Here’s a piano version, followed by an ‘orchestral’ rendition:

More info on John Cage: Wikipedia - John Cage

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President Barack Obama’s decision to address the ‘Muslim world’ from Egypt has provoked a great deal of head-scratching from observers, myself included. I had hoped that the President would pick a location outside of the ‘Arab world’, to emphasize the diversity existent amongst Muslim nations (and perhaps to show that the notion of a ‘Muslim world’ is of our own making). The decision comes as part of a prominent public relations campaign to better ties with Muslims the world over. An interview with the satellite news station Al-Arabiya, and a speech to Turkey’s parliament, both emphasized the value of respect and the willingness on behalf of the United States to listen to the grievances of these nations. While this has been an effective start, the President would do well to make his speech in Cairo a compelling advocacy for the ills of autocratic political culture.

The likelihood that Obama ‘the pragmatist’ will make any room in his speech, however, for effective criticism of the Egyptian regime is quite low. Early signs from his administration indicate that the United States is willing to shelve its push for political reform in Egypt in order to gain that government’s cooperation on other regional issues. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking after having met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, claimed that while the U.S would always support democratic reform, the $1.3 billion that Egypt receives in military aid would not be subject to any conditions of such reform. Obama, though, would be wise to follow his own wisdom, as expressed in an interview with the Washington Post during his campaign for the presidency in which he stated that despite the occasional necessity of working with repressive governments, “those interests need not and must not prevent us from lending our consistent support to those who are committed to democracy and respect for human rights.”

The President’s speech will be sure to draw much comparison to that of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, delivered in 2005 amidst the Bush administration’s forceful push for political reform in the Middle East (transcript). That speech upset the Egyptian President, who refused to visit Washington during President Bush’s second term. And while much of the political repression imposed by the Mubarak regime in the aftermath of that speech was also a response to it, it would be incorrect to assume that it wasn’t worth the trouble or that such efforts shouldn’t be repeated. Learning the right lessons from the past eight years of democracy promotion will be crucial to ensuring that Obama’s upcoming speech does not play directly into the hands of an authoritarian government.

What follows are five suggestions for what the President should say in Cairo:

Stress the importance of democracy and human rights

The Bush administration’s push for democratic reform in Egypt produced a limited opening of political space for dissidents and opponents of the regime. Many candidates openly campaigned for both the presidency and seats in parliament, and a tangible democratic yearning filtered throughout Cairo’s streets. To be sure, the reform was not perfect and quite short-lived. The elections were predictably marred by fraud and vote-rigging, unconstructive political campaigns and corruption. Nevertheless, a democratic political culture cannot be cultivated overnight, and the gains made during this period were certainly to Egypt’s benefit. Ignoring democracy promotion would risk completely rolling back any of the limited advances made since 2003. And as far as human rights go, an emphasis should be placed on minorities and the protection a democratic political system affords them. Even if all of this is delivered in abstract fashion, the point will be well felt by the local regime.

Speak out against torture

Police brutality has been a well documented, frequent occurrence in Egypt. A quick YouTube search reveals dozens of videos depicting a complete disrespect for human dignity on behalf of Egyptian officers. Egypt is also a prime destination for suspects in the C.I.A rendition program. As a former CIA agent has remarked, “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear — never to see them again - you send them to Egypt.” Given the U.S experience with torture, and the positions that Obama has taken throughout his campaign and presidency, it would be morally negligent for this issue not to be brought up. As much as it is a domestic U.S debate, Obama should introduce the discussion on an international level.

Speak out against discrimination

This point, as with the last, is related to addressing the necessity of human rights, and can be applicable to much of the ‘Muslim world’. In Egypt, Christians, Baha’is, and Bedouins (among others, certainly) are often treated poorly by the state. The President should make an effort to highlight the diversity within Muslim nations, so as to acknowledge the minorities as he addresses the majority. He would serve his cause well to relate the experience of black Americans, of his own story, to those of the repressed minorities in these nations. And if he’s feeling extremely brave, Obama could make a plea for anti-Semitic state-funded propaganda to cease. It’s high time that a head of state call the autocrats of the ‘Muslim world’ out on their complicity in the dissemination of that junk.

