Month: November 2011

The U.S. military closed down its press desk in Iraq on Wednesday and sent out an email to Beltway journalists announcing so. Washington Post blog:

“Due to our reposture efforts the press desk function will no longer provide releases or responses,” said the brief e-mail that landed in journalists’ in-boxes on Wednesday morning.

Col. Barry Johnson, a senior spokesman who will remain in Iraq until the troops have departed by the end of the year, explained that “reposture efforts” is the phrase the military has determined most appropriate to describe what news outlets are calling a “withdrawal.”

“The reposture is how we refer to moving our troops to other locations outside the country,” he said. “The decision was made last year to talk about this as reposturing.”

Of course, he’s right. It isn’t a withdrawal, it’s a shifting.

You might have thought the warmongering had died down by now, but just yesterday former Israeli Military Intelligence chief Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin said “that Iran had enough material to develop ‘four or five’ nuclear bombs, adding that it was imperative for Israel to maintain good relations with members of the international community capable of dealing with that threat.” A more explicit articulation of Israel’s intentions of attacking Iran is hard to find (no, not really.)

But headlines like the ones that statement produced allow for the myth of an Iranian nuclear weapons to proliferate (no pun). In the words of a recent blog post at FPIF, “No, Really, Iran Isn’t Developing Nuclear Weapons.” Or take Seymour Hersh, an expert on the issue:

…Robert Kelley, a retired I.A.E.A. director and nuclear engineer who previously spent more than thirty years with the Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons program, told me that he could find very little new information in the I.A.E.A. report. He noted that hundreds of pages of material appears to come from a single source: a laptop computer, allegedly supplied to the I.A.E.A. by a Western intelligence agency, whose provenance could not be established. Those materials, and others, “were old news,” Kelley said, and known to many journalists. “I wonder why this same stuff is now considered ‘new information’ by the same reporters.”

…Greg Thielmann, a former State Department and Senate Intelligence Committee analyst who was one of the authors of the A.C.A. assessment, told me, “There is troubling evidence suggesting that studies are still going on, but there is nothing that indicates that Iran is really building a bomb.” He added, “Those who want to drum up support for a bombing attack on Iran sort of aggressively misrepresented the report.”

…The report did note that its on-site camera inspection process of Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment facilities—mandated under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a signatory—“continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material.”

(For some of my recent reporting on Iran, the U.S. and Israeli war-mongers, and this I.A.E.A. report see here, here, and here.)

Still, and as I’ve said repeatedly, I don’t think the military and intelligence communities in the U.S. and Israel are on the whole supportive of such saber rattling. Mier Dagan, the former Israeli intelligence chief who has consistently spoken out against an attack on Iran, again came out yesterday to warn against it. He said an attack on Iran – which would be preemptive and an act of aggression since Iran has broken no rules and presents no threat – would result in a vicious outbreak of regional warfare potentially resulting in massive casualties on many sides.

Those with any particle of sanity will agree with him.

Since World War II the United States government has divided up the world into different war zones. Every corner of the planet was placed under the auspices of some subdivision of the U.S. military and national security state to be utilized in the effort to maintain global hegemony. And Presidents from Truman to Obama have used it in exactly that way, acting as if their legal, territorial, and coercive jurisdiction spans the globe. And this monstrosity is still growing.

The National Security Act of 1947, best known for the creation of the Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency, and creating the office of the Secretary of Defense, also established the Unified Combatant Command (UCC) system. “The UCC system,” a recent Congressional Research report explains, “signified the recognition by the United States that it would continue to have a world-wide, continuous global military presence.” U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) had responsibility over the Middle East and parts of Asia, U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) over the North Americas, U.S. European Command (USEUCOM) over Europe, etc.

The primary aims were three-fold: to use U.S. dominance to (1) ensure privileged access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources (2) establish proxy military bases for use in any conflict and (3) to prevent any other peer competitor from gaining their own dominance, or independence from this system. As a Top Secret National Security Council briefing put it in 1954, “the Near East is of great strategic, political, and economic importance,” as it “contains the greatest petroleum resources in the world” as well as “essential locations for strategic military bases in any world conflict.”

