The president hits on points and phrases I have used time and again whenever I’ve written about the Middle East.
One Egyptian put it simply: Most people have discovered in the last few days…that they are worth something, and this cannot be taken away from them anymore, ever.
This is the power of human dignity, and it can never be denied. Egyptians have inspired us, and they’ve done so by putting the lie to the idea that justice is best gained through violence. For in Egypt, it was the moral force of nonviolence — not terrorism, not mindless killing — but nonviolence, moral force that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.
And while the sights and sounds that we heard were entirely Egyptian, we can’t help but hear the echoes of history — echoes from Germans tearing down a wall, Indonesian students taking to the streets, Gandhi leading his people down the path of justice.
As Martin Luther King said in celebrating the birth of a new nation in Ghana while trying to perfect his own, “There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom.” Those were the cries that came from Tahrir Square, and the entire world has taken note.
Today belongs to the people of Egypt, and the American people are moved by these scenes in Cairo and across Egypt because of who we are as a people and the kind of world that we want our children to grow up in.
The word Tahrir means liberation. It is a word that speaks to that something in our souls that cries out for freedom. And forevermore it will remind us of the Egyptian people — of what they did, of the things that they stood for, and how they changed their country, and in doing so changed the world.
Thank you.
Echoing his Cairo Speech, Obama again insisted on the moral force and efficacy of non-violence, by saying the Egyptian activists put “the lie to the idea that justice is best gained through violence. For in Egypt, it was the moral force of nonviolence — not terrorism, not mindless killing — but nonviolence, moral force that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.” That last part about the arc of history is a favorite of the president’s, and is printed on the Oval Office carpet. It was said by Martin Luther King Jr. in his final speech as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on August 16, 1967. In the address, he reaffirmed his commitment to love and non-violence, and his optimistic belief that blacks would eventually overcome their present difficulties. Here’s the quote in context:
Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right: Truth crushed to earth will rise again. Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right:
Be not deceived, God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. This is for hope for the future, and with this faith we will be able to sing in some not too distant tomorrow with a cosmic past tense, We have overcome, we have overcome, deep in my heart, I did believe we would overcome.
What King puts here in biblical and religious terms is also the secular progressive hope. Namely, that through our collective efforts we constitute a creative force in the universe working to pull down gigantic mountains of evil, and that though the path is long and sometimes despairing, it is ultimately a path towards justice. History is not cyclical, and pre-destination does not exist.
Just as importantly, our president is a faithful student of Dr. King. In his Cairo speech he said that violence “is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered…” He told the people of the Nile and of the Occupired Territories that “violence is dead end,” and that “resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed.”
Perhaps the Egyptian organizers learned this for themselves, but it didn’t hurt to hear it from the president of the United States, who happens to have been sending Hosni Mubarak billions in cash every year. And, as if to drive the point home once more, President Obama went on to quote Dr. King directly: “There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom.”
Until yesterday, Arabs could truthfully say that non-violence never toppled an Arab tyrant. They can’t say that anymore. Alhamdulillah!
A lot of people on the left–right-wingers are another matter–critique Obama for not doing x or y, but to be honest to most important thing is for him to get out of the way of genuinely democratic movement, which is precisely what happened here. Even Carter went along with violence against people in East Timor, while Obama has been entirely consistent in his opposition to political violence, at least as far as events that began in his Presidency are concerned–as in, yes, his administration is continuing to prosecute Bush’s wars, which is an important discussion to have.
I’m sorry. What are standing armies in Iraq and Afghanistan if not political violence?
Obama is going along with our military-industrial complex on those wars. Every President goes along and has gone along for close to fifty years. Egypt has received billions in military aid every year for the last thirty years. It bought Mubarak and it bought Sulieman. If Sulieman is deemed too close to Mubarak there’s someone else, a general or colonel, or someone with civilian cover, whatever, who will be pushed to the head of the class.
Hey, Jack!
