I'm beginning this essay with a bold and possibly foolhardy assumption: that the wave of protests throughout much of the Arab world, and what is increasingly drifting in the direction of a violent revolution in Libya, will eventually lead democratization and real reform in many Arab states. This hasn't happened yet, of course. In Tunisia, where it all began, certainly there's a lot more freedom now by all accounts than there was under Ben Ali, but protesters recently found that when they went into the streets again, there was a rather familiar government response: they were beaten up. The same thing happened when small protests reemerged in Egypt. In both of those countries, the process of reform is underway, but where it will lead is totally unclear as yet. Islamists, led regionally by the elderly fanatic Yusuf Qaradawi, are slowly but surely introducing their agenda into what has, thus far, to all appearances been a secular, ecumenical and fundamentally nationalist set of movements. In Egypt and Tunisia, "people power" did not exactly unseat the hated dictators, but forced the militaries in both countries, which were unprepared to open fire on their own people, to perform “soft coups,” removing the individual dictators from power and shipping them and their families out of the country or to remote areas.

Utopian and dystopian scenarios look the same at this point
The problem is that both the utopian and dystopian scenarios in Tunisia and Egypt would look exactly the same at this stage, so it's impossible to tell where this is all really heading. In Egypt, for example, a real transition towards democracy would involve the dissolving of a parliament elected recently under very dubious circumstances; the suspension of the Constitution and the formation of a committee to draft a new and presumably better one; the release of at least some political prisoners and opening up of political space; and the initiation of a period of transition presided over by the military which can maintain order while working with the remnants of the old regime and with opposition groups to craft a new system that is acceptable to a broad range of society. That's exactly what's happening. Unfortunately, a dystopian scenario leading to Pakistan-style military rule would look about the same at this stage: dissolving of the parliament, suspension of the Constitution, military control of the process through which a new system is developed, etc.

Even if it is the intention, as I strongly suspect it is, of the Egyptian military to oversee a transition in which it once again recedes into the sidelines of Egyptian politics, that may prove difficult to actually accomplish. Certainly Egyptian military culture has held that while it is not only acceptable but expected that former senior officers, once they are retired, can and in many cases will become senior government officials, the Army itself is not supposed to have a role in domestic politics. But now it does. And after months of being in control, and getting a good, long, hard look at the kind of civilian politicians and their petty machinations during the process of crafting a new system, the Army may well start kid itself that it alone can secure peace and stability in Egypt, run the country efficiently, and preserve the national interest. This has happened countless times in numerous developing states around the world. This could happen in Egypt in spite of the best intentions at the moment by the General Staff, assuming they have them. This impulse would be greatly intensified if it appeared that Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood were becoming increasingly well positioned to seize and hold power in a parliamentary process or other democratic structures, or to seize power through extraconstitutional means of one variety or another. So the same process that's underway at the moment could lead to democratization or it could lead to and extended period of military rule, and it's almost impossible to tell at this stage where things are really leading.

Extended violence could lead to extremism and/or national fragmentation
As I've written and said many times in the past, the violence in Libya is a grave threat to the prospect of a positive outcome to the Libyan uprising. The ruthlessness, indeed insanity, of the Qaddafi regime really does have the potential to create national fragmentation if the conflict is protracted, or to produce radicalized, extreme opposition groups that could come to power locally or nationally if the violence is greatly intensified and drags on for a long time. Again, the historical precedents for this grim process are myriad. Qaddafi is threatening his people with incredible violence from himself, and his continuous insistence on invoking the gruesome specter of bin Laden, Zawahiri and even the late, monstrous figure of Zarqawi no less, is designed to frighten Libyans into fearing that because he will not go without a bloodbath, the outcome could produce new leaders or organizations, radicalized to the point of psychosis, as happened in Algeria, Iraq, Peru, Cambodia and many other societies wracked by brutal civil war.

Reasons to hope for an Arab renaissance
So, obviously, while the outcome of the relatively orderly processes underway in Tunisia and Egypt is not clear, the danger is in Libya, and of course in areas where protests are steadily gaining steam, particularly in Yemen, is even more uncertain. However, there are very powerful grounds for optimism that what we are seeing are the birth pangs of a new Arab renaissance after an extended dark age of cultural obscurantism, political sclerosis, misrule and corruption, religious fanaticism and economic decay. The behavior of the Egyptian people in Tahrir Square was anything but that of an anarchical mob baying for blood. It was highly organized under almost impossible circumstances, dignified, nationalistic, secular, ecumenical, respectful, and displayed a very refined degree of social consciousness. Protesters displayed wisdom in maintaining the discipline of nonviolence under grave provocation, and the political sophistication to welcome the military with open arms, which certainly was a crucial factor in avoiding a confrontation and a bloodbath. Books will be written, both worthy and ridiculous (brace yourself for some of the most ridiculous academic anthropology and sociology theorizing coming soon to a peer-reviewed journal or academic press near you on this subject), about the spontaneous organization in the “Tahrir Republic,” the organization of neighborhood watch committees, spontaneous public protection of the National Museum and other crucial installations, and the enforcement of certain kinds of law and order, particularly against looting, by spontaneously organized groups of citizens. This is a people not only yearning for self-governance, but who have proven more than capable of it under very difficult circumstances. The icing on the cake was that, after celebrating the removal of Mubarak by the Army, the protesters returned to the Square the next day and cleaned it up, handing it back to the military authorities in fairly pristine condition. This is a display of national and social consciousness that should leave no one in any doubt that the urban middle, lower-middle, and working classes of Cairo and other cities in Egypt are a people as ready for self-government as any other in the world. They know what the right thing to do is, and they were ready, willing and able to do it at great risk to themselves, animated not by religious gobbledygook but by national and social consciousness.

A very similar attitude has been on display in Tunisia, and in the Pearl Roundabout in Bahrain, even though, as I've written before, the Bahraini case is slightly different than many of the other Arab protests. What this suggests is that the protests that we've seen so far were not simply about removing individuals, or even changing systems or expressing pent-up economic and political frustrations, but were also very much about demonstrating the readiness of Arabs to embrace well-functioning, equitable, self-governing social orders. There are also indications of this mentality — a yearning for genuine social order based on real rules and accountability that is equitable — is coming out of liberated parts of Libya such as Benghazi and the other cities free of the control of the Gaddafi regime. So even if military rulers were to try to impose long-term control over these societies, they might find themselves facing another round of major protests, and this is already beginning to happen in Egypt and Tunisia where dissatisfaction with the pace of change and with the continuation of too many facets of the old national security states are starting to boil the pot again.

The dangers ahead
The dangers of this kind of uncontrolled, spontaneous movement for change in many Arab states are significant, and they include military dictatorships, Islamist takeovers through elections and/or seizure of power, national fragmentation, and extended civil conflict. Malefactors are everywhere and, as Qaddafi is proving, some old orders don't only die hard, they kill enthusiastically and for as long as possible. But at a cultural level, the essential elements of an Arab spring, a real cultural, social and political renaissance in the Arab world at long last, are readily discernible for the first time in decades if not centuries. I think that's why the movement spread like wildfire throughout the region and has captured the imagination of Arab peoples in almost every country in the Middle East. It's even inspired the reigniting of the Green Movement in Iran. Anyone who isn't optimistic about where this can go isn't doing justice to the evident animating spirit of the Arab protest movements in general. However, anyone who isn't concerned about dystopian outcomes isn't being realistic about the potential dangers.

There is one serious concern that hasn't received enough attention either from the euphoric, triumphalist voices heralding the new Arab spring/Renaissance, or from the dysphoric, alarmist voices, mainly on the American, European, and above all, Israeli, right wing. Assuming that the three most obvious dystopian scenarios can be avoided in the Arab states that will undergo major transformations in the coming months and years — military dictatorships, Islamist takeovers, and national fragmentation, failed statehood or chaos — the question will then be how best to manage the emergence of a new, democratic order in much of the Arab world and what are the pitfalls to be most assiduously avoided?

Elections alone and majority rule are NOT democracy
There is a danger that too many political orientations in the Arab world have confused democracy with elections and the majority rule, and not fully assimilated the other side of the democratic, republican coin, which is protection of individual and minority rights and limitations on the power of government. The essence of democracy, of course, is a balance between the right of majorities or majority coalitions to exercise the fundamental functions of government on the one hand,  with inalienable rights of individual citizens, minority groups of various kinds, women and others, on the other hand. In other words, a real democracy doesn't merely involve enacting the will of the majority, whatever it might be at any given moment. It means doing so with strict limitations as to how far the government can go in intruding on the rights of individuals and minorities, and other limitations on government actions.

Most people in the Arab world, with the exception of the most extreme Islamists, seem to have understood that government legitimacy must stem from elections that gain the consent of the governed, and this understanding even extends to many Islamists, including many Muslim Brotherhood parties such as the one in Egypt. It's true that Islamists aren't necessarily committed to elections as such, but many of them do seem to have understood that there is no other way to guarantee the legitimacy of a government, and many of them, such as the more mainstream Islamist organizations in Egypt and Jordan, seem to feel it is their best path to power, and they're probably right. It's a grim truth that during the 20th century Salafists and other Islamists have managed to redefine Islam in the eyes of many Muslims in a very narrow-minded, obscurantist, and non-traditional manner in the name of a faux-authenticity and a fatuous and completely fictional “return” to the alleged principles of the early stages of Islamic history. And it's also true that in many Arab societies, Islamist parties would probably do very well in elections, although that may have more to do with their degree of organization and party discipline than their mass appeal.

It's important to note that Islamist rhetoric and religious identity was not only not at the forefront of the Tunisian and Egyptian protests, it was barely evident at all. Of course in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood was very much involved in the protests, and deliberately kept their rhetoric off the table and stayed in the background. They strategically decided not to overplay their hand, and it was a smart thing to do. It's clear that their hope is that while a secular, ecumenical and nationalist movement will create a new, open political space in Egypt, and hopefully a parliamentary democracy, that they will be the primary beneficiaries because they are the best organized and most disciplined political party other than the discredited NDP. So, in keeping with their founding Leninist party structure and strategy (although not, of course, content or ideology), they are willing to let the popular uprisings sweep the Ancien Régime from power, confident (rightly or wrongly) that they will be among the main beneficiaries of a newly open political system and can attain great influence if not seize power either through the ballot box or as a result of potential ensuing chaos if things go badly or spiral out of control. In short, the Egyptian protests especially, and the whole wave of change in the Arab world more generally, have been a mixed bag for the Islamists. On the one hand, their ideology was not the one that brought millions of people into the streets, and the political symbolism of the revolution has nothing to do with their own. On the other hand, no doubt they feel that they can sit back and wait for space to open up and be well positioned to gain more power than they have ever had in the past, if not seize control of government outrightly.

The prospect of military dictatorship can probably only be combated by more people power, popular rejection of any kind of extended military rule that is regarded by majorities as unacceptable or simply a continuation of the national security states without the old and essentially symbolic figureheads like Mubarak and Ben Ali. National fragmentation, failed statehood and chaos are, I think, unlikely in most if any Arab cases in the near future (other than Iraq and Lebanon, obviously), and would probably be the result of protracted conflicts to remove dictatorships such as may be emerging in Libya. The cure for this is quick resolution with international support, which is why I have been reluctantly advocating for asset freezes, targeted sanctions, travel bans, weapons sale bans, and even a country-wide no-fly zone in Libya for almost 10 days now. But I do think there are very few regimes, although honestly I can think of at least two others, that might resort to such extreme violence even though they are not led by certifiable lunatics. At any rate, those dangers are largely in the hands of the dictatorships, and the people and the most of the opposition groups are unlikely wish for such an outcome and can be relied upon to work against it at least in the initial phases of any uprising. Of course, if local factions come to power in certain regions, then national fragmentation becomes a very lively possibility because people are loathe to give up quasi-governmental authority once they've got it (the same temptation that will apply to the militaries as they rule for “transitional periods” that might not prove all that transitional in practice).

The threat of tyrannical majorities
The final obvious danger facing the Arab peoples as their revolts/revolutions proceed is the most difficult one to manage, and in many ways the most serious: the installation of democracy resulting in the rule of a tyrannical majority. As I noted above, most people in the Arab world, including many Islamists, have interpolated and accepted the idea that government legitimacy is best secured through elections. However, the notion that there should be strict limitations on the will of the majority may not be as clearly understood by as many people as necessary. The only real way to combat the potential of tyrannical majority rule through parliamentary democracy impinging on individual, minority and women's rights, among other concerns, is the development of constitutions with very strong limitations on government powers, backed up by an army whose loyalty is to the Constitution and not to the elected parliament.

The most obvious case in point is the Algerian model from the early 90s, a veritable textbook of how not to do democratic transitions in the Arab world (or anywhere else for that matter). The Algerian ruling elite and junta decided, for various reasons, to transition to a parliamentary democracy. But they made the most fundamental error possible: they crafted a Constitution that was infinitely and openly amenable by nothing more than a supermajority of Parliament! After the first round of voting in 1991, in a two-round process, it became clear that the Islamist FIS (Islamic Salvation Front), which had already swept local and municipal elections across the country, was poised to almost certainly gain exactly such a supermajority in the very first democratically elected parliament. It would therefore probably have been able to amend the Constitution in anyway it pleased under the law, a prospect that was utterly unacceptable to the military, the ruling party, and much of the secularized Algerian elite. In January 1992, the military canceled the second round of elections, and replaced President Chadli Bendjedid with a new leader, the old revolutionary Mohammed Boudiaf. A state of emergency was declared, FIS leaders rounded up and given lengthy prison terms, and its cadres thrown into concentration camps in the Sahara desert. By 1993 the situation had deteriorated into civil war, which eventually claimed the lives of at least 100,000 Algerians and led to the emergence of some of the most extreme Salafist-Jihadist groups the Arab world has ever seen (as I mentioned in my last Ibishblog essay).

The lessons from the Algerian experience are crystal clear: the problem was not that the military and the junta decided to move towards democratization. That was a good thing, and a good idea. The problem also was not that a (relatively moderate) Islamist party was likely to be elected to a strong majority in parliament, although obviously that's an outcome that would dismay me and many other people. But the presence and possible success of right wing religious parties is not an argument for refusing to create democracies. The problem was that the Constitution was so poorly crafted that it allowed for something as commonplace as a parliamentary supermajority to amend the Constitution in an unimpeded manner. This means that whatever protections were put in place for individual citizens, minorities, women, and other limitations on government power would have been essentially meaningless in the face of an immediate Islamist supermajority in the very first democratic parliament ever elected in Algeria. This initial idiotic mistake led to a second idiotic mistake: the extreme overreaction of the government that led inevitably to a state of civil war which predictably degenerated into a level of savagery on both sides that is still not fully comprehended by most people outside of Algeria.

The need for strong constitutional protections for individuals, minorities and women
Arab democracy is, hopefully, coming, and if it does it's going to include a fairly strong presence of right-wing religious organizations that might do quite well in elections. This is already the case in many democracies, including ultra-conservative Catholic groups in Latin America and elsewhere, the evangelical Christian right in the United States, Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, the RSS and other Hindu extremists in India, and many other examples around the world. They should peacefully and politically be fought tooth and nail, because their message and agenda is divisive and, if they are not restrained, they have a tendency to become extremely oppressive and abusive towards individuals and minorities, and especially to women. Islamism and other right wing religious politics tends, in practice, to look more like misogyny in terms of its policies than anything else, and it's anti-woman agenda is crystal clear.

