From Egypt to Russia, the Western urge to meddle in other countries continues to be troublesome.
Behind The Headlines By Bunn Nagara
THE
so-called
Arab Spring continues to spring surprises, most of all on its
Western backers. With double standards in international politics, just
about anything goes.
US, Israeli and European cheerleaders of
Arab “regime change” through street politics have realised by now that
the naive notion of ousting dictators does not travel in a straight
line. Among other things, the new regimes that emerge have tended to be
more independent and less Western-friendly.
In Egypt, the Muslim
Brotherhood’s Islamist Freedom and Justice Party has taken the pivotal
role in post-Mubarak political life, including the upper house of
Parliament. In Tunisia much the same has been happening with the
Islamist Ennahda party.
Shifting
the goalposts: When allegations of voter fraud bore no fruit, Moscow’s
street protesters switched to accusing Putin of using rough tactics on
them as police made arrests. — AFP
An element of that
plays in the opposition
Syrian National Council’s multiple splits. The
more cautious Western officials are currently hesitant to provide “hard
power” to the rebels battling Damascus, since rebel ranks include
al-Qaeda.
Right-wing US lawmakers like
John McCain are chiding
President Obama for not arming Syrian rebels. It is telling that
McCain’s best claim to fame is as a veteran of the Vietnam War, that
classic icon of a failed and futile US armed intervention.
Even
so, the temptation for a hyperpower to intervene can be irresistible, so
Washington covertly dispatches regime-change NGO activists as catalysts
instead of the Marines. It is what
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
calls “smart power.”
However, the double standards when compared
to similar situations elsewhere then become glaring. After
Western-allied Saudi Arabia sent troops into Bahrain to suppress
protesters there one year ago, Western-compliant Qatar has called for
supplying troops and weapons to Syrian rebels fighting President Assad.
To
an incumbent government in Iran that is also being targeted by Western
and Israeli policymakers, all of that is enough to invoke
Islamism in
defiant response. Although President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains the
convenient bogeyman for the West, his political rivals at home are even
more conservative and Islamist as shown in parliamentary elections early
this month.
Nonetheless, neither religion nor showy forms of
piety is the issue: it is a country’s unwillingness to comply with
Western requests and demands that is. The stakes are raised when such a
country is oil-rich and occasionally snubs Western concerns as well.
Currently
the most conspicuous example of this is Russia, or rather
president-elect
Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This is a country that happens
to channel the West’s worst “fears” today: being big, rich in oil and
gas, independent-minded, “uncooperative” with the West over Libya, Syria
and Iran, and even opposed to Nato’s eastwards expansion right up to
Moscow’s doorstep.
Thus US and some European leaders are as keen
for a “Russian spring” as they have been about a political
spring-cleaning in Arab and Muslim countries they do not yet control.
How the West would respond to anti-Putin street protests was therefore a
foregone conclusion.
Russia’s recent presidential election
provided the moment for a convergence of anti-Putin posturing. Russian
street protesters, then Western media, and then
Western governments
formed a chorus to denounce Putin’s victory and the electoral process
that led to it.
This happened both from a distance, such as the
State Department or the Oval Office, as well as from within Russia by a
visiting team of OSCE (
Organisation for Security and Cooperation in
Europe) election observers. It also occurred from the editorial offices
of supposedly liberal Western media.
But what is the substance of complaints, apart from the usual geopolitical power plays?
If
indeed the election had been a sham as the protesters and critics have
been claiming, the evidence for it would have been presented, analysed,
commented on and displayed. The Putin electoral bandwagon would and
should have been stigmatised, although the appropriateness of any
foreign political action would still be in question.
Russian
protesters at least would have been justified in their street
demonstrations, and assured of the justice of their cause. Instead, the
protesters were already out in the streets denouncing Putin months
before the election, which gives some indication about the content of
their complaint.
Now weeks later, opposition claims of vote fraud
favouring Putin is still without substance. Opinion polls before the
election indicated a two-thirds majority support for Putin, and the
results have since shown 64%.
Even Putin’s opponents had agreed
that he had no problem securing enough votes to win the election. Until
now his opponents and critics have not explained why he needed to cheat
to win, and furthermore they failed to show that he had cheated.
No evidence
Interestingly,
the OSCE observers indirectly rebuffed opposition claims of multiple
voting by Putin supporters, and instead reported on the negative
perceptions that attended the voting. The Europeans had no evidence of
vote fraud and declared that there were no significant violations, but
they still hankered after attaching a negative spin to the election and
its result.
They cited no improper motives by Putin’s United
Russia party, yet they were not above tainting the election result
through implication or by default. Perhaps that was an attempt at smart
power too.
If anyone had any “actionable” evidence of fraud it
would have been the OSCE observers, yet they served up nothing. Their
position would in effect have been a workable endorsement of the
election’s credibility.
United Russia had failed to secure a
two-thirds majority, yet the CIA-linked Voice of America reported that
Putin had won “by a landslide.” Meanwhile, the opposition claim of voter
fraud persisted all-round in the face of the absence of any evidence to
substantiate it.
That much might have been expected of Putin’s
opponents at home and even Western governments averse to his independent
ways. But for Western media to chime along without questioning the
basis of their presumptions, and even failing to report dispassionately,
shows a decline in professional ethics.
At the heart of such
reporting and editing is a tendency to approach opposition claims with
less scepticism than government ones, although both sides are equally
interested parties in an electoral contest. It is an approach typical of
the Western media in the Third World.
As for Moscow’s street
protesters, they have lately taken to shifting the goalposts. After
their allegations of vote fraud bore no fruit, they switched to accusing
Putin of using rough tactics on them as police made arrests.
At
the same time, protesters say they want neither violence nor a
revolution, just more transparency and the rule of law. They have no
alternative candidate they prefer to Putin, just an alternative mode of
the government’s handling of the election for a better sense of
confidence in the process.
Essentially, the protesters did not
endorse any particular candidate but were instead just being anti-Putin.
The very fact that they have been doing so openly without being packed
off to a gulag in Siberia for life shows the distance Russia has
travelled since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
For now,
Putin’s main rival candidates – a communist, a crypto-fascist and a
controversial oligarch – seem to leave little to be desired between
them. If the unspoken objective of Russian voters is getting a president
who can act competently and confidently to safeguard Russia’s
interests, the election might already have been purposeful enough.
The
protesters and their Western backers might then just need a little time
to reconcile themselves to it. That could be their best option in smart
politics yet.
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