Guy Rundle has an enjoyable swipe at "the right" in his latest Crikey column, noting they helped catalyse the Egyptian revolt years ago, when they invaded Iraq - Helping to form the resistance is the Right's legacy in Egypt

A week after the Egyptian uprising sent the Right into disarray, they appear to have regrouped somewhat more successfully than the leader they once favoured, Hosni Mubarak. In the final days of Mubarak's reign last week, the neocons suddenly remembered their conservative side, and started sounding like Edmund Burke.

Pundits who had greeted the chaotic looting and violence of the early days of the Iraq invasion with Donald Rumsfeld's insouciant remark -- "stuff happens" -- suddenly became wary of disorder and the mob, as a substitute for authority.

The early attempt to claim the uprising as a knock-on effect of the Iraq invasion died by and large died early, collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity, and most of the neocons at FIXED news and elsewhere switched to an obsessive fear of the Muslim Brotherhood, and an orientation of the whole region to the effect on Israel. "Meteor Will Destroy Earth -- Implications for Israel", will be the final Fox news headline.

The spuriousness of seeing the Egypt uprising as having any positive connection to the Iraq invasion is so multiple and ridiculous as to beggar belief, but it's probably worth briefly recapitulating. The Egyptian uprising was a popular grassroots uprising sparked by multiple events and conditions, organised by multiple networks of people, and involving a substantial self-regulation of force.

The Iraq invasion was an external invasion of one state by another, based on a spurious intelligence scare about WMD, and justified as a human rights intervention propter hoc. Even those who conceived it as that first and foremost had an utter indifference to any demonstrated will of the Iraqi people.

They were not different methods of achieving the same thing. They were utterly different types of things.

That difference came to the fore after the invasion, and of January 25 in Egypt respectively. After the Iraq invasion, social solidarity was zero -- there was simply a vacuum of order created by mass violence.

Into that vacuum rushed the genuinely nihilistic and individualistic -- thieves, looters and sectarians with scores to settle. Since the invading force was nihilistic as well -- with planning to protect the oil industry, while leaving the National Museum, whose collection contains the roots of around half the world's civilisations, to the wolves -- the invasion was a perfect void, filled with PR photo opportunities.

After January 25, protesters worked together not only to control outbreaks of armed violence, but also -- sometimes with the army -- to protect museums and libraries.

The utterly different character of the events has been so marked that the right has had to come up with a different angle. The one they've chosen -- as if all dribbling for the one bell -- is the question of "Arab democracy". This was the debate between neocons and realists as to whether democracy could "take root" in the Arab world, or whether its culture was inimical to the possibility.

The "realist" answer to this usually took a blatantly chauvinist form, muttering about Arab and Eastern dependency, etc, etc, conveniently ignoring the fact that democracy had been snuffed out by the West, in establishing the Shah, the Saud family and others as client rulers in the '40s and '50s. The neocon answer was, to quote the ever-wrong Mark Steyn, that Iraq would look like Connecticut in 18 months, and any doubts as to whether an imposed system could establish legitimacy was just racism.

The "Arab democracy" argument has returned as a way of trying to refute the argument that the left made at the time of the Iraq invasion -- that people can only meaningfully liberate themselves, and that the Iraq invasion actively prevented that.

That it did, there is no doubt. In 2005, the Bush administration made some noises about no longer tolerating autocracy. In 2006, Mubarak cancelled municipal elections, and banned presidential candidates other than he and his son. Concerned by the enthusiastic way in which the Muslim Brotherhood had taken up the notion of "no longer tolerating dictators", and facing chaos in Iraq, and Hamas in Gaza, they, well, this photo is from 2008.

Desperate to head this off, the right has tried to turn the Egyptian process into a neocon one. Thus Tom Heidi Switzer in The Drum, stages a debate between his conservative realpolitik self, and a "smug metropolitan" neocon buddy, the latter representing the only possible alternative interpretation. Melanie Phillips goes further suggesting that "the left are all neocons now", arguing that the only rationale for supporting a popular uprising (Egypt) and opposing an invasion (Iraq) is hatred of the US.