Tell the Egyptian regime to ‘build, not destroy’

President Obama should repeat the line from his inaugural address in which he addressed leaders of the ‘Muslim world’, advising them to “know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.” Economic and human development is signal to the betterment of the Middle East and Muslim nations. Obama should tell the autocracies of the region that stifling the growth of human development will continue to engender antagonism to their rule. He should speak definitively about the inevitability of democracy, and make clear that when the day comes that all Egyptians are represented by their governments, an educated and skilled population will be to their collective advantage.

Don’t be afraid of the regime

There will inevitably be a response by the Egyptian government to any principled advocacy of these issues. These campaigns tend to involve wide-scale political repression, imprisonment of oppositionists, and bravado about the interference in internal affairs of Egypt. Unfortunately the domestic population will likely suffer from this in the short term. But President Obama must not allow himself, his administration, or his principles to be intimated by such thuggery; a clear message must be sent that these values are not subject to concessions. The U.S administration must call the Egyptian government out on any future “I’ll show you” backlash that is to follow.

While the speech is likely to be littered with references to Iranian cooperation and Isreali-Palestinian peace, failing or refusing to mention these issues compellingly would only serve to embolden an aid-fueled autocracy that adheres little to international norms of behavior. It would also make this administration culpable in the stifling of political reform in Egypt and the ‘Muslim world.’

Once we had made our way out to the parking lot, I asked my father why a Saudi man had just packed our groceries. After explaining the government’s push to steadily replace foreign workers with Saudi nationals, he laid out the problem at the crux of this policy in blunt terms: “The people they are hiring are rarely as good as those they are replacing.”

At my age of 18, this was something I had never seen before. Low-skilled jobs were the exclusive domain of foreign guest workers, who would often possess far more ability than the Saudis who refused those jobs on grounds that work at the lower end of the cooperate hierarchy was demeaning.

The presence of a young Saudi Arabian at the end of the checkout counter (as opposed to a middle aged Indian, Pakistani or Pilipino) was evidence of the policy of ‘Saudiazation’, a national policy that mirrors those of neighboring Gulf states whose attempts to integrate the local population into their private sectors have been met with little success. The policy itself is the source of much debate over its efficiency and role as an imprecation to merit-based employment. Debates on the issue aside, however, the policy is the resultant of a workforce dominated by foreigners whose presence has sparked a stream of initiatives aimed at separating the migrant population from that of the locals.

A recent article in Arabian Business called my attention to the issue, in which a morbidly comical initiative by the Bahraini government to allocate land for the construction of ‘safe cities’ is detailed. The following excerpts are reproduced from the article itself, with the emphasis added being mine:

A council leader in the capital has called for the move following complaints from a group of construction workers living in Bahrain’s Diraz area who say they are being persecuted by the local population who throw rocks at them and start fights.

One labourer said he had recently received three stitches in the head after being hit by a rock that was thrown through the camp’s front window, according to Construction Week.

…

“There are big cultural differences between the way we live and we don’t want these bachelors living in our family areas,” he said.

“In Manama there are more than 100,000 Indian bachelors - this is a demographic bomb and the biggest concern is that we are losing our identity in our own villages.

“This demographic shift is very important, let alone the other problems like cultural problems, social problems and crime rates,” he added.

An astute reader can find much to pick at in this selection of words, perhaps most notably the reality of assault that these migrants face. Consider the inanity of the notion that the same workers who construct houses that they may never occupy, in a country where they are made to feel like they do not belong, are made to do so on the condition that they stay away from those who benefit from their work.

Consider, furthermore, the language used to justify the proposition to segregate the city on the basis of culture and identity and the ‘concern’ they pose to the host nation. Isn’t this language strangely reminiscent of a political and social phenomenon we can witness in Europe?

From the Wall Street Journal, November 28th, 2008:

He acknowledges that “the majority of Muslims in Europe and America are not terrorists or violent people.” But he says “it really doesn’t matter that much, because if you don’t define your own culture as the best, dominant one, and you allow through immigration people from those countries to come in, at the end of the day you will lose your own identity and your own culture, and your society will change. And our freedom will change — all the freedoms we have will change.”

The words spoken above are those of Geert Wilders, seemingly the most popular politician in the Netherlands today and the man at the front of a movement aimed at stemming the immigration of Muslims to his country. While the diatribes of Wilders can necessarily be distinguished in character from the policies of Gulf states toward their migrant workers, the sentiments of fear used to justify each are eerily similar.

