Month: May 2012

From the New York Times:

The aspect of the Syria issue that is getting the most attention right now has the least to do with calls for intervention. I wouldn’t for a second belittle the suffering people there have faced; what I’m saying is that those demanding that America do something about that suffering, apparently care very little about it.

I’ve written previously about how strangely open many of these interventionists are about what an intervention in Syria would mean. Before Rick Santorum dropped out of the presidential race, his Syria talking point was the following: “Syria is a puppet state of Iran. They are a threat not just to Israel, but they have been a complete destabilizing force within Lebanon, which is another problem for Israel, and Hezbollah.” And Romney: “The key ally of Iran, Syria, has a leader that’s in real trouble. And we ought to grab a hold of that like it’s the best thing we’ve ever seen.”

Rep. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who is rumored to be one of Romney’s choices for VP, said recently in a video message to his constituents that arming and aiding the Syrian opposition is “in our national security interest” because “Iran,” which he described as “the number one immediate threat facing the world and the United States,” has “no stronger ally in the world than Syria” and “the loss of the Assad regime in Syria is the single, most damaging thing that can happen to Iran’s regime.”

This is nothing new. But the narrative about a humanitarian catastrophe in Syria obligating the U.S. to intervene on behalf of innocent civilians is still the dominant one. In the headlines of the major newspapers and on network news, the suffering of the Syrian people is prompting calls to “do something” to “stop this,” and so on. But the suffering going on in Syria – as horrendous as it is – is only as prominent in our news media and political debate because of the geopolitics.

I was struck by a segment on MSNBC’s Morning Joe wherein former National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski faced off against a chorus of Syria interventionists. Brzezinski was being eminently reasonable in arguing against intervention in Syria and against using the conflict to justify being a belligerent bully on the world stage – particularly towards Russia. Then he said that the conflict “is not as horrible or as dramatic as it is portrayed,” especially when compared to other recent conflicts around the world, like “the horrible war in Sri Lanka, the killings in Rwanda, the deaths in Libya and so forth – you know, let’s have a sense of proportion here.” He added, “Let’s not exaggerate this conflict…Look, I think what we are hearing is a lot of hand-wringing and hysteria…”

It’s an important point. To watch American media and listen to haranguing politicians right now, you’d think Syria was the worst hell-hole in the world. It’s bad (as I said above, I would never belittle it), but something like 800,000 people were murdered in Rwanda in the 1990s and we heard very little about intervention there. The civil war in Sri Lanka lasted for over two decades and led to 100,000 or so violent deaths, ending in a shaky resolution only in 2009. I can’t agree with Brzezinski about Libya, but consider the Sudan. There was something on the order of 400,000 civilians dead in the Darfur conflict, again only petering out in very recent years, while the conflict largely persists. In March 2011, a civil war in the Ivory Coast broke out with incredible massacres of civilians, but I’d bet Rubio couldn’t find it on a map, much less argue for intervention.

People like McCain and Romney and John Kerry and the other powerful people in Congress calling for more direct intervention in Syria like to present themselves as being genuinely concerned with the suffering of their fellow man. But that is evidently not the case. Syria is strategically located in the Middle East, is geographically a close neighbor of Israel and a close ally of Iran. President Bashar al-Assad is a puppet of the Russians who value their last close ally in the region because it affords them geo-political influence and a chance to defy U.S. imperialism. And this is why the conflict in Syria is being portrayed as disproportionately grave. And this is why pundits and politicos are calling for intervention. The conflict is merely a pretext.

[Luckily, the Obama administration has been able to perceive the costs of intervention and so have stated opposition to military action. Still, they have provided elements of the opposition with both lethal and non-lethal aid, which is probably helping to prolong the conflict.]

Here is the MSNBC segment:

The International Criminal Court has sentenced Charles G. Taylor, the former president of Liberia “to 50 years in prison over his role in atrocities committed in Sierra Leone during its civil war in the 1990s,” reports the New York Times.

As is common for heads of state, Taylor did not physically carry out these crimes himself. Rather he did by proxy, which is why the court convicted him on charges of “aiding and abetting, as well as planning, some of the most heinous and brutal crimes.” Prosecutors introduced evidence, for example, of communications Taylor had with rebel forces while he was in Liberia and they were in Sierra Leone. Other testimony “focused on arms and munitions shipments to those rebels.”

