Month: April 2012

Obama’s new initiative to sanction private companies that help undemocratic regimes repress their people should not be construed as an act against repression per se. Just the kind Washington isn’t complicit in.

The Washington Post explains “[t]he new steps are designed primarily to target companies explicitly aiding authoritarian governments with new technology that assists in civilian repression,” but the administration will “not identify the targets of the sanctions by name” but “said ‘entities’ in this case describes both government agencies and private companies in Iran and Syria.”

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense wrote a conspicuously timed piece for Foreign Policy today on the administration’s new initiative. They argue unconvincingly that this “is a clear-eyed and pragmatic attempt to expand our government’s tool box to meet the challenges posed by tyrants who pose an extraordinary threat to their civilian populations.”

First of all, I long ago declared eternal hostility towards anything that “expands the government’s tool box” or its bank account or its bathing-suit areas or whatever else it wants to expand. But the larger point is that it is clear this initiative is just a reiteration of the hypercritical approach to tyranny Washington has displayed for decades. These measures, I’m sure, won’t target the private U.S. firms providing security assistance to repressive regimes that happen to be allied with the U.S.

Bahrain has been tapping the expertise of ex-U.S. police chief John Timoney to crack down more efficiently on peaceful protesters as well as a UK cop John Yates who apparently specializes in illegal wire-tapping and police surveillance. Before the NATO-backed regime change in Libya, Muammar Gadhafi was a friend and ally of Washington and paid millions to U.S. firms to churn out propaganda for him, and now various public relations firms are doing the same for the terrible governors we’ve replaced him with.

Paul Mutter at Mondoweiss:

Security ties such as this are by no means uncommon in the region, though the focus is usually focused on counterterrorism rather than public demonstrations. The Monitor Group, a Massachusetts-based lobbying firm, helped Muatassim al-Qadhafi train and staff his proposed National Security Council before the Libya uprising curtailed its creation. The New York Times reported last May that Erik Prince, former Blackwater chief, was building up a mercenary army in the UAE on the Crown Prince’s dirham. Israel and the US often share counterterrorism techniques and trainings. The US has been involved in past Bahraini police trainings, as have trainers from the UK: “British police have helped to train their counterparts in Bahrain, Libya, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Saudi Arabia,” The Independent reported. The Saudi National Guard, which was deployed in force to Bahrain last spring, also received UK training. Military and intelligence training for security forces is also common – Iraq, of course, is the most notable Middle Eastern example of such a (multinational) effort, but the US has also funded and trained Lebanese, Egyptian, Saudi Arabian, and West Bank Palestinian security forces.

How many governments around the world receive the help of Washington and of private U.S. firms in repressing their own people? How many will be susceptible to the punitive measures in this new initiative? Heck, while we’re at it, will AT&T be targeted for sanctions? After all, they were collaborators in what former NSA official William Binney called the “direct violation of the constitutional rights of everybody in the country.” What about the private companies with ties to Israel that wiretapped Americans for the NSA, a story revealed by James Bamford in Wired Magazine recently? How many private contracting firms are at the disposal of the NSA’s forthcoming spy center?

As usual, Washington’s intentions have nothing to do with protecting civilian populations from repressive regimes. This initiative is just another device to target states that Washington already doesn’t like.

“…it was a direct violation of the constitutional rights of everybody in the country…”

People who actually work for the military empire and aren’t running for office tend to be very honest about America’s monstrous foreign policy. The fact that America has helped prop up barbarous dictatorships throughout the Middle East for decades isn’t really allowed in the polite political debates of the day, never mind that they badly want that system to continue.

Aaron David Miller, who has been an advisor to six Secretaries of State and is now a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, isn’t like the lying politicians, though. He is honest when he laments the troubling prospect of America’s Middle East puppet-dictators going the way of the dodo bird. “Many of the big and not-so-big men who held America in thrall and their own people hostage,” Miller regretfully mourns, “are now gone or going.” The Arab Spring, he fears, is changing America’s system of domination over the region.

Miller reminisces fondly about what he calls “the acquiescent authoritarians, those presidents and kings on whom America depended to help protect its interests.”

They were constant, if not always agreeable, companions. Egypt’s Mubarak, Jordan’s King Hussein, Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Yemen’s Ali Saleh, Morocco’s King Hassan II, Saudi Arabia’s kings Fahd and Abdullah. The PLO’s Yasir Arafat rounded out the group photo.

America’s arrangements with the acquiescents (and their sons, relatives, and successors) weren’t pretty, but they were clear: In exchange for their cooperation in matters of war, peace, oil, and security, the United States supported them and looked past their prodigal ways, human rights abuses, authoritarian behavior, and faux reforms.

While the events of the last year have certainly shaken the foundations of the longstanding U.S. approach to the geo-strategically important Middle East – that of keeping brutal yet obedient dictators in power – the system is far from extinction. Change is sweeping the region and some nations are in a state of flux, but American influence is still working very hard to suppress that change. And for the most part, it’s working.