The best way to restrain them is not to resist democratization, but create democracies in which individual, minority and women's rights, and other clear restrictions on government power are inviolable, and backed up by militaries that are committed to upholding the Constitution but not interfering with the legitimate exercise of constitutional, limited political power. It may be that the Arab world has to go through a period in which Islamists are given a chance to prove that they have no answers, no real economic development program, no sense of how to govern effectively, no less corruption than other political factions, and to give people a taste of how unpalatable their ultra-conservative social programs might be within the limitations of the rights cited above. They should probably be given a chance, if people really want that, to prove their uselessness, and the inherent vapidity of their ideology and political agenda. The nationalistic and ecumenical tendencies clearly evident in the protest movements in Egypt and Tunisia, and indeed elsewhere, indicate that there are strong countervailing political tendencies in the Arab world, and alarmism is no reason to reject democracy. But it has to be done right. And the right way is to create constitutions that provide powerful, inviolable protections for vulnerable groups and individuals, and especially women, restrain government action, and that prevents the emergence of tyrannical majorities.

This evening Pres. Obama signed an executive order blocking assets and prohibiting certain key transactions with Libya, the first major American effort to respond in a practical manner to the outrageous behavior of the Qaddafi regime. In my view, as my readers will know, this is not a moment too soon. For the past few days I've been advocating freezing of assets, various economic sanctions, travel restrictions on Libyan officials, and, with a heavy heart, the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya. While I know a great many people agree with me, and increasingly so, numerous friends have questioned the wisdom of any such strong response, so I feel that it's incumbent on me and others who advocate such measures to explain exactly what it is we think is in it for the United States and the rest of the international community.

The downsides of action:
Obviously, a short-term, amoral, and purely self-interested analysis would suggest that the simple answer is nothing, which helps explain the reticence of the West to respond vigorously to the incredibly violent behavior of the Libyan government and the increasingly bloodcurdling threats from Qaddafi himself. My point is that even if we are to take principles such as the Responsibility to Protect and the question of fundamental morality off the table, there are still important strategic and political reasons for getting involved vigorous and quickly. I've been very clear about the risks involved in my recent articles and blog postings, and I've tried not to shy away from the real dangers attached. These include threats to Westerners still in Libya and some Western economic interests; the possibility that Western, and especially American, engagement might be used as an excuse by the Qaddafi regime to bolster its ridiculous accusations that the uprising is a Western and/or Al Qaeda plot; the possibility that these measures may prove ineffective and ultimately might require some kind of more direct intervention (although I think that is relatively unlikely given the speed with which the regime is disintegrating); and the possibility of the fragmentation of Libya into separate zones of influence. This last prospect is especially raised by the possibility of a country-wide no-fly zone, since in other instances, most notably Iraq, that has proven the case.

What economic measures can and cannot achieve:
Moreover, I've been very straightforward about the fact that economic measures will not, in and of themselves, produce regime change, and that a no-fly zone would have limited effectiveness and not stop atrocities on the ground. However, while these measures carry certain risks and have obvious limitations, they would have certain powerful effects that shouldn't be discounted either. The freezing of assets, for example, would make it more difficult for the Qaddafi regime to continue to pay its people, particularly foreign mercenaries on whom it has by all accounts been heavily relying for the worst of its deeds. It would make life more difficult for the government, which at this stage would certainly be a good thing. It would also send an important symbolic message, and Pres. Obama is to be congratulated for his new executive order and encouraged, indeed, to go further. For sanctions to really bite, it will require the cooperation of countries like Russia and China, and that will be difficult, but may not be impossible. Public indications that the United States is working in this direction would be welcome and heartening. Even though economic sanctions take time to really bite, they would send an important signal to the Libyan government that not only domestically but internationally, the noose is tightening.

What a no-fly zone can accomplish:
A no-fly zone would have an even greater impact. It would reduce the ability of the government to try to extend its influence over the parts of the country it still controls, and make it extremely difficult for it to regain control of the apparently large areas it no longer commands. Most importantly, it would make it impossible to quickly and efficiently ferry in additional mercenaries from other parts of Africa or eastern Europe, and might help bring a quicker end to the conflict. It's true that a no-fly zone could increase the risk of fragmentation, but that risk is already there, and from what we have seen, at least rhetorically, the Libyan opposition isn't secessionist or terribly localized yet, and seems driven by nationalist rhetoric that militates against this kind of fragmentation. The real danger would come from a protracted period of instability in which the regime continued to control Tripoli and various other parts of the country, with other parts falling to local factions, tribes or, conceivably even, warlords. In other words, the danger of fragmentation is probably just as severe without a no-fly zone as with one. It emerges more due to an extended period of conflict than from the inability of the Qaddafi regime to use its air power.

The imperative to avoid ground intervention:
I understand that everyone, undoubtedly including the Libyan opposition and the people of the Arab world, have very serious reservations about any kind of direct foreign intervention on the ground, and I very much share those concerns. An international or Western presence on the ground in Libya could produce terrible downsides, raising again the specter of colonialism and creating a platform for international terrorists such as Al Qaeda or local forces to rally around various different self-interested campaigns of violence under the rubric of fighting foreign occupation. No doubt this is a contingency everyone is eager to avoid. I'd argue that strong measures short of that, including the ones I'm advocating above, would actually make such a prospect less and not more likely, even though once the Responsibility to Protect is invoked, it's logical conclusion might lead in that direction. The important thing is that this conflict not drag on, because that leads to almost all the dystopian scenarios one can paint, from extended massacres and atrocities, to fragmentation, or to the need for a very problematic and undesirable international intervention on the ground. I'm not surprised that nobody serious is talking these terms, and they shouldn't. It's far too early to consider such a measure, and it would to require the emergence of a humanitarian crisis of extraordinary proportions, far in excess of the already dreadful violence we have already seen to even begin to consider such a thing.

Broader US interests in taking a stronger stance:
The point I'm trying to emphasize, however, is that beyond these short-term, narrow practical and strategic considerations there is a broader imperative that needs to be borne in mind. The Arab world is being swept by a series of protests against the status quo, characterized by unaccountable governments that are corrupt and incompetent, leaders that have ruled for many decades and groom their children for succession, and a lack of inclusivity and transparency in governance that is simply unbearable. The United States in particular has a powerful strategic interest in not being perceived as the guardian of the status quo, addicted to a regional order that has become anathema to most of the people of the Middle East. It is very much in the American national interest to place itself, and more importantly be perceived as, on the side of the Arab peoples as they rise up to insist on reform, accountability and inclusivity. The Arab citizenry is finding its voice, and asserting its will, and the United States will have to deal with the outcome. Its ability to determine what happens is extremely limited in most parts of the Arab world, for instance in Libya. But I'd argue that the United States has a strong interest in being a part of the process of reform, in a manner that the people of the region can and will understand.

The need to side with the Arab peoples:
After an initially confused and halting reaction to the Egyptian protests, the Obama administration did get it right and sent a clear message that it was not interested in insisting on the survival of its ally, Pres. Mubarak. Nobody would consider Qaddafi a key American client or even really a friend of the United States, in spite of the fact that the Bush administration did make a deal with it to exchange its special weapons program for a degree of international rehabilitation. Standing on the sidelines and doing nothing for so many days while Libya has burned has simply not been in the American interest in my view. The new executive order is a very good step in the right direction. For understandable reasons, NATO is still saying it's not considering any kind of intervention, such as a no-fly zone, in Libya. But I think that as the conflict continues to deteriorate, and especially if Qaddafi and his regime make good on their threats to “cleanse Libya house by house” and turn Libya into “a burning hell,” economic measures will probably not be sufficient to place our country squarely on the right side of history and on the side of the Arab peoples yearning to be free (it sounds like a cliché, and it is one, but nonetheless it's apt).

A no-fly zone, as we've seen in the past, can be quickly organized and Libya is well-positioned around the whole series of NATO bases from which it could be enforced. It would be best if this were done with the backing of a UN Security Council resolution, but a broad-based international coalition need not be entirely dependent on Russian and Chinese acquiescence. I believe the Arab peoples generally, and most of the people of Libya, would welcome such a move and would see it as a very positive indication of where the United States, which is and insists on remaining the regional superpower in the Middle East, sees its role in the emerging order through which Arab citizens are trying to shake off the despotisms of the past. The political and strategic risks, which I certainly acknowledge, are hardly overwhelming, and the military risks are minimal. There are also undoubted political and strategic concerns, and I've never downplayed them, and I'm not doing that now. But I am suggesting that there are far greater and overriding political and strategic costs to being perceived as doing nothing, to giving the impression of being disinterested, relying solely on lip service, being overly attached to regional stability and the status quo at a time when people are rejecting it in a most heroic manner, and, of course, of hypocrisy.

Such accusations would be unjust and untrue, but they are already surfacing and will only grow over time. The Qaddafi regime will almost certainly not be able to survive its current crisis. Simply put, there's no way to put Humpty Dumpty back together again at this point. The loss of control so much of the country, the outrage of so many of its citizens, the defection of so many military, diplomatic and government officials, and the literally pathological performance and behavior of Qaddafi himself mean this regime has no future. The only questions are how long will it take, how much blood will be spilled, how much chaos will ensue, and what kind of order the endgame will produce. Here I do think the United States and its allies could play a role in hastening the end to the regime, which would minimize the risks of national fragmentation due to extended conflict and the emergence of extremist factions in control of certain parts of the country, both of which could be the consequences of a protracted scenario. This government is going to fall. It strongly behooves the United States to be perceived as having helped to play a positive role in bringing about its demise. Not only will that provide our country a great deal of credit in Libya and in the Arab world at large, especially among the ordinary citizens, it would also maximize the ability of the United States to deal positively with a post-Qaddafi order and to have some degree of influence in what comes next.

More importantly, it would send a clear message to the Arab peoples at large: the United States prefers transitions in which national militaries work with remnants of the old regimes and with opposition groups to create new, more equitable, democratic and transparent systems to replace existing autocracies. That process is underway in Tunisia and Egypt, and apparently is just starting in Bahrain as well. Libya is a strategically important country, but it is not a major ally of the United States. However, other important Arab states that are vulnerable to popular protests against autocracy are key allies, and the United States might find itself dealing with situations even more difficult than the one in Egypt, which resolved itself, thus far, relatively peacefully and in a more or less orderly manner. It's very important that the Arab people understand that the United States isn't willing to stand by idly, especially if they wrongly perceive it to be a reflection of an undue attachment to regional stability and preserving an unacceptable status quo, especially when the citizenry of the country is under unrestrained attack by a rogue government.

US interests in joining and helping manage transition in the Arab world:
There will be, almost certainly, many difficult challenges ahead for the United States and some of its key allies in the future as the wave of Arab reform protests proceeds. What happened in Egypt and Tunisia set the stage for what is happening in Libya, and what is also beginning to gain steam in Yemen and elsewhere. Wise strategic thinking would focus on the medium and long-term rather than the immediate, narrow interests that militate against doing anything, and would seek to maximize the American ability to deftly maneuver in the face of what are likely to be difficult transitions in other Arab states. So, just as Egypt and Tunisia were the precursors of the crisis in Libya, so too will the Libyan experience influence what happens next in other Arab countries. American policy should be clearly focused on maximizing our country's ability to deal effectively with those coming storms. Having been perceived to have played a positive role in helping to secure freedom in Libya, or at least an end to the conflict and the Qaddafi regime, is the best thing we could do at the moment to prepare a sound basis for securing our long-term interests and maintaining good relations not just with the governments, but also with the peoples, of our Arab allies.

Well, he finally came right out and said it: “those who do not love me do not deserve to live.” With those words, uttered on Libyan state television today, Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi at least rhetorically outdid all his megalomaniacal and mass murdering predecessors including Saddam Hussein, Ceausescu, Stalin and the whole bunch. Anyone who still doubts that this man is ready and willing to visit the utmost bloodshed upon his people simply isn't paying attention. The question is, is he able? The answer is, at this stage at least, quite possibly.

That should fill everyone with enormous anxiety and put paid to the idea that ideas for minimal interventionist efforts such as a no-fly zone are an overreaction, unjustified or would be counterproductive. My initial reaction to such calls a few days ago was caution and skepticism. After Qaddafi's first speech on TV two days ago, I had to change my mind given the ruthlessness and madness that was on full display. Yesterday in Foreign Policy magazine I came out strongly in favor of economic sanctions, freezing assets and indeed a no-fly zone, even though it conceivably might end up necessitating boots on the ground. I'm pretty sure it won't come to that, and I think these other measures will be enough to help push this madman off his perch. Indeed, his regime can't be saved, and it's only a matter of how many people will be killed, and what kind of political, social and human devastation will be left in his wake. And, let there be no doubt, the more chaos and bloodshed he inflicts, the greater the chance of a terrible outcome in Libya, involving national fragmentation, extended chaos, or the rise to power of extremists of one variety or another. The violence he is threatening has every prospect of radicalizing opposition groups and enough Libyans to produce a very gruesome outcome, and not one limited strictly to vengeance against the regime and those associated with it, which of course would be bad enough.

Let's be very clear about what exactly Qaddafi said today. Since a huge percentage, almost certainly an overwhelming majority, of the Libyan people clearly “do not love” him, including large numbers of his former officials, military officers and diplomats, he's basically issuing a death sentence on most Libyans. It's essentially a secular version of takfir, the bizarre and theologically inadmissible practice by the so-called “Salafist-Jihadist” lunatics of pronouncing other Muslims to be apostates and therefore, in their eyes, worthy of death (for this reason, those who call themselves Salafist-Jihadists have frequently been referred to as “takfiris” in the Arab media, in an attempt to distinguish them from less extreme Islamists like most Salafists such as Muslim Brothers who do not engage in the practice). And it has a grisly precedent: towards the end of the civil war in Algeria, as the Islamist opposition became increasingly deranged, both al-Jama'ah al-Islamiyah al-Musallaha (the Armed Islamic Group) and al-Jamaa'atu l-Salafiyyatu li l-Da'wati wa l-Qitaal (the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat) — the most extreme of the Algerian radical organizations, realizing they were finally losing the battle against the government, the military and the mainstream of Algerian society — pronounced takfir against the entire Algerian nation that did not join their ranks, not once but twice. And they meant it. These were auto-genocidal sentiments from two of the most radical Al Qaeda-style organizations the Arab world has ever seen. If they had not been small and marginalized by that time, there is no telling how many Algerians they would have massacred, given that attitude. Goodness knows they killed enough as it was, even given their limited means.

Gaddafi has done the same thing, without invoking religion or framing his arguments in a Salafist-Jihadist, pseudo-theological rhetoric. His madness is much more megalomaniacal than it is theocratic-maniacal. It's all personal, and about him: "those who do not love me deserve to die." There's no doubt at all that his regime continues to unravel, but it hasn't lost control yet. There are dire warnings that he still possesses some chemical or biological weapons, although whether he has the means to deliver them or not isn't clear. However, senior defectors from his regime are saying he has these weapons and will not hesitate to use them at the last moment. At the very least, he still seems to command considerable conventional firepower, and doesn't appear in the least bit hesitant to unleash it. Certainly he's acting very much in a Samson-mentality, talking and acting as if he were perfectly content to bring the entire edifice of the Libyan nation down around him if he has to go. Indeed, he's starting to exhibit the same attitude of contempt towards his own people that Hitler reportedly expressed in the final days in his bunker as the Soviet military bore down on Berlin: that his people had let him down, that they therefore didn't deserve to live, and that since he was about to lose power it was only right and just that they perish in large numbers.

