Month: July 2011

Last month our own Angela Keaton spoke on a panel in the Live Free or Die state on the future of the antiwar movement. Along with her are Will Hopkins of NH Peace Action, Iraq veteran Alex Peterson and John V. Walsh, MD of Come Home America.us, which has just posted the video on the forum. As Angela so eloquently explains, any truly effective antiwar movement will not come from the left, right, or libertarian spheres of ideological association, but from a diverse movement unified against state violence abroad. Broad appeal is the key to any successful mass campaign. Only when people are demanding an end to America’s military imperialism for their own darned reasons will we see this movement get the attention it needs and deserves.

Watch and enjoy!

Unbelievable news: bombing another country is not war. Over at Foreign Policy, Thomas E. Ricks writes that he’s convinced by the Obama administration’s justification for use of drones in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and now Somalia. That is, they are not a form a war or military aggression, but rather a police action in cooperation with sovereign governments.

The drone strikes being conducted in those three countries are not being done to challenge those states, but to supplement the power of those states, to act when they cannot or will not. More importantly, these are precise strikes against certain individuals, making them more like police work than like classic military action. Police work involves small arms used precisely. Drones aren’t pistols, but firing one Hellfire at a Land Rover is more like a police action than it is like a large-scale military offensive with artillery barrages, armored columns, and infantry assaults.

[…] Drones, like cruise missiles before them, have made it much easier to use force internationally. But doing this does not mean we are at war.

The ability of the conductors of state warfare to twist something so far in the wrong direction in order to call it something it is not should leave us in awe. First of all, who says attacks that supplement state power instead of undermine it don’t qualify as war or aggression? Even that question is too charitable because it stipulates that these governments have any legitimate sovereignty over the people of these countries. We know the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan have repeatedly asked the United States government to ease up on drone attacks, especially those that kill large numbers of civilians. Any reticence exhibited by those governments to stand up against American bombing is there essentially because of bribery: both governments continue to exist due to U.S. support. Can it really be said that these drone attacks are supplementing state power? Or that they’re carried out in good faith and cooperation with some legitimate sovereign power? This excuse loses all credibility when it comes to Somalia, a country that barely even has a government.

Ricks also suggests these drone strikes are such concentrated, isolated incidents that they are more like police work than war. This is fallacious. Many operations in traditional warfare can be described as “involv[ing] small arms used precisely.” And anyways, the drone campaign in each of these countries is an extended, systematic policy that repeats itself almost daily (at least in Pakistan). These are not isolated incidents.

We can be sure that if this same gobbledygook explanation of bombing campaigns not qualifying as war or international aggression were employed by another country, no American (even these war hawks currently employing it) would accept it. The rocket attacks coming from Gaza into Israel (which are far rarer than U.S. drone attacks and which are far less effective in killing people) are regarded as international terrorism by the United States. But we’re special. Different standards apply to us. And you can take this thought experiment further:

The idea that the United States can arrogate to itself the right of life and death of people around the world can set off a dangerous precedent.  What happens if India decides to do a bit of police action of its own in next door Pakistan. Unlike the CIA, India has actually built up a legal caseagainst the founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hafeez Sayeed, for involvement in the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai. Given the lack of action by Pakistani authorities, should India take the law into its hands and target Sayeed and his associates for the assault ?

Or as Greg Scoblete says in the Real World Compass blog, what if Iran develops the capability to fly drones of its own and blows up the suburban Virginia home of a CIA official that is suspects is  instigating violence in Iran, how will America react ?

Surely it is not going to say this is police action, but an act of war, or at the very least a terrorist strike on the homeland.

The U.S. leads the world in the use of unmanned aircraft for warfare by a distance, but it can’t be very long before other nations scale up their capabilities in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) as they are also  known.

The drone technology may be sophisticated, but it can be reverse-engineered and replicated (the Chinese are reportedly already doing it). Forty countries already have UAVs in their arsenals, as do reportedly non-state actors such as Hezbollah. Today the U.S.  is able to fly its drones over Waziristan and Yemen, but it is not inconceivable that in the future others too might be able to fly their drones over New York and Washington.

So there you have it. The Obama administration’s official strategy for conducting war with impunity wherever and whenever they want is to classify war as anything other than…war. That excuse was employed in Libya, and now for drone operations in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Where next?

Update: I hadn’t seen this in yesterday’s Washington Post before I posted this blog, but it provides some more background. Global Race On to Match U.S. Drone Capabilities:

More than 50 countries have purchased surveillance drones, and many have started in-country development programs for armed versions because no nation is exporting weaponized drones beyond a handful of sales between the United States and its closest allies.

But the world’s expanding drone fleets — and the push to weaponize them — have alarmed some academics and peace activists, who argue that robotic warfare raises profound questions about the rules of engagement and the protection of civilians, and could encourage conflicts.