In Yemen, long-time U.S. client dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh is no longer president. Yemenis voted in February in a referendum on a U.S.-backed transition deal to formally depose Saleh and elect his deputy Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi, who was the only name on the ballot. The deal granted Saleh total immunity for the crimes he committed while on Washington’s dole. U.S. aid to prop up Hadi is now back in full force, partly in exchange for allowing Washington to dramatically escalate the drone war there with impunity, just as Saleh did. Much of Saleh’s cronies are still in power in Yemen and nothing substantive has changed in the government as far as the U.S. is concerned.

In Egypt, the veritable epicenter of the Arab revolutions, the military junta that served under ousted-U.S. puppet Hosni Mubarak still rules the country. Parliamentary elections have taken place, a constitution is being written up, and presidential elections are on the way. But few doubt who is really in charge. The military rulers recently barred ten presidential candidates from the election, including two front-runners. The constitutional process is in shambles and the secular, liberal forces in the country that sparked the revolution have been marginalized all along the way. Much of this is because of the internal politics of Egypt, but the U.S. is still sending billions of dollars in aid to Egypt and continues to arm the military rulers, even as they have brutalized peaceful protesters. The future isn’t certain but as things stand, much of the status quo has been maintained.

In Bahrain, the repressive monarchy is still in place after a year of protests urging reform and terrible murder and systematic torture in response, thanks to the Obama administration’s dedicated support. Bahrain hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet and is considered by Washington as a geopolitical asset in the strategically important Persian Gulf, also serving as a bulwark against Shiite Iran. Over $92 million in aid has been sent since Obama’s inauguration and another $22.4 million slated for 2012 and 2013. The Obama administration has quietly moved forward with a new package of arms sales to the regime in Bahrain, after international pressure forced them to delay its planned $53 million arms sale. Despite claims of reform, the dictatorship is as entrenched as ever.

After an invasion and occupation which Americans were promised would result in a free and democratic Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has consolidated power and is carving himself out a dictatorship. Sectarian violence is widespread and freedom is a lost a concept as ever, and Washington continues to support the Iraqi regime. The services rendered are the same as they’ve been throughout the Middle East for decades: comply with Washington’s demands, suppress democracy for your people.

We can go on like this. Miller actually admits that U.S.-supported dictatorships in the Gulf Arab states “have fared considerably better than the presidents of the phony republics.” But this isn’t something to shrug off. The puppet authoritarian governments on the U.S. dole include Saudi Arabia, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and Jordan. Together with the aforementioned, its clear the U.S. still has a stranglehold on any sort of democracy in the Middle East.

Miller’s lament ends with this:

In 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt allegedly quipped about the Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Somoza that he may be a son of bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch. Those days are over for America in the Middle East. SOBs may still emerge, but they won’t be ours. That may prove to be very good thing. But for now, America is in for a very rough patch in the new Middle Eastern Oz. And unfortunately, unlike Dorothy, we can’t just click our heels and go back to Kansas.

It remains to be seen what will come of this period of flux. But I’m thinking Miller should be more optimistic. American-induced despotism still reigns.

The Los Angeles Times has released just two of 18 photographs depicting U.S. soldiers posing happily next to Afghan corpses, or pieces of bodies. As with previous such incidents, the dehumanization of the “enemy” – a virtual necessity in war – runs deep.

Other unreleased photos show “Two soldiers posed holding a dead man’s hand with the middle finger raised. A soldier leaned over the bearded corpse while clutching the man’s hand. Someone placed an unofficial platoon patch reading “Zombie Hunter” next to other remains and took a picture.”

The Army of course promised to “take appropriate action” against those involved, just after reciting the same line about how this isn’t representative of the rest of the soldiers. These are hard to listen to when news of such behavior is anything but new. It’s worth noting also that the U.S. military officials the Times approached to ask questions about the photos before their release, requested they not be published. Big surprise there.

The release of the images comes at a time when the Obama administration is losing its grip on the war. The last few months have held a number of high-profile failures and embarrassments. First, a video went viral depicting U.S. soldiers urinating on Afghan corpses. After that, the controversy over the U.S. Army’s burning of Muslim holy books sparked country-wide protests and violence. Then Staff Sgt. Robert Bales (& Co.) slaughtered 17 Afghan civilians in an unprovoked massacre of men, women, and children. Just last weekend, insurgents mounted spectacular coordinated attacks that set off an 18-hour battle with NATO forces, an indication of their annual spring offensive and a public relations embarrassment for the U.S. at what seems to be the lowest point in the war.

Posing with dead, tortured Muslims or their body parts is an all-too-common exercise in the military since 9/11 – whether in the Abu Ghraib torture dungeon, the urban kill zones of Iraq, or the arid plains of blood-soaked Afghanistan. But it’s not just smiling and flashing a thumbs up for the camera, it’s killing civilians. The “Kill Team” in Afghanistan, the army unit that planned and committed executions of multiple innocent, unarmed Afghan civilians, framed the dead as having been a threat and mutilated their corpses as trophies. They also took photos of their gruesome escapades.