Obama has dutifully taken over the reigns. Just consider the last two major foreign policy decisions he’s made. The “withdrawal” from Iraq not only left a significant contingency in place to secure an intricate economic and military relationship, but it happened in tandem with a surge in the Gulf. As the New York Times reported in October, the Pentagon is planning “to bolster the American military presence,” including “sending more naval warships through international waters in the region.” To counter Iran – the one country left in USCENTCOM without U.S. military bases and a subservient client state,

the administration is also seeking to expand military ties with the six nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. While the United States has close bilateral military relationships with each, the administration and the military are trying to foster a new “security architecture” for the Persian Gulf that would integrate air and naval patrols and missile defense.

The other example is even more illustrative. Obama has also begun a surge in Asia-Pacific, just recently ordering thousands of U.S. troops and weaponry to be permanently stationed in Australia, accompanying key military bases in South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and Guam. The impetus is clear to most observers: countering China’s rising influence. This fits into all three aims of imperial grand strategy that I outlined above.

In Singapore last June, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke at an International Institute for Strategic Studies meeting and argued for “sustaining a robust [U.S.] military presence in Asia.” He spoke of overcoming “anti-access and area denial scenarios” that the U.S. military faces in Asia, which threatens America’s access to strategic markets and resources. Predominantly, Gates explained, U.S. military presence in Asia-Pacific is important in “deterring, and if necessary defeating, potential adversaries.” To curb China’s economic competitiveness in the region, Obama has been making trade deals with Asian nations that would give America’s allies some trading privileges that do not immediately extend to China.

In September 2000, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest published a series of articles on this system of global militarism (cited in the CRS report) exposing how each domain had yielded an inordinate amount of influence in policymaking. She wrote that they “had evolved into the modern-day equivalent of the Roman Empire’s proconsuls—well-funded, semi-autonomous, unconventional centers of U.S. foreign policy.” The CRS report asks “whether or not COCOMs have assumed too much influence overseas, thereby diminishing the roles other U.S. government entities play in foreign and national security policy….The assertion that COCOMs have usurped other U.S. government entities in the foreign policy arena may deserve greater examination.”

The question is a pertinent one, especially since the COCOM system and U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) has not been static since WWII. It is still expanding in dangerous ways. Take U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). In the past, the COCOMs acted as ready-made war plans in case conflict broke out. Now, special forces are provided to each domain and can be sent in absent the approval of Congress and without even notifying the American people.

USSOCOM’s primary mission is to organize, train, and equip special operations forces (SOF) and provides those forces to the Geographic Combatant Commanders under whose operational control they serve. USSOCOM also develops special operations strategy, doctrine, and procedures for the use of SOF and also develops and procures specialized, SOF-unique equipment for its assigned forces. USSOCOM is also responsible for synchronizing DOD planning against terrorists and their networks on a global basis. This particular aspect of USSOCOM’s mission requires working extensively with other non-DOD U.S. Government Agencies, sometimes referred to as the Interagency.

Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) for example “reportedly conduct highly sensitive combat and supporting operations against terrorists on a world-wide basis.” These forces grabbed some fame from the JSOC unit which carried out the bin Laden raid, but they are mostly secret. “Without the knowledge of the American public,” writes historian Nick Turse, “a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world’s countries. This new Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been revealed.”

U.S. policy during the Cold War was focused on maintaining full spectrum dominance and, in part, countering Soviet influence. This manifested in violent overthrows of democratically elected governments, bloody wars, and steady expansions of the military industrial complex. With its end, an even more extreme doctrine for hegemony prevailed, with even more savage manifestations.

In 1992, the Defense Department circulated what came to be known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, after then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz. “America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era,” the New York Times reported, “will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union.” America’s mission, read the DoD document, would be “convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.” What came next were expansions of the empire and COCOM.

