Washington assaults democracy from Pakistan to Middle America

The disdain for democracy shared by Democrats and Republicans alike is visible from California and Ohio to Gaza and Pakistan.

Washington’s claim to defend democracy has played an integral role in its justification of everything from “manifest destiny” and the indigenous genocide it enabled, to Pax Americana and the human rights abuses on which it has relied over the past 75 years.

America’s bipartisan, self-congratulatory rhetoric has never matched the reality. But rarely has the disparity between rhetoric and reality grown more vast than over the past few weeks. Yet, even most Americans critical of U.S. foreign policy remain ignorant of where, beyond Gaza, Washington continues to assault democracy and human rights today.

Connecting some dots

I’ve written recently about the hypocrisy of Democrats who claim that democracy is on the ballot while backing a president chosen by party elites, insulated from primary challengers, and allowed to duck debates and ignore mounting concerns about his mental fitness and advancing age. The pattern appears even worse when considering the policy records of Biden’s predecessors.

I’ve also written recently about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Biden's complicity in international human rights violations, and the crisis of democracy in America it indicates given the abject refusal of anyone in Washington to heed the millions of voices from coast to coast and around the world clamoring for basic human rights in Gaza.

My most recent post addressed another theater, where Washington’s hypocrisy when claiming to stand for democracy has grown inescapably apparent: the country from which my parents immigrated in order for me to be born in England, and raised in the United States. I observed how the Super Bowl distracted attention from a recent coup in a nuclear state encouraged and enabled by the Pentagon. In fact, that post was charitable to Washington: I intended at the time to dedicate an entire post to Israel’s “Super Bowl Massacre” in Rafah before current events overtook my intentions.

This post aims to highlight Washington’s attacks on democracy and human rights beyond Gaza. Joe Biden’s support for Israeli genocide there has destroyed his prosects of re-election. But even the genocide in Gaza is the tip of an iceberg.

Democrazy in America

Political scientists have long accepted official statements about America's supposed support for democracy as gospel, despite evidence from Laos and Cambodia, to Nicaragua and Chile, suggesting that it has never been more than a convenient canard to cover up imperial brutality and the theft of natural resources from countries lacking the wealth that the United States enjoyed in the wake of the Second World War.

First, the United States has forcefully intervened (i.e., invaded, staged a coup, or funded & supplied a military junta) in dozens of countries over the course of decades. This pattern has repeatedly reversed the results of democratic elections whenever convenient for Wall Street or the Pentagon. That pattern has destroyed democracies from Vietnam to Nicaragua.

Second, Washington has also overseen dramatic and vicious attacks on the domestic dissent on which democracy actually relies. This was the pattern that defined the McCarthy era in Washington, the decades when the FBI waged its relentless war on Americans pursuing their constitutionally protected rights, and also the new era of attacks on marginalized voices from San Francisco all the way to Washington.

I serve on the board of an organization called Defending Rights and Dissent, after having led for six years one of the organizations whose merger created the organization. The reason why I’ve dedicated so many countless hours to that movement is because I understand democracy as more than a buzzword, more than a campaign slogan trotted out by hypocritical self-promoting liars, and ultimately, the standard by which Washington’s institutional sincerity can be measured since it remains an object of (at least theoretical, if not real) bipartisan consensus.

America’s latest attack on democracy

Pakistan is the world’s fifth most populous country. It is a nuclear power. It has played a crucial role in  US foreign-policy over the past generation, particularly as a staging ground for the war in Afghanistan, and, ironically, the haven in which Osama bin Laden took refuge when America focused on bombing its next door neighbor.

Pakistan has a relationship to democracy not unlike that of the United States. Both countries bray about their supposed commitments to popular rule, while repeatedly undermining it in practice. In 2007, I visited Pakistan with a dozen other lawyers and law students from across the U.S. to document “Pakistan’s struggle for democracy” in the face of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy that overtly undermined it.

Our investigation was prompted by the military coup that made former army general Pervez Musharraf the head of state. Washington choosing Pakistan’s leaders is not without precedent: Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a democratically elected Prime Minister, was deposed in 1977 by a military general backed by the Reagan administration. This was all just before the era when the CIA and foreign proxies (often trained by the U.S. military) began murdering priests and labor organizers across Latin America.

I wish this post were just about forgotten US and world history. Unfortunately, my concerns find reflection in current events, as well. 

Earlier this month, national elections in Pakistan appeared to be generating surprising electoral windfalls for the PTI, the party led by democratically elected Prime Minister, Imran Khan. Khan had been previously arrested by Pakistani authorities at Washington’s behest.

Ironically, the basis for his detention was publicity surrounding the U.S. State Department message inviting his removal from office. Pakistani authorities claimed that he had violated Pakistan’s national security by revealing to the public Washington’s plot to depose him.

When the intelligence agencies of one country remove a democratically elected leader in retaliation for his exposing their complicity with foreign intelligence agencies to seize control over a government, there can be no plausible claim to advance democracy.

What happened in Pakistan over the past two weeks was nothing short of a bloodless coup opposed by millions of people disenfranchised, ultimately, by the United States.

A protest in Pakistan following the arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan

In that respect, the only deviation from Washington’s decades-long pattern is the effective seizure of Pakistan’s government without filling thousands of graves.

Most recently, an election commissioner publicly admitted his role in tampering with election results. Rather than prompting widespread accountability, his admissions led to his arrest, while the beneficiaries of his fraud remain in power because they are favored by Washington and the legions of journalists who serve as its stenographers.

The costs of empire

America claims to support democracy around the world. But the shoe unfortunately does not fit—even here in the United States.

Hundreds of millions of Americans have been denied any opportunity to influence the choice among presidential candidates for the general election. Meanwhile, Pakistanis marched and voted by the millions despite tremendous obstacles, only to fall prey to scheming and subversion emanating from Washington’s vast international tentacles.

Those tentacles aren’t just picking Prime Ministers in Pakistan. They are also enabling an Israeli genocide that has killed tens of thousands of Gazans, including children guilty of nothing more than being born to dispossessed and displaced families in an inconvenient place.

As the United States continues to collapse into a pit of its own making, one hopes that American voters can pin the tail on the proverbial donkey (and elephant) responsible.

Looking at international relations to the lens of promoting democracy reveals that there are very few good actors in the world today. In Putin’s Russia, the leading critic of the prevailing regime just died in prison under mysterious circumstances suggesting that, after enduring years of persecution, he was effectively assassinated. In the United States, the parties are discarding even the vestigial trappings of democracy, disregarding elections while also embracing bipartisan attacks on the press, as well as grassroots dissent.

Many voices share concerns about the seeming inexorability of the mounting global climate catastrophe, or the genocide in Gaza, or the crisis in state violence targeting innocent civilians elsewhere. The emergence and continuing acceleration of each of those problems have all been enabled—perhaps even ultimately driven—by the erosion of democracy.

The whole is sadly worse than the sum of its parts. And those parts resist “solutions” that aim to address one while ignoring the others.

If humanity has any hope of surviving an unstable future, we must first establish democratic control over our respective governments. Too many voices presume that struggle for democracy has been already won, not recognizing the authoritarianism that becomes all too apparent when reading between the lines published by co-opted newspaper editors.

Paid subscribers can access an editorial recently published by a corporate newspaper to which I plan to respond in my next post. The editorial demonstrates everything wrong with journalism today, and conspicuously avoids any reference to the ongoing federal lawsuit that aims to hold the publisher & its co-opted editorial board accountable for their history of publishing election disinformation favoring the Democratic establishment.