Reply to Stephen Zunes

Reply to Stephen Zunes

Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

Stephen Zunes does make a credible case that he has directed the bulk of his work to the critical analysis of U.S. and U.S. client-state abuses and that it is unfair to accuse him of focusing only on governments that are U.S. targets.[1]  We had done this in passing when we quoted an independent blogger who named Zunes as a member of a "clique" (our word) that takes an interest in the "democratic" potential of countries only when the "U.S. wants to bring down a government by military force, attempting to refocus any First World opposition away from opposing imperialism and toward 'bringing down dictators by nonviolent means'."[2]  As the inclusion of Zunes' name in the original version of our text was wholly tangential to the larger case that we made there as well as in Part 1 and Part 2, and as in personal communication (December 19), Zunes had already convinced us to remove his name from the paragraph in question, we have done so.

We do believe, however, that Zunes' aggressive reaction to our one-time mention of his name is excessive and may well betray the serious vulnerability from which he and his colleagues suffer. 

Zunes is a prominent advocate for "nonviolent conflict," and has written analyses of its general theory as well as some of the concrete efforts to put it into practice.[3]  But our disagreement with Zunes is about some of the major events on the international stage over the past decade or longer, and whether their histories ought to be understood in the manner in which Zunes' work has portrayed them.  Specifically, we are referring to U.S. destabilization and regime-change campaigns which we believe to be follow-ons to earlier, similar campaigns by the CIA, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, and a vast and proliferating number of NGOs, many supported directly or indirectly by Washington.[4]  Although Zunes' writings on these campaigns have not always followed the U.S. party-line, oftentimes they did—and the major campaigns, such as in Yugoslavia (2000), the several "color revolutions" within the former Soviet bloc (e.g., Georgia in 2003, the Ukraine in 2004), and Iran (2009), most surely did.  He invested considerable moral capital in these four cases, and it is interesting to see the lengths to which he went to downplay and even deny the role of the United States and other Western states and NGOs in carrying them out, always careful to promote them as "indigenous" flowerings of the kind of "people-power" that anyone who supports freedom and democracy ought to support.

Leftists and progressives who adamantly oppose U.S. imperialism are often torn when asked to support "democratic" movements and "nonviolent" resistance instead.  It is a disturbing fact about Zunes' work that he has repeatedly made such a plea.[5]  We find it highly revealing, therefore, that one month before the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, while opponents of the imminent war were organizing protests on the streets of America's cities, Zunes was extremely harsh towards Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), which had successfully mounted some of the major protests.  "It's one of the Leninist, Trotskyist organizations that has emerged in the past few decades," he told the Washington Times, and exercises a "disproportionate influence in some sectors of the peace movement."  But Zunes identified an even more serious problem with ANSWER and related anti-war organizations: Their leaders "are not willing to say a bad thing about Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic.  And if you ask questions, they accuse you of red-baiting."[6]  Hence, no glowing rhetoric about "people power" and the genius of "civilian-based movements" where opposition to the U.S. war machine was the issue.  Only comments that discredited the anti-war movement in a manner that Zunes never extended to protesters against one of the regimes targeted by the United States.

Zunes has had a long connection to the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, an NGO where he holds the nontrivial title of chairman of its Academic Advisors Committee.[7]  ICNC founder and chairman Peter Ackerman[8] was a board member and eventual chairman of Freedom House (September 2005 - January 2009), an institution that has been as clear an instrument of U.S. foreign policy as has the CIA itself.  While U.S. anti-war activists were still organizing to oppose the then-just-initiated U.S. aggression against Iraq, Ackerman joined with 21 other Freedom House trustees to issue a statement in support of the war, and to express their hopes for "Saddam Hussein's removal" and the "building of a democratic Iraq."[9]  His credentials as an advocate for U.S. imperialism could not be more clear.

