Ayman al-Zawahiri | BIG GREEN

As I’ve mentioned more times than I should have, I have had very low expectations for the Biden foreign policy since the beginning. By “the beginning”, I mean well before his election, when you couldn’t find foreign policy positions on his campaign web site for love or money. Biden’s fifty-year track record on foreign affairs is not a particularly good one. I remember him saying he was “ashamed” of Reagan’s “constructive engagement” policy towards apartheid South Africa back in the 1980s. Um …. that’s about it.

These past two weeks have done little to change my mind on this. The drone assassination of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al Qaeda leader, prompted a lot of fist-pumping on the part of mainstream Democrats and some never-Trump Republicans. A similar amount of jingoism accompanied House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, as well. I’m not certain what the expected takeaway is for either of these decisions, but it the point was to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that the current Democratic leadership is well vested into America’s imperial enterprise, they certainly succeeded.

A child of bad policy

Ayman al-Zawahiri was a terrible person, there’s no question. I think, though, as we are the one global super-power, it’s probably a good idea to consider how our policy may have contributed to his no-goodness. Al-Zawahiri started down the road to al Qaeda when he was imprisoned by the Mubarak regime, where he and his fellow prisoners from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood were tortured, killed, and otherwise abused. Egypt, I will remind you, has long been a major recipient of U.S. aid, far beyond what nearly every other nation has received from us. If Egypt’s notoriously brutal prison system contributed to al-Zawahiri’s radicalism (which it most certainly did), we bear considerable responsibility for that.

Secondly, there likely wouldn’t have been an al-Qaeda for him to join up with if it hadn’t been for (1) the Afghan CIA operation during the 1980s, and (2) the first gulf war in 1990-91, when U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia for the first time, remaining there long after Iraq was driven from Kuwait. Again, these were policy choices, not forces of nature. Without multiple interventions in the middle east and southwest Asia, America might not have been such a big, attractive target for these people. Can’t be sure, but …. might have been worth a try.

Worst of the worst?

Then there’s the question of how many lives were lost at the hands of al-Zawahiri. I would argue far too many. As Rachel Maddow pointed out on her show last week, he had a long history of planning terrorist actions, including being one of the masterminds of the September 11 attacks, the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and so on. So, thousands of live lost. Not a nice person, right?

Now, there should be some reckoning as to how that record stacks up to the record of his pursuers. All killing is intrinsically bad, so I’m not suggesting that the rapacious policies of the United States somehow lessen the severity and the cravenness of al-Zawahiri’s attacks. But if it’s bad when he does it, then it’s bad when others do it as well, right? And if others do a lot more killing than he did, well … that makes them particularly bad, right?

Let’s just stick to the wars that followed 9/11. How many people died as a result of our actions? Was it less or more than the number of al-Zawahiri’s victims? In all honesty, America’s victims through this period run in the high six-figures to perhaps seven figures. Several countries were destroyed essentially beyond recovery. Fist pump, anyone?

Unfair comparisons

Okay, I know …. it’s really not fair to compare nation states like the U.S. to non-state actors like al Qaeda or individuals like al-Zawahiri. Nation states have international obligations, responsibilities, and should at least formally be accountable to their populations. Terror networks are kind of a law unto themselves, though international law does bear on them. But honestly …. shouldn’t we expect more out of our own government then that they should be responsible for hundreds or even thousands of times the number of deaths caused by our most ruthless enemies?

Seems like kind of a low bar.

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I should start out by saying that I have never been unhoused. There’s a good reason for that – I am a CIS-gender white male who grew up in a middle class / upper working class family. (In other words, dad didn’t have any college but made a decent living during a time when white men with no degree could do okay, not great.) The American economy is set up for people like me, and I benefited from my place of advantage.

That means that, even when I was broke, there was a home I could go to. That home had equity, and when my parents passed away, some of that equity was passed along to me. Poor Americans, Americans of color, non CIS gender American largely do not enjoy this level of privilege. When they run into money trouble, it’s for real, and a lot of them go without food, medicine, or a roof over their heads as a result. In a country as wealthy as this one, that’s worse than a scandal; that’s a crime. What can we do about this?

If it works in Austria, why not here?

We have public housing in America. It’s not much to write home about, though, and it’s been under attack for decades. In my home town, a fair number of the units have been bulldozed. They were substandard in a lot of ways, built on undesirable patches of land, some of them close to brown fields where lead smelting was done a century or more ago, leaving poisonous residue that persists to this day. It’s not that different elsewhere, and public housing tends to reflect the high level of contempt that wealthier Americans feel towards the less fortunate.

As Americans, we tend to get cynical about government’s ability to change things for the better. It’s only fair to point out that other nations have provided for housing rights much more effectively, and they are not countries that have anywhere near the resources we have. One good example is Austria, where socialists put an exceptional public housing system in place in the 1920s that somehow survived WWII and is still rolling. There are others, but I think the key is to treat housing as a right, not a privilege, and to direct public investment towards building livable communities, not just units.

The problem is the same damn one it always is

Of course, the housing crisis in America is a product of the craven for-profit industry that has grown up around real estate and rental properties. Just as a general principle, anything that is a necessity for a decent life should not be a commodity. People should be able to get the food, water, housing, fresh air, clothing, and health care they need to thrive. These necessities should not be contingent on your ability to earn large amounts of cash. People should not be dependent upon good fortune to keep a roof over our heads.

It’s not a question of not having enough money. Of course we have the money to solve this problem. We spend enormous amounts of money on military hardware alone, largely because doing so lifts the political fortunes of members of congress. It does nothing to keep “us” safe. What would keep more of “us” safe is investing that money into sustainable housing. The only real obstacle to giving people what they need is the blinkered way we tend to think about what others deserve. As Heather McGhee pointed out much more elegantly in her book The Sum of Us, white people would rather screw themselves than share resources with black people.

How about this – nobody gets a second home until everyone has a first one.

Zero dark bullshit

Everyone on MSNBC is fist pumping over the CIA’s killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian cleric who was Bin Laden’s right-hand man and later head of Al Qaeda. They’re pulling out the John Brennans, the Richard Engels, the John Kirbys. I will have more to say on this next week, but these people are no better than the Republicans on foreign policy. Al-Zawahiri was a horrendous person, but by sheer body count over the past thirty years alone, we make him look like a piker.

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An unhealthy dose of imperial fetishism