I'm a very reluctant supporter of humanitarian international intervention in Libya. But I think it's almost impossible to believe that major international efforts like freezing assets, economic sanctions, travel bans, weapons sale bans and, indeed, a no-fly zone are not urgently required here. In fact, for those who are concerned about the possibility of the international community being forced to intervene on the ground, I'd say the quickest possible implementation of those measures is the best bet of avoiding two very bad scenarios: one, the need to intervene physically to prevent extremely widespread atrocities or possibly even genocide; or two, having to live with the fact that as in Rwanda, the international community had every warning about what was happening and about to happen, and stood by and did virtually nothing. Is there anyone who doesn't feel shame about the global lack of response to the genocide in Rwanda? Do we really want to go through that again in Libya?

I don't think I'm overstating the case here at all. My strong suspicion is of the regime is on its last legs, and that it's quite unlikely that any sort of direct intervention in Libya would be required to finish it off. But I do think these other measures, short of ground actions, while they carry the risks I've outlined in my last blog posting and also in my Foreign Policy article, these are greatly outweighed by the urgent need to take action and the even more serious consequences of failing to do so, not only for the people of Libya, but for the stability of the region and for Western interests in the long run. I'm not sure how intervention on the ground would be regarded in Libya (I'm sure at the moment there is no appetite for any such thing, because it hasn't come close to requiring that… yet), or in the rest of the Arab world. The specter of colonialism cannot be underestimated. However the imposition of a no-fly zone would, I strongly believe, not be regarded by most Arabs and certainly not by most Libyans as an unwarranted Western intrusion, a neocolonial action, or abusive meddling. I think the anxiety for the future of the people of Libya is sufficient to offset any mistrust of the West at this stage, and actually I think it would be regarded as a noble and most welcome form of intervention.

The situation is quite simple: we have a crazed and extremely ruthless dictator desperately clinging on to power, still in possession of considerable armed forces and foreign mercenaries, threatening to massacre his people and declaring that those who do not love him deserve to die. Under such circumstances it seems to me that economic measures and a country-wide no-fly zone are the very least that can be done, and after his speech today, every day that passes without them, assuming his regime doesn't fall quickly, will be an added embarrassment to an international community that has declared that it has a Responsibility to Protect. If the Libyans right now don't need protection from an armed, crazed and homicidal dictator who is openly and on television threatening the overwhelming majority of them with death, I can't imagine who would.

UPDATE:

There is now some dispute over whether Qaddafi said "those who do not love me do not deserve to live" or "if people do not love me, I do not deserve to live." Al Arabiya reports the later here. But first-rate tweeters reporter Muna Shikaki quoted him as "Qaddafi: 'those who don't like me don't deserve to live'" and Sultan Al Qassemi wrote "Gaddafi now in TV 'I'm in central Tripoli now. The people who don't love me don't deserve to live.'" Those are two pretty good sources, in my view. Either way, the thrust of the arguments remain unchanged. At UN today, the Libyan ambassador finally abandoned Qaddafi after sticking by him till now in an open dispute with his deputy. With emotions and tears flowing, Amb. Shalqam embraced Sec. Gen. Ban and asked the UN to "save Libya, we want quick action, save Libya." He rightly said Qaddafi's message to Libyans was if i cannot rule you, "I will kill you." I think that says it all. And there is no dispute that Qaddafi today threatened to turn Libya into "a burning hell."

UPDATE 2:

My tweep @abuhatem says:

Yeah I read it. Al-Arabiyah is wrong. They tend to get a lot of things wrong. You, Munashik, and Sultan are all correct. 100%

Col. Qaddafii's speech on Libyan state TV this evening set a new low not only for him and other beleaguered Arab leaders, but internationally and historically as well. It was one for the ages. Qaddafi rambled and howled, cooed and bellowed, pleaded and, above all, threatened. Surely the most apt adjective to describe the speech is bloodcurdling. Qaddafi essentially threatened to unleash entirely new waves and levels of violence against his own people, suggesting that he has not yet even given the order to fire, but making it clear that he is willing to stop at nothing to keep hold of power if it comes to that. To justify his shameless ruthlessness, he approvingly cited other uses of force by states around the world, particularly permanent members of the Security Council, including US actions in Waco and Falluja, among others, Russian actions against the rebellious Duma, the Chinese military assaults on protesters in Tiananmen Square and so forth. The main point of his address seemed to be to strike fear in the hearts of any Libyan who happened to be listening to him and imply that the blood hasn't yet begun to flow in earnest.

Of course the speech was not only ruthless, but utterly deranged. We're used to that from Qaddafi, but this latest performance took his mania to a whole new level. He appeared unusually disoriented and rambling, at one point pausing to read out “transgressions” worthy of the death penalty under Libyan law. These seem to cover virtually everything other than obsequious fawning before him. At the same time, he produced familiar rhetoric about being a humble man with virtually no possessions and no real ambitions: a simple servant of the nation. In the same breath, he was as megalomaniacal as possible, claiming to be the soul of the nation and “not a normal person” (hardly a revelation, although I doubt most listeners took it in the way he meant.) Moments later, he accused the demonstrators of being both hardened, ultrareligious, fundamentalist "followers of bin Laden and Zawahiri" and of also being shiftless teenage drug addicts. Neither are true, but please, pick one. He repeatedly implied that because of the protests Libya was about to be simultaneously attacked by Al Qaeda AND the United States (as if they work hand in glove), and went so far as to dig up the name of Zarqawi, a menacing figure no one has mentioned for many, many years. It was all part of an incoherent and kitchen-sink parade of horribles and monsters designed to strike terror into the hearts of the listeners. Underneath it all it was clear that the biggest monster in this imaginary evil pantheon is Qaddafi himself, and he made no bones about his willingness to spill blood and burn down his own society.

In terms of Libyan domestic politics, other than promising a bloodbath if the rebellion continues, Qaddafi appealed to tribal leaders in the most paternalistic terms, insisting that he has done a tremendous amount for them and demanding their continued support. Other than those elements of the regime and the military which remain loyal to him for whatever reason, and of course the foreign mercenaries he pays, his only bet is that some kind of deep, local, tribal politics will somehow provide him with a constituency that survives the uprising and his own outrageous conduct. This seems unlikely, but few observers outside of Libya are well informed enough about these deep local politics to be certain. As I've been saying since Saturday morning, it seems to be only a matter of time before the Gaddafi regime falls, and the main question is how many people will be killed in the process and what the endgame will throw up in its place.

Obviously the first impulse of any reasonable person under such circumstances is to ask how this dreadful situation can be most quickly resolved and with the minimum of bloodshed. My initial reaction to calls for foreign intervention, including a no-fly zone, was at least ambivalent and skeptical. Following his speech today, which was mainly a litany of overt threats against the population at large, both the international community and sober observers will have to think twice about maintaining any kind of hands-off attitude and simply leaving it up to the Libyans themselves (which obviously is a preferable scenario, all things being equal.) Clearly there is a strong case to be made for freezing regime assets, wide-ranging economic sanctions and even no-fly zones. A robust international response to not only the violence of the past few days but also the threat of much wider violence from Gaddafi is undoubtedly called for.

The problem is that economic measures will take a good deal of time to have any real effect, let alone lead to regime change, while the crisis is urgent and, if it is taken seriously as a moral and political (and maybe even strategic) crisis, really cannot wait for the grinding attrition which such measures can actually inflict. No-fly zones can, and probably should, be quickly imposed, and it would probably fall to NATO to do that, presumably with UN Security Council backing. However, as with economic sanctions, no-fly zones will only attenuate the degree of violence that the regime can visit upon its people. In few instances have governments needed to resort to air power in order to conduct atrocities and massacres, especially if it is a matter of armed forces confronting unarmed or lightly armed populations. So in the end these measures may well not be sufficient, which is probably one of the main reasons it is taking the international community so long to decide whether they want to undertake them or not. No-fly zones, it should be added, carry with them the prospect of dividing countries into irreconcilable or ungovernable antonymous or even independent zones, and setting the stage for future conflicts on that basis as well, by allowing regional forces to establish the prerogatives of governance for an extended time in a given area that may be difficult to reverse.

Once international intervention to protect the Libyan people from the regime is embraced as a principle and a strategy by the international community, there is every reason to suspect it won't and can't end with no fly zones. If world powers, particularly the West, NATO and the United States, make a point of intervening on behalf of the Libyan people and economic sanctions prove effectively meaningless and no-fly zones only slightly curb the violence, and especially if greater atrocities and massacres become widespread, a direct intervention by ground forces will become increasingly hard to avoid. The point is that in a case like this largely symbolic measures like economic sanctions and no-fly zones ultimately won't cut it if the regime does not fall under the weight of its own contradictions and if it continues to increase the use of brute force against essentially unarmed civilian populations.

The United States government has been very cautious in its approach to the crisis in Libya, disappointing a great many people in the process. President Barack Obama has been virtually silent on the issue, and both he and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton have spoken of Libya mostly in the same breath with other Arab states subjected to protest movements. One reason is that the United States does not have much leverage with or in Libya, and presumably does not have particularly good or reliable information either. Another is the fear that strong support from the United States for the protesters might serve to discredit the opposition in the eyes of some Libyans and other Arabs who are used to thinking of the Americans as the enemy. In addition, there are American and other Western economic interests at stake. And finally, I do think there is a reticence to be sucked into an interventionist stance in Libya given that the logic of such a policy might not allow itself to be restricted to ineffective economic measures and no-fly zones. Such concerns certainly explain the Obama administration's caution on the subject thus far.

But the United States risks being perceived as disinterested in Libya, hypocritical or too attached to the deal that was struck by the Bush administration with the Qaddafi regime over its special weapons program in exchange for international rehabilitation. I don't think this is an accurate reflection of Obama administration attitudes, but such accusations have already surfaced and are likely to gain momentum over time. The UN Security Council meeting this afternoon will reveal much about how far the international community is willing to go. The United States, whatever it wants to do at this stage, will also perforce have to take into consideration attitudes of states like Russia and China that may have very serious reservations about external intervention in Libyan affairs. The Obama administration so far hasn't given any indication of being interested in unilaterally imposing sanctions or no-fly zones without this kind of international backing, assuming it's willing to consider these steps at all. If the US does opt for intervention, it will almost certainly have to be with the backing of a strong international coalition and it is extremely unlikely to act alone or in the face of strong Chinese, Russian or other opposition.

For the past couple of decades in cases such as Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Kosovo and elsewhere, the international community and the West in particular have been caught between a new rhetoric of international liberal and humanitarian interventionism on the one hand versus the principle of non-interference and rejecting the legacy of colonialism on the other. The Libyan case is quickly becoming the latest conundrum over whether Western interventions (because it is going to have to be Western, I'm afraid) can legitimately take the form of liberal, humanitarian interventions consistent with an enlightened approach to international law and legitimacy or whether they will also be partly, at heart, or inevitably degenerate into new expressions of old-fashioned colonialism or imperialism.

Without question the Tunisian and Egyptian models, in which popular protests were able to unseat hated dictators and kick off a process of reform that has a very realistic fighting chance of producing reasonably democratic systems, is far preferable to most people in the Middle East and around the world than the Iraq model in which American invasion and occupation, not to mention protracted civil conflict, set the stage for the possible emergence of a stable democracy. The problem is that the Libyan case probably looks a lot more like what Iraqis would have encountered from Saddam Hussein if they had risen up in this manner, and it's very difficult to imagine the Iraqi system under Saddam allowing a "velvet revolution" to succeed or his army throwing him out in a soft coup as happened to Ben Ali and Mubarak. And, of course, direct Western intervention on the ground opens space for various forms of extremists, including Salafist-Jihadists of the Al Qaeda variety, to open new fronts against both Western interests and mainstream Arab societies, as happened in Iraq, and for civil conflict driven by communal or power politics to proceed under the guise of combating foreign occupations.

So the problem of international intervention is not nearly as simple as some people are making it out to be because the steps that are being proposed may well prove ineffective and require stronger measures requiring a much more serious committment, and more blowback, internal and external opposition and unintended consequences. On the other hand, following the demonstrated ruthlessness of Qaddafi and, especially, his blatant threats in his speech today of greatly escalated violence, atrocities and massacres and his approving invocation of various dreadful incidents around the world as a model for how to deal with rebellion and insurrection, doing nothing may be even less attractive or defensible than starting to seriously do something on an international basis in spite of the considerable risks.

Last Saturday morning I blogged that I thought that the epicenter of the Arab revolt was now in Libya and that it was the place to watch in the immediate term, and that Yemen probably would be the most volatile and significant in the medium term. This was as opposed to the obsessive and misguided focus on Bahrain that was largely the consequence of the physical presence of international media in that relatively open society and a lack of understanding about the differences between the rather unique political mix in the "Island Kingdom" and the generalized pattern in the broader Arab world. Everything that has happened since then has tended to confirm this view, and reports coming out of Libya today suggests that the situation has become downright abominable. The Gaddafi regime, facing a wave of unprecedented protests throughout the country now including the capital of Tripoli and a pattern of diplomatic and military defections, has unleashed the full force of the Libyan military and its mercenaries on significant segments of the population. Reports suggest that extraordinary atrocities have taken place and that up to 600 people have been killed, although this may be a very lowball estimate. Information is very difficult to come by, and often is unconfirmed and/or not reliable.

Even more ominously, the situation appears to be deteriorating. There are strong suggestions that the Libyan Air Force has been deployed against protesters and rebellious areas, and that the largest city that appears to have fallen into the hands of the opposition, Benghazi, may face a sustained evening of aerial bombardment tonight with potentially unimaginable consequences. The Arab League has remained largely silent, not knowing quite what to say. Most of the international community has condemned the violence, but Italy, the former colonial master in Libya, has actually supported the Gaddafi regime with Berlusconi's Foreign Minister warning about an “Islamic emirate” just to the south of Europe and similar balderdash.

Those calling for international intervention may unfortunately be wasting their breath: no party has the inclination, the means or the ability to launch a direct military intervention in Libya under the present circumstances. It's not going to happen for the foreseeable future. This could quickly change, but for now, the Libyan drama will play out entirely, or almost entirely, based on local forces. The idea of a "no-fly zone," being floated by some dissident Libyan diplomats and others, is not completely out of the question, although who would enforce it remains undefined, and at any rate even if any international forces wanted to do this, it would take some time to organize and would not prevent atrocities on the ground. It seems virtually certain that at the end of the day, when the dust settles and no matter how much blood is spilled, the Gaddafi regime will not survive its outrageous behavior. It's a matter of how many days it takes and how many lives are taken, but at least this aspect of the outcome now seems completely unavoidable.

What we are witnessing, then, is a nightmare version of the dream that began in Tunis and Cairo. The Tunisian and Egyptian peoples were able to leave their militaries with virtually no choice but to hand hated dictators one-way tickets out of town. In both cases, when push came to shove, the Army preferred to intervene to restore order and salvage what it could of the national security state rather than confront the protesters and initiate a bloodbath. Whether or not these experiments end up in full-blown democracy or long-lasting major reforms remains to be seen, but the extraordinary displays of “people power” managed to remove the despised symbols of oppression and unseat powerful dictators. In both cases, the protests were almost entirely nonviolent and while police and thugs initially brutalized demonstrators, the militaries intervened to stop that and refused to be drawn into a direct confrontation with unarmed people. Especially after the success of the Egyptian uprising, it was virtually inevitable that the model would be followed in other parts of the Arab world, and quickly. Libya was always a prime candidate, having a sclerotic dictatorship that began in the 1960s and being sandwiched geographically directly between Tunisia and Egypt. So it's not surprising that the next phase of the new Arab uprising/awakening, or whatever it proves to be, would be in Libya.