Ackerman and ICNC President Jack DuVall[10] have been explicit about using NGOs for destabilization campaigns.  Thus in writing about how "civilian-based struggle makes a country ungovernable through strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other nonviolent tactics—in addition to mass protests—crumbling a government's pillars of support," Ackerman and DuVall counseled that although "Iranians have the resources" to carry out a regime-change operation similar to the one that toppled Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia in 2000, Iranians lack the "know-how."  Such "know-how," they added, "should not come from the CIA or Defense Department, but rather from pro-democracy programs throughout the West"—in other words, from the kind of "nonviolent-conflict" consultants that the ICNC was founded in 2001 to supply.[11]  As Allen Weinstein, a longtime engineer of foreign elections at the behest of several U.S. presidential administrations, admitted to the Washington Post in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."[12]  Two decades later, the "Age of Overt Action" has grown in sophistication—and by light-years in the technology available to it—from where it was at the time of the Soviet Union's collapse.

Note that Ackerman and DuVall were publicly advocating their how-best-to-destabilize-Iran line as early as July 2003, and that the example upon which they drew was the successful campaign three years earlier against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.  Among the sponsors of this form of interference in the internal affairs of foreign countries, the so-called "Bulldozer Revolution" that toppled Milosevic in 2000 is widely regarded as the prototype for a whole series of regime-change campaigns known as "color revolutions."[13] 

 

Zunes' writings about this case paid lip-service to the fact that the U.S.-led NATO bloc had been warring on Yugoslavia for almost a decade, including the large bombing war of 1999, and that this exercised considerable influence on the country's political environment.  But we regard his writings on Yugoslavia as a prototype for how best to deny the crucial role of powerful foreign actors in bringing about regime-change in a targeted country.  Shortly after Milosevic's ouster, Zunes wrote that the event showed the "power of ordinary people…to make history," and that any attempt to credit the United States or NATO was badly misguided[14]—incredible statements, given the efforts to dismantle the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and the damaging and disruptive effects of these efforts.

 

Zunes' denial of the importance of foreign actors in these 2000 events also runs into the problem that the ensuing ten-year domination of Belgrade by NATO sycophants has never once brought forth a second surge in these alleged "democratic forces," and one could plausibly ask why they suddenly disappeared from the political scene after October 2000.  In a retrospective ten years later, Zunes provided the answer: "With the success of the democratic revolution, Otpor was unable to sustain itself as an independent movement and eventually dissolved"—more realistically, Otpor ("Resist"), the street-protest-delivering instrument used against Milosevic, had its financial plug-pulled once its mission was accomplished.  However, some of Otpor's "former leaders" did go on to found the Centre for Applied Nonviolence Action and Strategies, Zunes added, and this "independent NGO disseminated the lessons learned from their successful nonviolent struggle through scores of trainings and workshops for pro-democracy activists and others around the world…."[15] 

 

Zunes also echoed himself from 2000: "Neither the US president's leadership nor NATO's vast arsenal was responsible for Serbia's dramatic transition.  Credit belongs solely to the people who faced down the tanks with their bare hands…."  These comments badly misrepresent the actual users of force in this transition, the fact that it was a coup that terminated a still working democratic process, and, as noted, ignores the massive intervention from the outside that included organization, planning, tools, and large sums of money.  We wonder whether Zunes would have written in 1990 that credit for the transition in Nicaragua from Sandinista rule to the U.S.-backed rule of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro belonged solely to the Nicaraguan people and not to the contras, the continued U.S. military threat, and the decline in per capita income of some 50%? 

