Month: September 2013

Justifying massive military expenditures and a program of universal conscription isn’t easy in a time of peace, but the Swiss military has managed to keep it up even though they don’t face any conceivable military threats, and indeed haven’t faced any in decades.

But being the head of a conscript military with no enemies is kind of boring, so at least for the sake of wargames, they had to make one up.

So get this: France has split up into multiple warring statelets, and somehow the Duchy of Burgundy is independent for the first time since 1477 and falls on hard economic times. And they’re pretty sure it’s Switzerland’s fault, because banks.

So a totally fictional militant faction, the Brigade Libre Dijonnais (BLD), based in the totally fictional future statelet of Saonia, which is named after the Saone river but is itself based on the borders of an ancient duchy, invades Switzerland outright, with an eye on robbing banks.

Swiss officials defended the wargame, saying that maintaining the nation’s military credibility required preparing for the “threats of the 21st century.” In practice, it seems the wargame centers more on the threats of the mid-15th century.

According to government officials speaking to the New York Times, traditional mainstream newspaper reporting of a single incident last month caused more damage to national security than everything Edward Snowden leaked.

As the nation’s spy agencies assess the fallout from disclosures about their surveillance programs, some government analysts and senior officials have made a startling finding: the impact of a leaked terrorist plot by Al Qaeda in August has caused more immediate damage to American counterterrorism efforts than the thousands of classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.

Since news reports in early August revealed that the United States intercepted messages between Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden as the head of Al Qaeda, and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, discussing an imminent terrorist attack, analysts have detected a sharp drop in the terrorists’ use of a major communications channel that the authorities were monitoring. Since August, senior American officials have been scrambling to find new ways to surveil the electronic messages and conversations of Al Qaeda’s leaders and operatives.

“The switches weren’t turned off, but there has been a real decrease in quality” of communications, said one United States official, who like others quoted spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence programs.

Why is this important? While I’m not all that interested in isolated official estimates of what information hurts national security, this is notable because of how the two instances were treated. Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Bart Gellman, the Guardian and nearly everyone who was associated with those NSA leaks were denounced as traitors, depicted as dangerous outsiders, and were targeted viciously for their disclosures.

McClatchy, the New York Times, and the Daily Beast reported heavily on this intercepted al-Qaeda communication, reporting that U.S. officials now say harmed national security to a far greater degree, and yet they weren’t universally denounced, scrutinized, and called traitors.

Why the bias? At their core, the two sets of disclosures were essentially the same. Both involved government officials of some sort with privileged access to classified information and dishing it out to established journalists at reputable publications.

Snowden did it to push for accountability and put pressure on government surveillance and overreach. And he didn’t do it anonymously. The al-Qaeda intercept, on the other hand, was arguably (although this is speculative) leaked to counter the narrative Snowden’s leaks had induced and rectify the public’s confidence in surveillance. Those are the differences, and it may make clear why they were treated so differently in the media. Snowden’s leaks were meant to undermine government and keep it accountable. The other leaks were aimed to bolster government and propagandize its worth.

Given the divisive political climate up on Capitol Hill right now, one might think the greatest liability to the Obama administration for its positive reaction to Iran’s diplomatic overtures would be Republicans who prefer sanctions and war over détente. But one would be wrong. The real pressure to rebuff Iran’s extended hand comes from America’s closest allies in the Middle East: Israel and Saudi Arabia.

“Israel and a number of allied Persian Gulf states are voicing concern about the pace of rapprochement,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “arguing that Iran will use the diplomatic cover to advance its nuclear work.”

The article goes on to report that Obama is scheduled to have what is sure to be a fretful meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today at the White House. And administration officials have listened to strong opposition to easing tensions with Iran from the Arab Gulf states.

Note the misleading reason given in the lede that Israel and the Persian Gulf states are concerned about Iran “advanc[ing] its nuclear work.” No, they are not. As the U.S. intelligence community has repeatedly established, Iran is not developing nuclear weapons and, according to the IAEA, none of Iran’s enriched uranium has been diverted to uninspected facilities for possible military use.