Unfortunately, it's also not surprising that what Libya is providing is a dystopian version of the euphoric, utopian "velvet revolutions" in Egypt and Tunisia, since this military, or at least significant parts of it, appears to have no compunction in unleashing its firepower on unarmed demonstrators. There is a degree of unscrupulousness and recklessness at work in the Gaddafi regime's response that was simply missing in Tunisia and Egypt and only briefly glimpsed, and in a very limited manner, in Bahrain. But this is what it looks like when the state won't restrain itself and at least some key elements of the military, mercenaries or otherwise, will take orders to open fire on unarmed demonstrators.

What effect this will have on future potential Arab uprisings against autocratic regimes very much remains to be seen, but it will be another major turning point. Assuming that Gadhafi is overthrown, as seems inevitable, there are several obvious possible ramifications to a very bloody, as opposed to velvet, Arab revolution. First it's possible to suggest that if the Libyans can go through what they seem to be willing to endure and shake off their dictatorship in spite of the extreme violence, Arabs generally will have lost their fear of brute force. Certainly the Tunisian and Egyptian peoples were willing to face down the prospect, but the Libyans are currently suffering on the rack in actuality rather than tempting fate. It could serve as an inspiration to those who might have to face much more draconian dictatorships than those in Tunis and Cairo. But it could also be an object lesson about the costs involved, especially since the degree of carnage has yet to be fully realized. It's one thing to enter into a rebellion expecting a scenario more or less analogous to the Tunisian or Egyptian models. It's quite another to have watched what has otherwise been potential brutality actually play itself out like this, and then volunteer for a repetition in your own country. So it's possible Gaddafi's brutality might have as much of an intimidating as an encouraging effect on other Arab populations.

This could particularly be the case if the outcome is long and drawn out, and above all if it is chaotic, uncertain or yields some kind of extremist post-Gaddafi regime. The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were gratifyingly secular and ecumenical, and clearly reflected the desire on the part of much of the population, especially the educated, under-employed, urban middle, lower-middle and working classes for democracy and good governance. They were strikingly non-Islamist in their character and reflected a sudden and unexpected resurgence of Arab and local nationalism and an amazingly refined sense of social consciousness. Both of these cultural phenomena — nationalism that transcends ideology and religious and sectarian identity, and a refined social consciousness — had been considered if not dead then at least moribund in the Arab world by most observers. It's extremely heartening to see that these were the animating impulses that were able to bring millions of Egyptians and Tunisians onto the streets, and not narrow-minded, obscurantist religious ideology.

One of the most severe long-term political dangers arising from the kind of brutality currently being visited upon the Libyan people is that it could have a severely radicalizing effect on the opposition and throw up a post-Gaddafi era dominated by extremists rather than reformers. Extreme violence has a historical tendency to radicalize movements in an extremely nasty way and to set the stage for gruesome replacements to grizzly regimes. Extreme American bombardment in Cambodia undoubtedly help to transform the Khmer Rouge into the monstrous regime it proved to be once it seized power. In Algeria, when the military canceled elections in the early 1990s for fear of an Islamist takeover through the ballot box and put FIS members and supporters in concentration camps in the Sahara desert, it set in motion a process of radicalization that ended up with the opposition being characterized by the most extreme version of Salafist-Jihadist mania yet seen anywhere in the Arab world. I'm not predicting that this will be the outcome of what is, without question, a very heroic uprising by the Libyan people, but rather noting that much of the hope for serious, positive reform in Egypt and Tunisia stems from the fact that the military and parts of the ruling elite refused to confront the demonstrators violently and, in the final analysis, were ready to jettison hated dictators and elements of the regime that were just not acceptable to the general public. A period of confrontation gave way to at least some degree of conciliation and compromise, which in both those cases is no doubt still a work in progress. My point is that the kind of brutality being unleashed in Libya makes such conciliation and compromise, and purposive work between elements of the military, remnants of the old regime and opposition groups towards reform, far more difficult. It could, if it goes badly wrong, throw up either a chaotic or deeply oppressive outcome, which would then have its own potential negative influence on the unfolding Arab reform protest movement.

Islamists are beginning to come out of the woodwork after having almost no role in Tunisia and being both marginalized by the protesters and also deliberately holding back in Egypt. Most notably, Yusuf Qaradawi, the elderly Egyptian Salafist who is a client of the Qatari government and a main feature on Al Jazeera Arabic, has been steadily attempting to insert himself into the reform movement limelight on a regional basis. On February 18, Qaradawi gave a speech on the evolution of post-Mubarak Egyptian politics that was not particularly subtle about the direction in which he wants the country to go. Indeed, he went further than his fellow Muslim Brothers based in Egypt ever have, since the revolt at least, in implying that there should be a theocratic element to the country's future. And today, Qaradawi had a remarkable and emotional performance on Al Jazeera Arabic in which he issued a formal fatwa calling for the death of Gaddafi. He said that any soldier or other person who could pull the trigger and end Gaddafi's life should do so immediately. The response of Al Jazeera's anchor at the end of this allegedly religious diatribe was “amen.” I'd agree that any Libyan at this stage who wanted to try to end the conflict by killing the dictator could plausibly claim to be acting in self-defense, given the number of people who've been killed by the regime. But obviously Qaradawi's extraordinary comments are political, not religious, as usual. And it's clearly another effort by the leading Islamist of the Arab world to slowly and methodically usurp the momentum of the Arab uprisings and turn it towards the ends of the Muslim Brothers and similar Salafist forces.

Whether or not anyone will really listen to Qaradawi, or whether, if they do, such efforts will actually succeed in shifting momentum away from the secular, ecumenical character of the Tunisian and Egyptian protests and finally gain some traction for an Islamist turn in the Arab uprisings very much remains to be seen. The fact is that it was nationalism and social consciousness, not Islamism, that brought millions of Arabs out onto the streets, and it may well be the animating force in Libya and elsewhere as the movements progress. As I noted over the weekend, Bahrain is a different case, and in fact does reflect sectarian tensions, although not necessarily Islamist politics as such. If the Arab uprisings and protest movements are to lay the groundwork for a better future, it's essential that notwithstanding brutal repression as being carried out by the Gaddafi regime in Libya, shameless opportunism as being conducted by Qaradawi on Al Jazeera, or sectarian tensions as evident in Bahrain, the visions for the future remain nationalist, secular and ecumenical. The purity of that vision is under serious threat from numerous quarters, but there's every reason at this stage to remain optimistic that it can nonetheless persevere. Such purity is not optional. It is essential.

In recent days most international and even regional attention has been focused on the outpouring of unrest in Bahrain and the government's extremely violent response that left perhaps a dozen people dead and many more wounded. News media, particularly television, are driven by what is readily available, and, just like in Egypt beforehand, Bahrain immediately saw a huge influx of Western and regional journalists parachuting in to cover what they figured would be the Next Big Story. And, no doubt, the events were dramatic, disturbing and very newsworthy. However, they've been widely misunderstood as the next phase in the generalized Arab revolt against tyrannical rulers that began in Tunisia and spread to Egypt and now other states in the region. Compelling though the drama in Manama has been, the real action, so to speak, in the unfolding transformation of the Arab world is actually elsewhere, most notably in Libya and most ominously in Yemen.

Context is everything. The uprising in Bahrain is less of a direct response to the events in Tunisia and Egypt than it is essentially a replay of earlier, less dramatic but also very intense and in many ways quite similar, uprisings against the rule of the Al-Khalifa royal family. Like the earlier Bahraini protest movements, the new outpouring has become very sectarian, in spite of many protestations to the contrary, and largely reflects extreme Shiite dissatisfaction at marginalization and disenfranchisement. Unlike the other Gulf states, even those with significant Shiite populations like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Bahrain has a substantial Shiite majority but a royal family and ruling elite that is largely Sunni and very conscious of the sectarian differences. Obviously there are lots Bahraini Sunnis with serious grievances against the government as well, including liberals and, much more powerfully, Islamists. However, the principal faultline in the country has been and remains a Sunni-Shiite divide separating the royal family and most of the country's elite from the majority Shiite population.

A couple of years ago the American Studies Center at the University of Bahrain celebrated its 10th anniversary (it is, by the way, the oldest American studies center in the Arab world, a grim testament to the state of Arab higher education), and they invited me to be their keynote speaker at their anniversary celebration. During my trip to the country I was struck by not simply the obvious sectarian tensions that were evident right away, but also the striking cultural divide between that part of Bahraini society, including the government and most of the ruling elite, which is very definitely Arab and that part, including a very significant chunk of the Shiite population, which seems to be culturally, not to mention religiously, much more attuned to Iranian orientations. It hit me as early as the immigration desk in the airport upon entry to the country, in which I noted a strong Farsi pronunciation and cadence to some of the officers' otherwise flawless local Arabic. I immediately began to look for opportunities to ask about this striking social feature, but it clearly needed to be done gingerly and with some discretion. I quickly learned just how gingerly it needed to be approached, but I did take the opportunity later on in my brief stay to travel around the northern part of the country a bit and I was struck by the culture and aesthetics of many of the Shiite towns and areas I passed through, which were not only Shiite but did not seem to reflect Arab Shiite culture such as one might find in southern Iraq or southern Lebanon as much as they did Persian culture.

I wasn't surprised by this, of course, but it was still striking. Some of the aftermath of the sectarian rioting of the mid-1990s was still evident in and around some of these Shiite areas, although I found people very reticent to discuss those events. This fault-line has a very deep history, in both recent and more distant Bahraini history. Following the Iranian revolution, after all, Shiite Islamists in Bahrain tried to replicate Khomeini's accomplishment and establish a similar system in that country. In 1956, during British rule, the royal family was briefly driven out of Manama by such sectarian tensions to the village of Refae Al Gharbi, reportedly attended only by Sunni servants and followers. It would be very nice to think that the present uprising was a unified and principled rebellion against an autocratic government, but I think the reality clearly is that it's largely yet another expression of these deeply rooted and ongoing sectarian tensions. In other words, while the Bahraini opposition may have been inspired by Tunisia and Egypt, I do not see this latest unrest in the island as primarily an extension of the logic of those rebellions but more a replay of earlier events, particularly the unrest of the 1990s.

What this implies, of course, is that the focus by international attention and media coverage on Bahrain as the next stage in a generalized Arab revolt against autocrats has probably been misguided. Bahrain is a unique case, as the history of sectarian tensions and repeated uprisings against what is, after all, a religiously, and in some senses culturally, minority government demonstrates. There isn't any similar history of deep sectarian and even ethnic tensions leading to repeated uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya or Jordan. Yemen has had its share of unrest and even civil war, but again, with a very different character than the Bahraini experience. So while I wouldn't argue that the unrest in Bahrain is disconnected from the wave of protests stemming from the Tunisian and Egyptian examples, I would argue that it is largely a manifestation of other dynamics. It could be observed that every Arab state has its own logic and its own unique set of circumstances that define its political evolution. But it's much easier to see a direct connection between Tunisia and Egypt on the one hand and anti-government protests in Libya, Yemen, Jordan and elsewhere than this latest manifestation of the ongoing and unresolved tension between the rulers and the ruled in Bahrain that is, sad to say but in truth, largely sectarian.

There is another important distinction between the dynamics in Bahrain and that in other protest-wracked Arab states, which is that neither side can really hope to “win” in that country, which means that a compromise is virtually inevitable no matter how much blood is spilled. The government of Bahrain has a very strong hand to play, unlike many of the other Arab governments affected by anti-government protests. The Bahraini royal family enjoys significant support from the local Sunni population, even if they have simmering grievances against the autocracy, in the face of what is perceived as a largely Shiite uprising. Very significantly it also enjoys strong regional support, particularly from its nervous fellow Gulf Cooperation Council members, and international support from the United States, which bases its Fifth Fleet in that country as the centerpiece of US naval power in the Persian Gulf. It also clearly has a military, largely made up of foreign mercenaries, that has demonstrated not only a willingness but an excessive eagerness to use deadly violence against unarmed protesters. The baneful legacy of Ian Henderson — a British mercenary and thug, and veteran of the dirty war against the Mau-Mau in Kenya, who ran Bahrain's state security services for some 30 years until he was shunted aside following the unrest in the 1990s — has been on full display. Henderson was known for his embrace of torture as a primary security tactic and has been reported by numerous victims to have participated in beatings and other abuses personally, in both Kenya and Bahrain. The security culture he helped establish in the country over many decades sadly seems alive and well given the casual brutality of the largely mercenary armed forces towards the demonstrators.

On the other hand, violence alone cannot restore order and will eventually lead to greater levels of chaos and possibly worse. The country could be wracked by protests and organized opposition for quite a while pitting a sizable majority against minority rulers, which is an untenable situation. Worse, there is always the possibility, if violence by the government forces continues unchecked, that somehow opposition groups, particularly Shiite ones, will begin to arm themselves in response. Certainly with the presence of the Fifth Fleet, it would not be easy for Iran or other outside forces to arm anyone in Bahrain who wishes to fight fire with fire, but history demonstrates that when people are determined to arm themselves, they can usually find a way to do so. In other words, there is always the possibility, however remote, of Bahrain degenerating into a sectarian civil war, a prospect that must make the royal family and the Sunni population in general exceptionally nervous. And, while there isn't any immediate prospect of Iranian intervention, Iranian territorial claims on Bahrain are deeply rooted in the history of the two countries and passionately believed in by lots of Iranians, and possibly by many Bahrainis as well. Certainly during the 50s and 60s under the Shah, Iran's continuing insistence that Bahrain was merely a province of their country led to considerable tensions with Britain and Arab states. Since the revolution Iran has been more quiet, but probably not less determined, about its territorial ambitions with regard to the Bahraini islands. The prospect of a long-term, even low-level, civil conflict that is sectarian and cultural most ominously presents a potential opportunity in the medium or long terms for possible indirect or even direct Iranian intervention, particularly if the power of that state continues to increase and the presence and influence of the United States wanes in the region.

Both the Bahraini protest movement and the government face a very difficult situation in which clear-cut victory is almost certainly not available. They both also have a great deal to lose and a great deal to fear. Therefore, in spite of the bitterness caused by the extreme overreaction and brutality of the military and police, and the deep divides that underlie the rebellion, a compromise seems virtually inevitable and nothing else makes any sense for either side. One can already see the government, or at least some parts of it, moving quickly in this direction. The Crown Prince in particular has indicated an understanding of the gravity of the situation and said at least some of the right things. His speech following the violent crackdown was a considerable contrast to speeches by former Egyptian Pres. Mubarak, in that it reflected an understanding of what exactly was going on in his country and the dangers at hand, and even implied some grasp of what would be required to get a grip on the situation. The military has been withdrawn from the streets, replaced by the police, which does not mean an end to the violent suppression of the protests but does indicate the government's recognition of the need to move away from confrontation and towards dialogue. The government has been calling for such a dialogue, and while it has been correctly observed that shooting people is not a good way of starting the conversation, I don't see a way out for either side without it.

