Month: May 2012

A couple of hours after Obama’s “stay the course” oration from Kabul, the boys at the US Embassy in that city are diving under their desks. Explosions are rocking the  city, and the Embassy itself seems to be in the crossfire.  Here‘s the latest, direct from the Embassy. Here‘s a tight-lipped Reuters report.

“My fellow Americans,” intoned the President a mere two and a half hours ago, “we’ve travelled through more than a decade under the dark cloud of war. Yet here, in the pre-dawn darkness of Afghanistan, we can see the light of a new day on the horizon.”

The only light on the horizon in Afghanistan, apparently, is the flashing of Taliban guns. As US Embassy personnel cower in their offices, how long before the myth of American “progress” in defeating the insurgency is definitively deflated?

Ben Piven at al Jazeera:

From an active-duty force of 1.4 million soldiers, the US has deployed some 350,000 troops to at least 130 foreign countries around the world. Some are at Cold War-era installations, but many are in or near combat zones in the Middle East. At more than 750 bases internationally, private contractors and third-country nationals also form a large percentage of the staff, in addition to military reservists and civilian employees of the Pentagon.

…There were three reasons why the US sought a presence across the Middle East, says Mehran Kamrava, Director of the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar:

“Securing oil resources, guaranteeing the security of the state of Israel and combating threats to American interests” were the initial priorities of US military activity in the region prior to the first Gulf War, Kamrava says.

Kamrava says US forces “have the ability to project force when needed, by intimidating and signalling to potential threats that the US can flex its muscles if necessary … This is a combination of ‘showing the flag’ and practical, logistical issues such as the movement of troops, supplies and services”.

“So, these bases are not necessarily because of Iran, but certainly Iran has given the US a compelling reason to further the number of bases,” Kamrava told Al Jazeera. “But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Iran is encircled militarily.”

View American military bases near Iran in a larger map

It was nice to see Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin disrupt a speech on the “secret” drone war by Obama’s counterterrorism chief John Brennan. In the brief time before she was carried out, she told the audience about two of the innocent children murdered in the drone war, Tariq Aziz and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Both were just sixteen years old.

Medea organized the drone summit that I attended in DC this past weekend. It featured journalists, lawyers, and scientists knowledgeable of the expanding drone war both at home and abroad. For an excellent primer, read Antiwar.com columnist Kelley B. Vlahos’s piece for today. Also see Kevin Gosztola’s coverage. I did my best to live tweet the event, highlighting everything from my question to Jeremy Scahill about the air campaign in Yemen, to the human costs to the drone war in Pakistan, to the impending outbreak of scary high-tech domestic surveillance drones sure to violate the civil liberties of hordes of Americans.

With regards to Brennan’s speech, I watched it. In all its statements on the drone war, the Obama administration has dodged serious questions and pretended the inconvenient facts don’t exist, all while insisting a global program of extra-judicial assassinations is none of the American people’s business. For my previous posts on the drone issue see here and here and here.

Here’s the ACLU’s Hina Shamsi’s response:

“We continue to believe, based on the information available, that the program itself is not just unlawful but dangerous.  This statement makes clear that the administration is treating legal restrictions on the use of force as questions of preference.  Moreover, it is dangerous to characterize the entire planet as a battlefield,” Shamsi said.

“It is dangerous to give the President the authority to order the extrajudicial killing of any person – including any American – he believes to be a terrorist.  The administration insists that the program is closely supervised, but to propose that a secret deliberation that takes place entirely within the executive branch constitutes ‘due process’ is to strip the Fifth Amendment of its essential meaning.”

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On a related note, this WOLA study published last week reports that drones are heavily used by U.S. security forces along the Mexican border. The focus is not drones, but it is still interesting throughout. It claims that drones are only used on the Mexico side of the border. But Adam Isacson at the Just the Facts blog says that’s a bit sketchy:

The Homeland Security Department’s Customs and Border Protection agency, however, runs six Predator-Bs, plus one maritime variant, out of Sierra Vista, Arizona and Corpus Christi, Texas.

In fact, WOLA’s report is already out of date on this issue. Testimony last week by the Pentagon’s top homeland security official, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Stockton [PDF], reveals that, as of this year, four Defense Department drones are now operating out of Arizona.

Congress approved the use of domestic drones this past winter, and the Federal Aviation Administration was recently forced to reveal over 60 drone sites already constructed on U.S. soil. I wrote about drones on the U.S.-Mexico border here.

Belligerent foreign policies often end up having the opposite effects than were intended. Economic sanctions are a good example. Robert Pape, of Dying to Win fame, years ago examined 115 cases of economic sanctions over almost 80 years and found only 5 that could be considered a success (that is, the recipient nation changed policy in the desired direction of the imposer nation). Attacking a country economically often emboldens the regime meant to be weakened by sanctions.

With Iran, aggressive postures, economic sanctions, military encirclement, and rhetorical threats have led Tehran to a defensive policy of attaining nuclear capability without ever even moving to actually build a bomb, thus providing them with a credible deterrent while abiding by law and denying the West their pretext for war. Nuclear power turned into a point of national pride. The regime, again, ends up emboldened and rallied behind.

The New York Times features another good example of this today. In the news section today I wrote about how U.S.-backed Sunni dictatorships in the Gulf states have been taunting Iran lately over its apparently disputed claims over three tiny islands in the Straits of Hormuz. Instead of further isolating and destabilizing the leadership – which is at least in part the intention – the opposite has resulted.

For many Iranians, the dispute over Abu Musa, a four-square-mile spit of sand with about 2,000 inhabitants and surrounded by pristine blue waters, arouses strong nationalistic feelings at a time of general hopelessness over the devastating impact of a grinding economy, foreign sanctions and a feeling of unprecedented isolation. To that extent, it mirrors Iran’s nuclear program, which has also whipped up nationalistic emotions that Mr. Ahmadinejad has used to build support for the government.

“We Iranians continuously fight and disagree like a husband and wife during a nasty divorce,” Somaye Allahdad, 35, a Tehran homemaker who does not always agree with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s policies, said over a family lunch of traditional lamb kebab and sabzi, a sort of herbal stew. “But when someone tries to take away our child, we team up and face the threat.”

Oops. Oh, and here’s this to boot:

“The emirates are not acting independently in this matter,” said the analyst, Sadollah Zarei, 55, a columnist for the hard-line state Kayhan newspaper. “Bigger powers are behind this.”

He said the West was trying to raise the pressure on Tehran ahead of the second round of nuclear talks between Iran and world powers, scheduled for May 23.

“By driving up tensions in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. and their allies are trying to send a message to Iran: back down, or face pressure on other fronts,” Mr. Zarei said.