If Israel were truly concerned about the possibility of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, it would have responded affirmatively to the successive proposals to impose a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the region, instead of opposing it each and every time. Truthfully, Israel needs Iran as a foreign bogeyman to keep attention away from the Israeli-Palestinian issue. As former CIA Middle East analyst Paul Pillar has written, “the Iran issue” provides a “distraction” from international “attention to the Palestinians’ lack of popular sovereignty.”

And the Persian Gulf states aren’t worried about an Iranian bomb so much as they are concerned that, absent U.S. pressure to keep Iran down, Iran’s geo-political role in the region would expand at the expense of their own.

The Wall Street Journal acknowledges this in its buried lede half-way through the article: “U.S. officials acknowledge that the Persian Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, also are concerned about the U.S. rapprochement with Iran. The Arab states are concerned that Iran could use improved ties with Washington to advance its efforts to dominate the Mideast.”

This is purely realpolitik for the GCC states. The same has been true for Syria, where Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and others have pressured the U.S. towards undermining and even toppling the Assad regime. This was made starkly clear in an email exchange among employees at the intelligence contractor Stratfor, released by WikiLeaks, in which one analyst writes about “the Saudis trying to put a hole in the
Iranian plan to its radical/Shia arc of influence stretching from Iran to Lebanon.”

Riyadh can’t do much in Lebanon and has lost Iraq. The uprising in Syria provides for the Saudis an opportunity to undermine the arc if they can topple the regime in Damascus. This would be a huge blow for the Iranians, which is why they have been trying to support the Syrian regime. For Iran, which is still waiting to finalize its hold over Iraq and thus complete the arc, the loss of Syria would be huge. For a quarter of century the Iranians sought Iraq but couldn’t get it and now when they are almost there they staring into the abyss of loosing Syria and with it Lebanon.

The U.S. was on the brink of war with Syria earlier this month because of these types of pressures. Our supposed allies in the Middle East would like the same fate for Tehran.

Here’s an idea: Let’s stop outsourcing our own “national interests” to nefarious “allied” regimes in the Middle East.

This interview with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif on ABC’s This Week is well worth watching, despite the horrible Stephanopoulos.

People involved in politics almost invariably engage in confirmation bias. It’s easy to welcome ideas that bolster what you already believe, than to deal with facts and evidence that seem to puncture your own opinions.

If there are two seasoned politicians in Washington, surely they are John Kerry and John McCain. So we’d expect them to be confirmation bias professionals. And that’s exactly what they were doing when they were citing Elizabeth O’Bagy, an alleged “expert” at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), to elucidate the make-up of the Syrian rebels.

O’Bagy is now disgraced, after it was revealed that her opinions on the rebels are not exactly objective since she was part of a pro-Syrian rebel lobbying group and often did not disclose this fact to people seeking her counsel on how awesome the rebels were. She was even further discredited when it was revealed she lied about having a PhD. She was subsequently fired from ISW.

I kind of assumed Kerry and McCain would have been at least a little embarrassed that they cited O’Bagy favorably. It was bad enough their confirmation bias was displayed for the world to see.

But I was giving McCain too much credit apparently. Not only is he not embarrassed, he is hiring O’Bagy.

Foreign Policy:

Sen. John McCain has hired Elizabeth O’Bagy, the Syria analyst in Washington who was fired for padding her credentials, The Cable has learned. She begins work Monday as a legislative assistant in McCain’s office.

…”Elizabeth is a talented researcher, and I have been very impressed by her knowledge and analysis in multiple briefings over the last year,” McCain told The Cable in a statement. “I look forward to her joining my office.” McCain’s office said there would be no further comment on the matter.

Despite the pull of confirmation bias, normal human tendencies should have engendered some shame on the part of both O’Bagy and McCain.

McCain? Shame? Who was I kidding.

Antiwar.com columnist/reporter Kelley Vlahos appeared on Russia Today’s Crosstalk program today. The subject was blowback triggered by Western-supported Kenya intervention in Somalia. Also on the show were occasional Antiwar.com contributor Stephen Zunes and Richard Barrett of the Soufan Group.