Month: January 2014

If you say it out loud, it seems too preposterous to be true. Four high-profile former government officials are getting paid by an Iranian dissident group that until 2012 was an officially designated terrorist organization to publicly oppose the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts with Iran.

BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray attended a briefing in the Dirksen Senate office building on Capitol Hill sponsored by “an Iranian exile group related to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK).” The former government officials speaking out on behalf of this group against diplomacy with Iran included “former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, former Ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg, General James L. Jones, and and former US Special Envoy for Nuclear Nonproliferation Robert Joseph.”

Robert Joseph described the diplomacy as “appeasement” and urged additional sanctions, which Obama has promised to veto, to stop “Iran’s nuclear quest.”

Howard Dean refused to answer questions as to whether he was still getting boatloads of money from MEK groups and even went so far as to say that U.S.-Iran negotiations should not go forward until the Obama administration agrees to grant some kind of asylum to the 3,000 MEK activists sheltered by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein that are now living in a U.S. military base called Camp Liberty.

“We ought to sign no agreement until those 3000 people are safe,” Dean said.

Rewind to 2003. George W. Bush included Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorists like MEK in his propaganda justifying the invasion of Iraq. “Iraq shelters terrorist groups including the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization,” reads a document in the archives of the White House’s website, “which has used terrorist violence against Iran and in the 1970s was responsible for killing several US military personnel and US civilians.”

As recently as 2007, a State Department report warned that the MEK, retains “the capacity and will” to attack “Europe, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, and beyond.”

Many experts, including current senior U.S. officials, believe that the MEK, backed by Israel, is the group responsible for assassinating Iran’s civilian nuclear scientists in what are clear-cut terrorist acts.

This is the group lobbying hard to get high-profile U.S. officials to come out publicly against the U.S.-Iran negotiations, which supporters say is the only thing with any chance of verifiably curtailing Iran’s nuclear program and keeping Washington off the inevitable war path to Tehran.

Like I said, reality seems stranger than fiction in this case.

Catherine Traywick at Foreign Policy explains how the U.S. government and the (U.S.-backed) Philippines government exploited the U.S. military’s disaster response to the recent typhoon in order to justify more U.S. troops to be stationed at more U.S. bases in the Philippines.

Officials from both nations quickly framed the catastrophe as a justification for a broader U.S. military presence in the Philippines. Two weeks after Haiyan made landfall, Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario said the disaster “demonstrated” the need for U.S. troops in the Philippines. Shortly after that, U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg argued that Haiyan underscored his top priority: to deepen the military relationship between countries. That argument riled some Filipino legislators. One leftist political advocacy group decried it “disaster opportunism at its finest.”

U.S. troops already have a small but significant footprint in the Philippines. U.S. special forces have spent the past 12 years in the southern part of the country to help Philippine troops carry out counterrorism missions against Abu Sayyaf and elements of Jemaah Islamiyah, two Islamic terrorist groups with links to al Qaeda. U.S. troops also participate in frequent military exercises with the Philippine military. Since President Barack Obama announced his so-called “pivot to Asia,” however, the United States has been pushing for greater access to Philippine bases and the right to build exclusive facilities on them — a politically contentious issue that caused negotiations to fall apart last October.

Traywick notes the issue of more U.S. troops is “a sensitive one”: “The Philippine legislature ousted U.S. forces from the country in 1991 over issues of national sovereignty and the public’s perception that American troops were above the law, after allegations of rape and the human rights abuses made national headlines.”

I wrote about this cynical effort to win more basing rights back in November, noting specifically why the history of U.S. interventionism in the Philippines makes many Filipinos justifiably wary of welcoming U.S. troops back:

The fact that Filipinos hesitate to welcome the U.S. back onto permanent bases, after kicking us out at the end of the Cold War, should not be belittled. The 1899-1902 U.S. war and occupation of the Philippines was a vicious colonial experiment waged for cynical geopolitical interests. Inclusive estimates that account for excess deaths related to the war say there were as many as 1 million casualties. Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were locked up in concentration camps, where poor conditions and disease killed thousands.