“They could reduce the threshold for going to war,” said Noel Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield in England. “One of the great inhibitors of war is the body bag count, but that is undermined by the idea of riskless war.”

As far as the Arab Spring goes, Morocco seems to be a model for how not to needlessly shed blood and inflame unrest as we’ve seen in many other Arab countries.

Morocco’s overwhelming approval of a new constitution granting new rights to women and minorities was met with scorn by some democracy advocates and hope by foreign policy experts that the reforms could become a model for Arab monarchies facing uprisings.

Morocco said the reforms proposed by King Mohammed VI were approved by 98% of Moroccans who took part in a vote Friday — the first Arab nation to hold an election since the “Arab Spring” protest movement swept the region.

The amended constitution gives more power to the elected parliament and establishes an independent judiciary but the king will still control matters of foreign policy and religion. It comes at a time when other Arab monarchies, such as Bahrain and Oman, have used violent repression as a response t calls for democratic reforms.

David Ottaway, a member of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, says the North African nation differs from other Arab monarchies in ways that bode well for political reform in Morocco.

In the thousands, pro-democracy protesters this past Sunday pushed for more reform in addition to these constitutional amendments. Some activists charge that the stated numbers of support for the reforms are an exaggeration, and reject their promises:

“We are here to say no to the referendum and the Constitution,” said Oussama Khlifi, a founder of the group, which unites young, Facebook-fluent activists and members of Morocco’s Islamist movement. “We want a parliamentary monarchy with a king that reigns, but does not rule, and we want a real fight against corruption.”

But Morocco still represents a refreshing contrast to the terror we’ve seen other Arab states engage in with enthusiastic U.S. support. It remains to be seen how much positive change will actually occur, but the protests appear to be continuing with vigor. I certainly haven’t come across any reports of the Obama administration encouraging the positive, peaceful changes that have been taking place, but support for the Moroccan government remains pretty high, with aid at just over $40 million for both FY2011 and FY2012. This is less than in previous years, so perhaps the decrease will continue due to the lack of repression that is the baseline prerequisite for eligibility of U.S. financial and military assistance.

When the Obama administration last week released their new National Strategy for Counterterrorism I naively expected some honest iteration of policy of the kind that slip through in declassified NSC reports. That wasn’t the case. Rather, the report was similar to a vague and lofty Obama speech that avoided all actual explanation of US policy, especially towards the Middle East and Central Asia.

But then I realized that the true story coming out of that report was what it didn’t say; what was in between the lines. Tom Parker at Amnesty:

Having read all the fine words in the new strategy document, and digested Brennan’s thoughtful speech, you compare the administration’s rhetoric with the actual reality of its actions on the ground and you would be hard pressed to find a single core American value that the Obama administration hasn’t violated in the security arena.

This is a government that has hidden behind the state secrets privilege to avoid to compensating exonerated Canadian national Maher Arar and others abused and broken in illegal black sites and foreign jails; That has institutionalized indefinite detention and welched on its promise to close Guantanamo; That has stepped up targeted killing operations in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, revitalized Military Commissions and failed to fulfill its promise to put KSM and other alleged 9/11 co-conspirators on trial in federal court in New York.

In the past week alone the administration’s new nominee for Director of Central Intelligence, General David Petraeus, suggested during his confirmation hearing before the Senate that there might be a role for torture if the US was confronted with that old canard the ticking bomb scenario. And Special Prosecutor John Durham took the opportunity presented by the holiday weekend to announce discretely that he had decided that only 2 of the 101 cases of alleged CIA detainee abuse referred for his consideration merited any further investigation.

Not only is the strategy filled with broken promises and papered-over iterations of actual policy, but its missing a very large piece of the puzzle. It’s similar to a question I asked recently at a Cato Institute forum on Obama’s military strategy in Afghanistan (watch it here, around 72:20). Essentially, the terrorism problem facing the United States is primarily a reaction to U.S. imperialism. Yet, every policy or strategy we see suggested or implemented involves getting more entrenched militarily in the Arab/Muslim world. In this sense, the United States government is working overtime to bolster the chief threat to the safety of ordinary Americans (sometimes even directly arming the enemy). So, when it’s not lying through its teeth, the Obama National Strategy for Counterterrorism entirely misses the point which is that unwelcome intervention fuels the fire they’re trying to extinguish.

In an article on news aggregator “The Drudge Report,” a story titled “Iran Ridicules July 4th: America is Not Independent” from Israel National News spoke of

The left-wing anti-war.com site was sourced as writing that Israel “conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the U.S. of any ally,” with the quote attributed to the U.S. General Accounting Office.

As antiwar.com’s manifesto makes clear, the website was founded by libertarian-oriented folk who are, however, inclusive to all those who oppose war and American imperialism.

This quote was actually from “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,” a paper by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.

So all misconceptions aside, a big thanks to the Drudge Report and Israel National News for a bump in site traffic.