Yes, he’s not going to go against the military industrial complex. He’d be assassinated, seriously. He’s not starting new wars, though. That was the point.
He may be ending wars. Although completely ending either of them is beyond his power without a groundswell of public opinion to bolster him and members of Congress.
And, indeed, people can’t be bothered here to force their government to end wars.
It’s not that easy, frankly. Look how long Vietnam kept going after it was clear that the people were sick of it and the kids didn’t want to fight it?
My comment was more flip than my actual feelings on the subject warrant. Thank god someone with my level of impulse control is not President.
Had Humphrey had a little more courage and come out in 1968 more boldly about ending the war, instead of just offering a modest difference from his boss Lyndon, that war would have ended much sooner than it did. No massive bombing on the way out, as with Nixon, and the US withdrawal proceeding at a much faster clip.
But by half a million votes only we got Nixon, who apparently was favored by LBJ to succeed him as he would continue more faithfully Johnson’s VN policy, or at least not embarrass him as Nixon promised Johnson in a pre-election ’68 meeting.
But Nixon was politically crafty — he gave us withdrawal finally, to the great relief of many fed up with the war, he ended the draft and instituted a less sweeping draft lottery system where only a few would be called up. Then with the other hand he struck hard against VN with a massive bombing campaign, as if to prove the US wasn’t running away from battle tail between legs. Political result was that in 1972 he got electoral credit for winding down the war — and thereby took away peacenik George McGovern’s most important issue.
Point here being these decisions by LBJ, HHH and Nixon re the war were all personal-political decisions having almost nothing to do with the power of the MIC/Intel structure. These were pols acting for their own political benefit, and not out of some diktat from the Pentagon or Langley.
I’ve seen this one a few times on lib boards, usually to give Obama a pass
and I think it’s an overwrought reading of today’s MIC/Intel situation which, while still committed to maintaining its power, isn’t nearly as insane or as morally corrupt as the bad old days of the Cold War. Certainly JFK in the early 60s had a crop of bad guys imbedded deep in the nat’l security chain and at the top — Dulles, Angleton, Helms, plus all those crazy warmongering Chief Joints of Staff who wanted to initiate a nuke war against the Soviets, including the Chairman Lemnitzer — who combined made for a frightening force to have to contend with.
Kennedy, to his credit, courageously decided to forge ahead and defy them time and again on a range of FP matters.
Obama today has the benefit of a much more moderate group running that MIC/Intel structure; the 1970s revelations about the CIA, the end of the Cold War, and the watering down of the influence of CIA with the supervising DNI have also acted to moderate the leadership of the Pentagon and Intel bureaucracies.
I doubt very much O is worried about getting knocked off by the MIC/Intel people if he goes against them. He hasn’t rocked the boat much because it’s not his nature to rock the boat. Basically he’s a moderate centrist who prefers modest incremental change in the FP area. Additionally, politically there just isn’t major motivation at the moment to call for major change — the wars are back-burner issues for most Americans, the US casualty list barely a blip on the radar — and I don’t think he wants to do anything significant prior to 2012 which could hand the Repubs a huge campaign issue.
Second term, if he gets one, he’s probably planning to act with a little more urgent “deliberate speed” with Afghan and Iraq. First term has been about domestic and the economy, keeping FP and terrorism from becoming hot-button items.
The SOFA calls for all US military to leave Iraq by the end of 2011. This was signed by the US and Iraq.
Nato starts drawing down this summer in Afghanistan.
It’s quiet, but it is happening.
Brodie, I agree that some of the assassination talk is over the top.
This may be more a matter of interpretation than anything else, but I’d characterize Obama as a center-left politician who has, for strategic reasons, emphasized the continuity of American policy while pushing for (and sometimes winning) substantive changes. For example:
Guantanamo is an example of Obama pushing for change and failing to win it. There are others.
Overall, I’ve been astounded at how much Obama has accomplished in foreign affairs given how much he’s had to deal with domestically.
