Month: October 2011

I’m consistently amazed at how very smart people can be fooled by the Obama administration’s (and his predecessors’) fraudulent humanitarian rationale for war. Well, as if we need any more evidence, Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy has recently articulated another nook and cranny of Obama foreign policy that would seem to negate any humanitarian motivations behind his decisions (via Jesse Walker):

President Barack Obama has decided to waive almost all the legally mandated penalties for countries that use child soldiers and provide those countries U.S. military assistance, just like he did last year.

The White House is expected to soon announce its decision to issue a series of waivers for the Child Soldiers Protection Act, a 2008 law that is meant to stop the United States from giving military aid to countries that recruit soldiers under the age of 15 and use them to fight wars. The administration has laid out a range of justifications for waiving penalties on Yemen, South Sudan, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all of which amount to a gutting of the law for the second year in a row.

Last year, the White House didn’t even tell Congress or the NGO community when it decided to do away with the Child Soldiers Prevention Act penalties. Most had to read about it first on The Cable. Aid workers, human rights activists, and even congressional offices were shocked that the administration had gutted the law without consulting them.

One of the headlining aspects of the Ugandan terrorists Lord’s Resistance Army was that they employ child soldiers, among their many other horrible crimes. But the Obama administration circumvented the law as recently as a few weeks ago in order to send US military aid to the very same region (Sudan, Congo) to which he has now, by arbitrary presidential decree, sent 100 US combat forces to stop things like employing child soldiers. What a guy.

The Iranian government is now accusing Gholam Shakuri – the supposed Quds Force member who assisted US citizens Mansour Arbabsiar in carrying out an assassination of a Saudi ambassador in DC – of being a member of the Iranian terror group Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MeK), a State Department listed terrorist organization hostile to the Iranian government. The state-backed Iran Times alleges that Interpol has evidence which they can corroborate that Shakuri was in the MeK’s compound in Camp Ashraf.

The obvious corollary here is that, if true, this would absolve the Iranian government of culpability in the attack. The MeK seeks the overthrow of the Iranian government, and the fact that they’re on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations further detaches them from the Iranian government. This means that the US’s belligerent response to the alleged plot was based on false evidence and entirely misdirected at an uninvolved third party (the Iranian government).

It should also be noted that the extensive doubts and suspicions that almost every sober person had about the accuracy of the DoJ’s and the Obama administration’s official narrative – like, no evidence of Iranian government complicity, totally out of character for the Quds Force, why choose a bumbling idiot like Arbabsiar, no motive whatsoever, etc. – practically dissolve if the narrative is changed to the plot being an MeK operation. Again, we have to wait for the evidence because all we have now are allegations from the Iranian government, but if the evidence is put forth that Shakuri is an MeK, then it is much more in MeK’s character to carry out an amateur, dangerous plot like this. And its obvious they chose a bumbling idiot like Arbabsiar because they needed someone gullible enough to believe they were actually Quds Force. And of course the motive would be to influence the US towards war with Iran, so that they get their long-sought regime change and a chance at a power grab in the transition.

But what’s perhaps more pressing than all of this is the fact that if the MeK actually is responsible, it will make it very awkward for many prominent US leaders. Why? Because many US leaders support the MeK. Such hawkish supporters include former Vermont governor and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, former New York governor Rudy Giuliani, former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, former US Rep. Lee Hamilton, former US ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson, the campaign advisors of former Masschusetts governor and top Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and many others. These people and more are have actively lobbied for the MeK. Read more about these efforts here, here, and here. If the MeK is now found to have come close to not only carrying out a terrorist attack on American soil but to influencing the US towards war with Iran…will these people be held responsible in some way?

