My posts on this blog tend to address three themes. One, topical stories that don’t always make the front page, such as my recent posts on Honduras and Switzerland. Two, Afghanistan because of its importance to US foreign policy and because better governance is integral to ending the war.  Three, criticizing the Obama administration for its apparent preference for stability over democratization.  Sometimes a post from the third category has been a bit of a rant, so I want to explain myself. Read the rest of this entry…

The (UK) Independent’s Adrian Hamilton, slams the Obama administration’s foreign policy of prioritizing diplomacy over political reform in places like Burma, Iran, North Korea,

We are back, in other words, to the old world of propping up discredited and oppressive regimes because stability has once again become more important than values…

…the problem of the doctrine of spreading democracy and humanitarian intervention was not that the aims were necessarily wrong, but they were used as cover for a Western assertion of power that was entirely contradictory to them…

You have only to travel almost anywhere abroad to understand just how much damage the charge of hypocrisy has done to “our cause” as we talk of “democracy” and “freedom” while all the while interfering to the opposite effect.

…we should stand here saying to those who want freedom abroad: “Yes, we are on your side, we won’t keep quiet as to your plight and if you want a safe haven, our doors are open here.”

I agree fully.  The lesson the Obama administration seemed to have learned from the Bush administration was that pushing for democracy has no place in US foreign policy.  Yet, as Hamilton notes, the administration’s efforts to advance democracy were typically insincere.  Moreover, the world didn’t turn against the US because the Bush administration advocated for democracy, but because it started wars.  The Obama administration sees diplomacy as a policy.  It’s not.  It’s a means to a policy.  And if the Obama administration values diplomacy over democracy in countries like Egypt and Iran where the people want change, the image of the US will not improve.

MA in Democracy and Governance co-director, Dan Brumberg, writes about the growing disillusionment of Egypt’s democracy advocates with the Obama administration in the Washington Post’s On Faith blog:

During my recent visit to Cairo, I heard some of these young people during a conference on “Emerging Leaders for Democracy.” Listening to them, I realized just how many had been inspired by President Barack Obama’s election. Indeed, most looked to his June 4 Cairo University speech as a harbinger of a new U.S. policy, one that they hoped would be based, at least in part, on a frank dialogue about human rights and democracy in Egypt.

Five months later, not a few of these aspiring leaders are now asking whether the President’s fine words will be matched by fine actions. Certainly, they know that they must look first and foremost to themselves for answers. But they still wonder if their dreams matter to an administration that is focused on the security challenges emanating from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Israel/Palestine. So far, they can be forgiven for thinking that U.S. policymakers do not seem troubled by the growing chasm between a fragmenting state and a fractious society, many of whose young people yearn to be heard both at home and abroad.

As readers of this blog know, I am growing frustrated with Obama’s diplomacy policy.  It is important to recall that diplomacy is a means to a policy objective, not a policy objective.  The administration believes that diplomacy can help repair the US’s image abroad.  That is a fine hypothesis.  They would be wise to recognize, however, that if people living in repressive countries perceive the US as indifferent to their desires for political reform, the image of the US will suffer as well.

OK, so I am a day late.  I wrote a very favorable post about the TV show recently.  If you want to get a feel for how much of a difference it can make, I highly recommend the clip “I wanna be mania” at Alam Simsim, the Egyptian version of Sesame Street.  I have shown it to lots of people.  The typical reaction before people see it is “yeah, right.”  The typical reaction after seeing it is “wow.”

Dan Brumberg, co-director of the MA in Democracy and Governance program at Georgetown University, writes that admitting the challenges the US faces in Afghanistan is going to be a tough sell in the Washington Post’s On Faith blog.

MA student Samuel Tadros along with Amr Bargisi writes about wide-spread anti-semitism among Egyptian liberals in the Wall Street Journal.

Samantha Shapiro has a very good article in today’s New York Times magazine about Sesame Street in Palestine.  While the article focuses a lot of attention on the sort of insane details that makes resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so maddening (such as a fight between Israeli and Palestinian writers over whether hummus was an Israeli or a Palestinian food), the article talked briefly about the show’s efforts to help children cope with difficult social problems in many troubled parts of the world.  Intrigued, I decided to look into their work in more detail.  It blew me away.  Truly, literally, I kid you not, it blew me away.  I am a cynical about most international development projects (derived from personal experience), and thus don’t expect much from these types of programs.  Not in this case.  The folks at Sesame Street are doing some amazing work.

Sesame Workshop (SW), the policy and program development arm of the Sesame Street shows, develops television shows in a number of very difficult environments around the world to help children cope with deep social and political problems.  The work is truly impressive.  First, SW develops programs in a number of harsh conflict and post-conflict countries, such as Kosovo, Northern Ireland, and Palestine.  Not only do their programs teach values such as cooperation, tolerance, and solving problems non-violently, but they also address the anxieties and fears children who live in these countries tend to feel.  Second, SW tailors their shows to the situations relevant in each country.  In Egypt, Alam Simsim stresses the importance of educating girls, an important government priority.  In Palestine, Shara’a Simsim teaches boys to solve problems non-violently.  In South Africa, Takalani Sesame focuses on removing the stigma of having HIV/AIDS.  I watched one of the video clips dealing with this issue and was extremely impressed.  Third, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funds a lot of this work.  I used to work at USAID and still cooperate closely with them.  I never knew they supported Sesame Street programs in other countries.  The work is phenomenal, yet USAID does not go out of its way to publicize their support for it.  This is amazing considering how much abuse USAID takes for being ineffective.  If I ran USAID, I would put Elmo on USAID’s homepage, hire Big Bird as a receptionist, and hang a giant banner of Bert and Ernie outside USAID headquarters.  This is great work.  Promote it shamelessly.

The New G8?

By the way, if you need your daily dose of cynicism, here it is.