Bob, I’d agree that progressives shouldn’t be naive about Obama’s (or any president’s) words about nonviolence.
As anyone who’s studied nonviolence (which Obama has) and who’s thought philosophically about the nature of “the state” (as Obama has) knows, deciding to hold elected office and to swear an oath to defend the Constitution against “all enemies foreign and domestic” means you’ve decided to abandon—to a significant degree–nonviolence and to use (or be prepared to use) violence. That’s a defensible choice, but we should all be clear it’s the choice Obama has made, and he made it years ago.
Obama’s been clear since the beginning of the Iraq War that he’s not opposed to all wars, that he thinks Iraq was the wrong war, and that Afghanistan was the “right war” to fight. He made it clear in 2008 that he would escalate the Afghanistan War; those of us who voted for him, voted for him knowing that to be the case.
As for what happens next in Egypt, I expect Obama to act in what he perceives to be the best interests—economic, military, political, social—of the United States. That’s his job.
As for going along with the military-industrial complex, it’s worth noting that Obama said he would “end combat operations” in Iraq by the fall of 2010, and he did despite the objections of some in the Pentagon.
When the Afghanistan policy review he called for in late 2009 yielded (from the Pentagon) only options that called for, in effect, endless war, Obama pushed back, negotiated an accelerated “surge” into Afghanistan with a drawdown beginning summer 2012, a deadline he has stuck to repeatedly despite Pentagon grumblings.
Right now it looks like Obama will run for reelection as a president who’s winding down two wars bequeathed to him by his predecessor, prevented another Great Depression, passed the most significant progressive social legislation in over a generation, and supported the democratic aspirations of people around the world. It ain’t perfect, but it ain’t bad.
palaverer, your point is well made that Obama has been “consistent in his opposition to political violence”. I’d agree that staying out of the way of genuinely democratic movements is a welcome improvement over some past US presidencies, but I’d argue that Obama did more than stay out of the way. From what we know so far, it seems that both publicly and privately he used the levers of power available to him to encourage the Egyptian opposition and to discourage the Egyptian government from violently repressing the opposition.
King’s speech to the SCLC contains a variation of one one of my favorite quotes by him. It’s pertinent, so here it is (in the form I first read it, not straight from the speech).
but I wanna murder terrorism, dammit.
No BooMan, listen to Dr. King. If you want to kill terrorism, you must embrace it.
Wait…that didn’t come out right.
It’s also a repudiation that we need guns to overthrow a government. Nothing but lies.
There are many committed people in Egypt (and at the core of the April 6 movement) who worked hard to make sure that the protests remained as nonviolent as possible in the midst of a repressive regime. Several hundred of these folks lost their lives nonetheless.
What made the difference in the end was discipline, a highly focused coalition, clear goals that were generally popular nationwide, attention to logistical details (first aid, food, water, sanitation, self-defense) and the decision of members of the coalition to not go off grandstanding.
These assets have been missing from protests in the US since the success of the civil rights movement in 1965. In 1967, the repression of protesters at the Pentagon came as a big shock. Bur in 1967, being against the war wasn’t nationally popular. The demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention drew the repression of the Chicago Police, but instead of helping the movement to end the war, it created a backlash against the protesters. And Kent State put an end to campus protests; parents made sure that their kids understood that if they even looked like they were going to sacrifice their lives or their careers for the cause of ending the war, they would cut off paying for their education. And don’t get me started about how A.N.S.W.E.R handled the larger protests during the Bush administration. Large crowds, zero focus, zero impact. Wasted opportunities.
If I were going to organize a protest within the next four months, its slogan would be “Pay the police, pay the firemen, pay the teachers, fire the lobbyists” or “Billions for lobbyists but zero for jobs”. And the venues would not be that Capitol Mall or the White House, but Wall Street and K Street. And I would make Tony Podesta and Dick Armey the poster boys for the corruption of the post-Citizens United era.