The court’s mandate “covered only those crimes in Sierra Leone between 1996 and 2002, wherein up to 50,000 people were killed.” Those were some interesting years. It just so happens that America was “aiding and abetting, as well as planning” what would become incredibly heinous and brutal crimes which would in many ways surpass what happened in Sierra Leone. But the leadership in Washington didn’t aid and abet these crimes against humanity sitting in a poor nation in Africa, so their crimes aren’t within the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction.

Throughout the 1990s, the Clinton administration provided the Turkish government with the bulk of its arms. As this was happening, the atrocities committed by Turkey against the Kurdish population in the southeast was at its peak. “In the single year 1997 alone,” writes Noam Chomsky, “U.S. arms flow to Turkey exceeded the combined total for the entire Cold War period up to the onset of the state terror campaign.” Under the pretext of suppressing Kurdish separatist rebels, Turkey unleashed a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the southeast, forcibly displacing more than 400,000 impoverished Kurdish villagers. Torture and extra-judicial killings and disappearances were rampant, and the bombing and attacks by security forces led to the deaths of up to 40,000 people. Such a vast and coordinated campaign would have been very difficult without critical U.S. support.

Indonesia had been committing crimes against the people of East Timor from 1975-1999. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gave the terrible President Suharto the green light to invade East Timor, an event which led to tens of thousands of deaths and major army atrocities right off the bat. The U.S.-backed state terror – “the United States was then supplying Indonesia’s military with 90 percent of its arms,” writes Reed Brody of the Nation – lasted through to the Clinton administration and by 1999 the dead totaled somewhere around 200,000-250,000 people. “This shows every sign of being planned and coordinated beforehand,” said Sidney Jones of Human Rights Watch in 1999. “The Indonesian army may be trying to teach a lesson not only to the East Timorese but to the people of Aceh and Irian Jaya. The lesson is: if you seek separation from Indonesia, even if support for separation is overwhelming, we will destroy you, and no outside power will come to your aid.”

In 2002, the last year in the ICC’s mandate for conviction of Taylor’s role in aiding and abetting the murder and torture of over 50,000 people, the Bush administration had already begun the sales campaign that would become the lead up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Prior to this, throughout the 1990s, the U.S.-led sanctions regime directly contributed to a dramatic increase in child mortality rates and notoriously resulted in the death of over 500,000 children (that’s ten times more than Taylor has been convicted of helping kill). But very soon after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, the Bush administration began to construct fallacious and distorted justifications for an aggressive, unprovoked war on Iraq. Every initial justification for the invasion has since been conclusively falsified, and the invasion and occupation of the country led to the deaths of well over 600,000 Iraqis. As this was being needlessly carried out, the Bush administration also had set up a worldwide system of torture and indefinite detention without charge or trial, also serious international crimes.

Nobody is saying Taylor isn’t a criminal that deserves to go to jail. But why is America’s leadership sitting comfortably in early retirement after “aiding and abetting” and “planning” crimes that far surpass anything Taylor did? Washington considers itself above the law, which is probably the reason for its refusal to ratify the statute authorizing the ICC, and why it would almost certainly veto any UN Security Council referral to the ICC. When the World Court held in 1984 that the Reagan administration had committed international terrorism – or rather, aided and abetted international terrorism – in Nicaragua through its terrorist proxies in the Contra rebel militias (who committed atrocities from torture to mass murder of tens of thousands of people), Reagan merely dismissed the case and refused to have anything to do with the court. And that’s how to commit massive crimes with impunity (i.e. have the power to ignore the victims). Easy as pie.

Via Glenn Greenwald, this New York Times report on the Obama administration’s drone wars:

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

…The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.

“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”

Even when it is admitted that civilians are killed in drone strikes, it is inevitably described as legitimate “collateral damage.” There is a systematic refusal to call it what it really is, although former general counsel at the CIA John A. Rizzo, now under investigation in Obama’s war on whistleblowers, has referred to these killings as “murder.”