[Marxism] Obama and the National Endowment for Democracy

[David Thorstad <binesi@xxxxxxxxx>]

Al Jazeera
September 16, 2008
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2008/09/20089151314357484.html


Opinion: Obama Shares Bush's Goals

by Hossein Derakhshan

Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, has adopted the
rhetoric of change which has captured the imagination of many Americans
and non-Americans around the world.

But when it comes to the foreign policy, there are enough reasons to
remain sceptical. Will he adopt a foreign policy with objectives which
differ from those of George Bush, the current US president, or will he
merely change Bush's strategies and tactics?

Some authors, like Raymond Aron, the French political theorist, in his
book, The Imperial Republic, hold that the US is essentially founded on
two principles--Empire and Republic.

Its foreign policy, from the start, has consistently fallen between the
tensions between Empire and Republic. In 1903, Beckles Willson made a
similar argument in his book, The New America: A Study of the Imperial
Republic.

National Endowment for Democracy

At the height of the Cold War, in 1983, Ronald Reagan, the late US
president, ordered the establishment of the bi-partisan, private, and
non-profit National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

"We must work hard for democracy and freedom, and that means putting our
resources--organisations, sweat, and dollars--behind a long-term program,"
Reagan said in its inaugural speech.

"I just decided that this nation, with its heritage of Yankee traders, we
ought to do a little selling of the principles of democracy," Reagan
added.

NED's brief history shows that Reagan's notion of selling principles of
democracy was in fact the practice of funding opposition groups in
unfavourable states to destabilise and ideally topple their governments.

These governments would then be replaced with US-allied local politicians
who in many cases had already risen to fame through the work of NED-funded
local human rights, labour, or democracy NGOs.

Coups

This has long been one of the main missions of the US intelligence
organisations such as the CIA.

In fact, NED admits on its own website that what it is doing now was being
done by the CIA: "When it was revealed in the late 1960's that some
American PVO's [or NGOs, as they're called today] were receiving covert
funding from the CIA to wage the battle of ideas at international forums,
the Johnson Administration concluded that such funding should cease,
recommending establishment of 'a public-private mechanism' to fund
overseas activities openly."

The most famous example of NED's work came as a coup against Hugo Chavez,
the Venezuelan president, in 2002. But this eventually failed.

In Eastern Europe, however, NED's attempts have been more successful. In
the past few years, Ukraine and Georgia's "Orange and Rose revolutions"
have effectively transformed the two countries into the most faithful
American allies in Russia's backyard.

NED's funding and consultants, along with funds and support from similar
American organisations, such as George Soros's Open Society Institute,
largely contributed to their metamorphoses.

In fact, as reported in 2004 by The Guardian, NED and its subsidiaries
such as the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National
Democratic Institute (NDI), as well as United States Agency for
International Development (USAID), Open Society Institute (OSI) and
Freedom House were involved in financing and organising those campaigns in
Serbia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia.

Since 9/11, NED has expanded its operations in the Middle East and has
slowly and quietly been training and expanding networks of pro-American
civil society and human rights activists, journalists, and labour unions.

"Our future and the future of that region are linked", Bush said in a
speech on the 20th anniversary of the establishment of NED.

NED in Iran

NED's interest in Iran was initiated in 1995 in the form of a fellowship
programme.

Among the first group of Iranian Fellows was Haleh Esfandiari, whose
research was focused on women's issues in Iran.

She later became the director of the Woodrow Wilson Centre's programme on
the Middle East and kept close contact with Iranian women's NGOs.

In 2007, she was detained and charged with "conspiring against the Islamic
Republic of Iran", but was released on bail after three months.
Interestingly, Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden were among the senior
US politicians who called the arrest unjust and explicitly demanded her
release.

Around the same time of Esfandiari's detention, Kian Tajbakhsh, another
Iranian-American was also detained, charged, and freed on bail.

The ministry of intelligence said he was identified with the help of
Esfandiari as the representative of the OSI in Iran. OSI later confirmed
in a statement that Tajbakhsh has been indeed a consultant to the
organisation in Iran.