Two other factors in Egypt which were essential: 1) the neutral stance by the Egyptian Army, the decision not to fire on fellow citizens, and 2) worldwide, extensive media coverage of the revolution, which gave Mubarak less room to pull off a slaughter of protesters.
As for the VN War era protests, actually by 1967 the public tide was turning against the war compared to the first year of 1965, but some of the Pentagon protesters were actively trying to bait soldiers into causing violence, causing them to overreact. Still, one key there, as compared to the slaughter at Kent, was the decision by a wise and level-headed commander, SecDef Rbt McNamara, to quietly arrange on his own that soldiers’ rifles not be loaded.
Generally the antiwar forces, except for the idiot troublemaker faction and the agents provocateurs sent by Hoover, did fairly well from about 1965-71 in organizing to stop the war. Unfortunately, they were up against two of the most stubborn and anti-dissent presidents in modern times, Johnson and Nixon, with major assists in disrupting dissident forces coming from Hoover’s FBI and the CIA. That’s quite a bit of powerful govt machinery and leadership to have to overcome.
From the reports of my friends who were at the “Levitation of the Pentagon” in 1967, it was not soldiers who attacked the protesters and it was not provoked. After the press left and in the middle of the night, the police (they were never clear which ones) waded through the crowd swinging billy clubs and arresting people. James Carroll, now of the Boston Globe, was there and describes the events much like my friends did in his book The House of War.
The powerful government machinery of the US during the Vietnam War was less substantial than what the Egyptian protesters faced. And the public finally treated the Chicago police and Ohio National Guard with impunity. So the public support was not as strong for the protesters as it reflected growing unease that the war could not be won–an entirely different point from the moral stance of a good portion of the protesters.
Well the USG machinery during VN was powerful enough to basically enforce the political will for long enough, though for sure when Tet happened in 1968 the ground beneath these great anti-dissent forces began to give way, a powerful and very ambitious president was forced to cut short his presidency, and from then on it was mostly talk about arriving at a resolution that would also allow us to extricate ourselves with some semblance of honor.
As for the adult public’s attitude towards antiwar protesters, there were always mixed feelings, often having to do with the look of the protesters themselves. Remember, that besides the antiwar dissent, there was simultaneously a cultural-social revolution that was being played out among the youth. Not all of the style and trappings that the antiwar forces brought to the streets, and not all of their anti-authority/anti-police attitude, was going to therefore be warmly accepted by the larger public, however much they might have agreed about the war. Example: liberal’s liberal and privately antiwar Dem nominee Hubert Humphrey, publicly sided with the brutal CPD cops after that horrible convention and police riot. He wanted a negotiated way out of the war, and would have achieved one had he been elected, but that day in Chicago he was for the cops.
I don’t think in Egypt there were quite as many already-existing complex social-cultural-political undercurrents that prevented the protesters’ message from being fully accepted by the larger public. After 30 years of dictatorship and martial law, unlike with all our freedoms and factions and consumer choices and entertainment distractions in the 60s in the US, the long put-upon and impoverished Egyptian public was better positioned, more inclined to mostly be on the same page with the protesters in Tahrir Square. Though I do applaud the way the organizers there brought it all off, and so peacefully and quickly.
Tarheel Dem, another fine post—particularly about the discipline and organization of the Egyptian opposition.
You say you want a revolution? I say, read Gene Sharp’s “From Dictatorship to Democracy”, written in 1993 at the request of Burmese democracy activists, translated into multiple languages and used (often successfully) around the world by those seeking to overthrow repressive regimes. (Yes, it’s been translated into Arabic, and yes, many of the tactics used in Tunisia and Egypt are precisely the tactics Sharp recommends.)
According to al Jazeera, the April 6th movement got training and advice from the Serbian pro-democracy movement that overthrew Slobodan Milosevich.
Yep. The Serbians used Sharp’s essay too. (Check out http://www.aeinstein.org for more about Sharp, his work, and translations of “From Dictatorship to Democracy”.)