Month: June 2012

Scott Shane from the New York Times has issued a clarification on their blog regarding last week’s story about President Obama’s role in deciding who to add to his ever-growing “kill list.”

The clarifications are two-fold, mostly lashing other sites that took the story and ran with it for missing some of the minutae, like a single mention near the end of David Axelrod attending Tuesday counter-terrorism meetings, like the one described at the start of the article. Axelrod was apparently pressed on his attendance at kill list meetings and denied it, embarrassing the times, and forcing this “but those are two different types of meetings” retraction.

But really, who cares? The story isn’t about David Axelrod, who could be pleasuring himself in the Rose Garden during these meetings for all we care. The real story uncovered was that President Obama is directly involved in every single decision on drone strikes and other assassinations, including those of American citizens.

The other half of the clarification involves the opening of the article, in which Obama et al. are discussing whether or not to assassinate a 17 year old American girl. Shane faults Prison Planet for taking the paragraph to its logical conclusion, since it focused on the 17 year old girl and the kill list, and concluding that she had been tapped for assassination.

Yet the narrative that opens the New York Times article just sort of trails off without an on-paper conclusion. There’s a girl of 17 on the “yearbook-style” list of pictures for Obama to consider, but whether she is or isn’t on the hyper-secret list of who the president intends to summarily execute for imagined crimes is never reported in the article.

Which is worthwhile to note, but also a secondary issue. President Obama may have marveled at the youth of this particular “nominee” but its already well-established that he’s comfortable murdering children, as with the assassination of Anwar Awlaki’s 16 year old American-born son, who was never even accused of a crime in the vague, hysterical manner of his father.

Whether or not the girl actually wound up on the list is interesting, but the very existence of the list, the fact that it is known to have contained children (American children no less) and that President Obama has personally approved the assassination of children and has been presented with more opportunities to do so, that’s the real story.

The original NYT article focused more on the faux-moralizing of the president, and reports from his aides that he’s keeping on top of things and limiting the program’s growth. Yet his direct order of every single drone strike makes him directly responsible for over 1,000 deaths in Pakistan alone since taking office, and his existing kill-happy record along with this cadre of insiders constantly “nominating” more victims for him is the real “news” of the NYT piece, one that its authors apparently missed.

The great Robert Higgs lists Axioms of Political Geometry. My two favorites:

• The shortest distance between a free society and a totalitarian society passes through war.
• The whole of society is greater than the part that government officials can comprehend, and much greater than the part that they can manage for the attainment of a desirable end.

According to Bonnie S. Glaser at the Center for Strategic International Studies (no relation), next year “could see a shift in Chinese foreign policy based on the new leadership’s judgment that it must respond to a U.S. strategy that seeks to prevent China’s reemergence as a great power.”

Signs of a potential harsh reaction are already detectable. The U.S. Asia pivot has triggered an outpouring of anti-American sentiment in China that will increase pressure on China’s incoming leadership to stand up to the United States. Nationalistic voices are calling for military countermeasures to the bolstering of America’s military posture in the region and the new U.S. defense strategic guidelines.

At this point in the international negotiations with Iran, people seem to be reading into it whatever is beneficial for their own arguments. They’re either bound for resolution in the third round in Moscow later this month, or they’re doomed to failure because, hey, you can’t trust those Persians.

As James Rubin, former assistant secretary of state during the Bill Clinton administration, just mentioned in his latest scrawl pining for war in Syria, “the current round of negotiations with the world’s major powers will not fundamentally change Iran’s nuclear program.” On the other hand, Laura Rosen today reported that IAEA chief Yukiya Amano announced another meeting with Iranian negotiators to take place just ten days before the Moscow talks. Iranian officials have reiterated their willingness to make concessions, namely opening up the Parchin military site to inspections and halting 20 percent uranium enrichment.

One thing is for sure, if the U.S. and its western allies aren’t interested in coming to an actual agreement, self-fulfilling prophecy will once again prove an accessible phenomenon.

The fact that Iran has been negotiating separately and in parallel with the IAEA is indicative. Washington’s needless intimidation and aggressiveness quite simply makes the Iranians not want to make concessions when talking with the P5+1. The IAEA is not the one waging economic warfare and threatening to bomb Iran to bits, so Tehran sees the UN watchdog as a more viable and reasonable negotiator.

As Reza Nasri over at PBS Frontline’s Tehran Bureau put it today, “world powers are again poised to ‘solve’ an international crisis through an ‘agreement’ that is essentially predicated on intimidation, illegal threats of military action, unilateral ‘crippling’ sanctions, sabotage, and extrajudicial killings of Iran’s brightest minds.” In other words, ensuring a failure of talks.

