that they inspired proves once again just how much the world needs our poets.

The speech is titled Let's give peace a chance, words that have been cached in cliché in a culture that refuses to take peace seriously, but which deserve much more than a knowing nod of nostalgic agreement. They are words that, when de-compartmentalized from that place in our brains where we store warm, fuzzy memories of grandma's cinnamon rolls and cozy family gatherings around the Christmas tree and our innocent first kisses the words to our favorite feel-good songs, hold the power of an idea unleashed from the confines of the ideal, a dove released from its bondage as a symbol of unattainable, perfect peace, freed to bring the reality of peace down to earth as a participant of an ecosystem where every creature innovates and creates its own niche.

In the individualist culture of the United States, the reality that many times, relationships are symbiotic in nature is washed over by the adrenalin rush of competition for resources. In the same way, the vision of an apocalyptic Mad Max future grabs the imagination, denying the chance for peace from being heard above the gripping din.

What this Mexican poet is seeking to do is what all poetry can do, if only we would let it. With the enduring strength of careful language, poetry serves as a connective force, connecting and reconnecting people, places, and ideas through past, present, and future, vanquishing the myth of separation with which those who hold so much power in our societies veil the truth of our ability to refuse to accept their version of the way things must be.

It was the words of Jim Morrison with which Javier Sicilia introduced the deeply Mexican notion that the dead can, by invitation, be with us in a meaningful way. After quoting that martyr of the culture wars, he began his speech in New York: 

For all the dead that this absurd war against drugs has left, but have come with us from far away; for the dead that this terrorist imbecility of the 11th of September left behind, and whom at the side of these victims of violence have been summoned here by the verses of Morrison to “anoint the earth”, “to announce the sadness” that overcomes us and to pray with John Lennon to “give peace a chance”, I ask for a minute of silence.

Every year, at the beginning of November, Mexicans summon their dead – to home altars and cemeteries – with such enticements as golden cempoalxochitl (Mexican marigolds), candles, pulque or tequila, sugar skulls, pan de muertos (sweet bread of the dead), and bowls of comforting atole.

Javiar Sicilia brought this stubborn Mexican refusal to deny the sadness of memory on a caravan of care that passed along the U.S.-Mexican border from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, then headed up through the heart of Texas, over to New Orleans, on through Jackson, Miss., Montgomery, Ala., Atlanta and Fort Benning, Ga., and then up to Chicago and over to New York City, to end up in Washington, D.C.

The Caravan for Peace with Dignity and Justice has sought to expose the roots of drug violence in Mexico, raise awareness about the devastating effects of the War on Drugs particularly upon communities of color in the United States, and to inspire civil society to demand changes in the priorities of the most powerful democracy on earth.

To expose, raise awareness, and inspire – this is what poets and other thought-provokers do, and it is through words that the legacy of an individual's actions, which can only take place at one moment in time and in one location at a time, can be shared through space and time. The Caravan certainly made its enduring marks on the lives of many people who had the good fortune of being in each place and time that the pilgrims of peace stopped to expose, raise awareness, and inspire.

Now is when poetry can serve as a mnemonic device for our consciences to remember to move forward and take action rather than allowing ourselves to revert to our more comfortable, compartmentalized, disconnected, and forgetful cultural habits.

Ojalá podamos merecer que nos llamen locos, como han sido llamadas locas las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, por cometer la locura de negarnos a olvidar en los tiempos de la amnesia obligatoria.

If only we could merit being called crazy, as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have been called crazy, for committing the insanity of neglecting to forget in times of obligatory amnesia.

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, in his poem, los caminos del viento, The Ways of the Wind, reminds us that to forget our past is to allow others reshape our reality. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo are the women who have been gathering in front of the Presidential Palace in Buenos Aires every Thursday for decades, ever since their children were abducted and "disappeared" by their government during Argentina's disgraceful Dirty War.

Eduardo Galeano's ode to the courage of hope ends with the words, 

no tienen fronteras los mapas del alma ni del tiempo,

neither maps of the soul nor of time have frontiers.

With these words, he connects souls across space and time, just as Javier Sicilia's caravan journey maps connections between souls across space and time. Along the U.S.-Mexican border, the fates of the citizens of two nations are inextricably tied together. And their fates are strung together with those of Indigenous Americans in New Mexico and African Americans in the agricultural South and the soldiers from throughout Latin America who have come to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning, Ga., to learn how to wage war against the illegality of drugs and uphold the illusion of security in their countries and more African Americans and Mexican Americans and so many more people from less developed countries who have come without official sanction to the industrial North to try to forge a better life.

In New York City, Javier Sicilia spoke, as he did in each place where he spoke, in the language of the place. To introduce his Caravan to people in the United States, he began his essay for the Huffington Post by quoting Bob Dylan. In Atlanta, he summoned collective memories of Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Maya Angelou. In Chicago, he invoked the image of Al Capone as a reminder of prohibition's failures. For New Yorkers, John Lennon's words struck the chord that blends together all of the irrational ironies of violence that the Movement for Peace is all about.