 

Zunes was also very enthusiastic about the "people power" regime-changes in Georgia and the Ukraine, and his writings on these two cases repeated the pattern that he used on the former Yugoslavia.  As in Yugoslavia, where the opposition greeted the official results of the September 24, 2000 presidential election with claims of vote fraud and protesters gathered outside key governmental buildings even though the challenger Vojislav Kostunica received a reported 48% of the vote to Milosevic's 40% (necessitating a runoff that never materialized[16]), in both Georgia's November 2, 2003 parliamentary election and the Ukraine's November 21, 2004 presidential runoff election, the challengers as well as U.S.-sponsored observers also claimed vote fraud as protesters kept-up anti-incumbent actions in the capital cities and elsewhere until the official results were discarded, with the incumbent parties replaced by challengers.  Thus in all three cases, allegations of fraud in national elections were used to delegitimize incumbent regimes and to turn segments of each country's publics against them.  But whereas the establishment U.S. consensus (as well as Stephen Zunes) holds that these were "revolutions" brought about by "democratic" movements, in fact they were to a great extent foreign-driven political transitions to regimes more to the United States' liking.

 

Downplaying the role of the United States and other foreign actors in Georgia's "Rose Revolution," Zunes wrote that the Bush administration was "not responsible for the change of government," although it "soon moved to take advantage of the change the Georgian people brought about…."[17]  Incredibly, he also wrote that Georgia's incumbent President Eduard Shevardnadze was "strongly supported by Washington," and "continued to receive the strong support of President George W. Bush" straight through Shevardnadze's resignation on November 24.  Just as incredibly, he wrote that Richard Miles, the U.S. ambassador to Georgia in 2003 who had also served as the head of the U.S. mission on Yugoslavia at the time of Milosevic's ouster, supported Shevardnadze against Kmara ("Enough"), which Zunes characterized as a "decentralized student-led grass roots movement." 

 

Here we see Zunes systematically denying both the U.S. effort to replace Shevardnadze and the U.S. support for Kmara as a street-protest-delivering instrument.  So committed is Zunes to promoting the "nonviolent conflict," "democratic," and "people-power" elements of the "Rose Revolution" that when a presidential election was held on January 4, 2004 to elect Shevardnadze's successor, and the U.S. trained and U.S. favored Mikheil Saakashvili triumphed with a remarkable 96% of the votes, Zunes found nothing amiss with this outcome—whereas Georgia's November 2, 2003 parliamentary election was "marred by a series of irregularities," the election that gave the presidency to Saakashvili was "certified as free and fair by international observers"! 

 

The same problematic emphasis of Zunes' work was evident in late 2004, when he reprimanded "elements of the American left" for committing a "grievous error, both morally and strategically, in their failure to enthusiastically support the momentous pro-democracy movement in the Ukraine."[18]  The "Orange Revolution," he gushed, was an "inspiring triumph of the human spirit against authoritarianism and repression," and "one of the most notable popular democratic uprisings in history."  Not only had it "captured the popular imagination of millions of people in the United States and around the world," but leftists and progressives should "not deny ourselves this occasion to celebrate an incipient peoples' victory."  Zunes then outlined four "arguments" that he claimed leftists and progressives had been making against throwing their support behind Ukraine's "pro-democracy movement," and how each of these arguments "play[ed] into the hands of the neoconservatives."[19] 

 

But this so-called "revolution" shared all of the components of the regime-change campaigns in Yugoslavia and Georgia, including a foreign-funded and trained street-protest-delivering instrument known as Pora ("It's time"), and allegations of fraud first in the presidential election (October 31), followed by allegations of fraud in the runoff election (November 21), followed by the challenger Viktor Yushchenko's eventual victory in yet a third election that foreign observers finally baptized as "free and fair" (December 26).  This was the kind of toxic mix of foreign interference and playing to the Western media that Zunes lauded as a "triumph of the human spirit," and he chided leftists and progressives for not climbing aboard the Orange bandwagon.  Zunes' work on the 2004 regime-change campaign in the Ukraine was apologetics at its crudest.   