Bahrain engaged in some significant political reforms during the last decade, although it backed away from some of them more recently. It has an elected parliament, although with very limited powers, and some legal political parties. The government of Bahrain has very little choice but to build on this legacy and expand the inclusivity of the system, particularly in an effort to enfranchise the Shiite majority and begin to repair the extreme alienation parts of it feels towards the entire social and political system of the country. It won't be starting from scratch, but it will be fighting its own deepest instincts. Internally, there is a powerful impulse to secure autocratic and minority rule against power-sharing and acknowledging the rights of the Shiite majority. Internationally, there is a powerful and rational fear of Iranian ambitions and influence, concerns shared by Bahrain's Gulf Arab neighbors. Nonetheless, if the government and ruling elite of Bahrain want to avoid continued unrest and more of these cyclical explosions of Shiite anger it has to begin to seriously change the relationship between the majority and minority, and between the state and its Shiite citizenry, as well as with the individual citizens in general. We are already seeing what appear to be efforts to balance the carrot and stick by the government, and I would expect those moves to continue, however slowly and haltingly, in the direction of a compromise which is the only way out for both sides, assuming most people want to avoid a degeneration into sustained chaos or even civil war.

Of course I'm suggesting here that much news coverage and analysis has misread events in Bahrain because it has lacked or elided this historical context, and has miscast it as the latest manifestation of a generalized Arab uprising against autocrats. It's not unconnected to that broader Arab wave of reformist protests, but it reflects a very unique set of circumstances and has much more in common with earlier Bahraini protest movements than with protest movements in the rest of the Arab world. Because the context is so different, the dynamics are also very different, and the choices facing the different actors involved are atypical. I don't think this has been made clear to most uninformed observers and most news coverage or analysis has failed to properly contextualize it and instead has tended to focus on the drama of the events, which was very striking of course, and the shocking brutality of the security services. But I think Bahrain remains very much a sideshow in the broader Arab realignment, wherever it is ultimately leading, and has its own unique dynamics which will play out in a singular manner and which is unlikely to tell us much about where the rest of the region, even other Gulf states with Shiite populations, is heading.

Meanwhile, in Libya, although virtually no foreign journalists or independent media are present on the ground, it's clear that the main feature is taking place, largely unobserved and woefully under analyzed. Human Right Watch has estimated that at least 84 people were killed in the past three days of protesting and unconfirmed reports suggest that a good deal of the eastern part of the country and significant cities such as Al-Bayda, and possibly even Benghazi, are not only the scenes of significant protests but may even have been partially seized by protesters. Good information is very hard to come by, but it looks like the aged, decrepit regime of Mouammar Gaddafi may be tottering at its foundations. Certainly the government in Tripoli seems the most likely candidate for early regime change at the moment, and it is considerably more vulnerable than the government in Manama. Even in simple geographical terms, it's impossible to miss the direct connection between this uprising in Libya and the revolts in its two immediate neighbors, Tunisia to the west and Egypt to the east. Of course there is a local context here — there always is and will be. But the Libyan uprising, like those in Tunisia and Egypt, seem very rooted in a generalized Arab disgust with autocracy, corruption, endless rule by individuals and their immediate families, and the sclerotic stasis which has seized so many Arab societies for so long. In other words, this is not only the main show, as opposed to the sideshow in Bahrain, it's a very logical next phase of a movement sweeping much of the Arab world that in turn will set the stage for what happens next elsewhere.

The most important of those elsewheres in the immediate or medium term will almost certainly be Yemen. The country is the scene of at least two civil wars, a robust Al Qaeda presence, a heavily armed, largely uneducated and very poor population, and an incompetent government led by a widely disliked and corrupt president who, like Mubarak and Qaddafi, has been in power for decades without delivering effective or decent governance to his country. Yemen is not only fragmented and already chaotic, it is also exceptionally strategically located and has very powerful cultural, social and familial connections to southern and western Saudi Arabia, which is almost certainly the most brittle of all Gulf states given its large population, increasing poverty and significant disgruntled Shiite minority. What happens in Yemen will almost certainly have a significant impact outside its borders, for many reasons. That's very unlikely to be the case with Bahrain, and while what happens in Libya will have an influence it's not as volatile a case as Yemen by any means. The protest movement is already underway in Yemen, and it may take quite a while for it to develop the kind of critical mass we have seen in Tunisia and Egypt, and now to some extent in Bahrain and, it would appear, in Libya. But there is every indication that the tracks have been laid and the train is heading towards the station, and diverting it is going to be extremely challenging for the government in Sanna.

More interestingly, while there will almost certainly be a clear winner and loser in Libya as in Egypt and Tunisia (and it will probably play itself out fairly quickly), and while there will almost certainly be no winners or losers as such in Bahrain, Yemen could be much more complex in its outcome. And by complex read dangerous. There are would-be breakaway provinces, regional tensions, sectarian differences, international interference from various parties, and of course the presence of international terrorists. Utter chaos in Yemen is a distinct possibility, as is its transition from a partly-failed to a fully-failed state, a potential Somalia on the corner of the Arabian Peninsula. Journalists and analysts have been so mesmerized by the dramatic images coming out of, and their own presence in, Bahrain that the potential implications of a deteriorating situation in Yemen have been almost entirely unremarked upon. This indicates a certain shallowness of analysis that frequently characterizes coverage and observations of Middle Eastern events, and the very annoying tendency of journalists to believe that if they are physically present, or at least have dramatic footage, this means the story is the most important one. That's not true, obviously, as the contrast between the woefully underreported events in Libya and the heavily covered (except by Al Jazeera, for obvious reasons) but ultimately almost certainly less significant events in Bahrain, demonstrates.

Of course it's a fair point that it's difficult to cover a story in a closed, locked-down society like Libya with no independent media and no willingness to grant visas to foreign journalists, especially in contrast to a relatively open society like Bahrain. But, excuse me, that's what journalists are for — to find a way of getting the facts on the biggest story rather than parachuting in, as so many prominent Western reporters have done in Manama, and focusing on the story they have as if it were the most important one for that very reason. Several big-name American and other Western journalists have done that parachuting into Bahrain, and have not distinguished themselves very well in the process. Some have even managed to over-dramatize what is an extremely dramatic, tragic and horrifying situation on its own terms. There is a certain solipsism at work here, and it hasn't been very edifying.

But even if Western and other reporters wanted to make Bahrain the big story in recent days because they were physically present, had good footage and could cover the events more easily and in a more compelling way, it doesn't change the fact that what's happening in Libya has been more dramatic, more brutal, more significant, and has far deeper implications. Or the fact that what seems to be brewing in Yemen could very possibly be more significant than either of them. My first reaction on Twitter to the apparently forced “resignation” of Pres. Mubarak was to state the obvious: that this would not stop with Egypt and would certainly spread far and wide in the Arab world, one stage at a time (most of the small, rich Gulf states being immune due to wealth and limited populations, and Iraq and Lebanon having their own dynamics). The epicenter of this broader Arab reawakening is clearly now in Libya, with Yemen and others waiting in the wings. At some point coverage and analysis is going to have to begin to be able to tell the difference between the big picture and a compelling but ultimately isolated sideshow.

The following Ibishblog interview was conducted a few weeks ago with Chris Lehmann, author of the new book Rich People Things (ORBooks, 2010). I heartily recommend this excellent satire of contemporary American class politics and the cultural mores, and I think Ibishblog readers can get a great sense of what's in the book and what Lehmann has to offer in general through the following conversation.

Q: Let's start with the title of the book and the genesis of the online column that gave rise to it. What I really like about it is how malleable this progression of non sequitur words really is. They could be three utterly separate words simply following on each other randomly, or it could be, as in the most obvious interpretation, things that belong to rich people or characterize the activities, beliefs and interests of rich people, which is the manifest meaning. Or it could be rich people ARE things, a hostile objectification of rich people which is I think the latent meaning of the title.

A: I think it works on all those levels and in various chapters of the book and various columns there will be times when I do just write about anything, like the chapter on Damien Hirst and his art and how that reflects the money culture.

Q: There are quite a few columns that talk about individuals, turning rich people into things.

A: Exactly, and their own jobs, one could argue, is to turn their own carbon lifeforms into rich people playthings.

Q: They have commodified themselves.

A: They have commodified their argument, or a certain vision of success, cultural achievement and the way that reward and punishment are distributed in the economic realm. These are all rich people things and they are all things produced by and for rich people, so I think even though it was very much a retroactive title slapped on an accidental column, it's proved a really good way to conceptually frame whatever it is I'm doing here.

Q: What is it that you're doing here?

A: I'm trying to insist that economic populism is an issue, or shall we say there is a useful way of looking at social and political class as an American cultural issue, and what's interesting to me is how that stable of ideas has been systematically subverted, buried or distorted beyond recognition in the official ways in which we have of understanding our economy, politics, and media culture. There are times when the columns in the book are a kind of media criticism. I try to think of my task as to go beyond the casual kind of deceptions, and lies frankly, about what it means to have a discussion about tax policy, say, where it's permissible to think of anyone making even more than $250,000 now as essentially middle-class. Right now in the debate over tax cuts the Republican Party has rather brilliantly framed this debate as Democrats trying to foment "class warfare" as it's called, which as you will note is something that is only discussed in America as coming from the bottom up, never the top down.

Q: Yes, there is only one class that engages in class warfare here.

A: Right, and it's also the least organized, least ideologically disciplined class is the one in question, so if they're making war, they're doing it with foam rubber swords. And, meanwhile, the Republican mantra that comes up whenever the subject of tax cuts arises is that "we want to extend the Bush tax cuts for everybody." That sounds so inclusive and unifying, right? Who doesn't want to pay lower taxes? What's interesting, at this very moment, as this debate is going on in Congress, is that there was a poll released by CBS at the end of last week that only 26% of Americans, when the issue is explained rationally to them, say that the Bush tax cuts should be extended for people earning $250,000 or more. So we're in this kind of Lewis Carroll moment.

Q: So, your book is a general attack on mystification.

A: Yes, that's the word I was trying to summon up earlier. How did we get to this point where the party that says it's representing “everyone” in this debate is actually contravening the stated will of 74% of the American public?

Q: Class warfare from the top down, but not recognized?

A: Yes, and cleverly concealed. If my book has a use, it's to insist on that concealment and point it out.

Q: And that's your conclusion, which is about mystification and the gutting of signification in economic language, class language etc.

A: Right, so we are in this through the looking glass moment where the other mantra you hear from the right now is, and every day you see examples of this, where Republican leaders will get up and deride elitists. But only liberals now are elitists. I often thinking casually scanning the news that an alien visitor would come to this country and encounter all this discourse and expect a liberal to basically be wearing a periwig and bloomers, with a snifter of some sort. The genius of this kind of rhetoric is that the GOP now represents the heroic mass resistance to these elitist fops. Just last week the incoming governor of Ohio, John Kasich, who used to be a Republican congressman, gave this barnstorming speech about tax cuts where he said that all conservative governors want from Washington, all we're telling to the leaders in Washington, is: let my people go. That is to say, stop all this talk of increasing taxes and let us destroy the barriers to wealth creation and let the economy get started again. This is a trope from the civil rights movement, going back to the book of Exodus indeed, but somehow I missed the moment in which Pharaoh became the Liberal tax hikers. It is rhetorically brilliant, but you also can't believe that things have deteriorated to this point.

Q: Some of this is very old. You find that an incredible swath of Americans consider themselves to be middle-class ranging from a household income of $20,000-$150,000 per year. And that has been true for a long time. It's almost meaningless as a term.

A: No, there's nothing new there and what's brilliant is that mathematically the term “middle” has no meaning, because again you are spanning the low 20Ks to, now, in the tax-cut debate rhetorically millionaires will be included in the middle class. So what does the middle mean in that situation? We should just get rid of the term and call it the baggy undefined class or something. The class that has no name.

Q: The point is it's not a class, it's a whole group of very separate registers in the economic spectrum with different interests.

A: Yes, and various actors in the economic and policy debate can rhetorically say things like “let my people go.” If you're savvy enough you could step forward as the Williams Jennings Bryan or Che Guevara of these oppressed people and they could be anyone. And usually, it's a funny thing but in the 70s it used to be, when I think this shift in debate started, that the middle class were the people who worked hard and played by the rules. Let me mention my first column in this series. My former employers at New York magazine looked at the uproar over the AIG bonuses when we had spent $70 billion bailing out AIG at the beginning of the financial crisis and they were paying out these lavish bonuses to executives and this, you'll remember, was one of the times in the media where there was this phony kind of anxiety about a populist uproar, and will Obama be angry and populist in response to the public's anger over this. New York magazine, and I knew this would happen having worked there, looked at this issue and decided, “well, we have to get Wall Street's side of the story.” Because, you know, these are the victims, these are the people who now say they feel unsafe and they need to hire security guards outside.

Q: Obviously the arsonist's point of view of the fire is very important.

A: Exactly, so they duly went out and reported a piece of which the short-term inspiration was, as you may recall, an AIG executive at the time who wrote this op-ed in the New York Times saying, I wasn't in the financial services division that is principally responsible and yet I'm tarred with all this and I'm quitting my job. It was this Spartacus-like statement, striking a blow on behalf of his fellow financial industry professionals.

Q: He was mad as hell and he wasn't going to take it anymore.

A:  Exactly, to use another populist trope from the 70s. So, this New York magazine piece quoted that and interviewed a number of other similarly aggrieved Wall Street executives who said things like, “people don't understand how hard we work," and "we are creating wealth,” and all that stuff you continue to hear constantly from these characters. And they were treated very sympathetically as the misunderstood Randian elite.

Q: It was a psychotherapy piece, basically?

A:  In terms of how it was framed, yes, that's right. Let's talk about the feelings of these misunderstood financial professionals. They're still getting seven-figure bonuses but they're hurt. And it was all framed as well as the public conversation about compensation and something about that in particular rankled me because here we are in the gravest financial crisis since the Depression, and you'll recall during the new deal, FDR took a very different tack. During the '36 campaign he got up at the biggest rally of the campaign in Madison Square Garden and announced that he “welcomed” the hatred of the bankers. And they hated him. At several points in the book I try to make the point of drawing that contrast because I think it's very telling, because now we have a political culture where we are worried about the feelings of these people, in official media culture anyway. And it's a very different climate.

Q: One of the things that you say about your book at the end of the introduction is that you hope it will have a tonic effect. So it seems to me you wanted to have a kind of therapeutic quality, for you and for the readers. There is a kind of venting going on here isn't there?

A: Well, absolutely, and I think part of the challenge going ahead, certainly for me personally and anyone else interested in these issues from a democratic standpoint is you do have to learn to both swat down the official social mythology about wealth in our society and figure out how to talk about it yourself in a way that's compelling, because I do think that no matter how debased the populist tradition has become at the hands of the right, there is a lot left that's worth reclaiming as well. Because God knows, the government and the financial elites understand their own class interests so we have to get in the habit of isolating that, detecting when they are speaking dishonestly about it, but also to discern what our own class interests are. Like, it doesn't make sense for our elected representatives be pushing for a tax cut extension that the vast majority of us oppose and will not only not benefit from but will be actively harmed by.

Q: We will pay for it. It's going to be a bill for us.

A: We'll pay in all sorts of ways, not only in marginal taxes but also the looting of Social Security, the social safety net which is already threadbare. One of the many absurdities of this particular moment is that we are debating this at the same time Congress has let federal unemployment benefits lapse. I don't know how much more dramatically to put this.

Q:  But, as you say, there has to be a register at which a lot of this populist rhetoric is recuperable even if it has been debased by the right because there's so much overlap between the critique that runs through your book and a lot of the critique of the tea party.

A: No, and I often wonder where is the left's tea party? But you have to look at what's tactically very smart, and I'm sure well intended on the part of the tea party, for example the appropriation of the whole idea of patriotism, you know, it's been a weird problem on the left.

Q:  But that's another thing that happened in the 70s, isn't it?

