Canuck; glad you liked it.  Levine has been consistently smart, and seemingly pretty wise in his editorials at Al Jazeera throughout the Arab Spring movements.  He knows the nations and plenty of history well, and has even been a bit prescient in anticipating events and moves by the various players.

On this thread and others, I’ve been discouraged that some of the old beliefs and memes about the Arabic world are still in place.  Throughout the progression starting with the Jasmine Revolution, we’ve been given such an overwhelming opportunity to open our minds to a different understanding of the histories, not only of which dictatorial regimes have been de facto client states of the US, but the debunking of the theory of Arab Exceptionalism, for instance.  Or that because their leaders had quashed rebellions in the past, that  there were still underground movements training and planning for the days when the winds of freedom might signal critical mass for successful uprisings, even though the end results might take different forms, like for Algeria: a Constitutional Monarchy might be enough for now.

When I consider Flavius’s trust that the CIA has hipped Obama to certain facts that cause him to reverse his position of support for those seeking democracy in Bahrain, for instance, it depresses me.  One, that anyone with a brain hasn’t learned that the CIA has teamed up with JSOC and private contractors like Blackwater and are essentially running their own agendas (or whomever gives the orders), or if they are under Presidential/Defense orders, they are so covert as to be beyond scary, astounds me.  If the Raymond Davis debacle in Pakistan didn’t prove it, I can’t think what would.

And two, that the media and the Powers that Be have been so successful about Iranians as Devils Incarnate that some of us can believe that other Shia are about to become Islamist Terrorists, not the Freedom Fighters they actually are.  We seem slower than I’d imagined to grasp that what our leaders assure us is ‘good for our country’ as Flavius mentions might be good for arms and weapons and fighter jet sales, or for securing the oil (that Wall Street will speculate on to increase the prices we’ll pay), but is not healthy for us in the long term, i.e., making enemies of the brown people all over the globe who see our policies as subjugating them in favor of keeping useful dictators in power, or forcing neoliberal economic policies that promote more and more radical wealth disparities.

Yemen, yeah, I get the administration is almost coherent there: the government pretends they haven’t okayed our drone kills, and keeps the money we send.  So maybe the protestors are inconvenient to our agenda.  Check.  And I’ll dodge the craziness of our actions in Pakistan (not brokering peace between P and India over Kashmir, etc.), but they have NUKES, for godssakes, and we should engage more comprehensively.

I get why Levine thinks we are becoming irrelevant; but the trouble is that we still have enormous power, thus potential to screw things up even worse, which we seem destined to do.  Mind-boggling.