Just who does she think she’s fooling? – Dana Frank on Hillary Clinton’s role in the destruction of Honduran democracy and lives

“Look, you, maybe you've got everyone around here fooled with this saint act you have going, but do not ever speak to me again like we don't know what really happened, you got me?” – Tess McGill in Working Girl





By the way, I wrote at the time in 2009 (and linked to more) contesting the mendacity of Clinton pet and Honduran-oligarchy mouthpiece Lanny Davis.

Venezuela in the mesh

Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1948 In the Mesh – a scenario for a film which was never produced as such – isn’t his best work. His emerging themes of political responsibility and the use of violence in liberation movements are largely sidelined in favor of a melodramatic portrayal of a love quadrangle (which itself is marred by sexism), the characters and their relationships are simplistically drawn, and many of the events are improbable.

But it’s of interest for two reasons. First, for its suggestions of experimental film techniques, marking a different artistic path for Sartre, who preferred “transparent” writing that didn’t draw attention to itself. Film, it seems, freed him to try new creative approaches. More important, for the premise of the film, even if it wasn’t realized as well as it could have been. It was prescient for 1948 and is of continuing relevance today.

The movie is set in a small, oil-rich country. It begins with a revolutionary storming of the presidential palace, and the action follows a hastily convened trial of the overthrown president for his seven years of repressive rule. We understand through trial testimony and flashbacks that he himself had been a revolutionary leader who rose to power in similar circumstances, and is seen to have betrayed the very movement he once led. While he came to power with a promise to nationalize the oil fields, he hasn’t done so. He’s restricted the press and refused to call free elections. He’s undertaken a mechanization of agriculture in the face of mass opposition from the country’s farmers and violently repressed their rebellion. The insurgents demand explanations.

We learn over time that he was operating under powerful constraints from the start. Moments after entering office, he was informed by the representatives of the government controlling oil concessions – presumably the US, but never named – that any nationalization would be regarded as an act of war and would result in an invasion and/or occupation. All of his actions, in his view, have responded to this dreadful possibility. He couldn’t nationalize, and democracy would have led immediately to legislative decisions to do just that. He was caught in the mesh. The only option he saw was to stall long enough for the superpower to become involved in a dispute with the other superpower and lose interest, which could take years but appeared to him the best of the very limited options.

Sartre set the film for some reason in Europe, but it would have more plausibly taken place in Iran or another less powerful nation of the global south. The constraints on movements and governments attempting to claim popular sovereignty, nationalize national resources, and institute social welfare policies in the face of US imperialism became all too clear in the years that followed. Outright invasion and occupation have been joined by covert actions: staged and assisted coups, the installation of puppet regimes, destabilization, underground support for the rightwing opposition, economic and resource warfare, financial warfare, diplomatic warfare, propaganda and (social) media warfare,…

Venezuela is facing these offensives, and has been since 1999 when it openly defied US dictates. Reading Sartre’s scenario, you wonder why the leader didn’t tell his comrades about the threat or include them in the decision, why he didn’t reach out to those in other countries in a similar situation. But that was to come in reality. In response to Venezuela’s defiance, as Sartre foresaw, the attacks never end, or even abate. A news search for the country reveals a constant barrage from the US government and its subservient media. Determined to have their way – or what they foolishly believe is their way - they won’t stop.

Whatever happens in today’s legislative – not presidential, as the English-language corporate media would have us believe – elections, the one certainty in the immediate future is that Venezuela will continue to be caught in, and its people to struggle against, the mesh.

COWSPIRACY

Now on Netflix:

Quote of the day – Oh, FFS

“‘Kissinger’s official biographer’, writes the man Kissinger first asked to be his official biographer, ‘certainly gives the reader enough evidence to conclude that Henry Kissinger is one of the greatest Americans in the history of the republic,…’”

[Source]

From an unofficial biography.

(They’re all men, by the way: neoliberal men, neoconservative men, imperialist men, biographical men, Islamist men, secular-nationalist men, ambitious men, historiographical men, critical men, theoretical men, anti-imperialist men,... It’s a regular club.)

