Month: May 2012

Stephen Walt is “thinking outside the box,” suggesting “a bit of a hail Mary” for mitigating the conflict in Syria:

Is there anyway to convince Assad and his closest associates to leave? I don’t have a surefire way to do it, but one big step in the right direction would be for Russia to shift is position and stop protecting him. In other words, what if Moscow made it clear that they were willing to grant Assad et al asylum if they left, but were not willing to help keep them in power any longer?

I don’t see this as particularly outside the box. In fact, I’ve been harping on about Russia’s support for Assad for months now. In this interview on RT from February I explained how Moscow’s support for Assad is one of the main factors prolonging the conflict. “Russia,” I wrote in March, “even after endorsing the Annan talks, continues to arm and support the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.” If this support were hypothetically withdrawn, I think it’s clear that would put unprecedented pressure on the Assad regime, which is already facing extreme diplomatic isolation. I hadn’t considered the asylum part of it, but that would certainly sweeten the deal.

As I understand it, Russia’s relationship with Syria is very much like America’s relationship with many of its own satellite states headed by puppet dictators. It is a relationship that, Moscow calculates, affords them a lot of influence in the geostrategically important Middle East, and continuing to support Assad throughout this conflict gives Moscow an opportunity to push back against Western, particularly U.S., imperialism for the sake of maintaining their own stake in the region.

The question is, as Walt points out, why in the world would Russia give up their satellite in Syria? Indeed, why would the U.S. willingly give up their influence in Bahrain or Yemen or Iraq just because it would be the humane thing to do? Walt suggests (1) letting Moscow and Putin take full credit for resolving the crisis and (2) to “toss in concessions on European missile defense, which is a costly boondoggle we ought to be ditching anyway.” I reckon there are several such “carrots” Washington could offer Moscow to make disunion with Assad more palatable. But this of course assumes Washington’s main concern is stopping the bloodshed in Syria, which it evidently is not. Like in Libya, the Obama administration views “credit” for “helping Arabs” as a high commodity, and I don’t see them easing up on the missile defense plan.

Furthermore, it seems unlikely that, if the Russians help facilitate a post-Assad transition, Washington would take a hands-off position going forward. Both Russia and the U.S. will then be vying to shape the politics of post-Assad Syria with nothing but their own interests in mind (and to the detriment of the Syrian people, if history guides). To Moscow and Washington, what happens in Syria is about them, not about the well-being of Syrians. If an obsessive-compulsive commitment to insidious intervention in the internal affairs of others remains the status quo, such a deal will be increasingly remote.

News from the Empire in South Korea:

A three-judge panel on Wednesday sentenced a U.S. soldier to six years in prison for raping a South Korean teenager in September.

Pvt. Kevin Robinson was found guilty of raping the 17-year-old at her residence in Seoul after a night of drinking. He also was convicted of larceny for stealing the victim’s laptop.

Unfortunately, this isn’t uncommon in countries where thousands of U.S. troops have been essentially permanently based. There was another high-profile case of rape last year in which “Pvt. Kevin Lee Flippin was sentenced to 10 years in prison for brutally raping another South Korean teenager.” These two cases prompted widespread protests in South Korea and “led to calls for changes to the U.S.-South Korea Status of Forces Agreement regarding the treatment of U.S. servicemembers suspected of crimes,” since they are often granted immunity.

Japan is another classic case of this. Between 1972 and 2009, there were 5,634 criminal offenses committed by U.S. servicemen in Japan, including 25 murders, 385 burglaries, 25 arsons, 127 rapes, 306 assaults and 2,827 thefts. Japanese citizens have protested against U.S. military presence on their land for decades.

Meanwhile, the locations for essentially permanent U.S. military bases are multiplying in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

This is Less Antman speaking at the Libertarian Party’s National Convention.

Of course, we at Antiwar.com do not support political candidates or parties. But this speech hits on the type of message we have tried to put forth for so long. The state has an interest in war. People do not. The state has an interest in economic and civil control. The people have an interest in liberty and in the market.

The key passage:

Drowning people in fear is the key to power. But we also learned five years ago that antiwar is the health of the anti-state movement. And even if we do nothing other than end ALL the wars, real as well as metaphorical, we will be well on our way to a free society. And millions are ready to rally around that banner.

