The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [129]
On the same day that Hillary Clinton delivered her seminal Internet freedom speech, James Glassman and Michael Doran, Glassman’s hawkish former colleague in the George W. Bush administration, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which they hinted at how they would go about harnessing the power of the Internet in the case of Iran. They called on the U.S. government to use technology to provide moral and educational support, increase communications within Iran and between Iran and the outside world, and refute Iranian propaganda. Here was a clear example of a “strong” agenda being put on the table, and, most probably, parts of the U.S. foreign policy establishment would be active in making it happen.
Marc Lynch, a prominent scholar of Middle Eastern politics, was quick to notice how easy it would be to twist Clinton’s speech—which aspired to little other than defending online freedom of expression—for more sinister ends. For hawks like Glassman and Doran, wrote Lynch on his Foreign Policy blog, “Internet freedom, which Clinton presents as an abstract universal good, is clearly and unapologetically a weapon to be wielded against the Iranian regime.... Most of the world probably assumes that Clinton has the same goal in mind as Glassman and Doran, even if she doesn’t say so.”
But Clinton’s speech was itself not particularly clear as to why Internet freedom is worth defending. On the one hand, she did acknowledge America’s commitment to the weak agenda by saying that “we stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas.” But Clinton also hinted that the reasons for such a wide embrace of Internet freedom are more pragmatic: “The internet can help humanity push back against those who promote violence and crime and extremism. In Iran and Moldova and other countries, online organizing has been a critical tool for advancing democracy and enabling citizens to protest suspicious election results.” In essence, what she really said is this: We’d like to promote Internet freedom so that everyone can express and read anything they want, but we also hope that this will essentially lead to a number of democratic revolutions.
This scenario, of course, is unlikely to come true, let alone help to promote democracy, if only because there is not enough space to maneuver in existing American policies, tied as they are to long-running concerns over terrorism, energy supply, and the politics of military bases. Technologists, in their typical streak of Internet-centrism, can talk all they want about the “Internet freedom agenda”—it makes them feel important, after all—but it is not going to alter what motivates the United States to behave as it does in the Middle East or Central Asia any more than its overall concerns with human rights and freedom of expression. Concerns over getting oil out of Azerbaijan won’t give way to concerns over getting tweets from the Azeri opposition anytime soon, if only because Washington has long made a strategic decision not to undermine the friendly Azeri regime.
This is not to say that Clinton wouldn’t chide the country’s government for cracking down on bloggers, as she did during a June 2010 visit to Azerbaijan. This is not the kind of criticism, however, that could seriously threaten the relationship between the two countries. Rather, it is the kind of criticism that assists American officials in presenting themselves as holding democracy above their own energy needs. While this may certainly help them cope with the often cynical nature of their