12 - 2011 - Antiwar.com Blog

Deep Thoughts From The Guardian

Will the Republicans ban sex in 2010 [sic]? Why did those “government-hating,” “market-worshipping” Republicans “sacrifice all the workers and retirees”? Why mustn’t we despise our corrupt, corporatist governments? Read The Guardian and find out!

Well, OK, just read one article from that august publication: Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of the Republicans’ greatest difficulty in campaigning against Obama. Much of it is off-topic for this site, but here’s a relevant snippet:

It is in the realm of foreign policy, terrorism and civil liberties where Republicans encounter an insurmountable roadblock. A staple of GOP politics has long been to accuse Democratic presidents of coddling America’s enemies (both real and imagined), being afraid to use violence, and subordinating US security to international bodies and leftwing conceptions of civil liberties.

But how can a GOP candidate invoke this time-tested caricature when Obama has embraced the vast bulk of George Bush’s terrorism policies; waged a war against government whistleblowers as part of a campaign of obsessive secrecy; led efforts to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs; extinguished the lives not only of accused terrorists but of huge numbers of innocent civilians with cluster bombs and drones in Muslim countries; engineered a covert war against Iran; tried to extend the Iraq war; ignored Congress and the constitution to prosecute an unauthorised war in Libya; adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of indefinite detention without trial for accused terrorists; and even claimed and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens far from any battlefield and without due process?

Reflecting this difficulty for the GOP field is the fact that former Bush officials, including Dick Cheney, have taken to lavishing Obama with public praise for continuing his predecessor’s once-controversial terrorism polices. In the last GOP foreign policy debate, the leading candidates found themselves issuing recommendations on the most contentious foreign policy question (Iran) that perfectly tracked what Obama is already doing, while issuing ringing endorsements of the president when asked about one of his most controversial civil liberties assaults (the due-process-free assassination of the American-Yemeni cleric Anwar Awlaki). Indeed, when it comes to the foreign policy and civil liberties values Democrats spent the Bush years claiming to defend, the only candidate in either party now touting them is the libertarian Ron Paul, who vehemently condemns Obama’s policies of drone killings without oversight, covert wars, whistleblower persecutions, and civil liberties assaults in the name of terrorism.

Paul’s Foreign Policy Focus

One doesn’t have to agree with all of Ron Paul’s libertarian views to admire his principled anti-interventionism and opposition to America’s eternal wars: clearly his foreign policy positions intersect at the point where character meets ideology. In this interview with USA Today, he responds to the ever popular if-only-Paul-would-moderate-his-‘isolationism’ meme:

“His poll status has attracted fire from his Republican opponents, who have criticized his views on Iran — he opposes a U.S. strike to stop their nuclear ambitions — and Israel, which he says no longer needs U.S. foreign aid. They’ve called Paul ‘outside the mainstream’ for those and for calling for the speedy removal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

“Paul cares little for calls that he ‘go more moderate’ on foreign policy. He is who he is. ‘That would be the last thing I’m going to do … water down my beliefs.‘

“‘Others have argued ‘Oh yeah, if Ron Paul would just go more moderate on this foreign policy all of the sudden he would get a broader audience’ and that’s isn’t it,” he said. ‘The more I’ve been talking about what I’ve been saying for a long time, the more people we have joining us.‘”

This is the same argument I make in my Friday column on the subject of “Ron Paul and the Future of American Foreign Policy” — that Paul’s success has changed the discourse inside the GOP and the conservative movement, and transformed the political landscape. His Iowa surprise debunks the myth of a monolithic militaristic “conservatism,” which hasn’t been the case since the implosion of the Soviet empire — and really never was the case, since libertarians dissented early on from their conservative cousins’ enthusiasm for nuclear war with the commies.

What has charmed millions about Paul is his purity, and I don’t just mean ideologically. It’s his insistance on emphasizing precisely what is supposedly “controversial” about his candidacy — because he recognizes its moral importance as well as its centrality to his own worldview. How unlike a politician can you get?

Video: Elderly Israeli Fighter Talks About 1948 Genocide

Electronic Intifada‘s Benjamin Doherty shared a video from “Nakba”-awareness group Zochrot – “Remembering” – of a former Palmach fighter who participated in the expulsion of unarmed Palestinian Arabs from their villages in Southern Israel. Amnon Neumann casually describes that he helped kill people, burn their villages, and chase off women and children. He regrets his actions but notes he is one of the few to admit his crimes; even so, he is loath to talk about the details of the atrocities.