And just as Javier Sicilia speak through the voices of others, so did John Lennon voice idea of imagining peace expressed by Swedish writer Stig Dagerman, who understood that life is little more than how we choose to face our fears. His poem, En dag om året, Just Once a Year, begins: 

En dag om året borde alla låtsas,    

att döden vilar i ett vitt schatull.

Inga stora illusioner krossas

och inge skjuts för fyra dollar skull.

Why don't we make believe just once a year

that Death has drowned beneath the deep blue sea!

No one's life is undermined by fear,

and no one shoots his neighbor for a fee.

The Mirror of History

The story about medical experimentation in Guatemala is a harrowing reminder of our past, yet our reaction to this story is itself a snapshot of where our society is today, and I see a welcome image of hope for Progressives, in this time when disillusionment and disappointment seem to be almost overwhelming.

Amy Goodman's October 5 interview with Susan Reverby, the medical historian who recently brought to light the unpublished documentation of the project, puts the incident in perspective. As an authority on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, she is very familiar with the social attitudes of those decades when the lives of some were simply and plainly not considered to be as worthy of respect as the lives of others. In the case of Tuskegee, poor black sharecroppers in Georgia who were found to already have syphilis were studied, without being told that it was syphilis that they suffered from, they were lied to about the nature of their medical treatment, and they were never treated for their disease, even after penicillin was found to be an effective cure.

The study in Guatemala is even more egregious due to the fact that individuals who were institutionalized in a prison and in an insane asylum, as well as some army soldiers, were actually infected with syphilis, surely without their knowledge, although what they were told was a detail that had been left out of these newly discovered physician's notes. And even in the atmosphere that allowed for the Tuskegee experiment to go on for forty years, from 1932 to 1972, Susan Reverby points to a comment in a letter referring to a statement by the surgeon general himself, showing that he knew that it would not be ethically acceptable in the United States, as the most shocking aspect of her discovery.

On one hand, it is difficult to acknowledge the wrongs of our nation's past. Many would prefer not to think about them. When Glenn Beck spoke of “restoring honor” to the United States during his rally in Washington, for example, his statement rang of the personal experience of a man who seeks to put his own past behind him. He said,

“Let's be honest. If you look at history, America has been both terribly good and terribly bad. It has been both, but to concentrate on the bad instead of learning from the bad and repairing the bad and then looking to the good that is still out in front of us within our reach— We have a choice today. We can either let those scars crush us or redeem us.”

When Glenn Beck looks into the mirror of history, while acknowledging the bad, he cannot bear to dwell for long on those painful aspects. Assuming that what has worked for him in his own life will work for the nation, he turns toward the language of religious redemption, seeing those shameful instances as a part of a necessary spiritual path, as all-too-human lapses, their lessons being those of faith rather than of seeking deeper self-awareness. And whenever Progressives are characterized as the “blame America first” crowd, this abject refusal to look in the mirror and take responsibility for our collective actions, particularly in the “America” that stretches all the way to Tierra del Fuego, the colossal societal disconnect is strengthened.

On the other hand is the hope that surrounds this story. I perceive this moment to be a brief flash of the hope that Barack Obama campaigned upon, the hope that progress brings. That we find this story to be so horrifying, that the president's immediate apology to the nation of Guatemala is seen nearly universally as the appropriate response, shows that the rate of progress is, like the growth of a child, slow and nearly imperceptible to those who are witness to it day in and day out, yet society is moving forward.

Furthermore, by facing up to the attitudes that decided that it was acceptable to do in Guatemala what was not acceptable to do in the United States, the story links us to other past actions that our nation has taken in the Americas that merit attention, if we want to find realistic answers to problems such as illegal immigration or improve our relations within the rest of America. Rather than fearing that our scars will crush us, or refusing to accept blame beyond doing so in seeking redemption, we must study our image in that mirror in order to link our past actions to issues that continue to affect us today.

Walt Long's novel, The Travelers, achieves this goal. It is a story about the smuggling of illegal immigrants through a community in southern New Mexico that not only humanizes all of the factions involved, but also makes the link between the social realities that so many of the travelers are escaping in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, and the part that the United States has played in helping to create those situations. This novel evenhandedly depicts the complexities of a vexing issue, offering not answers, but respect for the fact that it is as complex as the human character is.

Similarly, the past year's unveiling of classified State Department documents from the Nixon era merit close examination, as they go a long way in explaining how the brutal dictatorships that gripped the Southern Cone region of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay were the results of a concentrated effort by the United States to weaken social movements that were becoming legitimized through democratic processes, thus threatening the veracity of the neo-liberal narrative.

“History does not refer merely […] to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it, the past, with us. And we’re ‘unconsciously controlled’ in so many ways, that history, the past, is present now in all we do.” - James Baldwin

Felicidades, El Salvador – Viva la Democracia!