Quote of the day – being aware of the social position from which you speak

« Il est important d’être conscient-e-s du ‘point de vue situé’ c’est-à-dire avoir conscience d’où on parle. Je suis une femme blanche, française, sans problème de papiers, sociologue, de classe plutôt aisée donc. J’ai vécu au Mexique, au Salvador juste après la guerre, en Colombie, au Brésil, en République dominicaine. Les féministes lesbiennes noires, indiennes et les femmes ayant vécu des situations de guerre m’ont appris énormément de choses. ».

- Jules Falquet, speaking at the “Feminist Economic Alternatives to the Dominant System” workshop, September 13, 2015

If you read French, I urge you to read the whole report. Carla Sandoval’s discussion of anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial feminism in Latin America is especially important.

Chomsky Q&A at the New School

The transcript is here. Some highlights:

…The major center of radical Islam, extremist radical Islam, is Saudi Arabia, unquestionably. They are the source of the Wahhabization of the region, which Patrick Cockburn points out is one of the major developments of the modern era. Who’s the main supporter of Saudi Arabia? You are. You know, that’s where your tax dollars go. It’s been for a long time. Right now tens of billions of dollars of arms being sent under Obama, but it goes way back.

…The most extreme and interesting example [of the US government supporting a secular state in the Middle East] is Saddam Hussein, who was greatly loved by the Reagan administration and by the Bush I administration. I could give you the details, but they were so supportive of Saddam Hussein that he was even given a gift that otherwise only Israel has been granted, no other country. He was permitted to attack a U.S. naval vessel, killing a couple of dozen American sailors, and to get away with it with just a tap on the wrist. Israel had done the same thing in 1967. Saddam Hussein did it in 1987. And the friendship for Saddam Hussein was so enormous that he was granted that right. And that was a secular state. In fact, George Bush number one even invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in nuclear weapons production. That’s a pretty supportive relationship. So there are cases where the United States has supported secular Islam, but typically it’s radical Islam that has been the beneficiary of U.S. support, like Britain before it.

…The only conceivable hope for some resolution of this horrendous crisis [in Syria], which is totally destroying the country, is the kind of negotiated settlement that was worked on by serious negotiators, like Lakhdar Brahimi, an international negotiator, very respectable, sensible. And the main idea, which—shared by any analyst with a grey cell functioning, is some kind of negotiated settlement which will involve the Assad government, like it or not, and involve the opposition elements, like it or not. There can’t be negotiations that don’t involve the parties that are fighting. That’s pretty obvious, just as South African negotiations had to involve the leadership of the apartheid state. There’s no other way. They can’t have other negotiations. It’s perfectly obvious that the Assad government is not going to enter into negotiations that are based on the condition that it commits suicide. If that’s the condition, they’re just going to keep destroying the country. That unfortunately is the—has been the U.S. position of the negotiations. U.S. and its allies have demanded that negotiations be based on the precondition that the Assad government will not survive. It’s a horrible government, and I’d like it not to survive, but that’s a prescription for destroying Syria, because it’s not going to enter into negotiations on those terms.

…I think what’s actually happened is that during the whole so-called neoliberal period, last generation, both political parties have drifted to the right. Today’s Democrats are what used to be called moderate Republicans. The Republicans have just drifted off the spectrum. They’re so committed to extreme wealth and power that they cannot get votes, can’t get votes by presenting those positions. So what has happened is that they’ve mobilized sectors of the population that have been around for a long time. It is a pretty exceptional country in many ways. One is it’s extremely religious. It’s one of the most extreme fundamentalist countries in the world. And by now, I suspect the majority of the base of the Republican Party is evangelical Christians, extremists, not—they’re a mixture, but these are the extremist ones, nativists who are afraid that, you know, ‘they are taking our white Anglo-Saxon country away from us’, people who have to have guns when they go into Starbucks because, who knows, they might get killed by an Islamic terrorist and so on. I mean, all of that is part of the country, and it goes back to colonial days. There are real roots to it. But these have not been an organized political force in the past. They are now. That’s the base of the Republican Party. And you see it in the primaries. So, yeah, Trump is maybe comic relief, but it’s just a—it’s not that different from the mainstream, which I think is more important.