In one grimace-inducing moment, Neumann talks of the Palestinians who didn’t quite realize they wouldn’t be coming back, who sneaked out of Gaza refugee camps at night to tend their villages’ grapevines. There, says Neumann, they were gunned down.

As late as the 50s, he notes, Arab villages were being evicted wholesale and forced to Gaza. The desert was made to bloom, it seems, only after its villages were ploughed under.

The reason for the Nakba, said Neumann, was “the Zionist ideology.” Like all ultranationalist movements, Zionism requires the murder and expulsion of a people and the destruction of all evidence of their existence. Those not destroyed must be permanently subjugated by the ethnicity in charge. It seems that for many, the tragedy of the Holocaust was that it happened to Jews. That the Nakba happened to Arabs means it’s not worth our attention — or worse, they are revised as aggressors.

“This is very clear. We came to inherit the land. Who do you inherit from? If the land is empty you inherit it from no one. The land was not empty when we inherited it.”

US Sending Iraq $11 Billion in Arms, Despite Maliki’s Turn Towards Dictatorship

Pointing out Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s turn towards dictatorship is no longer a fad for opposition members of parliament and voiceless Iraqi subjects. Now it’s so blatant that it’s recognized by everyone. Even the New York Times.

The Obama administration is moving ahead with the sale of nearly $11 billion worth of arms and training for the Iraqi military despite concerns that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is seeking to consolidate authority, create a one-party Shiite-dominated state and abandon the American-backed power-sharing government.

The military aid includes things like advanced fighter jets and battle tanks and, as best I can tell, is in addition to the $82 million in arms and equipment the U.S. sent to Baghdad in October.

It’s true that Maliki has shown signs of solidifying some level of authoritarian rule, and it isn’t particularly new. He has circumvented Parliament, consolidated illegitimate power in a long trend of quasi-dictatorial behavior, harshly cracked down on peaceful activism, harassed and even attacked journalists that were critical of his regime, and has been accused of torturing prisoners in secret Iraqi jails.

In September, Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr issued a statement accusing Maliki of “building a new dictatorship.” That same month, Iraq’s head of the Integrity Commission Raheem Uqaili resigned and wrote an open letter accusing the Maliki regime of unutterable corruption and power grabs. Just this month, Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq warned in a CNN interview that Maliki is “going towards dictatorship.” Less than a week later Maliki ordered Iraq’s Sunni Vice President Tareq al Hashemi detained on trumped up terrorism charges, in a broader plan to marginalize Sunni authorities in government. Finally, former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi co-authored article in the New York Times this week, along with fellow Iraqiya members Osama al-Nujaifi (Iraq’s parliament speaker) and Finance Minister Rafe al-Essawi, warning that Maliki is taking the nation down the path of “sectarian autocracy.”

In light of this, should we be surprised that Washington continues to send Iraq billions of dollars in aid and billions more in military weaponry? No, I don’t think so. In a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, US envoy Ryan Crocker noted in 2009 that Maliki’s turn towards more centralized rule is “in US interest.” Even after Obama’s attempts to extend large-scale military occupation were rejected, ongoing responsibilities after the withdrawal still include carrying out “two of the largest Foreign Military Sales (FMS) and Foreign Military Financing (FMF) programs in the world and to spend the $2.55 billion in Iraq Security Forces Fund (ISFF).”

This is literally what it means to receive U.S. economic and military support in a strategically important region. How many foul, tyrannical, genocidal dictatorships does America have to avidly prop up for people to stop being surprised about it?

Obama Admits Drone War in Somalia Creates Terrorism

From yesterday’s Washington Post, in an article entitled “Under Obama, an emerging global apparatus for drone killing“:

But the administration has allowed only a handful of strikes, out of concern that a broader campaign could turn al-Shabab from a regional menace into an adversary determined to carry out attacks on U.S. soil.

Here, it is admitted by the Obama administration that al-Shabab is merely “a regional menace” that does not pose a direct threat to the United States. It is also explicitly acknowledged that unleashing a drone war against the group is likely to promote them into an international terrorist group “determined to carry out attacks on U.S. soil.”

Of course, we’ve been harping on these very points at Antiwar.com since the beginning. I’m glad to hear the Obama administration, at least according to the Washington Post, understands the fundamentals of our interventions in Somalia. My fear is obviously that we’ve already passed that threshold.