A:  Yes, you had the rise of a certain kind of identity politics, and while I don't subscribe to the conservative critique of political correctness, there is a difficulty pointed out by a very good former Clinton speechwriter who wrote a really good book called Speaking American, in which he pointed out how the '92 Clinton campaign rhetorically did a very good job of putting the first Bush presidency very much on the defensive especially around economic issues. It was more than just the slogan, “it's the economy stupid,” but it's hard to go back to that time because in 1992 Bill Clinton championed universal healthcare, and had a pretty compelling and thoughtful critique of trickle-down economics, but the problem is he never intended to govern along those lines. He was very effective in framing a populist campaign, and there's a chapter in my book on how the Democratic Party's economic profile beginning with the first Clinton term and certainly by the end of the Clinton years is the party of the rich. The rich now have a much broader range of choice. You can go with the party that is culturally more permissive and good on separation of church and state and other sorts of social issues, or you can go with the hard-line theocrats who will be there when the shit goes down, as we're seeing now.

Q:  Yes, but taking the layer of control and rhetoric at the top of the tea party out of the equation for a second, and looking at some aspects of the grassroots outrage that's genuine, how much is there separating that sentiment and those interests from a populist position in fact? Isn't it possible to argue that in there are all the elements of a genuine left populist critique?

A:  Well, not all. I would say the tea party is kind of emotionally populist, which is what gives populism a bad name, and justifiably so in many cases because that can degrade into bigotry and ugly anti-Semitism and all sorts of other stuff. It's emotionally populist and philosophically libertarian, because this is the other thing when you look at our recent political history that in my view is so essential to understand: the idea that market libertarianism has become dominant and, even for would-be dissenting movements like the tea party, hegemonic. You cannot move outside of that force field. So during the healthcare debate you had this first order delusion in the tea party protests where you would have older people coming out to town halls and telling their elected representatives, “I don't want universal healthcare because it will take away my Medicare.”

Q:  Or, I want don't government healthcare because it will interfere with my Medicare.

A:  And that is a first order delusion but behind that is the idea that they don't think of their government benefits as government benefits. What's happened is that something like Medicare has become disaggregated from a mass politics and it's become this sort of inviolate, individual right. That is to say, it's MY Medicare, it's not our Medicare, and keep your goddamn hands off it. That, in a nutshell, is the triumph of market libertarianism in my view. It's going to be a problem for the people on the right who, believe me, would love to see Medicare go away, because it can't be done.

Q:  This is the great thing about public healthcare. Once it's instituted you can never get rid of it. I've spoken with some hard-core libertarians in both developed and developing countries like Costa Rica where they have universal health care and I've never met a single one who, no matter how doctrinaire they are, thinks that it's either a good idea or politically plausible, whether or not there's any point in critiquing public healthcare as a theory, but as a fact, once it's there, it's a done deal and becomes unchallengeable. Which ought to tell you everything you need to know about public healthcare. Once it exists you can never get rid of it because people will lynch you in the streets if you try.

A:  It turns out they really like it. I mean Rush Limbaugh went to Costa Rica to get treated, for gosh sakes.

Q:  I'm sure he went to private hospitals, but it was funny that he said that if national healthcare were instituted he would move to Costa Rica, one of the few developing countries with national healthcare, which seems to elude him entirely. But I take it back. It's to give him credit for being sincere in any way. He just talks crap so I shouldn't even bother pointing out the glaring contradictions.

A:  Exactly.

Q:  So the problem you've identified is one of narratives. The free market libertarian sort of narrative that has become so hegemonic that there is no space for any other critique, in other words if there is a critique to be made it has to be a free-market critique of the free market. There is no other narrative. But why is there no other narrative? Obviously this is an overdetermined question, but I'd like to know what you think. Is it because the other narratives have simply failed to coalesce or is it because the existing non-free-market narratives have been discredited by performance in some way?

A:  Well, I think the first thing we have to understand is that there has been a 30+ year war on the new deal social contract and it actually began a long time ago. Jimmy Carter was a fiscal hawk, and he went after a lot of government spending ahead of Reagan. So, this is something that has very deep institutional roots in Washington. This idea of the vampire state or a demonized federal state has taken root in this country to such a degree that it's very difficult for anybody politically to challenge it. One of the very specific pieces of this dilemma is that Reagan not only declared war on the new deal social contract, he specifically declared war on the labor movement. So now we've gone from the mid-1950s where more than 30% of American workers were unionized, to where now it's 7% and shrinking. That is a shorthand way of explaining why the only popular planks now of liberalism are Social Security and Medicare from the Great Society because we still have old people. We don't have unionized workers, but old people vote. So as we've seen in the recent debate over healthcare, what ultimately won out was not the thing that was most popular in political terms, there was very strong support for a public option and single-payer wasn't on the table, but if it's ever explained as a rational policy people actually really like it. So the challenge then, if you're part of this force field of market libertarianism in Washington, is to ensure that it never gets to be part of the conversation and that's where the narrative comes in. It instantly got demonized, even before it was “socialist” in the rhetoric of the '09 health care fight it was “a foreign idea,” you know Canadians have it and, worse, the French! And that feeds into this debased populism because it's usually nationalist.

Q: You mentioned anti-Semitism. Have you seen any anti-Semitism from the tea party?

A: They've been very vigilant about it at least at the leadership level of routing out both that and racism.

Q: But there's been a decent amount of Islamophobia hasn't there?

A: Yes, and it's been underreported and undisciplined.

Q: Homophobia and Islamophobia, there's been plenty of both.

A: Those are acceptable. And you do see, like at the Glenn Beck 9/12 rally, racist signs too.

Q: Glenn Beck. Is he a mentally unbalanced subject? The only question I think worth asking about him is, does he need help, because someone like Limbaugh is plainly a businessman, he's making money, he's playing a role, and no need to ask what drives him. Is there something deeper and darker at work with Beck?

A: There is something deeper, and what I think it is, is that he has been treated: he's a recovering alcoholic who's become a Mormon convert. What's interesting about Beck is that he has the zeal of a convert, and that he actually uses this very particular image that's drawn from something that Joseph Smith supposedly said in the 19th century that “when the Republic is hanging by a thread the Mormon church will basically take charge.” It is a vision of theocracy.

Q: He subscribes to this?

A: Yes, there are many moments if you look through transcripts of his shows when he says that, and it's significant because it bespeaks a broader understanding of the world that is very much theocratic. In his view the Mormon faith saved his life and it will also save the American Republic in this time of crisis.

Q: So, America is an alcoholic basically?

A: Yes, which would explain the violent lurches of motivation that he attributes to the country.

Q: I wanted to ask you about the general category of rich people things for a second. What about the inverse, what about poor people things? Much of what's in here, also in its own way, are poor people things or working-class people things, or non-rich people things.

A: That's true, and I've tried to make a point in my weekly column of that. But the book is independent of that.

Q: There are some people who get particular opprobrium from you, and I was especially struck by your take on Malcolm Gladwell, who you seem to be particularly distasteful of. He generally speaking has a very good reputation, although I agree with you, so the question is what's the matter with Malcolm Gladwell?

A: Well, he's a very fluid writer, his prose is very readable, and he loves the move of going to the counterintuitive academic research and constructing a narrative such that everything you know about subject X is wrong.

Q: But, it's usually right isn't it?

A: Yes, and Steven Pinker has made this argument much better than I could, he sets up this straw man of common wisdom: what we all believe is X, but what the research really bears out is Y. His book Outliers is a perfect example, because it's an effort ironically enough to sort of take a very soft blow at the idea of the American meritocracy, and it turns out that material success doesn't correlate one-to-one with academic achievement, or that NFL quarterbacks who perform well are not necessarily the top draft picks. But as Pinker observes, college admissions offices or NFL coaches are betting in a system that guarantees a certain floor, it's not based on the performance of your number one draft pick or your summa com laude student.

Q: So, he's not looking at the whole casino, he's looking at the individual bet.

A: Right, and he doesn't understand that the house wins.

Q: Counterintuitive analytical gestures are often very rich but counterintuitive work based on research, alleged research, with an extraordinary degree of frequency turns out to be bogus, and Gladwell's an example. Foucault is another example, right? The analytical points he makes are extremely interesting, but he's wrong on almost everything factually. The great archivist was sort of completely full of crap and yet because his thinking is rich, he's still interesting. But Gladwell just only has the error, not the insight.

A: Right, he hasn't exactly filled out a persuasive analytical framework, it's just everything you know is wrong and also what ends up happening is that because the you he is tacitly addressing there isn't the average American, it's you the magazine editor or reader, and his book Blink is a perfect example of this. That's how he ends up drawing such exorbitant speaking fees from management seminars because he bears the message in Blink that every gut instinct you have is probably right, so if you are this middle manager at a major corporation and you're trying to develop some new sales pitch or some get rich quick scheme, then trust your instincts. And this is exactly what these people want to hear. It's a kind of mind cure, actually.

Q: It's a kind of anti-intellectualism of a rarefied variety.

A: You don't have to think analytically or critically about anything, just do it.

Q: Well, we've seen how that works at the level of national policy, under Pres. George W. Bush where much was determined apparently on the basis of gut and look where it got us, for example in Iraq. So there's some space left to defend the analytical, isn't there?

A: And it should be a growing space right now.

Q: But it's closing.

A: No, I agree, especially now in the wake of the last election the Obama administration seems determined to prophylactically surrender.

Q: You don't like the Obama administration.

A: Certainly I don't like its economic policies. To hark back to the experience of the new deal, what happened when the banks failed? Under FDR, he declared a bank holiday, he introduced a whole body of radical reforms saying to our financial institutions: you're doing business differently now, you can't co-mingle commercial banking and investment banking, there's going to be federal deposit insurance to ensure that you keep a minimum balance of holdings.

Q: Real reforms, structural reforms.

A: Yes, and what's just happened now is we've just had a bailout. And also three of the four bad actors in the '08 crisis were still making economic policy: Ben Bernanke,  who I think if Obama had any FDR instincts his head would be among the first to roll; Tim Geithner, who crafted TARP when he was head of the New York Fed and got a fucking promotion to go head the Treasury Department; and then as if all that weren't enough he brings back Larry Summers, the genius who as treasury secretary under Clinton dismantled all these new deal protections and created the basis for the crisis. So, in economic terms, this administration has been a big disappointment.

Q: Is there anything about the administration you like?

A: Well, I mean…

Q: I mean other than the fact that we have a black president, and more importantly a black First Lady, and maybe most importantly two African-American little girls growing up in the White House in front of the whole country?

A: That's true.

Q: From my perspective the most important aspect of the Obama administration is probably Sasha and Malia. If we get eight years of watching them grow up in the White House, the country will never be the same, culturally.

A: No, I totally agree with that. Part of this whole attack on the new deal social programs obviously involved race, and attacks on the black family, and this is a very significant moment in symbolic terms.

Q: But on policies, is there anything good, or is it one degree of disappointment or another?

A: That is our lot.

Q: I was going to say that if you have to reach back to Roosevelt for anything good to say about any administration then the question can only be asked in deep hindsight. I mean we could have sat here in the 30s saying, “he hasn't done anything about segregation.”

A: Fair enough, but why indulge in the soft bigotry of low expectations?

Q: How is it that in the midst of this catastrophe driven by greed, driven by unrestrained excess, lack of regulation, etc., that Ayn Rand has become the heroine? How the fuck does that happen? But it's a serious question. A more loathsome figure you couldn't imagine, and a less appropriate one. How could she possibly be a corrective? It would make more sense to become a Jesus freak.

A: Only in America my friend. But no, it's a real question. But you're right, there is a religious quality to the veneration of Ayn Rand but it can only be religious because logically, as you were saying, nothing in this moment recommends her.

Q: Well, it's particularly gruesome in that her most accomplished disciple, Alan Greenspan, would be the villain in chief in the grand narrative of this calamity. So the mastermind of his philosophy which caused all of this has become the heroine promoted as the corrective of the very thing which her ideas produced.

A: Yes, not only do we have a political culture that is often anti-intellectual we have zero historical memory.

Q: So, we are perfect postmodern subjects? We know nothing, we remember nothing, we are 300 million Sgt. Schultzes?

A: And that's why when, at the height of the furor during all the bailouts and when the tea party took off, you saw people wearing T-shirts and brandishing placards saying, “who is John Galt?," the famous refrain from Atlas Shrugged.

Q: I. can answer that: one of the worst characters ever dreamed up by one of the crappiest novelists who ever put pen to paper, and who was particularly unable to write characters.

A: Yes, I dallied with her work as many American teenagers do when I was a kid, out of curiosity, and I reacted with revulsion.

Q: Was she popular with your peers?

A: Oh yeah, I grew up in central Iowa and the appeal of Ayn Rand is particularly to an adolescent mentality because it's all obviously the cult of the creative genius, the Howard Roarks.

Q: It's an Oedipal fantasy, you're asserting your own phallic power.

A: Yes, and in this case that is no metaphor. There is a raging phallic mayhem in all of her novels. And it's no accident that in literary terms most successful one and her breakthrough novel, The Fountainhead, is about an architect who rapes his protagonist.

Q: And who builds giant phallic structures. Plus it's in the title anyway. It's pretty undisguised, as crude as the James Bond films I wrote about a few weeks ago.

A: But there is at least wit in the James Bond films.

Q: There is wit, and there is lots of conscious self-deprecation and self-parody. They don't pretend to be a grand philosophical project to overthrow the evil Immanuel Kant.

A: The other thing about the prototypical Ayn Rand character that I noticed when I reread a lot of this stuff for the book is that they have no family relationships unless they are fiercely Oedipal as you're describing.

Q: And as Whittaker Chambers pointed out, there are no children in any of her writings and no possibility of children. It's not a world for children.

A: In a weird way, it's almost Soviet.

Q: I really loved Chambers' review even though I don't identify with the spiritual side of it because his main rejection is of her materialism, but he had her number like nobody's business, and there's this great passage where he says that like her protagonists, she can't like children because she creates names of bankers like Midas Mulligan, and you can fool adults with this but children will always squirm uncomfortably knowing something isn't right, but not knowing exactly what. But they'll know something is all wrong with this. It's certainly a sociopathic worldview.

A: Society is a delusion that's used to enslave the creative individual.

Q: It's a philosophy that would be embraced wholeheartedly by an irate panther, living alone in the rain forest not wanting to see or meet another panther except once or twice in its life strictly for purposes of procreation, sleep most of the day and just emerge at night to kill and drink.

A: I kind of feel like you're maligning panthers.

Q: I probably am: they're just doing what panthers do, whereas she's telling people to do what people don't normally do. I am maligning panthers — they're noble creatures. Whereas her characters and people who follow her “philosophy” or dictate are ignoble. So I may be maligning panthers, but still you wouldn't want to hang out with somebody with the mentality of a panther.

A: And you definitely don't want them making your economic policies. There was this comical moment when Alan Greenspan was finally dragged before Congress and asked, “Jesus, dude, what happened here?” And he confessed. He said he had this core faith that the markets would regulate themselves and it seems to have been a flaw in his thinking. My bad. Except, and this is the beauty of the Randian worldview, there is zero personal guilt.

Q: Well, since he fulfilled his will perfectly, what's the problem? He fulfilled his own destiny. The consequences are beside the point.