…The United States did not—it was a—it may have been—it was probably the richest country in the world back in the early 19th century, but not the most powerful country. Britain was the most powerful. France was a powerful country. And that changed over the years, especially with the First World War and finally with the Second World War. So, exceptionalism has greatly expanded as power expanded. And I say again that this exceptionalism was also true of other great powers during their day of imperial power and domination.

…Israel is now - does play a major role - small country, but good high-tech industry, and it plays a major role in repression and aggression. It’s developed - the Israeli arms fairs, where they sell their arms, they advertise, correctly, that they have developed advanced means of repression and control, and that the arms that they’re displaying are battlefield-tested, namely against the Palestinians. So they’ve refined the techniques of control. And they contribute to that all over the place—in Central America, even in the United States. They’re providing advice on how to bar Honduran immigrants, say, from coming to the United States. They help train police and so on, many examples.

…One of the major doctrines of international affairs, which doesn’t appear in the literature, is the Mafia doctrine. International affairs are run like the—very much like the Mafia. The godfather does not tolerate disobedience. It’s much too dangerous. So, if some small storekeeper somewhere, say, doesn’t pay protection money, the don doesn’t accept it. You send their goons to beat him to a pulp, even if you don’t need the money, because others might get the idea, then things might start to erode. That is a dominant principle of international affairs. In fact, that was the reason for the 1953 coup [in Iran, orchestrated by the CIA], when you look back. And it’s also the reason why—for U.S. hostility to Iran, which is extreme. I mentioned the support for Saddam Hussein. That was an attack on Iran, and a serious one. But they defied orders. They overthrew a U.S.-imposed tyrant. They thumbed their nose at the United States. And you don’t get away with that.

…Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy’s Latin American adviser, reported to him the report of his Latin American mission, said the problem is the Castro idea of taking matters into your own hands, which appeals to others in the hemisphere where people suffer similar repression, and you can’t let that idea spread.

His assertion that in Syria the US government “has taken a somewhat hands-off position, except that it’s supporting its allies” is an understatement. I hope to write more about this soon, but see, for example, this revealing document, here, and here.

Dear Rachel Maddow,

Hugo Chávez was not a dictator. He was a popular, democratically elected president of Venezuela. You imperil Venezuelan democracy and empower the Right in Venezuela and the US when you repeat such bogus characterizations. There are very real forces working diligently to overthrow South American democracies and to (re)establish US-dominated corporatocracies, real dictatorships, and your carelessness has helped their cause. Millions of lives are at stake. I hope you’ll be more responsible in the future, and correct this error from tonight’s broadcast.

Update: This goes for you, too, Bernie Sanders.

She didn’t ask him to answer on behalf of the State Department and CIA

...or to fail to mention his own warmongering. But this is how Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch decided to respond to Amy Goodman’s question about the US role in creating the conditions for mass migration to Europe:

AMY GOODMAN: So what does the United States have to do with it? I mean, you have these massive conflicts that have roiled the globe. Do we have a responsibility here?

KENNETH ROTH: Well, yes. If you look at why people are fleeing—let’s take the Syrians, who are the largest percentage. In an ordinary war, you can get some degree of protection by moving away from the front lines. But in Syria, Assad is dropping barrel bombs in the middle of civilian neighborhoods that happen to be controlled by the opposition. There is no safe place to move in Syria if you’re in opposition-held territory, which is why we have 4 million refugees from Syria today. So one very important thing to do is to go to the root causes of this, to try to put real pressure on Assad to stop barrel-bombing civilians, and to take comparable steps in the other major refugee-producing countries, like Somalia, Eritrea and Afghanistan. You know, let’s not forget why we have this crisis. It’s not that everybody woke up this morning and thought it would be nice to move to Europe. These people are being forced out because of severe conflict and persecution.

“These are governments of the transnationals”: Manuel Zelaya on Democracy Now!