Phillips -- a pro-settler Zionist, climate-change sceptic, intelligent design advocate and proponent of the "MMR causes autism" theory -- wrote a hilarious blog post on The Spectator arguing that Obama had been "jaw-droppingly incompetent" in handling the matter and that his efforts had "backfired: at time of writing Mubarak is digging in his heels against this American pressure and is refusing to step down". It's particularly funny when you see the date: Thursday February 10. Barely 18 hours later, Mubarak was gone. Phillips was so incapable of seeing Muslims as agents of their own lives, it never occurred to her that Friday -- prayer day -- might bring a renewed pushback.

It's clear that no event will convince the Right that they need to look clearly at the world, without projecting their fantasies onto it. In the process over a decade, they've managed to discredit themselves across the Middle East and West Asia, to lose most of South America to the Left, and to see China spread itself deep into Africa through investment, while the US spent a trillion or two on futile wars.

Still the neocons did do one good thing in Egypt -- they helped the resistance form a few years ago. The group Kefaya ("Enough") that in turn formed many of the current uprising's leaders came together around 2003, protesting against the US invasion.

Crikey has an interesting article from Guy Rundle noting the passing of Irving Kristol - and that of neoconservatism (its also a good little history lesson, and much briefer than "The power of nightmares") - Rundle: The death of the neo-cons.

The obvious question on the occasion of Kristol's death is "what the hell happened?". Politically, Reaganism began to fall apart as soon as the cold war ended -- with one group of paleo-conservatives based around former Reagan director of communications Pat Buchanan coming out against the 1991 Gulf War, harking back to the old realpolitik basis of conservatism. Where, Buchanan and others asked, was the American interest in who ran Kuwait? It was not as if their oil would not come to market all the same.

For a new generation of neocons however, this was a jumping-off point. In the absence of global communism, neoconservatism had a chance to define itself as a set of positive values, to be exported to the world. Bush 41 and then Clinton had expelled these people from the White House, giving them the luxury of crafting a self-contained ideology in political exile.

With the addition of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilisations" the modernising energy rooted in Marxism, was joined by an ethnic and cultural particularism alien to it. Neonconservatism thus defined itself as both a universal approach to human governance, and a particular form of political-cultural life, namely an American one. The contradictions of this were never shaken out; and they are the reason for the chaotic pointlessness of a war like Afghanistan to this day.

By the time neoconservatism returned to power, with the Supreme Court coup of 2000, it was a cartoon version of the earlier movement, as occult and conspiratorial as a Dan Brown novel. Having parted with paleoconservatism, and its remnant traditions of realpolitik and isolationism, it was free to express a Jacobin spirit, of exporting revolution to the world, a return to the form, if not the content, of its Trotskyist roots -- and one of the reasons why latter-day Trotskyists such as Christopher Hitchens found it so easy to join the blurred crusade.

The neocons 1.0 had been secular Americanist Jews, initially with little interest in Zionism (the US Jewish population had been by far the least Zionist of the Diaspora until the 1960s). The neocons 2.0 elevated Israel and Zionism to a symbol and keystone of modernity and the West. When heritage enthusiast Mohammed Atta put those planes into the WTC, the whole mix became turbocharged.

By that time, both Kristol and Buckley were on the outer of the movement they had created. Buckley had never been hugely enthusiastic about the 2003 Iraq invasion, and would ultimately come out against it in National Review, the only columnist permitted to do so. The paleo-cons had decamped to a new magazine The American Conservative, and National Review had become a parody of itself. In the wake of 911, joke-figures like Ann Coulter ("we should invade the Muslim world, kill its leaders and Christianise it") came to the fore.

Creatures of the 24 hour news cycle and its insatiable appetite, they fed the raw need that the neocons had established -- the use of a supercharged patriotism, a jingoistic exceptionalism, to substitute for the slow and remorseless decline of American power, and the quality of American daily life for millions of people.