We all know about the extrajudicial assassination of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. It was murder without due process, guaranteed him by the Fifth Amendment. Less people know about the same fate befalling his 16-year old son (I reported on it here, but details have since been clarified and expanded upon):

In the days before a CIA drone strike killed al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki last month, his 16-year-old son ran away from the family home in Yemen’s capital of Sanaa to try to find him, relatives say. When he, too, was killed in a U.S. airstrike Friday, the Awlaki family decided to speak out for the first time since the attacks.

“To kill a teenager is just unbelievable, really, and they claim that he is an al-Qaeda militant. It’s nonsense,” said Nasser al-Awlaki, a former Yemeni agriculture minister who was Anwar al-Awlaki’s father and the boy’s grandfather, speaking in a phone interview from Sanaa on Monday. “They want to justify his killing, that’s all.”

The teenager, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver in 1995, and his 17-year-old Yemeni cousin were killed in a U.S. military strike that left nine people dead in southeastern Yemen.

Abdulrahman al-Awlaki’s family has set up a memorial Facebook page. It includes pictures like these:

The boy was killed by a US drone strike while he was out to dinner with his 17-year old cousin. Nine others died.

Yesterday’s New York Times revealed that the Obama administration considered attacking Libya through cyber-warfare before ultimately going the whole bombing and airstrikes route:

While the exact techniques under consideration remain classified, the goal would have been to break through the firewalls of the Libyan government’s computer networks to sever military communications links and prevent the early-warning radars from gathering information and relaying it to missile batteries aiming at NATO warplanes.

But administration officials and even some military officers balked, fearing that it might set a precedent for other nations, in particular Russia or China, to carry out such offensives of their own, and questioning whether the attack could be mounted on such short notice. They were also unable to resolve whether the president had the power to proceed with such an attack without informing Congress.

In the end, American officials rejected cyberwarfare and used conventional aircraft, cruise missiles and drones to strike the Libyan air-defense missiles and radars used by Col.Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government.

First note the worry that it would set a precedent that other international players would replicate. This is actually quite remarkable, because usually it is taken for granted in government circles that America can do things that others can’t; rules apply to others…that’s why its called Exceptionalism. I would actually speculate that this was less a concern within the administration as the Times makes it out to be.

Back in May, the Wall Street Journal reported the Pentagon’s opinion regarding potential cyber-attacks against the United States:

The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.

…In part, the Pentagon intends its plan as a warning to potential adversaries of the consequences of attacking the U.S. in this way. “If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks,” said a military official.

As I wrote at the time, this statement from the Pentagon was essentially a declaration of Iran’s right to bomb the United States: “At least, that’s the principle being laid down by this announcement. Cyber attacks have been an official policy, as far as we can gather, of the United States towards Iran for some time. No military response is even worried about from Iranians – they don’t have that prerogative. We, on the other hand, rule the world. And rules that apply to others simply don’t apply to us.”

Second, note the behind-the-scenes tendency to keep instances of international aggression secret from the American people. If cyber-attacks aimed at Libya still require us to endure the nuisance of informing Americans about the conduct of their government, they apparently deliberated, then we might as well go with good ol’ fashion cruise missiles anyways. They also worried cyber-attacks might fall under the War Powers Resolution. This further punctures the Obama administration’s ludicrous argument that the Libya intervention did not fall under the WPR. As even law professor and former Bush administration Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel Jack Goldsmith wrote today:

But if the kinetic and cyber attacks would have achieved the same effect on Libyan air defenses (which is what the story suggests), it is hard to see why the cyber attack and not the kinetic attack would have constituted “hostilities” under the WPR.  Indeed, on the administration’s narrow theory of “hostilities” under the WPR, the likelihood of an attack being deemed “hostilities” rises with the likelihood that a U.S. soldier will receive hostile fire or injury.  But as the story noted, the likelihood of risk to U.S. soldiers was higher with the kinetic than with the cyber attack, so it is not clear why a cyber attack would raise heightened concerns under the WPR.

But wait…this could only make sense if…no! Couldn’t be….If the Obama administration was…nah!…dishonest with us? Could it be!?