Matt Yglesias wonders whether we shouldn't give some more support and money to liberals in places like Egypt and Pakistan.
We should not. As several commenters at Matt's have pointed out, the sure fire way to poison anything in the Arab world right now is to stick "Made in the U.S.A." on it. Leave the poor liberals alone and let them do their thing. Sort of a "we're from the U.S. government and we're here to help" situation. With the amount of unfounded conspiracy-mongering that goes on in some corners of the Arab world, all we need to do is create more conspiracy-mongering that is founded.
Which brings me to a question I was glibly discussing with a colleague yesterday. Given the pervasiveness of conspiracy theories in the Arab world, how come we haven't started our own? We were just brainstorming, but the thinking went like this:
Leak to al Jazeera that a secret group in Cheney's office was discussing ways to disrupt the Iraq elections so that U.S. troops would be forced to continue to occupy the country and would have time to bring the oil system back up to full production and we could start really pulling some of it out of the ground for a good long time. How Cheney was freaking out that people thought the elections might come off all right.
Of course, there are at least two problems. One is that it's far too late. It would have been interesting, though, to have done this a month ago.
The second problem is that the theory is just plain nuts, but if you've ever heard some of the odder Arab conspiracy theories, it's certainly not that nuts. It would have been a low-cost project, and who knows, maybe it could have worked.
Well, many Arab liberals of them are being repressed or refused access to fair elections because they oppose US and Israeli policy. So a US willingness to allow Arab liberals to organise, by pressuring the governments of Jordan and Egypt to stop repressing them, is in fact necessary to allow them to do their thing.
Posted by: Otto | January 29, 2005 at 08:52 AM