Lack of freedom in the Middle East--I have tasted it :(

Back in 2004, I went to Dubai during a trip to India.  No, I didn't stay at the Burj Al Arab--I merely stood outside the gates and took the photo on the right.  They don't pay me enough to have even a cup of coffee there!

I stayed at a decent hotel that was a couple of blocks away from my brother's apartment.  A few hours after checking in, I went downstairs to check my email from the computers in the lobby.

I typed in www.wou.edu and waited for the university's home page to load up so that I could get to the email.  Boy was I shocked when instead of the familiar page, the monitor displayed in big, bold, bright red colors "Site Banned."

It was one hell of a shock that completely rattled me.  My immediate thoughts were along the lines of, "if I can't access my university email, then what are the other ways in which anybody might be watching my moves?"  My next thought was whether I should hide my American passport and identity, and kind of merge in with the huge Indian population there.  Particularly because my trip there was soon after the American invasion of Iraq, which wasn't favorably viewed especially in the Middle East.

For the rest of the four days that I was there, I hid my American identity as much as I could.  I couldn't wait to get the heck out of Dubai and the UAE.

I couldn't understand then, nor can I even now, how people continue to live in societies where simple freedoms are circumscribed by big brother governments.  My brother suggested that I find a university job in Dubai or anywhere in the Middle East because they paid American faculty a whole lot of money.  I laughed it off--I didn't want to offend him by describing the "site banned" incident and how I way prefer to be a pauper in a freer society than otherwise.

Do I think that freedom is a universal right?  I am not ready for that leap of faith. All I know is that I prefer freedom and, as I tell students, I would take America any day over any of the countries that I have visited or read about.  The primacy of freedom is also why I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU--you should too.

I do wish for a world without authoritarian regimes, and for people to have the option to choose freedom.

Barack O'Bush stays on course with wiretapping. Screw privacy!

Not a good way to start a week: the radio-alarm kicked in with NPR's Steve Inskeep talking with retired congressman, Lee Hamilton.  In a measured pace, Hamilton referred to Obama's foreign policies not being that much different from Bush's.  Half-asleep still, I pick up the local paper, which screams in its headlines that the Obama administration wants to expand wiretapping--which began under Bush.

I was sure that Glenn Greenwald would have said something about this; he does:

What these Obama proposals illustrates is just how far we've descended in the security/liberty debate, where only the former consideration has value, while the latter has none.  Whereas it was once axiomatic that the Government should not spy on citizens who have done nothing wrong, that belief is now relegated to the civil libertarian fringes.  Concerns about privacy were once the predominant consensus of mainstream American political thought. 

Greenwald notes that America is no different from Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates (and India too?) that demand:

full, unfettered access to all communications.  Amazingly, the administration had the temerity to condemn the UAE's ban on Blackberries on the ground that it impedes "the free flow of information," but in response, the UAE correctly pointed out how hypocritical that condemnation was:

Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE Ambassador to the United States, said [State Department spokesman P.J.] Crowley's comments were disappointing and contradict the U.S. government's own approach to telecommunication regulation.

Not a good beginning to a week, which is also the beginnings of a new academic year.
And, here is how Greenwald ends his commentary:

What makes this trend all the more pernicious is that at exactly the same time that the Government is demanding greater and greater access to what you do and say, it is hiding its own conduct behind an always-higher and more impenetrable wall of secrecy.  Everything you do and say must be accessible to them; you can have no secrets from them.  But everything they do -- including even criminal acts such as torture, assassinations and warrantless surveillance -- is completely off-limits to you, deemed "state secrets" that not even courts can review in order to determine their legality.

Well, renew your ACLU membership, and fight for civil liberties that, yes, the Constitution guarantees us.

So, the Middle East is going nuclear?

First, in order to counter Israel's nuclear bomb, the anti-Israel Arab world was keen on developing an "Islamic bomb". As India too got quite "explosive", Bhutto (Benazir's father) famously commented:"There's a Hindu bomb, a Jewish bomb and a Christian bomb," Bhutto once wrote. "There must be an Islamic bomb."

As Iraq got into that, Israel launched a brilliant attack that destroyed Iraq's key facilities. Much later, Pakistan detonated its nuclear devices to tell the world that it has arrived. A few months ago, something happened in Syria that nobody still talks about. But, speculation is that Israel wiped out some kind of a nuclear ambition that Syria had.

Yesterday (I think it was) as I was driving, I head on NPR that France was selling Saudi Arabia civilian nuclear power generating technology. Because, the Saudis want to prepare themselves for a world without petroleum--when they are sitting on the world's largest reserves that they can tap into for practically no cost at all.
I was not happy with all this talk about selling nuclear tech to the crazy guys in the Middle East. Because these are not democratic countries. We have no idea who the next ruler will be, and what kind of crazy things he will want to pursue.
And then I read this:

We are witnessing the beginning of a Middle East nuclear arms race. Iran's rivals do not want Tehran to gain the military, political, and diplomatic advantage that nuclear weapons convey. They are beginning the decades-long process of developing technologies to match Iran's capabilities. All of this is legal, by the way, under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In fact, nuclear weapon states are obliged to sell non-weapon states nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. It is one of the two grand bargains in the treaty. And it could spell our doom.

Not all Middle East powers may see civilian nuclear programs as a hedge against Iran. But recent history is instructive. The burgeoning interest in nuclear energy perfectly coincided with a set of events in the summer of 2006. At that time Western efforts to rein in Iran's enrichment program began to fail. The United States was becoming further mired in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and appeared unable to stop an Iran now freed of its main regional rivals. Iran's leaders expanded their military influence through aid to Hezbollah in the Israeli-Lebanese war. Referring to the changing atmosphere in 2006, Jordan's King Abdullah II observed, "The rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region." My translation: "After this summer, everybody's going for nuclear programs." Given the context, the connection to Iran's growing strength and spinning centrifuges is clear.

Now, instead of persuading Jordan and others to refrain from setting off a proliferation cascade in the Middle East, the United States is joining the Chinese, French, and Russian salesmen eagerly peddling the tools to do it.

At its core, this is a deeply flawed method for preventing proliferation. It continues the Bush approach of dealing with problems state by state, dividing them into good guys and bad guys, rewarding friends with nuclear treats and trying to deny them to enemies.

It does not work.

Great! after we are done with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, next decade will be all about uncontrolled chain reactions in the Middle East. Thanks. Now I can sleep well! Dr. Strangelove, any pills for me? :-)