Joost Hiltermann writes in the New York Review of Books blog about his recent trip to Bahrain:

Talking to dozens of people both in Manama and in smaller communities outside the capital, I was told again and again that the situation was becoming worse, not better: police forces have been using large quantities of tear gas against protesters, repeatedly causing deaths; police brutality had not ended but moved from police stations to alleyways and undeclared detention centers; young activists are increasingly resorting to Molotov cocktails, subverting the peaceful nature of the protests; and the government has not opened any dialogue with the opposition or offered hope for political reform.

Hiltermann explains how this narrative of sectarianism and of an encroaching Iran on the Shiite protesters is not a reality on the ground, although it is peddled by the regime which is desperate to conceal the fact that the protest movement in Bahrain really is about reforming a corrupt dictatorship. And of course there is the added benefit of trying to convince the U.S. that any harm to the regime will be a benefit to the ultimate bogeyman, Iran.

Meanwhile, the regime has promised enough messing around. After a year of killing and beating and torturing and repressing the population, they are apparently preparing for an even harsher crackdown. But you can bet support from Washington will continue.

The wing of the U.S. human rights movement which targets foreign countries can wind up as a cruel business, aiding the ruthless and violent actions of the U.S. Empire, wittingly or not.   For the U.S. all too often uses human rights as a cover for taking action against countries that defy the Empire’s control.

Some weeks back, I decided to look into one such group, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), an organization I had long refrained from joining out of skepticism.  But perhaps, I thought, PHR had sidestepped the dangers inherent in this work.  So I joined to find out.

Some days later I received my first email from PHR.  I was floored by the heading, “Protect Syrian Citizens: Help Make Sanctions Tougher.”  The word “tougher” struck me.  The email read in part: “Help us impose tougher sanctions on Pres. Assad’s brutal regime. The Syria Sanctions Act of 2011, S. 1472, will target Syria’s energy and financial sectors. Contact your Senators today and urge them to back S. 1472.”  The sponsor of this bill was Kirsten Gillibrand, and among the 12 co-sponsors were two neocon leaders, John McCain and Joe Lieberman, the latter hardly a human rights stalwart when it comes to Palestinians.   Did that not ring alarm bells at PHR?

Sanctions target the Syrian people, bringing poverty and hunger.

PHR argues that the sanctions are “targeted” at the oil and financial sectors and therefore are of consequence only for the Syrian elite.  Since 25% of the revenue of the Syrian government comes from oil revenues (according to the text of the bill), expenditures providing needed relief to the population, for example the current price supports for food, will certainly be affected.  But it is not only the revenues of the Syrian government that are affected. The Financial Times reports: “The most significant sanctions are on the oil industry, estimated by the International Monetary Fund to have accounted for almost a fifth of gross domestic product in 2010. Analysts estimate that they helped contribute to a contraction of 2-10 per cent to Syria’s economy last year (2011).”

The results of the sanctions should be obvious with only a moment’s thought.  If the Assad regime is as nefarious as PHR claims, then certainly it will put itself way ahead of the common people as sanctions bite.  Such an attitude is the norm not the exception in the world today.  But even if the leaders of the human rights community could not figure this out, the impact of the sanctions on ordinary Syrians is hardly a secret, even in the mainstream press.  Thus in March the Washington Post ran an article entitled “Syria running out of cash as sanctions take toll, but Assad avoids economic pain.”  One did not even need to read beyond the headline to get the point.  The article reports as follows: “The financial hemorrhaging has forced Syrian officials to stop providing education, health care and other essential services in some parts of the country, and has prompted the government to seek more help from Iran to prop up the country’s sagging currency.… Revenue from Syrian oil, meanwhile, has almost dried up, with even China and India declining to accept the nation’s crude…..  At the same time, President Bashar al-Assad appears to have shielded himself and his inner circle from much of the pain of the sanctions and trade embargoes, which are driving up food and fuel prices for many of the country’s 20 million residents…” The Washington Post is not alone in this assessment.  The Financial Times tells us:  A  “murky broader picture (emerges) suggesting that while some sanctions are hurting the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the president, and its alleged associates, they are also hurting ordinary Syrians … David Butter, a Middle East economic expert, said: ‘If it’s a scrap for limited resources, the regime is still in a position to get the first rights, whether fuel or cash or food. It [the sanctions regime] hurts them but to really cripple them is going to take a long time.’”