No less than black politics, or the queer movement, super-patriotism had become a form of identity politics for the white working-class and middle-class (the latter term now transferred to the working class itself -- in 2008, a publicity campaign by John Edwards addressed to "the American middle class" featured a picture of a man operating a factory lathe.). The process stripped it of all the attributes -- depth, reasoning, secularism -- that had allowed it to take a position of political command.

As countless memoirs now make clear, the Bush 43 White House during the WTC-Iraq-Afghanistan years was so utterly tangled up in its own fantasies and delusions that it could not begin to steer clearly. The unnamed official who remarked "we're an empire and we make our own reality" effectively provided the antithesis of Kristol's remark about being mugged by it.

The intellectual culture of neocnservatism was now dust. It's no coincidence, as an old Trot like Irving would once have said, that his son Bill introduced Sarah Palin to the national stage. The discourse of magazines such as Encounter, and Kristol's The Public Interest had been replaced by tomes such as Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism", which argued that the enthusiasm for natural fabrics and the Whole Foods store chain were a continuation of Mussolini's project by other means. It was only this decline that made it possible that a vacuum could be created, such as would make the election of a black Chicago community organiser even conceivable.

Mixed are the fortunes of political war -- war being the way in which Leo Strauss's lifelong friend, the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, suggested politics should always be defined. Conservatism in the US has intellectually collapsed into squalor, burnt-out in part by the supercharged nature of neoconservatism, its politics on steroids. European conservatism continues to cease to exist, clowns like Berlusconi and Sarkozy achieving nothing, the British conservatives now moving socially to the centre-left in many respects -- and the continental European vacuum increasingly occupied by a genuine neo-fascism.

One area where the neocons did survive was in British new Labour, where both Blair and Brown were influenced by Kristol's widow, Gertrude Himmelfarb, who called for the explicit state re-imposition of Victorian values, and turned the party of Methodism and Marx, into purveyors of a war-making surveillance state, in turn about to be dumped comprehensively by the voters. ...

All of which raises the question -- was neoconservatism the salvation of the right, giving it dominance for a generation, or the swansong of the West, its final supercharged hysterical claim of supremacy, against the cities crowding the horizon to the East. Was Irving Kristol its authentic expression -- or Dubya, the alcoholic saved by American Jesus, projecting his redemption onto the world?

UrukNet (not an impartial source, but of interest if you want to get a sample of one set of anti-American views from the middle east) has an article on the infamous "Order 81" and its impact on Iraqi agriculture - Mutant Seeds for Mesopotamia (via the Ron Paul Forums, of all places). William Engdahl and Naomi Klein have written about this subject before.

One would think that Iraqi farmers, now prospering under "freedom" and "democracy," would be able to plant the seeds of their choosing, but that choice, under little-known Order 81, would be illegal.

But first, it is important to set the context. Most people have never heard of the infamous "100 Orders," but they help explain why the majority of Iraqis remain opposed to foreign occupation. The 100 Orders allow multinational corporations to basically privatize an entire nation, and this degree of foreign and private control has not been witnessed since the days of the British East India Company and its extraterritoriality treaties.

A few examples of the 100 Orders are illuminating:

* Order 39 allows for the tax-free remittance of all corporate profits.

* Order 17 grants foreign contractors, including private security firms, immunity from Iraq's laws.

* Orders 57 and 77 ensure the implementation of the orders by placing U.S.-appointed auditors and inspector general in every government ministry, with five-year terms and with sweeping authority over contracts, programs, employees and regulations. (1)

Back to one of the most blatant orders of all: Order 81. Under this mandate, Iraq's commercial farmers must now buy "registered seeds." These are normally imported by Monsanto, Cargill and the World Wide Wheat Company. Unfortunately, these registered seeds are "terminator" seeds, meaning "sterile." Imagine if all human men were infertile, and in order to reproduce women needed to buy sperm cells at a sperm bank. In agricultural terms, terminator seeds represent the same kind of sterility.