Ramin Jahanbegloo, who was a Reagan-Fascell fellow at the NED in 2001 and
continued contributing to NED's Journal of Democracy, was detained in 2006
(according to the Iranian Fars News agency over his ties with NED) and was
charged with acts threatening the state.

The Iranian ministry of intelligence, reported by IRNA, stated at the time
that the Woodrow Wilson Centre's activities and programmes related to Iran
were sponsored and financed by the Soros Foundation (or Open Society
Institute) which had played a key role in the "colour revolutions" in the
former USSR republics in recent years.

Obama and NED

While Obama objects to military intervention, he is, like Bush, a big
supporter of the kind of activity that NED is doing--and interestingly
enough, more avidly than Bush.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Obama said that he would
"significantly increase funding for the National Endowment for Democracy
(NED) and other non-governmental organisations to support civic activists
in repressive societies."

He promised to "start a new Rapid Response Fund for young democracies and
post-conflict societies that will provide foreign aid, debt relief,
technical assistance and investment packages that show the people of newly
hopeful countries that democracy and peace deliver, and the United States
stands by them".

Joseph Biden, Obama's running mate is not much different. In an article
for Washington Monthly in 2005, he criticised Bush for not putting his
money where his mouth is: "Promoting democracy is tough sledding. We must
go beyond rhetorical support and the passion of a single speech. It's one
thing to topple a tyrant; it's another to put something better in his
place."

"The most effective, sustainable way to advocate democracy is to help
those moderates and modernisers on the inside build democratic
institutions such as political parties, an independent judiciary, a free
media, a modern education system, a civil society, non-governmental
organisations (NGOs), and a private sector," Biden said.

It was the same Joseph Biden in 2002 who, in a ceremony for the NED's
annual Democracy award, introduced Mehrangiz Kar, a "reformist" Iranian
women rights activist who now lives in the US.

Continuity

The similarities between Bush and Obama's view of the American role and
duty towards the rest of the world might be striking, but for those whose
concept of history goes beyond searching Google, there is no surprise.

In his book, Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky cites John Stewart Mill,
the British philosopher and one of the champions of the American notion of
liberty, and shows how the same rhetoric of liberty and democracy has been
used by the British Empire to justify its attempt to hegemony the world.

Mills describes England as "a novelty in the world" who is committed to
create an "idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity".

He refers to a selfless country that only acts "in the service of others",
even though the fruits of its success will be shared "in fraternal
equality with the whole human race".

Chomsky traces this non-partisan "altruist" foreign policy in the US  back
to Woodrow Wilson, who served two terms as the American president from
1913 to 1921.

"The primary principle of foreign policy, rooted in Wilsonian idealism and
carried over from Clinton to Bush II is the imperative of America's
mission as the vanguard of history, transforming the global order and, in
doing so, perpetuating its own dominance," wrote Chomsky.

In his 1968 book, Woodrow Wilson and the Modern Amercian Empire, Gordon
Levin, puts this eloquently: "The needs of America's expanding capitalism
were joined ideologically with a more universal vision of American service
to suffering humanity and to world stability."

Talking to Iran

When it comes to Iran, Obama's tactics indeed look quite different from
Bush's--engagement versus isolation.

But their goals are no different; both want to replace the only
independent oil-rich state in the Middle East with an obedient regime,
similar to the infamous Anglo-American coup in 1953 when Iran nationalised
its oil industry.

Obama's tactics are perhaps best articulated by Abbas Milani, an
influential "liberal" researcher on Iran who co-directs the Iran Democracy
Project at the conservative Hoover Institute and is a supporter of Obama.

He said to the New Yorker Magazine in 2005 that the Americans should talk
to Iran "but with the purpose of overthrowing them".

[Hossein Derakhshan is a London-based media analyst and freelance
journalist. He writes about Iran in a bilingual blog in Persian and
English at http://www.hoder.com which is blocked by the Iranian
government.]


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