Coincidences
Posted on June 22nd, 2009
by Daniel Larison |
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Do you think it’s an accident that when the neocons were in charge Hezbollah led the Lebanese elections but when we ditched the neocons, the Lebanese ditched Hezbollah? Do you think it’s an accident that when we ditched our far-right extremist government here in favor of a realist liberal that the liberals in Iran advanced their cause remarkably? Much further than anyone had a right to hope? ~E.D. Kain’s friend
Leaving aside some of the questionable descriptions in this quote (far-right? liberals in Iran?), yes, it was an accident! Perhaps the only thing more annoying than the use of green fonts and the sheer earnestness of some Westerners about the last two weeks is the maddening desire to describe events incorrectly to relate events in the Near East to our own political process. The Lebanese didn’t “ditch Hizbullah.” They maintained the status quo and kept the incumbent government in power, which means that Hizbullah remained in the opposition despite the fact that the opposition won the most votes. No one seems eager to paint their blogs yellow and ask where the Shi’ites’ votes went, and no wonder. Most people aren’t really that interested in having every voice be heard and fully represented, are they? We already know where their votes went–the Lebanese system is geared to misrepresent the population in parliament according to established rules that govern the settlement after the civil war. If winning 55% of the vote means that “the Lebanese ditched” the opposition, what would an opposition victory look like?
Suppose that a couple of districts had voted slightly differently, and the opposition had prevailed. We would undoubtedly hear from hawks how Obama’s election had “caused” a Hizbullah/FPM victory, but that wouldn’t make it true. A good way to test the silliness of a statement is to think about how reasonable it would sound if it were being made by your opponents against your preferred politician or in favor of one of their leaders. When people babbled about “the Arab spring” in 2005, they were horribly wrong. Enthusiasts for an “Obama effect” on the international scene are in danger of misrepresenting what has happened and what is happening to suit their hopes. This will come back to bite them. Suppose that Khamenei had decided to rig the election for Ahmadinejad, but to do so less blatantly. Would anyone believe hawkish arguments that the Cairo speech led to Ahmadinejad’s apparent victory? I would hope not, because such claims would be unfounded.
There can’t be that many countries where people earnestly believe that their elections influence the behavior of electorates in other countries. As far as I know, no one has attempted to tie local British and European election results to our presidential election or anything that Obama has done, but it would make no more sense. The Indian elections passed by almost unnoticed over here, as the incumbent government retained and even expanded its majority, and the ruling AK party lost ground in Turkey in municipal elections, and both of these were driven entirely by domestic political concerns. The “Obama effect” is rather narrowly focused, isn’t it?
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
There’s much here that I agree with – however – isn’t it fair to say that when an electorate is presented with what is made out to be a security threat (terrorists in our case; us in the case of many Middle Eastern nations) they will often vote more favorably for the hawks or the national security hardliners? For instance, when we are perceived as poised to invade Iran, isn’t it more likely that the Iranian people will rally around the hardline government than when we are no longer necessarily viewed that way.
That being said, I think your critique still mostly stands. This is rather convincing, for one:
A good way to test the silliness of a statement is to think about how reasonable it would sound if it were being made by your opponents against your preferred politician or in favor of one of their leaders.
It is dangerous to impute too much good or ill on the actions or non-actions of the U.S. political leadership.
It’s not so much Obama influencing the election as it is the USA influencing the election, or fear of western influences. Think about the majority of supporters of Ahmadinejad’s – poor, rural, uneducated, conservative. He waves the scary American flag – your girls will end up like Britney Spears – and they lock in fearful step. Sound familiar?
What you say is true regarding excessive claims of causality, but it’s true nonetheless that every US President and election is looked upon around the world as a sign of how the world is going, in a way that other elections simply are not. It’s simply true that Obama’s election has had an influence around the world, subtle but tangible, that is evident to some degree in Lebanon and Iran. THe people there will themselves agree to this. Mousavi himself compares himself to Obama. Why Obama and not some other liberal politician? Obviously because the US does matter to the rest of the world in a way that most other countries do not. It isn’t all in the fevered imaginations of neocons.
What’s different in Obama is that he seems to understand much more realistically how fragile American’s soft power is, and how it has to be played very modestly and prudently. In fact, by playing it modestly and prudently, he seems to actually be increasing our influence. It’s an example of less being more. The Iranian protesters seem to be more inspired by his acknowledgement of America’s past sins in Iran, and his non-interventionist stance, than they would by, say, a McCain Presidency that aggressively “supported” the protesters with bombastic speeches, moralistic preening, and pointless threats.
In other words, many of these people want to subtly emulate Obama. They see the US taking a new tack, and it helps them see that they can do something similar. They can see the US being less interventionist, and more reasonable, and they want a similar kind of leadership themselves. It’s very clear that things in Iran have swung in a dramatic way since around the time of Obama’s Cairo speech. Which is the cause, and which the effect, isn’t entirely possible to say. It’s more that there’s a kind of shift in the world going on, that you are in danger of missing, by being overly skeptical of exagerrated claims. Just as, during the election cycle, you were highly skeptical of claims that Obama would be different in foreign policy from McCain or the usual American jingoism. I remember at the time telling you that you would be pleasantly surprised by Obama’s foriegn policy, and even you seem to glad to admit that now, given how much praise you’ve heaped on him during recent weeks. Well, if even you are pleasantly surprised by Obama, how do you think the rest of the world is feeling? Those who were less skeptical than you are feeling even more reassured, and that kind of reassurance has real meaning in the world of diplomacy and the intangibles of international moods.
One can certain exagerate the importance of such things, but one can also underestimate their value as well. Pretending that, because foreign elections don’t much matter to the US, that US elections don’t much matter to the rest of the world, simply ignores the reality of how influential the US is in the world, and how much attention gets paid to American politics, particularly our President. If McCain were President, I guarantee it would have a strong polarizing effect on the world, and his rhetoric would undermine our interests. Obama is no savior, but he represents, symbolically and literally, a change in the way the US wants to relate to the world, to its former enemies and rivals, and this gets noticed. It frees up a certain degree of energy and attention in the world which was previously dedicated to demonizing the US, and lets it produce more moderating and reformist effects within nations that had previously been so devoted to opposing the US. Obama is a hard figure for many of these people to oppose, so instead, their opposition gets turned inward, towards those in their own societies who have held those societies back.
And, as you said repeatedly during the American election cycle, Obama’s overall effect, at least in the short term, is to heighten many of these polarities. We can see this occuring in Iran as well, as the old hard-liners get harder, but they also get more obviously crazy and identifiable as nut jobs. The GOP has become discredited in the process of overreacting to Obama, and so has the Iranian theocracy become more and more discredited in overreacting to the reformists and protesters there.
Why does Mousavi call himself the Iranian Obama if it has no meaning within his own country? Obviously it does. People in Iran are aware of Obama, and are pleased with the restraint they see in him. So even Mousavi wants to capitalize on that by positioning himself in Obama’s camp, even if in the purely political sense it’s absurd. There’s another, even more important sense in which its true, and people resonate in that way, not simply on the basis of overt policies and ideologies.