After decades of undue influence by the fascist corporatists in our government, starting with Ronald Reagan’s support for the Death Squads that terrorized the people who were fighting for social justice in the 1980’s, Democracy has finally prevailed in El Salvador, and the leftist FMLN party has won the presidency. Mauricio Funes was never one of the rebel fighters, but a strong philosophical supporter of the cause. He is reportedly a very smart man who had a popular talk show on TV, which represents a freedom of speech that only became possible after the FMNL negotiated peace accords with the ruling ARENA party, along with their ally, the United States, and he says that he wants to retain good relations with the United States, even after all the death and destruction our nation has caused there.

I believe that this is a direct result of Barack Obama becoming President of the United States of America, that the people of El Salvador were inspired and emboldened by his rise to that position, and they voted for the leftist candidate, despite threats from Congressmen Trent Franks of Arizona and Dan Burton of Indiana that El Salvadoran citizens would lose their immigration status here in the United States as well as their right to send remittances home, despite all the government propaganda by the ruling party, and despite the memories of violent U.S. backed suppression that haunt their recent history. Although he himself never came out with a strong statement of neutrality in these elections, the Obama administration did put out a quiet statement to that effect – as I keep pointing out, President Barack Hussein Obama is trying very hard not to appear too socialistical, to present his agenda of “change” as a matter of practicality, not as a radical social revolution.

As the Latin American movement toward true democracy creeps closer and closer to our southern border, this could be an opportunity to prove the point that socialism is not the enemy of the United States. Mexico is also beginning to move toward a rejection of financial tyranny by the United States, cleverly billed as “free trade,” but which has only repressed the vast majority of people of this hemisphere to the benefit of the corporatists here in the States and their wealthy allies in the governments to the south. Mexico has retaliated to the United States’ decision to end the policy of allowing their trucks on our highways, citing some kind of “danger” under protectionist pressure from the Teamsters, by imposing tariffs on items from the U.S. NAFTA has not been good for the people of Mexico, as their farmers could not compete with the corn that is subsidized by our Department of Agriculture and sold to Mexico at bulk prices, much of which is genetically altered, which is in turn ending up infecting what remains of their beautiful and diverse local varieties, developed over thousands of years to be best suited to their unique climates, and which, after the local farmers threw in the towel and sent their kids north to try to support their families, has been susceptible to rises in the price of oil for transporting it from far away, not to mention the further skyrocketing price of corn because the United States decided to divert food crops into our big, gas-guzzling, All-American trucks in a despicable corn ethanol greenwashing campaign.

Perhaps this marks the beginning of the end of the myth of “free trade” and the pretense that the subjugation of the people of the Americas by U.S. corporate powers is the spreading of democracy and freedom. Freedom does not march, it is passed from on human being to another, as shackles are removed, one by one, as ideas are spread, as families are reunited, as fears are dissipated, as participation is widened, as voices are heard, as human rights are respected, as illusions are dispelled, as dreams are realized. Trade is not “free” when one partner strong-arms another, forcing them to adhere to policies that the bully party did not itself adhere to when it was a developing power, that it insists on only now that it has the upper hand. And democracy is not defined by the absence of socialism. In fact, real democracy logically tends toward socialism, if the population is truly informed, the government is truly transparent, and everyone is truly allowed to participate. Doesn’t “government by the people, for the people” mean exactly that the government should work for the people?

Meanwhile, capitalism naturally tends toward fascism, as it seeks more and more money and power through influence of government policy, the spreading of propaganda, and the convincing of the population that they are furthering their own freedom and dignity when the reality is the exact opposite, that the workers have enslaved themselves through debt and the fear that they will not have access to health care; enslaved themselves to the illusion that the products that are pushed onto the marketplace are somehow magically inspired by their wants and needs, like big trucks and I-phones; enslaved themselves to a system that cannot sustain itself without massive consumption of resources; enslaved themselves to the double speak that capitalism is the noblest form of humanity, that it is all about individual rights and personal responsibility, when its dark underbelly is anti-democratic, duplicitous, murderous, insipid fascism, the true face of which appears in developing countries that are under the shadow of the United States and at the mercy of our IMS and World Bank.

Latin America has had no choice but to reject the United States – blow-back is a bitch, and the venom with which Salvadorans utter the words “Ronald Reagan” shows that his legacy lives on there. But the increasing tendency of governments in the western hemisphere to enact socialism, to nationalize their utilities and services so that everyone will have access to them, as a matter of human rights, and to turn away from unfair policies that only serve to delegate the masses to lives of despair and poverty does not mean that these nations are our enemies. In this nascent century, with this new kind of world leader, and with changing political atmospheres around the globe, there is much work to be done to convince the people of the United States of America that our faith in capitalism has led us astray, has been the downfall of the entire world financial system, and that only by joining together with other human beings, learning that the raising up of the weakest among us raises us all up, and ensuring that everyone understands that the benefits that people enjoy in the wealthier nations are intimately linked to how people are treated in the poorest nations - only by  these means will we build an international system that benefits everybody and represses none. That is the promise of socialism, linked with democracy, and it is fair-minded and egalitarian, not a scary monster to use as an excuse to kill and terrorize people in the name of corporate profits.

see:
Democracy Now! March 16, 2009 "Leftist FMLN Candidate Mauricio Funes Wins El Salvador Presidential Election, Ending Two Decades of Conservative Rule
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