A: Everyone else has to deal with it. Early on during the worst of the subprime loans when they were targeting inner-city neighborhoods, a number of the community activists and others went before the Federal Reserve and said, you don't have to be a genius to see that these people aren't really going to be able to pay their mortgages, especially when they go up. And Greenspan actively dismissed their concerns and said moreover that it's not the job of the Federal Reserve to do this kind of regulation. To which, I think, our national response should be: what the fuck is the job of the Fed in that case? It's supposed to control the money supply as an instrument of making economic policy. So maybe he could've referred these issues to HUD or Congress but he didn't do that, he just batted the concerns aside derisively. There is a perfect specimen of the Randian faith in market self-regulation.

Q: Sticking with popular culture for a second, because that's where Ayn Rand lives being utterly dismissed by any intellectuals and academics worth their salt, and certainly one of the worst writers I've ever read…

A: Well, her books are readable at a certain level.

Q: Gladwell is, but what with Midas Mulligan and everything I just can't deal with Ayn Rand.

A: You go through it much more quickly when you're 14.

Q: One of the most surprising entries in your book is the one on reality television, which I wouldn't necessarily think was a rich people thing except insofar as all TV shows are made by rich people. But it raises some very interesting questions. First of all, the whole category is an oxymoron. There couldn't be anything further from reality than TV and never the twain shall meet.

A: And there's something especially perverse about manipulating the appearance of reality to make it seem as though it is documentary vérité. I only came upon this as a subject because my wife was a TV writer and critic for a long time, and consumes it a great deal.

Q: My mantra was always do TV but don't watch it. I did go through a period of doing a lot of it, but now I try not to.

A: I know, it's an unhealthy relationship to have.

Q: Very. Toxic, is it not?

 A: So she was watching all these shows and it suddenly dawned on me that the topics were not surprisingly based on, because who else would want to do such a thing, desperate people who wanted a quick buck.

Q: It's what always drew people to become circus freaks.

A: I think the right analogy is that of the geek, the original geek, someone who would bite off a chicken head for cash. Two things gradually struck me. One was, there is literally a show on VH1 called “I love money” in which people really scheme and debase themselves and subject themselves to horrible, total exposure and at the end of the show they go to the vault where you're voted out and it's all very symbolically rich and repulsive. And you have this show called “toddlers in tiaras"…

Q: Sounds like kiddie porn.

A: It's very close. It's kiddie beauty pageants.

Q: How disgusting.

A: I will literally leave the room any time my wife has this on.

Q: You mean you've actually seen this?

 A: In passing. And only for purposes of research.

Q: They always say that.

A: I read it for the articles. But seriously, what I realized is that in all these spectacles, what they are doing is they are presenting a public theater taking poor people who have the wrong sort of ambition and punishing them, humiliating them publicly. The tacit script of all these shows is, despite all the mythology about social mobility in America, there evidently is a class of people who we relegate to geek status. For all the talk about economic reward, and we should be having a conversation about what Wall Street gets paid or whatever, this is the economic punishment side. This is the moment where we hold that these people who are just less educated, vulgar, have bad social skills and family relationships, and we just say, you don't belong.

Q: So it's similar, in that sense, to another place on TV where the same kind of thing happens on those daytime sort of spectacle shows where they'll bring on the goodies and baddies, people who are supposedly deviating from the normative bourgeois mores of American society, and the audience is supposed to boo and hiss or applaud in order to reinforce the way you're supposed to behave.

A: It's a symbolic kind of show trial. In a Sally Jessy Raphael show in the 1990s, and this is a perfect example, economics aside, about how there is something immoral, to use a quaint term, about this because what they are doing is fucking with people's heads. They took this homophobic man and had a gay coworker of his publicly confess a crush, and humiliated him, and eventually the guy went and killed him.

Q: That was bound to eventually happen, wasn't it?

A: You invade other people's psyches, and you humiliate them publicly, and what the fuck do you think is going to happen eventually? All these spectacles have that undercurrent of risk, and what's going on beyond that though is your making the statement that there is a class of people who it's okay to fuck with. And they signed a contract, so we are legally covered, and let the gladiator exhibition began. It is hard not to think of ancient Rome.

Q: The chapter I disagree with the most is the first one, the one on the Constitution. Your critique is often sound, and it's very rooted in the kind of classic revisionist view of Charles Beard and so forth, and there's a very long tradition of this in the 20th century, particularly the first 70 years, of this sort of critique. My own sense is that there are places in which you are unduly harsh. I don't think there's anything you've said about the Constitution that's wrong, but I think there is a whole other angle to it that isn't there. So it's perfectly true that in the parts of the Constitution that were constructed to protect minorities, the minority that they had in mind was the propertied class, the creditors. And, what they wanted to protect them from was the wrath of the majority, that is to say the debtors. And so they were very concerned that if you create a democracy people would vote themselves out of debt, vote themselves into property, vote propertied people out of property, and this is not acceptable. But it didn't take that long for those provisions to metastasize into legal protections for all kinds of minorities and it continues to happen, so even if there is some kind of very questionable origin of some of this stuff it's played out in a way that's often been very salutary and you don't really allow for that.

A: Well, I don't dismiss it.

Q: You don't dismiss it, but to my reading you don't give it enough credit.

A: That's a fair criticism. I would say, though, that, as is the case in dealing with mystifications, one has to be firmly insistent at times.

Q: I wouldn't ask you to back down on your assertions about the propertied class. No one who is aware of the founding and the debate at the Constitutional convention and the arguments between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists can doubt it. That's what they were worried about: non-propertied people and their use of voting rights, they weren't worried about racial minorities or women or anything like that. They were worrying about poor people legislating against rich people. That's what they were arguing about.

A: And your point is well taken that the genius of the document is that as a social basis of American democracy expanded, the Constitution was able to adapt and move forward and use the language and provisions it contains to apply to other purposes and categories. Which is true.

Q: In other words, it seems hard for me to simply look at the Constitution and say, “oh, rich person thing.” It is of course that. But at certain crucial moments, and decisively so, it's been available to others as well. Now of course not without sometimes the permission of rich people, or the thwarting of rich people against their own anger and resistance, usually by other rich persons such as during the new deal.

A: You need a defecting group within the ruling class.

Q: Well, and also they defected in order to save capitalism from itself. They were not Bolsheviks, and that was their whole point: we don't want to become Bolsheviks but the next step is a bunch of Bolsheviks. So it wasn't very much of a defection.

A: And you need an expansive welfare state in order to save capitalism from itself, and that was the new deal. I'll stipulate that FDR was wrong in this move, but he felt it was necessary to try to pack the Supreme Court and add justices after the court struck down the national recovery administration to preserve the new deal as constitutionally robust. In a way, the same Janus-faced argument applies to the Supreme Court. The court has extended the reach of the Constitution, and vindicated the rights of formerly oppressed minorities, but at the same time, especially right now, we are looking at a court that is unbelievably skewed toward the propertied classes.

Q: I don't have the same problem at all with your chapter on the Supreme Court. The court has always been an explicitly political institution, the third branch of government, and only attenuated from the political system in certain ways. There is no one except the most mystifying law professors and historians who could be naïve enough to say of Bush v. Gore, well that was an extraordinary thing. They voted along party lines and they reversed their normal positions in order to do so. Okay, wow! Who'd a thunk it? Well, me and everybody else with half a brain, that's who. Because this is a political institution based on political appointments and it's the product of the political process. The Constitution's relationship to the political process is much more indirect than the courts', although of course it is the court that determines what the Constitution says. At least for now. It's still completely a document that serves to legitimate what power wants to do, but it functions in a radically different way than the court.

A: Yes and no. Because it exists in our common life as it is interpreted by the Court. But yes, I understand your point that once these core principles were instituted and made the founding document of our nation they took on this life of their own.

Q: It seems to me the biggest critique in economic terms to be made of the way the Constitution has been interpreted and applied has to do with the personhood of corporations. Which is simply a bizarre reading of the document, but it also seems to have been inevitable. It is not in the Constitution, and you have to torture that poor document to get it in there, dragging it back and forth between the rack and the chamber of little ease before you can get it into the right shape for that, by stretching it and crushing it and stretching it and crushing it, but it couldn't have been any other way. The social and economic structure of this country demands that. You really couldn't have had another interpretation, no matter how bizarre it is. It had to be there. Much in the same way that some things liberals like about privacy rights and such, again not to be found anywhere in it, have to be read into it.

A: What's the famous phrase from Rove v. Wade, shadows of penumbras or whatever? There's clearly no guarantee of a right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution.

Q: Except that we now hold there is.

A: And there is no direct language about separation of church and state either. So you have on the left people wanting there to be privacy for the sake of abortion rights or people on the right, even though the Constitution disestablishes state religion, will say it's not in the Constitution to separate church and state.

Q: Well here's the thing: it's just a pile of language, so has no inherent meaning, other than the meaning through which it is interpreted. One chapter you don't have in your book that might be there is one on so-called constitutional “strict constructionism.” Strict constructionism is certainly a rich person's thing, but it's also a no thing, so to speak, given the fact that at the time of the adoption of any of these passages in the Constitution itself, or the Bill of Rights, or any of the subsequent amendments, almost never has there been, or at least rarely has there been, unanimity or even consensus among the people who adopted the language about what exactly they thought the language meant. There was merely a consensus of the choice of words, but at the time raging battles about what they meant even though people could agree on the literal words. So this is all fatuous, and not only fatuous from the point of view of anyone who understands how language actually functions, but also fatuous in terms of the historical record.

A: Absolutely, and in part that's why it's interesting to me that taking the strict constructionist or originalist view of the document I think you can make a strong case that the most incontrovertible stuff is the economic stuff, it's about contract law, it's about no state can make their own currency because that would cause inflation and decrease the value of credit.

Q: Except for the crucial thing: the legal personhood of corporations, which we could not do without.

A: Yes, it had to be tortured through the 14th amendment, which of course was originally designed to protect the rights of the freedmen, former slaves.

Q: And from there it becomes a charter for corporate personhood.

A: Yes, and from there you have the Citizens United decision.

Q: By the way, it really does sound like an extremely bad S/M movie: “Strict Construction.” Doesn't it?

A: And, in a sense, it is. Dudes in black robes.

Q: Well, I guess that's it. Congratulations on a great new book and I hope everybody reads it. Thanks for your time, and I look forward to doing this again very soon.

An Ibishblog reader, who I respect greatly, writes:

Hussein, I agreed with much of what you said in your recent Huffington Post column, but this really puzzled me:

"In our own country, the most vociferous proponents of the Arab and Muslim victimization narrative, those who blame the West, especially America or "the white man," for all the ills that befall the Arabs and Muslims, and those who most loudly advocate against the legal and societal harassment of Arabs and Muslims in the United States, take full advantage, as they are entitled to, of the American system and find shelter in the comfort and security of its freedoms. The damage they do in being the loudest and most anti-American voices emanating from the vulnerable Arab and Muslim immigrant communities, who already feel besieged, is to provide ammunition to the demagogues and profiteers of racism and peddlers of hate and fear of Arab and American Muslims, and to empower and encourage the worst racist and chauvinistic tendencies in this country."

Who, exactly, are these groups?  And are you suggesting that our discourses here should be restrained by the risk that our criticisms of the US can be appropriated by al-Qa'ida to justify their terrorism?

I'm glad you asked. First of all, I can only speak for myself in this case because the commentary in question was co-authored by my colleague, ATFP Pres. Ziad Asali. Indeed, the passage you cite from our collaboration was originally drafted by him, although I agree with and stand by every single word of it. But let me give you my own personal view of what I think we mean in this important passage.

The groups we are referring to are many and various, which is why we were not specific in naming them. They run the gamut from the Islamic religious right to the Arab nationalist left, and therefore cannot be placed in a straightforward ideological category or box. It's more an attitudinal issue: a way of looking at our country from a jaundiced point of view, with an attitude of hostility, unjustified hyper-criticism, an obsession with its faults and disregard for its virtues, and the knee-jerk reaction that blames everything that is wrong with the Arab or Muslim world on Western intervention alone. The fact is there are very loud voices among the Arab and Muslim Americans that not only blame the West in general and the United States in particular for everything that goes wrong in the Middle East, including much of which is plainly and unmistakably self-inflicted by the Arabs and the Muslims without any help from anybody else, and that these are influential voices. They sing the siren song that it's not our fault, that someone else is to blame, and that all we have to do is sit back and complain loudly enough and everything will ultimately be all right. If you're not familiar with such voices, you don't read the Arab blogosphere at all, because that's mainly what's in it.

The irony were getting to in this passage, I think, is how easy it is to vilify the West from the comforts of the West; to hypocritically take advantage of the financial and professional opportunities afforded by a country like the United States and, even more hypocritically of the political freedoms it provides, and yet to maintain an attitude of utter hostility towards it at every level and blame it for anything and everything, including the bad weather. This is a discourse that holds that even bad actors in the Arab world, whether it is the oppressive regimes or the demented and violent extremist groups are all either respectively acting at the behest of, or simply producing an inevitable and natural reaction to the policies of, the West. It's a set of arguments that essentially alleviates Arabs and Muslims from any responsibility for their predicament, and that reduces the Arab and Muslim American role to one of being almost entirely critical of our own country in a very unhealthy and unrealistic way, and in a manner that ensures political self marginalization and total and utter irrelevancy.

In other words, there is a tremendous degree of hypocrisy in the radical chic anti-American attitude expressed in so many online forums by younger (and older, for that matter) activists who sit in the comfort of US universities or other American places and spaces and fulminate against the evils of the United States day and night. It's not a question of love it or leave it. That's preposterous. But it is a question of having the minimal integrity of recognizing that the country you choose to live in obviously has something to offer you that you're taking advantage of, not least a degree of political freedom to castigate it without any potential repercussions of any serious variety. The fact that some people hide behind pseudonyms or do so anonymously only underscores their hypocrisy. There is a striking lack of personal, political and professional integrity at work here that deserves to be pointed out. It's not courageous, although it might be tragically hip. From a political point of view, it's completely self-defeating and while it may gain one fans in the online echo chamber of social media and the blogosphere, insofar as it has any influence at all, it helps consign the entire community to the political margins, which is where some people openly say they are determined to stay because the American political system is inherently corrupt and/or corrupting.

The damage such voices do to the Arab and Muslim American communities is almost incalculable, because not only do they encourage self-marginalization and determined, calculated irrelevancy, leaving an open field for our adversaries (something they have enjoyed for decades and continue to take full advantage of), but because by being reflexively, irrationally and unfairly anti-American they feed into the narrative that Arabs and Muslims in the United States are a potential fifth column. None of this is to say that principled opposition to misguided US foreign policies is not important or essential. Anyone who's followed my career over the past couple of decades will know that I have not hesitated to voice strong, passionate and sustained critiques of policies I thought were indefensible and damaging to the national interest such as the misguided, and indeed I think disastrous, invasion of Iraq. But the only attitude worth taking if one is in the least bit interested in political viability is that of the loyal opposition. It's one thing to make a patriotic critique of a policy on the grounds that it will not in fact strengthen the country or achieve consensus policy goals. It is another to denounce the entire political system of the country, imply that it needs to be overthrown, attempt to influence foreign policy by simply vilifying policymakers and the entire system of policymaking and stand militantly outside it waving real or virtual impotent placards, or to give our fellow citizens every reason to feel that we might be, as the anti-Arab racists and Islamophobes like to suggest, fundamentally disloyal.