And the effect desired by the U.S. is quite clear.  Another article in the Washington Post with the headline “Amid Unrest, Syrians Struggle to Feed Their Families” reports that food prices have risen as the result of sanctions.  As a result the Assad government in March “introduced a system of price-fixing for essential foods that has stabilized the cost of bread, sugar and meat — although they remain much higher than they were a year ago.  ….. ‘ Despite efforts to mitigate the problem around half of Syrians may live in poverty, said Salman Shaikh of the Brookings Institute in Doha, who argued that this is increasing anti-government feeling.”  Regime change is the point.  And the pronouncements of Obama and Hillary make this abundantly clear.

The Empire in Desperation Pulls Out all the Stops to bring Syria to heel.

Since Russia and China drew a line in the sand to stop the overthrow of the Syrian regime by the West, the United States appears increasingly desperate.  That desperation has grown since the UN-brokered cease-fire has terminated much of the fighting and killing, however imperfectly.

But is not the Assad government to blame for the failures of the cease-fire?  If so, it is certainly not alone.   Recently the NYT reported: “An explosion killed at least three people in Aleppo, and two blasts hit a Damascus highway on Saturday in further signs that rebels fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad are shifting tactics toward homemade explosives.  Syria’s state news agency said three people had been killed, one of them a child, and 21 had been wounded by a booby-trapped car in the northern city of Aleppo.  The Syrian Observatory for Humans Rights, an opposition group based in Britain that relies on information from Syrian activists, said the blast destroyed a carwash in Tal al-Zarazeer, a poor suburb, and killed five people.  A member of the rebel Free Syrian Army claimed responsibility for the bombing, saying that the carwash was used by members of a pro-Assad militia.”  A car wash is hardly a target that is focused on the military.   And today The Guardian and others reported that a Syrian military convoy protecting the UN observer mission was hit by a roadside explosion, injuring six Syrian soldiers, three badly.  When Russian officials accuse the Syrian opposition of “terrorist tactics,” it appears that they have a point.

PHR has certainly done some good things in the past, for example documenting human rights violations and medical abuses in Gaza and the West Bank – although this work is now solidly in the hands of the Israeli division of PHR, meaning, among other things, that it will get less attention in the U.S.  And at no point has PHR called for boycotts against Israel a regime that has killed untold thousands of Palestinians in what amounts to a long slow genocide.  In the eyes of PHR it would appear that official enemies of the U.S. Empire deserve sanctions, whereas allies who violate the most basic human rights get an investigation and a tongue lashing – at most.

In fact sanctions are the work of our imperial government; and when a “human rights” organization gets into the business of supporting them, it is de facto in the business of supporting the Empire and its drive for domination (1). Token ruminations about human rights violations by U.S. “allies” or clients do not alter this fact.  Such ruminations serve as little more than a cover for the real use of these groups to the Empire.  Whether the PHR policy makers understand this or not makes little difference.

So what was this PHR member to do in the face of such stance?  This writer called the Boston office, the home office, to complain about the decision to back the Sanctions bill.  I was given to understand by one staffer that I was not the only member to register dissatisfaction.   I inquired who made this decision and how it was made.  Initially I was told that such decisions were not made in the home office but at a smaller office in Washington, which works closely with Congress.  In a subsequent email I was told that “the policy and program decisions are made by our Executive Management team.”  Who is the “Executive Management Team”?  This member does not know and has not been told.  Furthermore the PHR web site does not contain any information about the Executive Management Team, as far as I can see.  Are personnel of the U.S. government consulted in such deliberations?  (The PHR membership clearly is not.) And should not such an important decision at least have some input from the members?

But PHR is not alone in providing cover for the designs of the Empire.  They are but one example. Other human rights organizations appear to be jumping on the bandwagon.  And of course the U.S. government is happy to have their support.  Syria is clearly the gateway to Iran – and both countries have refused to one degree or another to submit to the will of the U.S.  So regime change for both countries is high on the agenda of the West.  That is the way of Empire.

PHR started out at its founding in 1978 documenting the abuses of the Pinochet government, a client of the Empire.  Today it has descended into an instrument for justifying an attack on one of the official enemies of the U.S.  That is the danger of a “human rights” approach if uninformed by an understanding of the designs and ruthlessness of the Empire.

The core of the physicians’ credo is “First do no harm.”  Starving a people for the sake of  “human rights” as part of a campaign that serves imperial machinations for regime change hardly fits into that injunction.  And certainly PHR knows that diseases arising from privation and hunger fall most heavily on non-combatants, children and the elderly especially.  That is no secret either.  Perhaps PHR is echoing the judgment of Madeleine Albright on Iraq that the human carnage of the sanctions is “worth it.”  However, from an ethical viewpoint, that judgment does not belong to citizens of the Empire living in comfort far from the victims in Syria.