Constant threats of military action, paired with harsh economic sanctions, are admittedly meant to coerce Iran into concluding an agreement with the P5+1 on its nuclear program. Covert operations, such as the assassination of top Iranian scientists and the spate of massive cyberattacksthat have targeted the country’s civilian energy sector, also seem to be part of a broader policy whose aim is to diminish Iran’s position at the negotiation table.

Mind you, taking these postures is illegal under international law (not that this matters to Washington):

Indeed, from the lens of modern international law, an agreement that is obtained through coercion is generally considered invalid. Article 52 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties — which codifies some of the most fundamental bedrocks of the laws among nations — is very clear on the subject: It specifically renders “void any treaty which has been procured by the threat or use of force in violation of the principles of international law embodied in the Charter of the United Nations.”

After the failed talks in 2009 and 2010, wherein Obama ended up mysteriously rejecting the very deal he demanded the Iranians accept, as Stephen Walt wrote last week, the Iranian leadership “has good grounds for viewing Obama as inherently untrustworthy.”

Still, the Iranians have all but given in. They just haven’t laid prostrate in the face of Western bullying. Rosen:

For the upcoming P5+1/Iran talks in “Moscow, an agreement on ‘zero stockpile of 20 % enriched uranium would be the best achievement,” Mousavian proposed.

Under such a plan, he explained, the P5+1 and Iran would set up a joint committee to determine how much 20% enriched uranium Iran needs for medical purposes, and the rest of its 20% stockpile would be exported or converted to 3.5%.

He also proposed that the IAEA define the maximum amount of transparency it would like from Iran. “If Iran accepts, to sign the additional protocol and give the IAEA access beyond that demanded in the additional protocol, then the [western powers] should be ready” to defer new European and American sanctions set to go into effect next month targeting transactions with Iran’s Central Bank and oil exports.

There you have it. The agreement is there. No more 20 percent enrichment, just don’t impose further economic sanctions. Whether Washington will accept this peaceful resolution in Moscow remains to be seen. But so far, the Obama administration’s policy has been schizophrenic. And when it comes down to it, the U.S. is primarily concerned with Iran’s nuclear know-how – not out of concerns of nuclear proliferation – but because it closes “avenues for regime change.” That mentality will mean the long-term failure of any resolution. And any peace.

Nikolas Kozloff writing at al Jazeera had recently brought to light the Obama administration’s construction of a new military base in Argentina. Local authorities and official U.S. explanations insist the “Resistencia” base is for civil and humanitarian purposes alone, but many Argentinians reject this. One Argentine legislator even called for an investigation into the “Yankee base in Chaco.”

Well, now Kozloff writes about another new military base in Chile:

The installation, which has cost the US taxpayer nearly a half million dollars to construct, is situated in the port city of Concón in the central Chilean province of Valparaíso. In Chile, the political debate surrounding the Concón base mirrors the previous fight over the Resistencia installation: while local authorities and the US military claim that Concón will be used for training armed forces deployed for peacekeeping operations, the Chilean left believes the base is aimed at controlling and repressing the local civilian population.

For Chilean civil society, which has longtime experience with US interventionism going way back to the dark days of the Augusto Pinochet military dictatorship, the Concón base raises eyebrows. Human rights groups charge that the actual design of the base – which simulates an urban zone with eight buildings as well as sidewalks and roads – suggests that the Chilean military is interested in repressing protest. According to United Press International, Concón “is growing into a major destination for regional military trainers and defence industry contractors”.

The facility is run by the US Southern Command, headquartered in Miami, Florida. The US, which has in recent years been losing some of its political and economic hegemony in the region, is interested in getting another foothold for its military operations. Indeed, ever since the nationalist/populist regime of Rafael Correa booted Washington out of its base in Manta, Ecuador, the US has been on a quest to find alternative sites in South America.

It doesn’t take a Ph.D in international relations to know that the presence of U.S. military bases around the world serves as a projection of power and control, not for civil and humanitarian purposes as is officially claimed. As was on display in recent weeks in the cases of Japan and Guam, foreign military bases typically engender deep resentment on the part of the local population. But these feelings will be even stronger in a place like Chile, where in 1973 the U.S. ousted a democratically elected leader in a coup and had him replaced with a dictator, Augusto Pinochet, who tortured and murdered his own people. Pinochet’s rule lasted until 1990 – a mere 22 years ago.

Nevertheless, Obama sent his secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, over to meet with the Chilean president – fast becoming a client of Washington’s, as Kozloff explains – to smooth over the new military-to-military relationship. This seems like a good example of the liberal claim to the Obama presidency: imperialism with a softer face.