“It is possible that plans are underway right now to establish fascist dictatorships such as those that we had in the 20th century, here now in the 21st century. There is a difference, though. It is true that there is a conservative restoration, but it is also true that the peoples have awoken. The people are no longer willing to just see it happen. The people are taking to the street, and they protest, and they call for their rights to be respected. That is the hope that we have in my country, that the 99 percent have taken to the streets.”

(Full transcript here.)

The Saudi Cables and the TPP Healthcare Annex

Two new troves of documents published by Wikileaks: the Saudi Cables, of which a portion were released yesterday (evidently the most damning are to appear any moment now...), and the TPP Healthcare Annex (to the “transparency” chapter), which was released last week.

The Saudi Cables:

Today, Friday 19th June at 1pm GMT, WikiLeaks began publishing The Saudi Cables: more than half a million cables and other documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry that contain secret communications from various Saudi Embassies around the world. The publication includes “Top Secret” reports from other Saudi State institutions, including the Ministry of Interior and the Kingdom’s General Intelligence Services. The massive cache of data also contains a large number of email communications between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and foreign entities. The Saudi Cables are being published in tranches of tens of thousands of documents at a time over the coming weeks. Today WikiLeaks is releasing around 70,000 documents from the trove as the first tranche.

…

The Saudi Cables provide key insights into the Kingdom’s operations and how it has managed its alliances and consolidated its position as a regional Middle East superpower, including through bribing and co-opting key individuals and institutions. The cables also illustrate the highly centralised bureaucratic structure of the Kingdom, where even the most minute issues are addressed by the most senior officials.

[Source]

As’ad AbuKhalil has a post today about the Saudi regime’s comical – well, they would be comical were the regime not in the habit of imprisoning, torturing, and beheading noncompliant “citizens” – warnings:

This is hilarious. The Saudi foreign ministry issued this directive to its citizens: It reads: ‘Dear Aware Citizen: Avoid entering any site for the purpose of obtaining leaked documents or information that may be untrue, for harming the security of the homeland’. Kid you not. The second one reads: ‘Dear Aware Citizen: Don’t publish any documents that may be untrue which could aid the enemies of the homeland in attaining their goals’. Kid you not.

The TPP Healthcare Annex:

Today, Wednesday 10 June 2015, WikiLeaks publishes the Healthcare Annex to the secret draft “Transparency” Chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), along with each country's negotiating position. The Healthcare Annex seeks to regulate state schemes for medicines and medical devices. It forces healthcare authorities to give big pharmaceutical companies more information about national decisions on public access to medicine, and grants corporations greater powers to challenge decisions they perceive as harmful to their interests.

Expert policy analysis, published by WikiLeaks today, shows that the Annex appears to be designed to cripple New Zealand's strong public healthcare programme and to inhibit the adoption of similar programmes in developing countries. The Annex will also tie the hands of the US Congress in its ability to pursue reforms of the Medicare programme.

The draft is restricted from release for four years after the passage of the TPP into law.

…

Few people, even within the negotiating countries' governments, have access to the full text of the draft agreement and the public, who it will affect most, have none at all. Hundreds of large corporations, however, have been given access to portions of the text, generating a powerful lobby to effect changes on behalf of these groups.

[Source]

Historical quote of the day

“You’re going to be puking up everything in your guts, you shitty intellectual.”

- policeman’s comment to Benaissa Souami, 27-year-old Algerian political science student, prior to his torture in Paris by the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire), led by Roger Wybot, in 1958; from his testimony reported in Gangrene, compiled by Béchir Boumaaza, published in 1959 by Éditions de Minuit and immediately seized by the French government, which also destroyed the printing plates

Historical quotes of the day

“It’s a Washington…where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none of our environment or our workers who’ve seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear, workers whose right to organize and unionize has been under assault for the last eight years.