A community is “the lasting and genuine form of living together” wrote Ferdinand Tonnies in his seminal distinction between the sociological concepts of Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). His work, published in 1887, presented the dichotomy of communities and societies as two collective forms of human bonding. Tonnies considered the community to be characteristic of a group of individuals who placed the interest of the larger association on equal footing with that of their own. The theory, considered to be at the root of the conceptualization of ‘community’, sprung out of the depths of a well of European discontent at the modern forms of human bonding, considered at the time to lacking in both collective affinity and meaningful affiliation.

This new form of association was termed ‘society’. Characteristic of a co-existence of people independent of each other, ‘society’ is transitory and superficial. Members express far less loyalty to the greater ‘society’ than they do to their own individual interests. Tonnies drew on a comparison of rural villages and developed, urban cities; the latter constituting the foci of developed nations. Forms of human bonding were found to be markedly distinct in each of those settings, which gave rise to a challenge of the sociological construct of community.

A similar challenge may very well be in order in the realm of international politics. Recently, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir became the first-ever sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC). While the likelihood of a significant aftereffect remains ambiguous (al-Bashir reportedly responded to the arrest warrant with a common phrase of derision in Arabic, telling his prosecutors to “boil the warrant and drink its water.”) reaction to the warrant has revealed the apparent neurosis of the ‘international community.’

Amnesty International’s deputy director of the human rights organization’s Africa program released a statement shortly after news of the warrant, claiming that it sent “a strong signal that the international community no longer tolerates impunity for grave violations of human rights committed by people in positions of power.” A U.S state department spokesman, when pressed on whether or not his government supported the indictment, stated that “(The United States) recognize(s) that by the international community, this has been a move that will try and help resolve the problems in Sudan.” The BBC’s Amber Henshaw, in an article for the news organization’s website, tied the Sudanese government’s claim that the ruling represented a ‘Western’ conspiracy to “blame (of) the international community.” Madeleine Albright, former U.S secretary of state under President Clinton commented that “the international community can(not) stand by and watch as thousands more people starve to death.”

The last statement may hold true and certainly appeals to the morality of a responsibility to protect. Consider, nonetheless, the character of any force that may intervene to resolve a conflict that has, among other tragedies, produced an accepted reality of war rape amongst 1.45 million displaced members of our species. Such a force would undoubtedly be composed of U.S or NATO troops, ‘Western’ troops if you would allow me the use of that phrase. Is the ‘international community’ a euphemism for the ‘Western’ world?

Perhaps; the ‘international community’ that roundly voiced either overt or veiled approval of the indictment would not seem to include members of the African Union, Egypt, Yemen, Iran, and China, among others. Those nations either expressed regret or concern over the indictment, and would not seem to factor into the formulation of the ‘international community’ and its tolerations.

This point, however, seems an obvious linguistic hypocrisy that the world’s most powerful nations are privy to. Assuming that the term is indeed an inflation of the ‘Western’ world, the ‘international community’ that is championing justice for millions of Sudanese would be the same ‘community’ that was responsible for the colonization of Africa or the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Yet that premise does not hold, since many ‘Western’ nations opposed the war in Iraq and did not participate in the enterprise of colonialism.

What we are left with is a conception of the ‘international community’ whose composition of nation-states do not exhibit a collective will nor action. This ‘community’ is neither entirely international nor Western in composition, and has acted in manners that have been opposed by its own members. The ‘international community’ cannot seem to be defined from a global perspective, but rather finds its identity in its many composite parts. In view of Tonnies’ distinction, what is considered a ‘community’ in this case may well be regarded as more appropriately as a ‘society’.

The ‘international society’, then, looks to be a more appropriate terminology for the collection of states that co-exist to maintain a global order of peace and prosperity. The distinction here is significant in that it changes the assumptions with which an observer can (and should) expect the society to act.

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Back when the global food crisis, which is certainly ongoing, was making the front pages of international newspapers, a particular spotlight was shone on Egypt.  Not only were there several stories of the bread shortage, to which the government responded by commissioning the military to open more bakeries to avoid both hunger and the inevitable political unrest; the rise of food prices also spawned two days of rioting in the industrial city of Mahalla, home to the region’s largest textile factory.  From the L.A Times blog, Babylon and Beyond, April 9th:

The two-day riots this week that rocked the Delta province town of Mahalla, leaving one young man dead and about a hundred injured, exposed the failures of President Hosni Mubarak’s regime. The clashes erupted after the police aborted a planned strike by the town’s 25,000 textile workers. Police fired tear gas and rioters threw stones and burned schools and shops.