This Imperial Hubris, as former CIA official Michael Scheuer explained, prompted the blowback that was the terrorist attacks on September 11th. Those attacks provided a pretext for perhaps the greatest war crime of the decade: invading a non-threatening Iraq, leading to the deaths of well over 100,000 people by the most conservative estimates, displacing millions more, and installing a government more subservient to U.S. interests.

Since 9/11, our interventions have only become more numerous. Our domains of military authority have become more engrained and independent. The CRS report recommends that Congress be concerned about whether “Geographical COCOMs have made U.S. foreign policy ‘too militarized.'” If not, we can only guess what kinds of impending devastation will surpass 9/11 and the War on Terror.

In my piece today on the gradual drawdown of NATO troops in Afghanistan, I provided plenty of evidence supporting the notion that we are not getting out of Afghanistan in 2014, as the Obama administration claims. By the end of next year, 40,000 will have been withdrawn, from the approximately 140,000 there now.

I’ve written before about how actual military and defense officials repeatedly explain that 2014 will not be the end of the occupation. As just one example, in a recent talk at the Council on Foreign Relations from under secretary of defense for policy at the Department of Defense Michèle Flournoy, she explained that “2014 is not a withdrawal date—it’s an inflection point.” And now Afghan President Hamid Karzai has tacitly approved a robust strategic agreement and U.S. military presence through 2024 at his council of over 2,000 tribal elders.

But if we needed more evidence that 2014 is merely a political stamp (I think the zero should have a peace sign in it), as opposed to an actual date for the end of the military occupation, I think training Afghan geoscientists to collect, process, and exploit valuable “mineral resources” and “rare earth elements” in Afghanistan is plenty enough to top it off.

The Pentagon’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO), in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey, announced today it will provide training and equipment specific to airborne geophysical exploration to the Afghan Geological Survey.  This initiative is part of the U.S. Government’s continuing efforts to help the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan identify and develop its vast deposits of mineral resources in a transparent and responsible fashion.

A key component of the USGS’ new effort is to train Afghan geoscientists in collecting, processing and interpreting high-resolution geophysical data themselves.  Utilizing airborne technology is essential to obtaining reliable, detailed information on mineral and rare earth element deposits.

…The TFBSO has already worked extensively with USGS to develop an ongoing survey of mineral resources and rare earth elements in Afghanistan, as well as creating an online and central repository for that data in Kabul.  The new training is intended to augment and expand these earlier efforts.  This earlier work identified at least $1 trillion in mineral resources, fossil fuels, and rare earth elements within Afghanistan, according to Pentagon estimates.

A couple weeks ago I posted a blog with the story and video of journalist Sam Husseini who asked a Saudi official a tough question and was subsequently suspended from the National Press Club. The incident was not only indicative of the embarrassing journalistic culture in this country – one that instinctively gushes deference to authority as opposed to strict scrutiny – but it was also an indication of the Good Guys/Bad Guys reality of U.S. foreign policy. Saudi Arabia is one of our most highly valued allies, you see…we’re supposed to be nice to them and whitewash their tyranny because, you know…our betters in Washington support it.

Husseini has written a piece on the incident and it can be read at Foreign Policy in Focus. Here are excerpts on what he thinks about journalism:

Journalism is in crisis and it must be reinvented for its own good and for the good of society as a whole. A substantial part of that re-invention is the capacity to ask tough questions of powerful officials. Being a journalist in essence isn’t about “credentials” and professional affiliations. It’s about the practice of it.

…Real journalism is asking tough questions of all the players. Or, more appropriately, asking the toughest questions of the most powerful. Too often, I’ve seen reporters fawn over a figure more the more powerful they are. That I think is exactly the wrong instinct.

…The Ethics Committee, despite the secretive process, has an opportunity to rescind my suspension and issue an apology. Hopefully the members will do the right thing.