…

You know, in the years after her husband signed NAFTA, Senator Clinton would go around talking about how great it was and how many benefits it would bring. Now that she’s running for President, she says we need a time-out on trade. No one knows when this time-out will end. Maybe after the election…. ”

– Obama on the campaign trail speaking in Janesville, Wisconsin, February 2008 [Source]*

“[Obama advisor Austan Goolsbee] was frank in saying that the primary campaign has been necessarily domestically focused, particularly in the Midwest, and that much of the rhetoric that may be perceived to be protectionist is more reflective of political maneuvering than policy.

…Noting anxiety among many US domestic audiences about the US economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign. …[H]e cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.”

– Joseph De Mora, Canadian political and economic affairs consular officer, “REPORT ON US ELECTIONS – CHCGO MEETING WITH OBAMA ADVISOR AUSTAN GOOLSBEE” [Source]

“I would immediately call the president of Mexico, the president of Canada to try to amend NAFTA because I think that we can get labor agreements in that agreement right now. And it should reflect the basic principle that our trade agreements should not just be good for Wall Street, it should also be good for Main Street.”

“We should use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage to ensure that we actually get labor and environmental standards that are enforced.”

- Obama on his supposed plan as president to prioritize renegotiating NAFTA [Source] [Source]

“At a time when the economy has been shrinking drastically and trade has been shrinking around the world...we probably want to make the economy more stabilized in the coming months before we have a long discussion around further trade negotiations.”

- Obama explaining to reporters why he won’t be moving to renegotiate NAFTA, August, 2009 [Source]

“[M]ake no mistake, this administration is committed to pursuing expanded trade and new trade agreements. It is absolutely essential to our economic future.”

- “REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT ON FINANCIAL RESCUE AND REFORM,” Obama speaking to representatives of the “financial industry,” Federal Hall, New York City, September 14, 2009 [Source]

Obama’s learned an important lesson: dispensing with even the pretense of democracy and cutting the public out of the process – except as passive recipients of placating paternalism – is much more efficient.

* (Some of these remarks are discussed in Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (2010). The first quotation is presented in historical context in a recent post by John Nichols at The Nation - “Why So Many Democrats Rejected Obama’s Lobbying on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Deal.”)

The Kochs’ Libre Initiative

Not to be confused with the Honduran LIBRE Party…

The LIBRE Initiative is the Latino outreach program of the Koch brothers’ political network. With millions of dollars from the Kochs and their allies since its founding in 2011, LIBRE has established a presence in 10 states and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on deceptive political ads. Its ultimate goal, shared with the broader network of Koch organizations, is to build political power by electing anti-government conservatives to office at all levels. LIBRE’s job is to help right-wingers into office by a) convincing more Latinos to support anti-government candidates, and/or b) discouraging other Latinos from bothering to vote by running attack ads on progressive candidates.

LIBRE is also part of another right-wing tactic – convincing religious voters that opposition to progressive taxes, unions, and government regulation are actually biblical positions….

Like a Latino partner to the State Policy Network and ALEC, and a node in the Latin American rightwing network.

Historical quote of the day

“The PSYOP [Psychological Operations] aspect of the PRC [Population and Resources Control] program tries to make the imposition of control more palatable to the people by relating the necessity of controls to their safety and well-being.”

- US Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (1994, 2004)

Good piece by Paul Street on “Washington’s Continuing Murderous Middle East Myopia”

“No Wise Men Here: Gabriel Kolko and Washington’s Continuing Murderous Middle East Myopia”:

…The U.S. imperial establishment might still rule, but it does not do so through superior intelligence, vision, principles, planning, and strategy. As Kolko suggested in his synthesis Main Currents in American History (1976), it reigns instead thanks to deep structural fragmentation, powerlessness, cruelty, misery, and chaos in the imperial “homeland” and across the world system. It rules over and through disorder, drift, violence, division, and sheer inherited technological, institutional, and territorial advantage at home and abroad. The moment when underlying political-economic and other structural and conjunctural shifts and events will unseat the great post-WWII “rogue superpower” once and for all from its deadly global position cannot be precisely determined of course. There have long been signs that the death spiral of U.S. hegemony is underway; how long the process will take and whether humanity can survive it in decent shape are open questions….

Read the whole thing here.