Zunes' apologetic themes were evident once again in 2009, when in the aftermath of Iran's June 12 presidential election, he wrote that "It is not clear whether the opposition can successfully organize a 'people power' revolution [of the kind that has] succeeded in ousting autocrats who attempted to steal elections in such countries as the Philippines in 1986, Serbia [i.e., Yugoslavia] in 2000, or Ukraine in 2005…," but that "it is clearly a home-grown indigenous struggle," and the "best thing the United States can do to support a more open and pluralistic society in that country is to stay the hell out of the way."[20]  That by this moment in Iran's history, it was much too late to admonish the United States to stay "out of the way," and that the major components of the post-election response inside Iran, including the challenger's allegations of a stolen election (repeated enthusiastically in Western capitals) and the street protests that were inspired by this lie ("What happened to my vote?"),[21] conformed to the familiar techniques put into play against regimes dating back to Yugoslavia (at least), was dismissed by Zunes as the musings of crackpot bloggers and misguided leftists.    

Nine days later, Zunes followed-up with a commentary that emphasized Iran's "stolen election" and noted that it was the main challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi's "suspicious loss [that] prompted the uprising."[22]  Now he stated categorically that the "United States had nothing to do with the massive unarmed insurrection against the Iranian regime"—as with the former Yugoslavia, an incredible assertion, given the cumulative impact of the massive U.S. wars on Iran's neighbors, the U.S. military encirclement of Iran, the harassment and isolation of Iran over its nuclear program, the sanctions, the open investments in "democracy-promotion" efforts, the support of terrorist attacks, and the threats of large-scale aggression by the United States and its Israeli client.[23]  Just as he did with Yugoslavia, Georgia, and the Ukraine, Zunes accepted the allegations of vote fraud in Iran's presidential election, and he treated the post-election response of the protesters as deriving from a "popular movement" with "genuine indigenous origins."  No U.S. destabilization campaign could ask for more of its observers than to turn blind-eyes towards these now standard techniques, and pretend that they don't exist, but for the past decade, Zunes has done just that—and on Iran, we once again regard his work to be crude apologetics. 

 

Concluding Note

 

Stephen Zunes has done some very good work,[24] but in 2000, he wishfully read-into the regime-change campaign against Yugoslavia a triumph of "people power" and "nonviolent" resistance, and he has been misreading such campaigns ever since.  We find it astonishing that for over a decade, he has failed to notice any connection between the relentless power-projection by the U.S.-led NATO bloc,[25] on the one hand, and the rise of the "democracy promotion" and "nonviolent conflict" NGOs, on the other, with their heavy concentration on the countries that once comprised the Soviet bloc and now border on Russia.[26]

 

We also find it astonishing that, in the four cases surveyed above, Zunes maintained his geopolitical-denying mode across the map, stripping all four anti-regime actions of significant historical contexts both within and, more important, beyond their countries' borders.  Thus he wrote that a "surprising number of leftists in the United States and other Western countries" mistakenly believe that "popular civil insurrections against autocratic regimes are part of some grand U.S. conspiracy," and, like Iran's leaders, also believe that the "pro-democracy uprisings in [Yugoslavia], Georgia, and Ukraine earlier this decade were an American plot to advance U.S. imperialism."[27]  Zunes' use of the words "plot" and "conspiracy" is as pathetic as it is revealing.  Is the view that the spread of the National Security State throughout Latin America from 1954 to 1990, and the return of Honduras to a dictatorship from the date of its June 2009 coup d'état onward, flowed from U.S. power and policy interests nothing more than conspiracy-mongering? 

 

It is disturbing to watch Zunes repeatedly downplay the role of foreign money, knowledge, and power at work behind regime-change campaigns, and hype the "democratic" credentials of the opposition to targeted regimes.  Indeed, the latter is an especially powerful cocktail for sowing confusion among leftists and progressives, whose minds tell them to oppose imperial causes, but whose hearts warm to emotionally manipulative rhetoric about the "homegrown" nature of "pro-democracy" movements.    
  

