by JOHN FEFFER
It’s easy to make fun of Michele Bachmann: her history gaffes, her Christian extremism, her ludicrous political positions. Journalists, though, would be sad to see her leave the Republican primary race, since she can be reliably counted on to make an outrageous statement to enliven a slow news day. Last week, for instance, she blamed the Arab Spring on the Obama administration. “You want to know why we have an Arab Spring?” she asked her audience at a Republican Party fundraiser in New Hampshire. “Barack Obama has laid the table for an Arab Spring by demonstrating weakness from the United States of America.”
You’re probably wondering why Bachmann thinks the Arab Spring is a bad thing. And why she believes the Obama administration caused something that it was so slow in supporting in the first place and remains ambivalent about even today.
The answer lies in a peculiar association that Bachmann – and an unfortunate array of politicians and analysts – makes between strong-arm leaders and the prevention of Islamic radicalism. In an updated version of the classic Cold War rationalization, these anti-jihadists argue that the United States must support dictators around the world in the fight against the larger, more existential enemy. The key moment of transition from the anti-communist to the anti-Islamist era came in 1992, when the Algerian army stepped in to prevent an electoral victory by the Islamic Salvation Front. The United States and its allies simply looked the other way at this detour from democracy. The resulting civil war was devastating and served only to radicalize the Islamist movement in Algeria.
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