Continuity and…more continuity in US government’s relationship with Latin America

Obama has appointed Mark Feierstein as Senior Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the National Security Council. He’s “Eager to continue efforts to foster prosperity/security in Americas.”

19 members of Congress send letter to Colombian president supporting cessation of aerial spraying

This happened yesterday, but I’ve only heard about it from Spanish-language sources - I haven’t turned up a single English-language or US-oriented news piece about it. As usual, information about Latin America, even when it involves our government and public funds, is deemed of little interest to us.

The letter is described, and the full text available, in a press release from the office of Rep. Sam Farr:*

“In addition to [Sam Farr (D-Calif.)] and [James McGovern (D-Mass.)], the letter was signed by Reps. John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.), Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), Beto O'Rourke (D-Texas), Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), Jared Polis (D-Colo.), Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.) Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), José Serrano (D-N.Y.), Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.)”

* Unfortunately, they make the typical error of describing what’s been sprayed as simply glyphosate.

Quote of the day

“No se puede descolonizar sin despatriarcalizar.” [“You can’t decolonize without depatriarchalizing.”]

- Bolivian feminist and anarchist María Galindo and Mujeres Creando

More graffiti from Mujeres Creando:

“The church crucifies women every day, feminism resuscitates them. (Happy Easter)”

“Sovereignty in my country and in my body.”

“Nothing more resembles a rightwing machista than a leftwing machista.”

An interview with Galindo:



And an article about her most recent book, ¡A despatriarcar! Feminismo urgente, at Feminicidio.net.

El guión oficial del movimiento gay es el matrimonio, el guión oficial de los indígenas es la reivindicación de los usos y costumbres, el guión oficial de las mujeres es el acceso al poder masculino, y así sucesivamente. (70)

The publisher’s description:

La fundadora del colectivo boliviano Mujeres Creando y creadora de “Ninguna mujer nace para puta” nos entrega con este libro una herramienta para la acción. Teoría hecha desde y para la práctica que analiza la historia moderna del feminismo, plantea una hipótesis sobre su fracaso y promueve acciones concretas para recuperar el poder liberador y de transformación de esta concepción de la realidad, las relaciones y el poder, que involucra tanto a mujeres como a hombres.

¡A despatriarcar! Feminismo urgente es un grito que nos convoca a salir de las trampas y casilleros para recuperar la calle y la alegría de crear, junto a otras y otros, nuevos horizontes.

Honduras is now the most dangerous country for environmental activists

Honduras Culture and Politics discusses a new Global Witness report about killings of environmental activists, which notes that Honduras is “the most dangerous country to be an environmental defender.”

They point to how the numbers killed in Honduras (111 people total between 2002 and 2014) increased abruptly after 2009, as shown in the Global Witness graphic:

From 2002 to 2009, Honduras had 0, 1, 2, or 3 deaths per year of environmentalists. Starting with 2010, those numbers skyrocketed: 21 deaths in 2010, 33 deaths in 2011, 25 deaths in 2012, 10 deaths in 2013, and 12 deaths in 2014. 90% of the Honduran environmentalist deaths occurred in the last 5 years!

Global Witness found that mining and other extractive industries caused the largest number of deaths in 2014, with a tie for the second spot between Water and Dams, and Agribusiness. These three accounted for 84% of the environmentalist deaths in 2014.

This violence has come down particularly hard on indigenous environmentalists. Three Tolupan leaders were shot and killed during an anti-mining protest in 2014.

Because readers of the blog are likely to be familiar with the country’s recent history, HCAP doesn’t explicitly point to the transformative event in 2009: the military coup against democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya. When Hillary Clinton worked to “render the question of Zelaya moot” and institutionalize the coup, this is what she helped set in motion. They also don’t mention – again because most readers will be all too aware – the impunity with which these crimes are committed. But I’m sure the Marines will help with that.

In short,…

“In short, Obama’s diplomacy at the Summit of the Americas in part consisted of going around promising not to overthrow his fellow leaders, which would be faintly ridiculous if Washington hadn’t in fact intervened so much in neighbors’ affairs.” – Juan Cole