Most disturbing of all, though, Zunes' work asks us to swallow the pro-imperial premise that the United States, U.S. allies, and the "nonviolent conflict" and "democracy promotion" NGOs have the right to interfere in the lives of peoples everywhere.  No leftist or progressive accepts this right, but Zunes never questions it. 

 

Edward S. Herman
David Peterson

 

---- Endnotes ----

 

 [1] See Stephen Zunes, "Herman distorts the facts," ZCommunications, December 19, 2009.  Zunes was responding to Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "Iran and Honduras in the Propaganda System: How the Left Climbed Aboard the Establishment's Bandwagon" (ZCommunications, December 15, 2010), specifically the second paragraph of the section titled "Louis Proyect Versus Louis Proyect."  For two examples in which Zunes focused on a regime supported by the United States, see Stephen Zunes, "Showdown in 'Tegucigolpe'," Foreign Policy In Focus, July 10, 2009; Stephen Zunes, "The Power of Nonviolent Action in Honduras," Yes! November 8, 2009.  

 [2] See Louis Proyect, "Peter Ackerman: billionaire sponsor of toxic NGOs," The Unrepentant Marxist, October 3, 2007.

 [3] See, e.g., Stephen Zunes, Lester R. Kurtz, and Sarah Beth Asher, Nonviolent Social Movements: A Geographical Perspective (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1999), esp. Zunes' own Ch. 3, Ch. 7, and Ch. 11 in this volume.  In the "Conclusion" to this volume, Zunes and Lester R. Kurtz write: "There have been movements in Third World countries which have shaken the foundations of authoritarian rule only to have the regime bailed out by large infusions of aid and assistance from the United States and other Western governments.  It is unlikely the Salvadoran junta could have survived the nonviolent uprising in the early 1980s were it not for US support; the failure of the nonviolent movement led to a bloody civil war which cost the lives of tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians.  In many respects, it was not the failure of nonviolence by the Salvadorans but the failure of nonviolent action by those in the United States to change US policy of support for the Salvadoran junta.  Similarly, it is unlikely that Israel could have afforded the enormous financial and diplomatic costs of its suppression of the Palestinian intifada were it not the more that $4 billion of annual subsidies the US sends to prop up the Israeli occupation.  There was virtually no nonviolent action in the United States to challenge US policies of large-scale support to Israeli's right-wing government, resulting in the current US-led 'peace process' which still denies the Palestinians national self-determination and encourages violence and instability" (pp. 319-320).  As both the regime-support and the regime-change headquarters of the NATO bloc, these comments on the lack of an effective, well-organized, civilian-based, nonviolent, direct-action network within the United States itself, where so many of the experts who study this topic live and work, are as damning as they are revealing. 

 [4] See Gerald Sussman, Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Europe (New York; Peter Lang Publishing, 2010), esp. Ch. 3, "The Infrastructure and Instruments of Democracy Promotion," pp. 67-121.

 [5] See, e.g., Stephen Zunes, "Nonviolent Action and Pro-Democracy Struggles," Foreign Policy In Focus, January 24, 2008.

 [6] In Julia Duin, "Protests for Peace," Washington Times, February 16, 2003. 

 [7] See the biographical entry for "Stephen Zunes" on the ICNC's "Academic Advisors Committee" webpage.

 [8] See the biographical entry for "Peter Ackerman" on the ICNC's "Officers, Staff and Advisors" webpage.

 [9] See "Freedom House Statement on Iraq War," Press Release, March 20, 2003.  Ackerman's co-signers included Freedom House Chairman James Woolsey, Brian Atwood, Samuel Huntington, and Jeane Kirkpatrick.

 [10] See the biographical entry for "Jack Duvall" on the ICNC's "Officers, Staff and Advisors" webpage.

 [11] Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, "The nonviolent script for Iran," Christian Science Monitor, July 22, 2003. 