The account of U.S. Corporal Sam Gillis provides a vivid insight into what the occupation was like: “We make everyone get into his house by seven p.m., and we only tell a man once. If he refuses we shoot him. We killed over 300 natives the first night. They tried to set the town on fire. If they fire a shot from the house we burn the house down and every house near it, and shoot the natives, so they are pretty quiet in town now.”

Just as the U.S. is now trying to cloak their interventionism in the guise of humanitarian causes, the 1899 intervention was of course described in the loveliest of terms. The leader of the nationalist movement in the Philippines who declared independence from the Spanish, Emilio Aguinaldo, received a letter from U.S. General Thomas Anderson that read,” General Anderson wishes you to inform your people that we are here for their good…”

President William McKinley insisted the U.S. was just trying to liberate the Philippines: “No imperial designs lurk in the American mind,” he said, but it was “not a good time for the liberator to submit important questions concerning liberty and government to the liberated while they are engaged in shooting down their rescuers.”

The legacy of that imperial war persisted over the decades until the U.S. was finally kicked out of the Philippines in the early 1990?s. The only reason the U.S. is interested in increasing military presence in the Philippines is to threaten and thus contain China. Never mind the fact that China doesn’t actually pose a threat to Americans.

It should go without saying that it is unacceptable for the U.S. to cynically use the quick military relief operations response to “lubricate” a deal that benefits U.S. foreign policy interests.

Read the whole thing.

Colin Dueck, writing in Foreign Affairs, argues that Rand Paul’s foreign policy does not seem to be on the ascendency, as some have assessed. Not only does the GOP establishment oppose Paul’s less interventionist take on national security policy, but even the supposedly Tea Party leaning Republican base (essential in any 2016 presidential campaign scenario) is hawkish at its core.

Using Walter Russell Mead’s categorization of the conservative electorate’s foreign policy, Dueck describes Paul as a “Jeffersonian,” someone who “emphasize[s] the need to avoid military interventions abroad,” is concerned about the “corrupting effects of international warfare and power politics on American traditions,” and advocates the United States “keeping to its own affairs and not intervening forcibly overseas.” Contrasted with this is the Republican/Tea Party base, who Dueck describes as “Jacksonian,” who are “intense nationalists who take great pride in the United States’ military and prioritize protecting its sovereignty, honor, well-being, and security in what they view as a dangerous world.”

“Jacksonians,” Dueck writes, “are generally skeptical of elite-sponsored legal, multilateral, and idealistic plans for global improvement — hence the surface resemblance to Rand’s views. But once their country is at war, threatened, or under attack, Jacksonians tend to be relentless and unyielding.”

In my post yesterday pondering whether or not Paul’s foreign policy views are on the ascendancy in the GOP, I linked to a recent Pew poll that found a majority of Americans think the U.S. should mind its own business in the world. Dueck, though, thinks the Pew poll’s “less reported findings” reveal the more interventionist leanings of the Republican electorate.

The practical and current policy implications of the distinction between Jacksonian and Jeffersonian tendencies within the GOP can be illustrated by drilling down into some of the less-reported findings of that same Pew poll from December. The poll found that 63 percent of Republicans want the United States to remain the world’s “sole military superpower.” A whopping 73 percent of Republicans believe Iran is “not serious” about addressing concerns about its nuclear weapons program. Some 80 percent of Republicans believe the United States is “less respected” than it was a decade ago. (It is unlikely that those Republicans view this as a good thing.) The highest foreign policy priority listed for Republicans was “protecting U.S. from terrorism.” Moreover, the December Pew poll found that 51 percent of all Americans view Obama as “not tough enough” on foreign policy and national security, 37 percent view him as “about right,” and only five percent view him as “too tough.” It is more than likely that the proportion of Republicans, specifically, who view Obama as “not tough enough” is well above 51 percent.

Continue reading “How Popular Are Rand Paul’s Foreign Policy Views, Really?”

Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest, spoke with Chicago University professor and renowned international relations theorist John Mearsheimer about the apparent shifts in attitudes in both the country and in Washington on foreign policy issues:

I would submit two points of caution. First of all, whatever hospitality the broader GOP has afforded more libertarian-leaning Republicans like Rand Paul and Justin Amash on national security issues is very likely to dissipate once the party regains power in the White House. The party out of power typically does things in the opposition that it later backtracks on once in power again.

Secondly, public opinion tends to ebb and flow on the issue of war and peace. Like in the aftermath of Vietnam, a majority of the country is currently opposed to excessive U.S. meddling around the world and overwhelmingly opposed to another lengthy war. The Bush administration’s excesses, particularly in Iraq, pushed the electorate in this direction. But this could also be just another fluctuation. Public opinion tends to be fickle and could easily flip back in the war fever mode given the right (or wrong) circumstances.

The question is whether this popular lean towards less muscular foreign policy and the small GOP faction that opposes excessive interventionism can be sustained for the longer term and whether it can then manifest itself in actual policymaking (which is a whole other obstacle given the entrenched interests in the foreign policy community in Washington). I’m agnostic on that question.

In last night’s State of the Union speech, President Obama put the spotlight on one of his invited guests, Army Ranger Sgt. 1st Class Cory Remsburg, a severely wounded veteran who was nearly killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. Here’s Reason‘s Nick Gillespie in Time on why using the wounded vet as a political tool is “morally dubious.”

The most emotionally powerful moment in Barack Obama’s State of the Union address was also its most morally dubious. The nation’s commander in chief drew attention to a wounded warrior while eliding any responsibility for placing the young man in harm’s way.

A record number of Americans – 60 percent – think the government is too powerful, says Gallup, which also finds a near record low percentage trusts the government “to do what is right.” Who can blame us? The government under Republican and Democratic presidents has spent virtually the entire 21st century sending young men and women to fight in ill-defined and unsuccessful elective wars. That’s bad enough, but then to use them as props in political speeches? That’s positively obscene.

Gillespie is exactly right. As I tweeted at the time, praising Corey for almost getting killed in a war zone that Barack Obama ordered him into is a bit off.

Praising wounded soldiers who fight in the country’s wars is an old pastime, stretching back to tribal warfare and the ancient Greeks. It is mostly an attempt to gin up support for state violence.

So when Obama paid tribute to our warriors “who risk and lay down their lives to keep us free,” he was not being genuine. Does having 50,000 U.S. troops in Germany really have anything to do with keeping us free? Or is it what policymakers, in their less public moments, have said NATO is all about, namely ensuring the U.S. maintains dominance over the European continent? Are the approximately 50,000 U.S. troops in Japan really there to keep Americans “free”? Or are they there, as in Europe, to maintain Washington’s dominance and, more lately, contain a rising China? Did troops really invade Iraq in 2003 to secure the freedom of Americans? Isn’t it true that the presence of U.S. troops in the Middle East motivated al-Qaeda to attack us on 9/11, and thus made us less secure and less free?

And if the troops in Afghanistan are there to protect freedom all the way back here in America, why does it look like we’ll be pulling out with none of our major objectives accomplished and the Taliban as strong as ever? Might Americans have been just as free if we pulled out in 2009, when Obama took office and when Corey was nearly killed? Wouldn’t Afghanistan be in approximately the same position it is now, with a weak government that survives on foreign aid and systemic corruption and a Taliban insurgency that, despite the vaunted surge, looks like it can break up the country?

By 1965, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had privately admitted the war in Vietnam was unwinnable, but necessary in order to maintain American credibility and prestige. The war in Afghanistan is very much the same. Soldiers sent to fight and die in Afghanistan are sent for the international reputations of politicians in Washington, to save face, to prove to the world that America will use force even in lost wars.

The greatest threat to Americans’ freedom doesn’t come from Germany or Japan or Iraq or Afghanistan. It comes from Washington. That’s why people in the Founding generation like James Madison said, “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” He also warned posterity that, “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Thomas Jefferson described “standing armies” as a “menace to the liberties of the people.”

If Obama said something like that, it would have been a hard truth put to the country. Hard, but at least it’d be true.