Terminator seeds have no agricultural value other than creating corporate monopolies. The Sierra Club, more of a mainstream "conservation" organization than a radical "environmentalist" one, makes the exact same case:

"This technology would protect the intellectual property interests of the seed company by making the seeds from a genetically engineered crop plant sterile, unable to germinate. Terminator would make it impossible for farmers to save seed from a crop for planting the next year, and would force them to buy seed from the supplier. In the third world, this inability to save seed could be a major, perhaps fatal, burden on poor farmers." (2)

What makes this Order 81 even more outrageous is that Iraqi farmers have been saving wheat and barley seeds since at least 4000 BC, when irrigated agriculture first emerged, and probably even to about 8000 BC, when wheat was first domesticated. Mesopotamia's farmers have now been trumped by white-smocked, corporate bio-engineers from Florida who strive to replace hundreds of natural varieties with a handful of genetically scrambled hybrids.

Where does such hubris come from? It comes from the entire mission surrounding the invasion of Iraq, which, upon closer inspection, had been planned years in advance by a faction of "neo-cons" who adopted Leon Trotsky's glorification of the state, his theory "permanent revolution," and his goal of exporting revolution worldwide. The neo-con revolution aims to alter the economic, political and cultural foundations of nations on the other side of the planet (rejecting old-fashioned notions of self-determination, popular sovereignty and even the nation-state system). This mission includes the transformation of agriculture and the establishment of "food control" over local populations.

Order 81 fits into this revolutionary program, and it is quite diabolical upon closer inspection. First, it forces Iraq's commercial farmers to use registered terminator seeds (the "protected variety"). Then it defines natural seeds as illegal (the "infringing variety"), in a classic Orwellian turn of language.

This is so incredible that it must be re-stated: the exotic genetically scrambled seeds are the "protected variety" and the indigenous seeds are the "infringing variety."

As Jeffrey Smith explains, author of Order 81: Re-Engineering Iraqi Agriculture:

"To qualify for PVP [Plant Variety Protection], seeds have to meet the following criteria: they must be 'new, distinct, uniform and stable'... it is impossible for the seeds developed by the people of Iraq to meet these criteria. Their seeds are not 'new' as they are the product of millennia of development. Nor are they 'distinct'. The free exchange of seeds practiced for centuries ensures that characteristics are spread and shared across local varieties. And they are the opposite of 'uniform' and 'stable' by the very nature of their biodiversity." (3)

Order 81 comes with the Orwellian title of "Plant Variety Protection." Any self-respecting scientist knows, however, that imposing biological standardization accomplishes the exact opposite: It reduces biodiversity and threatens species. So Order 81 comes with an Orwellian title and consists of Orwellian provisions.

While I've got no time for neo-cons, the argument that they are imposing a Trotskyite agenda on the world has always seemed bizarre to me - even allowing for the fact that some of them are apparently unrepentant ex-Trotskyites (though perhaps this is because I've never bothered to understood what Trotsky's version of communism actually is).

Usually this line of argument is confined to some of the more out of the way paleocon and libertarian websites (though I did see it surface once, seemingly ironically, on TomDispatch once as well).

The "terminator gene" objective of corporate dominance over agriculture (and thus entire populations) has always seemed an essentially fascist project to me - and while the neo-cons do have a lot of fascist attitudes, I find it hard to credit that this is a Troskyite objective - aren't they supposed to be at the anarchist end of the communist spectrum ?

The other question that comes to mind is the ability of the Iraqi government to dispense with the orders that were promulgated by proconsul Bremer's provisional authority - you'd hope the "democratically elected" government would be able to override these now. And given that they've waged a semi-successful campaign to avoid handing over ownership of all their oil to the US, you'd think enabling farmers to grow crops from their own seeds wouldn't be too much of a stretch.

So - maybe the whole article is just propaganda, but you never know...