 [12] See David Ignatius, "Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups," Washington Post, September 22, 1991.  As Ignatius explained at the time: "When…covert activities surfaced (as they inevitably did), the fallout was devastating. The CIA connection, intended to protect people and organizations from public embarrassment, had precisely the opposite effect.  'A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA', agrees [Allen] Weinstein. The biggest difference is that when such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection. Allen Weinstein is just one of many overt operatives who helped prepare the way for the political miracles of the past two years by sponsoring exchanges and other contacts with liberal reformers from the East. It's worth naming a few more of them, to show the breadth of this movement for democracy: William Miller of the American Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations; financier George Soros of the Soros Foundation; John Mroz of the Center for East-West Security Studies; John Baker of the Atlantic Council; and Harriett Crosby of the Institute for Soviet-American Relations. This has truly been a revolution by committee."

 [13] Evidence for the prototypical status that the 2000 overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic holds in the pantheon of "nonviolent conflict" and "democracy promotion" can be seen in the treatment that the ICNC has devoted to it.  In the 13-page "Discussion Guide" that accompanies Steve York's documentary film Bringing Down a Dictator (A Force More Powerful Films, 2001), we read that "In preparing for the September 2000 elections that ultimately unseated Milosevic, the opposition had extensive help in the form of financial assistance and training from the United States and European countries," and that a "number of factors contributed to the overthrow of Milosevic, especially financial assistance and training from the United States" (p. 6).    

 [14] Stephen Zunes, "Credit the Serbian People, Not NATO," Foreign Policy In Focus, October, 2000.

 [15] Stephen Zunes, "Serbia: Ten Years Later," Truthout, October 10, 2010.

 [16] On September 27, 2000, a runoff election between Vojislav Kostunica and Slobodan Milosevic was announced for October 8, but on October 6, Milosevic announced his resignation as president and withdrew from the runoff, leaving Kostunica the only remaining candidate.

 [17] Stephen Zunes, "U.S. Role in Georgia Crisis," Foreign Policy In Focus, August 14, 2008.

 [18] Stephen Zunes, "Why Progressives Must Embrace the Ukrainian Pro-Democracy Movement," Foreign Policy In Focus, December 1, 2004.

 [19] For a current example of this resort to the technique of laying guilt-trips on leftists and progressives with respect to Iran, see Daniel Postel and Nader Hashemi, "Why Peace Activists Should Take an Active Interest in the Green Movement in Iran," Truthout, December 24, 2010.

 [20] Stephen Zunes, "The Iranian Uprising Is Homegrown, and Must Stay that Way," Foreign Policy In Focus, June 20, 2009.

 [21] On the stolen-election lie in Iran 2009, see Eric A. Brill, Did Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Steal the 2009 Iran Election?, Self-Published Manuscript, last updated  August 29, 2010.  Also see Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "Riding the 'Green Wave' at the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and Beyond," MRZine, July 24, 2009; and Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "Chutzpah, Inc.: 'The Brave People of Iran' (versus the Disappeared People of Palestine, Honduras, Afghanistan, Etc.)," MRZine, February 20, 2010.

 [22] Stephen Zunes, "Iran's Do-It Yourself Revolution," Foreign Policy In Focus, June 29, 2009.

 [23] See e.g., Seymour M. Hersh, "Preparing the Battlefield: The Bush administration steps up its secret moves against Iran," New Yorker, July 7, 2008; Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "The Iran Versus U.S.-NATO-Israeli Threats," MRZine, October 20, 2009; and Christopher Dickey et al., "The Shadow War," Newsweek, December 20, 2010.

 [24] See, e.g., Stephen Zunes and Jacob Mundy, Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution (Syracuse University Press, 2010).

 [25] See, e.g., Rick Rozoff, "Lisbon Summit: NATO Proclaims Itself Global Military Force," Stop NATO, November 22, 2010.

 [26] See Sussman, Branding Democracy, Ch. 4, "Democracy Promotion in Central and Eastern Europe," pp. 123-179.

 [27] Zunes, "Iran's Do-It Yourself Revolution."