The workers were angry over low wages and triple-digit inflation that have led to increasing unrest in a country where nearly half the population is poor. The Egyptian economy is growing, but the benefits have not trickled to the middle and lower classes, who blame Mubarak for years of neglect.

“The whole world suffers from inflation. Each state deals with the problem according to its capabilities; however, the Egyptian government failed in dealing with the crisis and let it deteriorate,” wrote columnist Khairy Ramadan in the independent al-masry al-Youm daily. “Aimless anger and aimless siege will only lead to chaos.”

Yesterday, an emergency court sentenced 22 of the rioters to jail-terms ranging from 3 and 5 years:

Among the 22 people convicted was a 58-year-old woman who was sentenced to three years in jail for allegedly carrying a Molotov cocktail.

Only Mubarak can intervene with a presidential pardon in the cases of those convicted, as under the 27-year Emergency Law emergency courts have no appeal process and the verdicts will stand.

Mubarak has kept the country under a state of emergency since President Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981 in order to combat terrorism. The powers enacted under the emergency law give the government the right to imprison anyone for any length of time for virtually no reason at all, and it widely and freely uses that prerogative.

“Those sentenced today are scapegoats used by the authorities to hide their inability to adequately handle the Mahalla protests and to cover up for their failure to investigate the killing of three people, including a 15-year-old boy,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa deputy program director in a statement.

At least 20 percent of Egypt’s 80 million people live on less than $2 per day. With the sharply rising cost of living facing the North African nation, the majority of Egyptians are finding it difficult to support their families.

This is a sad reminder of how the Middle East’s authoritarian governments deal with demands for an increased quality of life; they feed oppression with more oppression.

Here’s some insight into the riots of April and their significance.  An interview with Saad Eddin Ibrahim AlJazeera English’s program “Frost over the World”, on April 16th:

Over the past 8 years, we have seen movements of political reform, as weak as many of them proved to be, arise from soil long barren to the notion of representative governments and respect for freedoms.  In Egypt we saw the protests of Kifaya; Lebanon took a courageous step toward true sovereignty; there were movements for the release of journalists, student protests, and bloggers.

The rhetoric of this outgoing administration tied the freedom of the United States to the freedom of the rest of the world, tying the liberation of people to the pursuit of self-interest. From George W. Bush’s second inaugural address (2005):

“The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

The “Freedom Agenda”, as applied to the Middle East through programs such as the Middle East Partnership Initiative, was ultimately abandoned due to rising pressure emanating from an unstable Iraq, requiring a reprioritization of its policies toward the region. While the Iraq war was the most important driver of this change in policy, its failures have influenced three regional developments which have further undermined American policy in the region: Iranian expansionism and its quest for nuclear armament, a failure of Arab states to make progress on political reform, and a perceived hypocrisy on behalf of the United States in its role of democracy promotion.

Thus, it would seem, Obama ‘the pragmatist’ may continue to shy away from the assertive nature of the democracy promotion in the Middle East so characteristic of the Bush administration pre-2006.  From Fouad Ajami’s latest piece in the WSJ, “The Return of Realpolitik in Arabia“:

One thing is sure to go with Mr. Bush when he departs to Crawford, Texas: his “diplomacy of freedom.” That diplomacy — which propelled the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which drove the Syrians out of Lebanon after they had all but destroyed the sovereignty of that country, and had challenged pro-American allies in Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula — is gone for good.

It was an odd spectacle, the time behind us: a conservative American president preaching the gospel of liberty for lands beyond, his liberal detractors at home giving voice to a deep skepticism about liberty’s chances in inhospitable settings. No one was more revealing of the liberal temper — and of things to come — than Vice President-elect Joe Biden (then the point man for foreign policy among the Democrats) speaking in December 2006 about the hazards of believing in liberty’s appeal to Muslim lands. Of President Bush, he said: “He has this wholesome but naive view that Westerners’ notions of liberty are easily transported to that area of the world.” Mr. Biden knew better: He warned the president, he said, that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s view of liberty differed from “our view of liberty . . . I think the president thinks there’s a Thomas Jefferson or Madison behind every sand dune waiting to jump up. And there are none.”

