Hueys Over Yemen
by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt, April 29, 2011

Recently, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates attended a groundbreaking ceremony at Mount Vernon for a National Library for the Study of George Washington. (“I’d like to thank the Mount Vernon Ladies Association for extending this invitation to me…”) He used the occasion for a full-throated defense of the American right to support democracy and freedom with extreme and remarkably self-interested selectivity in the Middle East. “The most successful leaders, starting with Washington,” he told the ladies, “have steadfastly encouraged the spread of liberty, democracy, and human rights… We have at times made human rights the centerpiece of our national strategy even as we did business with some of the worst violators of human rights. We have worked with authoritarian governments to advance our own security interests even while urging them to reform…”

And here, after a fashion, was the good news he had to offer, if you didn’t happen to be a Bahraini, a Yemeni, or from other states where we still like “doing business” with those “violators of human rights” and “authoritarian governments”: “When we discuss openly our desire for democratic values to take hold across the globe,” he said, taking a conveniently long view of history, “we are describing a world that may be many years or decades off.” …more