U.S. intervention in Somalia doesn’t begin and end with the drone war. As Jeremy Scahill has reported, the Obama administration is running secret CIA prisons which confine uncharged individuals in terribly inhumane conditions without access to legal council, building up a Somali intelligence agency and giving weapons to thugs and murderous warlords in a proxy war, and deploying Joint Special Operations Command on the ground in Somalia. Add to that the U.S. cooperation in Kenya’s invasion and military assault on Somalia in recent months, as well as U.S. support for the Ugandan regime which also contributes to fighting al-Shabab. Go back even further to 2006 when the Bush administration sponsored Ethiopia’s military invasion of Somalia, an action which helped give rise to al-Shabab in the first place. Covert missions in Somalia go back to 2003, at least. All this and we haven’t even delved into the Somalia interventions of the 1990’s.

If we’re concerned about turning al-Shabab “from a regional menace into an adversary determined to carry out attacks on U.S. soil” we better do more than give them drone-war-lite. Or rather, we better do much, much less.

(h/t Charles Davis)

The War on Boko Haram, and the Hubris of Unwarranted Intervention

The Nigerian terror group Boko Haram detonated explosives early this week in Christian churches during Christmas mass, killing about 40 people. The attacks are just the latest in a series of an increasingly frequent actions by the group, which has renewed vigor as of late. What has also been happening with increasing frequency and with unprecedented vigor is U.S. intervention in Nigeria targeting Boko Haram. The day after the attacks, White House spokesman Jay Carney said “We have been in contact with Nigerian officials about what appear to be terrorist acts and pledge to assist them in bringing those responsible to justice.”

Interventions into Africa have been increasing overall recently, but Nigeria appears to be one of the hotspots. In October, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Nigerian Foreign Minister Olugbenga Ashiru, and pledged an assorted variety of newfangled interventions from economic stimulus to fighting terrorism. Then reports came out in November that U.S. troops had been sent on the ground in Nigeriato help fight Boko Haram.

A Congressional report issued at the very beginning of December said “Boko Haram has quickly evolved and poses an emerging threat to US interests and the US homeland,” and justifies entrenching military and security interests with the Nigerian government. “We ought to put much more into developing local intelligence and relationships, and more into cooperating with Nigerian authorities to encourage them to help us work together to understand the nature of the threat,” said Patrick Meehan, chairman of the U.S. Congressional committee that drew up the report.“While I recognize there is little evidence at this moment to suggest Boko Haram is planning attacks against the [US] homeland, lack of evidence does not mean it cannot happen,” Mr. Meehan was quoted as saying. Brilliant.

As best I can tell, Boko Haram wasn’t on the radar until Africa became Washington’s new pet project in the “war on terror.” Indeed, the name translates to “Western education is sinful,” and until months ago they had an explicitly local agenda. Only recently does it have more national, anti-Western-intervention overtones.

The hubris of the current policy (which, by the way, is largely secret) is truly remarkable. First of all, these approaches backfire. As was pointed out in October when Obama announced the troop deployment into Uganda to fight the LRA militias, a similar operation against the LRA occurred in 2009, when “a small team from U.S. Africa Command helped the Ugandan army plan a complex series of raids on LRA camps” but ended up missing their target. LRA rebels responded by dismantling those camps and going on a rampage, killing more than 600 civilians.

Secondly, these policies will create a greater constituency for groups like Boko Haram and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb by giving people reasons to hate U.S. interventions and fight against it. Through the Pentagon’s Africa Command, the U.S. is training and equipping militaries in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Libya, Egypt, Kenya, Uganda, Senegal and Tunisia in the name of preventing “terrorists from establishing sanctuaries.” The strategy appears irreconcilable with recent history, however, given the U.S.-sponsored invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia in 2006 which gave rise to the militant group al-Shabaab – now ironically justifying current interventions.

This is the beginning, and as even Patrick Meehan and other imperialists recognize, there is no evidence that groups like Boko Haram present any sort of threat to the U.S. But U.S. policy seems intent on helping them reach that threshold, no matter how many illegitimate interventions it takes.

Update: Commenters rightly point out that Nigeria is one of America’s major oil suppliers. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration in November 2011, Nigeria ranked fifth in crude oil and total petroleum imports to the U.S., after Canada, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and Venezuela.