Perhaps there aren’t, and perhaps we’ll never get to find out. I can find much to quarrel with in the foreign policy of President Bush and his administration, and the decisions of the last eight years will certainly have played a role in shaping the succeeding decade. I suspect history will not be so kind to the president, and that is largely his own fault. However, should it completely disappear, the assertion with which reform was pursued in the Middle East, for all its faults, is a development I won’t soon forget.

The developing consensus I referred to earlier is both evident in the amount of material available on the subject of humanitarian intervention today (I just read two reviews of books on the subject in this weekend’s edition of the Herald Tribune), but also the increasing amount of U.N resolutions that have tied gross human rights violations specifically to the threat of international peace, allowing for the invocation of Chapter VII.  From the conclusion of a paper by a professor of mine, Fred Grunfeld:

My point may seem rather academic, since all of today’s conflicts are caused by gross violations of human rights; in the words of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights: “today’s human rights violations are the causes of tomorrow’s conflicts.” Conversely, all conflicts have produced gross and mass violations of human rights.  This is correct and in that sense, the two principal objectives are inextricably linked.  This does not detract from the fact that development described in this contribution reveals an upgrading of the protection of human rights by the international community.  The upgrading is expressed by the use of enforcement measures under Chapter VII.

Grünfeld, F. (1998). Human rights violations : a threat to international peace and security. In: M. Castermans, F.v. Hoof, J. Smith (Eds.), The role of the nation-state in the 21 century, Kluwer Law International, The Hague, pp. 427-441.

Rather than repeating the well-reported pros and cons of humanitarian intervention, I’d rather discuss the importance of the will to intervene.  There is a renewed sense of hope that under an Obama administration, the cause of humanitarian intervention will finally receive a U.S administration willing to assert its power, in concert with the international community, to intervene in occurring genocides and perhaps even to prevent those for which the early warning signals are strong. From a recent article in Newsweek by Jonathen Tepperman:

Meanwhile, much of the international opposition to U.S. military action is specific to George W. Bush and will dissolve come January. That’s especially true for interventions to stop mass killings, which have grown much more palatable to the international community since Kosovo, Rwanda and Darfur. The United Nations recently unanimously approved the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine that gives such missions international imprimatur. And as Ivo Daalder, another prominent Obama adviser, and Robert Kagan have pointed out, between 1989 and 2001 America dispatched significant military force to foreign hot spots so often—once every 18 months—that intervention became something of a standard weapon of U.S. foreign policy, and one with bipartisan support. Kagan argues that this new tradition has been reinforced by 9/11, which showed both policymakers and the public that troubles abroad can come back to hurt the United States. Today’s public is thus “remarkably willing to support overseas action” for the right cause, Kagan says.

Still, only one thing will ultimately determine whether the United States intervenes when crisis strikes: “political will,” as Albright puts it. Kagan is more specific: “At the end of the day, the only person who will be able to answer these difficult questions is the president. It’s all about what this guy wants to do.” Where exactly Obama stands on humanitarian intervention remains something of a mystery. Though he made supportive comments in the campaign—”when genocide is happening … that diminishes us” he said during the second presidential debate—no one seems to know what Obama will do when faced with a real live crisis. The answer may depend on whether he’s an idealist who favors do-gooder missions, as some experts argue, or a hardheaded realist who’d avoid them.

My suspicion is that Obama will fall somewhere in between these two personality types.  John Stoessinger wrote in his book “Why Nations Go To War” about two personality types of American presidents: the crusader and the pragmatist.  The chapter is titled ‘New Wars for a New Century’, and predictably analyzes the personality of George W. Bush (you can guess which end of the spectrum Stoessinger saw W. leaning toward).  The crusader tends to make decisions based on a preconceived idea rather than on the basis of experience, yet also exhibits a “missionary zeal to make the world better.” The pragmatist, by contrast, is “guided by the facts and his experience in a given situation.”  While its certainly too early to tell which end of the spectrum Obama will fall toward, based on his presidential campaign and his appointees to top foreign policy positions I would project that the next president will adopt the role of the pragmatist, keeping more idealist influences around him to inject a humanitarian tinge to his policies.

Needless to say, it will be both interesting and exciting to see how the next administration reacts to the crises in the Congo and Darfur and others exhibiting the gross violations of human rights, and whether the responsibility to act will be met with a will equally as strong.