Principled, patriotic, measured and sensible criticism of US foreign policy or other aspects of American behavior, conduct or culture is not only a useful thing: it's a patriotic duty. And I don't think there is the least danger that any such discourse can be “appropriated by Al Qaeda” to justify their violence. This certainly isn't what I think we were trying to suggest. But I do think it is essential for Arab and Muslim Americans to shed their tin ear — their apparently chronic inability to hear how our words will sound to our fellow Americans — and begin to pay serious attention to crafting a message that conveys our fundamental interests and concerns in a receivable manner that can have a positive impact rather than reinforcing the worst stereotypes and stoking the deepest fears of disloyalty. Angry people will probably regard such a suggestion as an appeal to kowtow to chauvinistic American attitudes or unreasonable expectations. I don't think that's the case at all.

All that is required is to embrace one's position as a loyal American with as much seriousness of purpose and sincerity as possible, and begin first and foremost always with the national interest at heart. From then it is a fairly simple matter to craft arguments centered around the national interest (and I mean as commonly understood, and not the alternative Dennis Kucinich left wing alternative version or the Ron Paul right-wing one) that advance issues we believe in such as the urgent need to end the Israeli occupation that began in 1967 and establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Or, for that matter, to have advocated against the Iraq war and in favor of its rapid drawdown. Or to advocate in favor of an intelligent and fast-tracked drawdown in Afghanistan. Or to oppose irrational and counterproductive “national security” measures that unfairly target Arab and Muslim Americans based on their identity. And so on and so forth. It's not terribly complicated, once you accept the proposition that we are Americans, that our first duty is to our own country, and that there is nothing we legitimately want that is incompatible with our American national interest.

But the truth is that the Arab and Muslim communities in the United States ARE vulnerable on many fronts, especially to charges of disloyalty. It's totally unfair and irrational, but it is the reality and we ignore it at our peril. Our point was that irresponsible, juvenile and unthinking rhetoric that plays into the hands of the anti-Arab racists and Islamophobes is something our community just can't afford, and yet many of the loudest voices on social media, the blogosphere and other decentralized forms of communication produce exactly that. This is a definite danger, because it gives ammunition to the worst of the racists and bigots. And, of course, politically it not only doesn't achieve anything, it makes matters worse. It's not a matter of declining to say something that really needs to be said out of fear of  the reaction of others. It's a question of having a healthy respect for the sensitivities and sensibilities of our fellow Americans — something we frequently and correctly demand Westerners and especially Americans show to Arabs and Muslims — and trying to understand the difference between a receivable message that can have a positive impact as opposed to venting, preaching to the choir and providing the likes of Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller with more ammunition to spread their fear and hatred. It's just a question of being smart rather than stupid.

This morning I received one of the more disconcerting and annoying, although no doubt inadvertently, responses to an Ibishblog post I've ever gotten. A reader writes: "I read with interest and appreciation your somewhat generalized denunciation of Arab anti-Semitism. Would you be willing to get more specific (as in 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' being distributed by Arab governments) – and would you be willing to speak out in Arabic, in the news organs of the Middle East?"

Well of course my denunciation of anti-Semitism among Arabs and Arab-Americans was somewhat generalized, because I was talking about the phenomenon in general and in the big picture. The same can be said about my concomitant denunciation of Jewish anti-Arab and Islamlophobic sentiments. I didn't go into any details about that either, because I was talking about the phenomena in general. But this question “would you willing to get more specific” is really pretty obnoxious. In fact I've been very specific about this issue, and in 2010 alone I've written long essays, including another one coming out shortly in The Common Review, the quarterly journal of the Great Books Foundation, on the subject. I've taken on many individuals by name and in print, organizations and others on this very point for many years, and I've been very specific. Sometimes you have to step back and look at the big picture, particularly when it comes to the idea which was the main subject of my last essay, that Arabs cannot be anti-Semites because, like Jews, they are also Semites. Had people not been making such claims in the context of the Helen Thomas controversy, the whole essay wouldn't have been written and I wouldn't have felt any need to give a big picture review of what is and isn't anti-Semitism and to try to explain to that part of my Arab-American audience that doesn't seem to know about it the etymology and history of the term anti-Semitism, and therefore why it has the specific meaning it does.

As for the so-called “Protocols of the Elders of Zion," I can't tell you how many times I've discussed and referenced this issue, particularly in the context of references to it and plagiarisms from it in the founding document of Hamas. I'm not aware of any systematic campaign by any Arab government at the present time to distribute this notorious forgery, but I've written at length about the effect it had in spreading Western Christian anti-Semitism in the Arab world, first among Arab Christians and then among Islamists and other Muslims during the course of the 20th century. It's simply insulting to be asked this question after having written the essay I just did, among other recent ones touching on the same subject. This is exactly the kind of thing Arab and Muslim Americans who want to take constructive stances on issues like anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, extremism or other internal problems facing our community have to deal with on a regular basis, and it's just unacceptable. One of the conundrums facing thoughtful, reasonable, introspective and intellectually honest Arab and Muslim Americans is precisely this: it's never enough. There is always the follow-up question: "well, that's all well and good but will you…" (fill in the blank with some additional demand or another).

It's all based on a series of extremely insidious ideas and assumptions that need to be fought against at least as strongly as anti-Semitism or any other form of prejudice: the idea that Arab and Muslim Americans, no matter how forthright or intellectually honest they are being, at some social and political cost I might add, about some of the excesses in the discourses of our own communities and those of the countries of our origin, always have something more to prove. Will you denounce this? Will you denounce that? Will you sign this statement? Will you endorse this petition? Will you participate in this rally? Will you say this in Arabic? And, by the way, when will you stop beating your wife?

It's so obnoxious that it makes one want to throw up one's hands and either walk away, or take the gangsta rap route and embrace the stereotype by throwing it in people's faces or by exaggerating to the point where it becomes obviously an absurdity. Of course I'm not going to do that, and neither should anybody else. But the kind of response I got this morning from the reader, well-meaning though it probably was, couldn't be more discouraging or unhelpful. And, of course, it taps into rather deep reservoirs of anti-Arab stereotypes about oriental subtlety and dissimulation, dishonesty, “taqiyya,” and the simple assertion, that we've heard from American and other Western officials, commentators and politicians in the context of the Iraqi and other recent conflicts in the Middle East that Westerners tend to be straightforward and tell the truth, whereas “Orientals,” including Arabs, tend to engage in what the French would call in their charming phrase “Chinoiserie." This can refer to an artistic style but can also refer to racist Western conceptions of “Oriental subtlety,” deceptive practices and dissimulation. In other words, a certain kind of racism, or racist stereotypes anyway, lie at the core of these outrageous demands. So, my answer to all those questions is not only no, but hell no, unless I want to say such things anyway for my own reasons and purposes. Were it my cue to speak, I should have known it without a prompter, thank you very much.

In the past two years I had the distinct pleasure, following a decade of debating anti-Arab racists and Islamophobes on American television, of debating individuals such as a Hezbollah MP from Lebanon and, on another occasion, a senior leader of the so-called “Islamic Jihad” organization from Gaza on Arabic language TV stations. In both cases the “gentlemen” in question ultimately resorted to openly accusing me of taking the positions I was espousing, which of course were strongly in contradiction to virtually everything they were saying, because I live in the United States and have to submit to the exigencies of American culture and politics, and implying that if I were living in an Arab or Muslim-majority country, I would be agreeing with them wholeheartedly. It was infuriating, but also easily dismissible, because it was obviously a rhetorical tactic of last resort. So now having written a rather soul-searching, and in many circles unpopular, article about what the Helen Thomas controversy reveals about the way some Arab Americans think about Jewish power in the United States, anti-Semitism, and similar issues, to be asked whether I would repeat these sentiments in Arabic almost makes me regret having written it in the first place.

I've written before about the phenomenon whereby Arab and Muslim American “silence” on terrorism is more a function of deafness on the part of our fellow Americans than muteness on the part of our own community. The response to my recent posting I received today is a close relative of that conundrum: no matter what we say, it's never enough. There is always another question, another hurdle we have to jump over, another hoop we have to leap through, another doubt we have to satisfy. And it never ends either. There are those on the Arab-American left and Muslim-American right who think I make a profession of doing precisely that. They're completely wrong, of course. I'm saying what I think, without trying to tailor it to anybody's particular sensibilities, and it hasn't exactly won me a large pile of friends on any side. So be it. But there has to come a time, and soon, when this particular stigma against Arab Americans, the a priori assumption that we will only say certain things in certain contexts or in certain languages, that we will not repeat our views in the same way in both English and Arabic or to Western or Middle Eastern audiences, and that we are somehow always probably dissembling in some way or another, hedging, or being coy about some aspect of our real opinions or sentiments has just got to stop.

If some people want to see this as an angry or defensive reaction to a question that might be viewed as either reasonable or obnoxious depending on your point of view, then fine. I'm perfectly happy to admit to having been obviously annoyed by it, and I came by that honestly. But I want to say very clearly to anyone who cares about it that I absolutely refuse to jump through anybody's hoops, to meet anybody's endless series of BS litmus tests to make sure that I'm not really secretly some kind of radical extremist no matter what I've been writing and saying for so many years, or to in any way allow myself to be held to a different standard than is applied to others. I have written what I have written. It speaks for itself. If it's too much for some people, that's fine. If it's not enough for others, that's fine too. It is what it is, and it's what I think. The stakes are too high to do anything else: The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

Ben Cohen, Associate Director of Communications of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), has written a thoughtful, interesting and, I think, wrong commentary for the Huffington Post on the ongoing Palestinian campaign for international recognition in Latin America and Europe. For Cohen, there is an incompatible contrast between the achievement of what the United States has announced it now regards as the "inevitable" Palestinian state, and the international pursuit of the Palestinian cause. His argument has to be taken seriously because while there should not be any such contrast, if mishandled there could be a kind of tension between the two. But in the end, his conclusion that they are fundamentally incompatible is not, or at least should not be, correct.

Cohen is reflecting the annoyance of Israel and its supporters with what they perceive as a Palestinian end-run around negotiations with Israel by seeking recognition in Latin America and bilateral upgrades to missions in Europe. The Palestinian pursuit of upgraded bilateral relations with third parties does not contradict or bypass indispensable negotiations with Israel but certainly does not involve the Israelis directly. As much the stronger of the two parties in an extremely asymmetrical relationship involving occupation, dominance and subordination, the Israelis are used to being in the driver's seat at all times. In this case, they find themselves somewhat sidelined and unable to prevent Latin American and European states from acting in their own interests to promote the cause of ultimate Palestinian statehood and independence. The only state in which Israel has any confidence in the final analysis is the United States, because of the special relationship the Americans have with Israel and their rock-solid commitment to Israel's security. Again, this is understandable. But it's not understandable for the Israelis to expect Palestinians to rely exclusively on bilateral negotiations with Israel, brokered by the United States, as the sole and only element of their diplomacy.

Proto-Israeli diplomats in the period leading up to Israel's independence, after all, did a great deal of diplomatic outreach around the world to lay the groundwork for the recognition of their own state, led by officials of the "yishuv," the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine, such as Moshe Sharett and Golda Meir. To say that such efforts annoyed the Palestinians and other Arabs at the time would have been an understatement. It's important for the Israelis and their allies like Cohen to understand that Palestinians accept that there is no path to statehood other than a negotiated agreement with Israel brokered by the United States. This is clear and obvious, and the fact that Palestinians are pursuing multiple strategies to make that happen and augment rather than undermine that process doesn't contradict it. He should take very seriously the words of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who recently told Israel's Channel Two television, "What we're looking for … is a state of Palestine, we're not looking for yet another declaration of statehood. We're not looking for a Mickey Mouse state, we are not looking for some form of self-rule, we are looking for a sovereign state of Palestine, where we Palestinians can live as free people."

Much of Cohen's argument is based on placing the full blame on the Palestinians for the parties not having yet reached an end of conflict agreement that creates a Palestinian state. But the truth is there is plenty of blame to go around, all parties have made mistakes and miscalculations and missed opportunities, and the fact remains that Israel is the occupying power and holds most of the cards. He blames Palestinians for the present impasse in negotiations, conveniently eliding Israel's refusal to accept an exceptionally generous offer from the United States for a mere 90 day extension of a temporary, partial settlement moratorium that would clearly have resulted in a new round of direct negotiations. I'm not trying to let Palestinians off the hook here, but to pretend that if Palestinians had simply cooperated in the past, they would already have had their state is to evade huge chunks of recent, and indeed more distant, history. Unlike Cohen, I'm not interested in playing the blame game.

Everyone who warns Palestinians against unilateral declarations of independence is telling them something they already know: this won't be effective and isn't the path to freedom. Cohen also complains about threats by individual Palestinian leaders to suspend security cooperation with Israel, which would obviously be a huge mistake and which won't happen, or to dissolve the PA, which is similarly not a serious option under present or foreseeable circumstances. But when Palestinians seek bilateral recognition or diplomatic upgrades from third parties, it's not surprising that, as he quotes a pro-Israel communications strategist as complaining, "It's hard to convince the outside world why what the PA is doing is wrong." Apart from the fact that it's the PLO, not the PA, which is engaging in this diplomacy, I think it's pretty obvious why its hard to convince anyone that the very concept of Palestinian diplomacy and building stronger relations with countries around the world is “wrong.” Israel engages in its own diplomacy, as do countries around the world. Palestine, the inevitable, indispensable state-in-the-making should do so as well. It's hard to convince people that there's anything wrong with that, because, in the abstract, there isn't any plausible reason why it should be. In fact, its normal.

There is an important caveat, however. Palestinian relations with the United States are, and must be, paramount. The United States is the irreplaceable broker to the indispensable negotiations that are the only practicable path to peace and independence. If the Israelis are annoyed with Palestinian diplomacy while they happily busy themselves with announcing new settlement activity on a weekly basis in violation of international law, the Roadmap and clearly stated American and international opposition, so be it. It's better if the parties don't annoy each other, but since Palestinian diplomacy, unlike settlement building, isn't by definition illegitimate, and in fact at a certain level is absolutely necessary, then a limited amount of such annoyance is perhaps unavoidable and undoubtedly tolerable.

American annoyance, the other hand, must be both avoidable and intolerable from a Palestinian point of view. In her speech at the Brookings Institution on December 10, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made crystal clear her opposition to what she described as unilateral moves at the UN by the Palestinians to upgrade their diplomatic status in such multilateral bodies at this time. From a Palestinian perspective, that should be an end to it. These moves were blocked by the United States, and further such efforts are clearly inadvisable given open American opposition. But so far the US administration has not expressed any clear disapproval of diplomatic efforts to upgrade bilateral relations with Europe and Latin America. If and when it does, the Palestinians are going to have to consider these objections very carefully and understand that the symbolic recognition of Palestine by Latin American leaders clearly isn't worth any degradation in the relationship with the United States.

Cohen says Palestinians should forget about the rest of the world and concentrate on "reaching agreement with the one state that can make Palestine a reality: Israel." That's basically sound, except it places all the onus on the Palestinians for such an agreement and none on the Israelis, which is an analysis and formula that simply cannot work. Israel too has difficult, and indeed painful, choices to make, and he doesn't acknowledge any of them. But in fact Palestinians need to concentrate also on maintaining and developing their relationship with the one state that can make such an agreement achievable: the United States. Reaching out to the rest of the world is reasonable and important, especially insofar as it helps to solidify the international understanding that Palestine is an inevitable reality and a future member state of the United Nations. But if it ever starts to come at the expense of goodwill in Washington, diminishing returns will assert themselves very quickly and the cost to the Palestinian cause and aspirations will be prohibitive. Cohen is wrong there is an inherent contradiction between Palestinian statehood and the Palestinian cause, since in fact they are one and the same. But both depend, more than anything else under both current and foreseeable conditions, on the best possible relations with the world's only superpower.