(1.)It is interesting to read what is necessary for such sanctions to be lifted once imposed.  The bill states the following:

“Termination will occur “on the date the President submits to Congress a certification that the government of Syria is democratically elected and representative of the people of Syria and a certification under the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003 that the Syrian government has:

• ceased support for international terrorist groups;
• ended its occupation of Lebanon;
• ceased development and deployment of ballistic missiles and biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons and agreed to verification measures; and
• ceased all support for, and facilitation of, terrorist activities in Iraq.”

Given that one of the named “terrorist groups” is Hamas, which is the duly elected government in Gaza, and given the murkiness of the other requirements, this is a tall order indeed.

John  V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com

More than 600 U.S. troops are stationed across Honduras, engaged in an aggressive campaign in the so-called drug war. This piece from the New York Times yesterday explains that the strategy Washington is employing there draws from the “hard lessons learned from a decade of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq.” In those conflicts, massive amounts of U.S. troops were dispersed out of “giant bases” and “scattered across remote, hostile areas” to “face off against insurgents.” But now the U.S. military knows better: instead, they’ll be a light footprint based out of scattered forward operating bases.

Clearly, this is the wrong “lesson learned.”

Colonel Ross A. Brown, commander of troops in Honduras, explains the mission thusly: “By countering transnational organized crime, we promote stability, which is necessary for external investment, economic growth and minimizing violence. We also are disrupting and deterring the potential nexus between transnational organized criminals and terrorists who would do harm to our country.”

For every bullet-point goal in that statement, the opposite is occurring as a result of U.S. intervention. Let’s take them one at a time. First of all, “promoting stability” is a catch-all phrase with a literal military translation of “U.S. intervention.” Whatever America does, it promotes stability. When we overthrew democratically elected governments and installed brutal dictatorships all throughout Central America at the beginning of the Cold War, we were promoting stability. When Reagan circumvented U.S. law to fuel a proxy war and supported war crimes in Nicaragua, we were promoting stability. When we helped fuel one of the bloodiest civil wars in modern memory in Guatemala, we were promoting stability. And now that the pretext is fighting drug cartels, we are again promoting stability.

The drug war accomplishes precisely the opposite of “stability.” By trying to eliminate the drug trade through force, the U.S. has emboldened the cartels and militarized the whole game. In Mexico, it has led to up to 50,000 deaths in just 5 or 6 years. Honduras isn’t making out any better. U.S. drug war efforts there have led the country to attain the prestigious title of the highest homicide rate in the world, rivaling the war zone in Afghanistan. And when the Obama administration chose to support the illegal military coup in Honduras in 2009, which ousted democratically elected Zelaya and began a descent into what Dana Frank, professor of history at the University of California, called “a human rights and security abyss,” that was for stability’s sake, eh?

Moving on, there is very little evidence that the Defense Department and the State Department are concerned with “external investment” into Honduras. For starters, their efforts there are making it a virtual war zone led by a military regime, which Washington supports. That’s not good for business. But more than that, it seems the only external investment Washington cares about is wasting taxpayer dollars on wasteful military infrastructure and equipment for defense corporations. New bases are being built, Honduran forces are being trained and equipped, etc.

Lastly, the U.S. needs a military presence in Honduras and throughout Central America because we’re interested in “deterring the potential nexus between transnational organized criminals and terrorists.” Ah, the magic word. In the post-9/11 era, you slap on the word terrorist to any foreign policy adventure and suddenly that justifies it. Except that this supposed nexus doesn’t exist and has been repeatedly debunked. Those involved in the drug trade are business people in it for the money in a sector that has been driven into the black market. This has nothing to do with any group that could conceivably fall into that oft-used and abused phrase “al-Qaeda and its affiliates.”

This is was the most revealing quote from the Times piece: “There are ‘insidious’ parallels between regional criminal organizations and terror networks, Admiral Kernan said. ‘They operate without regard to borders,’ he said, in order to smuggle drugs, people, weapons and money.” Yeah, there’s another entity operating without regard to borders in order to smuggle drugs, people, weapons, and money. It’s called the United States Government.

See here for more on what U.S. intervention in Honduras looks like.