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August 6, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
The
Fox in the Pension Fund
August 5, 2002
Rahul Mahajan
Iraq
and the New Great Game
Jordy Cummings
The
Last Frontier of
Israel and Palestine
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Saddam's Diary
Mike Leon
US Mute
to Israeli Brutality
Norman Madarasz
Brazil:
the Most Important Election of 2002?
August 4, 2002
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
August 3, 2002
David Krieger
Nuclear
Apartheid
Gilad Atzmon
The End
of Innocence
Gavin Keeney
Everybody's
a Critic
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
August 2, 2002
Ralph Nader
The Labor
Party
Chris Floyd
Moral Maze:
Bankruptcy Made Easy
Jeremy Scahill
Saddam,
Chemical Weapons and Donald Rumsfeld
Jeffrey St. Clair
Dark Deeds in the Black Hills:
Daschle Dooms the
Sacred Land of the Sioux
August 1, 2002
Steven Higgs
Activists
Under Siege
Anthony Gancarski
Draft
Picks:
Staffing the Latest War
Zeynep Toufe
Invisible
Children: AIDS,
Africa and Selective Vision
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
Angelina Jolie, the NYT
and the Attack on McKinney
July 31, 2002
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
of Bombs:
Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
Resources:
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The Memphis Blues Again:
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Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
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A Pocket Guide to
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August
5, 2002
The Disastrous
Foreign Policies of the
United States: Part 5
Fit for Democracy vs.
Fit through Democracy
by Bill Christison
former CIA political
analyst
A 277-page U.N. report published in late July--you
know the kind, overflowing with tables, charts, and obscure acronyms--turns
out to be more useful and valuable than most other books I've
read in the past few years. Unfortunately, few people will hear
about it and fewer still will read it. The Bush administration
has ignored it and undoubtedly hopes nobody will read
it. The administration will probably be lucky. In the days following
publication of the document, the nation's foreign policy cadres
have been churning wildly over the Bush administration's views
on Iraq, Sharon and Arafat, terrorism, and preemptive war. Even
most of us rebels who see Bush's views on these issues as appallingly
deformed obsessions will not want to focus on other matters such
as this very important report. Nevertheless, here is one small
effort to do so.
The title of the U.N. document in question
is Human Development Report 2002: Deepening Democracy in a
Fragmented World. It is well written, definitely not the
turgid boilerplate you might have expected. It will tell you
how the U.S., other national governments, and the presently muddled
world governance institutions of the U.N., IMF, World Bank, and
WTO, are screwing up the further spread of democracy and justice.
The U.N. has published "human development"
reports fairly regularly since 1990. They have usually emphasized
economics, health, literacy, and environment as major factors
influencing social change. The report for 2002, however, concentrates
on the contribution that an expansion of real political democracy
might make to human societies around the globe, and the problems,
difficulties, and pitfalls facing such an expansion.
The "Director and Lead Author"
of this year's report is Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, a Japanese national
who has, sometimes gently and sometimes bluntly but always brilliantly,
criticized U.S. anti-democratic foreign policies around the world.
The report gets away with such brazenness by carrying a disclaimer
by the U.N. Development Program's administrator, who labels it
"an unapologetically independent analysis aimed at advancing
the debate on human development. As such, it is not a formal
statement of U.N. policy." Earlier reports in this series
have contained statements that they do not represent the official
views of the U.N., but rarely have they been so direct in their
transgressions of political correctness. "Unapologetic"
is indeed the right word.
The dominant U.S. philosophy--or religion
perhaps--emphasizes that democracy results automatically from
free markets, free trade, and an ever-expanding plethora of things
one can buy and consume. "Democracy needs nothing else",
is the claim. The underlying dogma rests on three assumptions:
First, that all, except perhaps for the
physically or mentally disabled, can progress from dependence
and poverty into the middle class through their own efforts.
Second, that one should simply ignore
evidence to the contrary, which in any case only benighted liberals
believe, and
Third, that many countries are simply
not "fit for" that other kind of democracy--the kind
in which elections are important and in which a principal objective
is to move closer to one-person-one-vote rather than one-dollar-one-vote.
Such political democracy is seen in any case as unnecessary
by supporters of the newer, and in their view better, consumer
democracy.
Without explicitly defining such false
notions as having originated in the U.S., Fukuda-Parr and her
team devote much of this book to rebutting them and demonstrating
the efforts various developing nations are making, sometimes
successfully and sometimes not, to move closer to the true one-person-one-vote
concept of democracy. A quotation from Nobel Prize-winning economist
Amartya Sen prefaces this part of the book. Sen writes--
In earlier times there were lengthy discussions
on whether one country or another was yet "fit for democracy".
That changed only recently, with the recognition that the question
itself was wrong-headed: a country does not have to be judged
fit for democracy, rather it has to become fit through democracy.
This is truly a momentous change.
Now that's a skillful, nicely low-key
but pointed slap in the face of the world's most arrogant government--a
government that seeks to make a new colony of Iraq, to dominate
other nations, and to extend this domination for the benefit
not of its average citizens but rather in the interests and for
the profit of the corporate structure that controls most of its
politicians.
The rest of this U.N. report lays bare
other areas where developing nations might have made more progress
toward meaningful democracy over the past decade. But the U.S.
has often hindered such progress in the belief that it was harmful
to Washington's own drive for global hegemony. For the same reason,
the U.S. government has opposed proposals to introduce more democracy
into international institutions such as the U.N., the IMF, the
World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.
With respect to the U.N. Security Council
and the undemocratic veto power enjoyed by the five permanent
members, the report spells out how, over the past 25 years, the
U.S. has used the veto more than any other permanent member.
A table in the report also makes clear that in the past decade
the U.S. has issued most of its vetoes in support of Israel against
the Palestinians--a subject not directly related to U.S. global
hegemony. These vetoes are, however, yet another example of arrogant
disregard for democracy by the U.S., since they encourage Israel
to continue its 35-year occupation and expand its colonization
of territories inhabited by three million Palestinians to whom
Israel grants absolutely zero democratic rights.
To repeat, this U.N. report is a very
fine piece of work that will give readers a better understanding
of the state of democracy around the world than anything else
this reviewer has seen in recent years. Fukuda-Parr and her team
deserve high praise.
[You can download the complete report
from http://www.undp.org,
or you can buy it from Amazon for $22.95 plus S&H. The actual
text is only 122 pages long, with an Overview or executive summary
taking up the first 12 of these pages. My advice: skip the Overview
and read the other 110 pages. ]
Bill Christison
joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the
Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National
Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central
Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast
Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was
Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis,
a 250-person unit. His wife Kathy also worked in the CIA, retiring
in 1979. Since then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue
of Palestine.
Other CounterPunch articles by Bill and
Kathleen Christison:
Bill Christison: Disastrous Foreign
Policies
of the US Part 3: What Can We Do About It?,
July 8, 2002
Kathleen Christison: The Story of
Resolution 242, How the US Sold Out the Palestinians,
June 28, 2002
Kathleen Christison:
Israel
and Ethics, May 11, 2002
Bill Christison: The Disastrous Foreign
Policies of the United States,
May 10, 2002
Kathleen Christison: Before There
Was Terrorism, May 2, 2002
Bill
Christison: Oil and the Middle East, April
6, 2002
Bill
Christison:
Why
the War on Terror Won't Work,
March 5, 2002
Today's Features
Alexander Cockburn
The
Fox in the Pension Fund
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