The lives of Afghans, insurgents or not, become less valuable than other human lives, like last October when American troops forced civilians to march ahead of them on roads believed to have been filled with bombs and landmines planted by insurgents. On routine house searches, writes formerly embedded journalist Neil Shea, U.S. soldiers would demolish the home and its contents for the fun of it.

War requires dehumanizing some enemy. The enemy becomes not only less than human, but also the origin of all your troubles. Nazis managed to proliferate this feeling towards Jews. But its prevalent in all of America’s wars as well.

Americans became aggressively anti-German during the First World War. In 1918, for example, a mob in St. Louis attacked a German immigrant named Robert Prager, who had tried to enlist in the Navy. They beat him up, wrapped him in the American flag, and lynched him. A jury found the mob leaders not guilty, citing a case of what they called “patriotic murder.”

U.S. troops fighting the Japanese in WWII commonly mutilated their corpses, severing their body parts to take as “war trophies,” just as the Kill Team did with Afghans. One famous photograph shows a decapitated Japanese head hung on a tree after a battle with American soldiers. Crimes by both sides served to intensify the dehumanization on both sides.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo calls this part of the Lucifer Effect. “At the core of evil,” he writes, “is the process of dehumanization by which certain other people or collectives of them, are depicted as less than human, as non comparable in humanity or personal dignity to those who do the labeling…Discrimination involves the actions taken against those others based on the beliefs and emotions generated by prejudiced perspectives.”

Dehumanization is “fundamental to a nation’s public support for war,” writes Kimberly Elliot, “Dehumanizing others renders the requisite horrors of war tolerable.” Soldiers as well as American citizens have to go through indoctrination about the strategic justifications for war, which have all but evaporated in Afghanistan, as well as indoctrination about who it is we’re fighting. That such indoctrination has to occur for the war to be fightable is a good indication that it isn’t worth another second of anybody’s life.

Update: At the Daily Beast, Harry Siegel, a war photographer who has published his own images of U.S. soldiers smiling with “war trophies,” says “these types of acts are more commonplace than we think.”

James Harkin argues at Foreign Policy that the internationalization of the conflict in Syria has exacerbated the civil strife there. Part of the problem lies with the Syrian National Council – the exile group allying itself with the opposition fighters – and their “orchestrated effort to turn Homs into a Syrian Benghazi — the eastern Libyan city whose imminent destruction by Muammar al-Qaddafi’s forces provided the catalyst that sparked the international intervention in Libya last year.”

Harkin has been in and out of Syria for years and was last there in February and from his own experiences and direct sources inside Homs, he explains how many of those stories were simply fabricated. With an eye toward the Libya example, “the exiled Syrian opposition seems to have aimed to exaggerate the civilian losses in the city into the claim of genocide in order to push buttons within the international community.” And the media, he argues, largely cooperated.

With regards to the international response, Harkin sees outside support for the opposition fighters to be counterproductive at best:

The SNC’s apparent decision to accept money from the Gulf States to pay salaries to Free Syrian Army guerrillas sounded breathtakingly arrogant, and makes for shockingly bad politics. Not only does lend credence to the conspiracy theories peddled by the government that the uprising is the handiwork of foreign agitators; it risks splitting the indigenous opposition movement and empowering exactly the kind of Sunni extremist groups who are most likely to stoke sectarian tensions.

This criticism of intervention by the Gulf States holds for the West as well, as I’ve argued many times. While countries like the U.S. and Britain claim to be supplying the Syrian opposition fighters with non-lethal aid, empowering the more militant religious extremists over the reform-minded political activists is still likely. As Marc Lynch has argued, if foreigners arm the rebels “fighting groups will rise in political power, while those who have advocated nonviolence or who advance political strategies will be marginalized.” Ed Husain of the Council on Foreign Relations also explained recently that “there are Saudi Salafis, as well as al-Qaeda elements, and others who are included toward more extreme versions of religiosity present in that conflict. Given that we don’t really know who the Syrian opposition is composed of in detail, how wise is it to then bring down another regime and put in its place yet another Muslim Brotherhood-led government?” Lynch has also argued previously that outside intervention would vindicate the Assad regime’s accusations and “would only invite escalations from Syrian regime forces.”

Harkin ends with a hard-hitting quip:

Who knows: If the unthinking drift toward creating neo-mujahideen in Syria and Iran (a strategyadvocated by Foreign Policy’s own James Traub) continues, following a decade in which radical Sunnis became America’s Public Enemy No. 1, Osama bin Laden might have to be posthumously converted back into the freedom fighter America saw him as in the 1980s, marching into battle to drive out one of the last vestiges of godlessness in the Middle East.

I argued the same back in February when the first reports of possible al-Qaeda fighters in Syria came forth. Unfortunately, to say that the leadership in the U.S. is explicitly advocating merging U.S. policy with al-Qaeda’s tactical plans is not enough to stop interventionists in their tracks.