Month: March 2012

Economist and Antiwar.com contributor David Henderson and co-author Zachary Gochenour have written a paper on the correlation between the popularity of a president and the number of people they’ve killed. Here is the abstract:

Historians and journalists commonly survey other historians on the relative “greatness” of American presidents, and these rankings show remarkable consistency between surveys. In this paper we consider commonalities between highly ranked presidents and compare plausible determinants of greatness according to historians. We find that a strong predictor of greatness is the fraction of American lives lost in war during a president’s tenure. We find this predictor to be robust and compare favorably to other predictors used in previous historical research. We discuss potential reasons for this correlation and conclude with a discussion of how historians’ views might affect policy.

They also point to this quote from Theodore Roosevelt:

If there is not war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not the great occasion, you don’t get the great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in times of peace, no one would know his name now.

The feeling that a U.S./Israeli strike on Iran is inescapably imminent has waxed and waned over the last few months. As soon as the feeling of impending war begins to dissipate, hawks in Washington and Tel Aviv step up the warnings of preemptive strike. They will privately admit that actually bombing Iran isn’t necessary at the moment, but that issuing threats of such an attack is vital to instilling fear in the Iranians.

Just to take one example, Israeli officials have complained on a number of occasions that U.S. officials speaking publicly about their reluctance to start a war with Iran “served Iran’s interests.” Incisive realists have recognized their reasoning as follows: If we don’t frighten Iran with the threat of war, they’ll behave however they want!

This reasoning seems to be true for economic warfare too. The Senate is preparing to consider yet another package of harsh economic sanctions on Iran as punishment for the nuclear weapons program they don’t have. Despite the intelligence consensus that Iran has no weapons program and has not even made the decision to start one, crippling sanctions and the threat of aggressive war is essential to terrify the Iranians into compliance. This is even more revealing: Iran has not committed the transgression supposedly justifying this aggressive approach, so paralyzing them with fear of attack has little to do with having a nuclear program and much to do with refusing to be subservient to Washington.

“If the United States doesn’t broadcast determination all along the road, both in sanctions and in the threat of military action, Tehran is liable to mistakenly understand from this that 2012 is a lost year for the international community, so its nuclear program can advance as usual,” a senior Israeli official told Ha’aretz.

“At the moment,” the official continued, “largely because of the administration’s contradictory messages, the Iranians assume that nothing military will happen before the U.S. presidential elections in November.” Fear of all out war is the most valuable diplomatic tool when dealing with Iran, the thinking goes.

This is, of course, a prerogative of the United States and Israel only. If any other state ran their foreign policy on the basis of fear, on repeatedly issuing serious and illegal threats of unprovoked attack, they would surely face international sanctions and perhaps even worse. It seems a form of terrorism.

It should be noted that, even though officials in Washington and Tel Aviv readily admit the purely rhetorical use of warmongering in instilling fear into our enemies, this does not mean an actual attack is out of the question. In fact, an attack would serve the same purposes. The Iranian nuclear program (which is purely civilian in nature) is far too redundant across the country and in some cases protected underground for a bombing campaign to completely wipe it out. And not even the most rabid warmongers are explicitly arguing for a ground invasion, regime change, and extended occupation of Iran. So it seems the only purpose of an actual military strike would be to cause fear, to signal we mean business.

This, of course, instead of the perfectly peaceful diplomatic solutions to the conflict.

Brian Dooley, of Human Rights First, on Bahrain:

They said they had been severely beaten by the police in the previous two days. “They beat us until they got tired, then other policemen would take over and beat us more,” said one boy.

Such beatings have become standard procedure in Bahrain. With high corruption and no functioning legal system to write home about, victims of abuse like this have no recourse. Reuters reports today that a teenage boy was abducted by “plainclothes detectives” who “dragged him into a garage and beat him into unconsciousness after he refused to spy” on other youth protesters. The boy came out and told his story, and the government simply denied it.

Overall repression remains high and widespread. No substantive move toward reform as occurred and the tyrannical government continues to receive Washington’s support.

The questions of whether or not to continue sending military aid to Egypt briefly occupied the power centers in Washington last week. Some in the Senate argued it isn’t good to aid undemocratic regimes who harm their own people. And then it was remembered that such programs are important welfare for American corporations and workers. New York Times:

A delay or a cut in $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt risked breaking existing contracts with American arms manufacturers that could have shut down production lines in the middle of President Obama’s re-election campaign and involved significant financial penalties, according to officials involved in the debate.

…The companies involved include Lockheed Martin, which is scheduled to ship the first of a batch of 20 new F-16 fighter jets next month, and General Dynamics, which last year signed a $395 million contract to deliver component parts for 125 Abrams M1A1 tanks that are being assembled at a plant in Egypt.

“In large part, there are U.S. jobs that are reliant on the U.S.-Egypt strong military-to-military relationship,” a senior State Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity under rules set by the department. In deciding how to proceed, the official said, Mrs. Clinton and her colleagues “were looking at our overall national security goals, as well as any domestic issues.”

Yes, military aid to Egypt propped up a dictatorship for decades, continues to help thwart democracy, and empowers the state to brutalize its own people – but we’ve got an economy to run! Lockheed needs those dollars, Americans need those jobs!

The military-industrial-congressional complex uses these same kinds of rationales for never cutting defense budgets, as was evidenced in recent months. See here for why defense spending-as-job-creation is bunk.

Two videos emerged this weekend that are worth highlighting. The first is apparently a rare look into a warantless night raid by Israeli forces in the West Bank.

The other video is of an Israeli “mob attack by hundreds of Israeli football fans on Arab workers and shoppers at the Malha Mall in western Jerusalem,” according to Ali Abunimah at Electronic Intifada. The mob beat up, spit on, and harassed Arabs in the mall and chanted  “mavet la ‘aravim,” or death to the Arabs, in Hebrew. No arrests were made.

(h/t Jonathan Liebowitz)