Month: June 2012

The status quo in Syria is that the rebel insurgency and the Assad regime continue to clash, neither budging, while foreign powers are engaged in an indirect proxy war because the split at the UN Security Council has ruled out any internationally mandated military intervention. The Russians and the Iranians continue to the support the Assad regime and the US and its allies in Europe and the Gulf Arab states are funneling aid and weapons to the fractured opposition fighters. I’ve spent months arguing against not just Western and Sunni Arab meddling, but also the meddling on behalf of the Syrian regime. The reasons are many and you can read a plethora of posts going into why this meddling is prolonging the conflict and is antithetical to the stated aims of the foreign powers, the latter part at least in the case of the U.S. and the Gulf states.

But there is another reason that supporting either side in this civil war is an extremely bad idea. Indirectly intervening can have unintended consequences that go far beyond the immediate ramifications on the ground. And recent history demonstrates this all too well.

Aaron David Miller discusses indirect intervention from the perspective of the Sunni Gulf states:

Turning the Shia-affiliated Alawi regime into a Sunni one that can be influenced would be a tremendous victory for the Gulf Arabs. It would weaken the Iranians and break the exaggerated but still very real threat of Shia encirclement — Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. And that’s why Riyadh is backing the rebels with money and arms and allowing individual Saudi clerics to sermonize about jihad and encourage non-Syrian foreign fighters to carry it out. This, of course has a potential downside. We saw the blowback in Afghanistan, where Saudi-inspired Wahhabi doctrine motivated a cadre of Arabs to fight first against the Russians and then against the West.

U.S.-Saudi interests were similarly aligned back when the Soviets invaded and occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s. The CIA funneled money to the mujahideen through Pakistan while Saudi Arabia – its Gulf neighbors in lock-step – funneled money, weapons, and actual fighters to join in the insurgency. The unintended consequences of this became so relevant and obvious post-9/11 that the intervention has become lionized as a “seemed-good-at-the-time-but-oh-hell-what-a-screw-up” foreign policy artifact. I can’t imagine anyone in the State Department or in the Saudi monarchy is thinking about how aiding the Syrian opposition might backfire 10 years down the line. The fact that Sunni extremists and al-Qaeda-type militants are a part of the opposition is well known, as is the fact that they have committed serious crimes throughout the conflict.

Aside from the immediate tactical and moral issues with giving support to these fighters, the arrogance of the power-weilding foreign meddlers is a thing to marvel at. Not only do they think they are all-knowing and all-powerful enough to craft and mold a particular outcome pursuant to their unscrupulous interests, but they have the hubris to disregard the possible consequences their interventions may breed far into the unforeseeable future. While making the current conflict worse, they are potentially laying the groundwork for future catastrophes.

The humble one rupee coin, worth around the same as a US one cent coin, isn’t exactly big money in Pakistan. But a mania has spread across the country, apparently originating in Makran last week, which has everyone, including the nation’s central bank, taking notice.

One rumor had it that the coins, which are made mostly of aluminum with a small amount of copper, had been “accidentally” made with gold, and what started as a rumor with children collecting the coins eventually had adults buying up the coins en masse, at a significant premium, under the assumption that they would pay off big.

The funnier rumor, however, is where the Iranian nuclear program enters into this, and the public began to believe that these coins had large amounts of weapons-grade uranium minted into them, to be smuggled to Iran for making nuclear arms.

Needless to say, neither of the rumors proved to be true, and the Pakistani State Bank is warning people not to pay a premium for the coins. Tip for Pakistanis: a coin of the same size as the 1 rupee coin made of weapons grade uranium would weigh about 10 times what they normally do.

The 2008 Supreme Court case Boumediene v. Bush ruled that Gitmo detainees – who had been caged indefinitely without charge or trial – could challenge their detentions in U.S. courts. Briefly thereafter, we saw a great number of Gitmo detainees released on the grounds that there was not enough evidence for their guilt. Under Obama’s reign though, habeas corpus rights for those accused of terrorism have been wrenched back. Adam Serwer at Mother Jones:

But in the years since the decision, conservative judges on the DC Circuit have interpreted the law in a way that assumes many of the government’s claims are true and don’t have to be proven in court. By not taking any of these cases, the Supreme Court has ensured these stricter rules will prevail. Civil-libertarian groups say that essentially leaves detainees at Gitmo with habeas rights in name only, since the rules make it virtually impossible for detainees to win in court. A Seton Hall University School of Law report from May found that, prior to the DC Circuit’s reinterpretation of the rules, detainees won 56 percent of cases. Afterwards, they won 8 percent.

…As a presidential candidate in 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama praised the Boumediene decision. Earlier this year, his administration urged the Supreme Court not to take the Gitmo detainees’ appeal, leaving in place legal standards that civil libertarians argue render Boumediene almost meaningless.

Gitmo detainees have now lost virtually every avenue—other than dying in detention—for leaving the detention camp. Congress has curtailed transfers to other countries by making the restrictions on them nearly impossible to meet. Gitmo detainees can’t be brought to the United States for trial in federal court. And the Supreme Court has now effectively blessed legal standards that make success in court almost impossible. There are now 169 detainees left at Gitmo, and like the facility itself, they aren’t going anywhere.

Given the fact that the Republican Party doesn’t object to the Democratic Party’s swift embrace of George W. Bush’s detention policies, this issue is decidedly irrelevant. We will not hear about it in the upcoming Obama-Romney debates. Therefore, so-called liberals won’t have to answer for why they’re supporting the re-election of a candidate who has come to embody his oh-so-hated predecessor. Instead we’ll just hear unchallenged election-fever hysteria.

Nicolas Pelham in the New York Review of Books reports from post-NATO-anointed Libya. The bungling interim government and the incessant ethnic conflict are not bringing the democracy heralded by the war’s advocates:

Yet for Libya’s new governors, the turbulent south—home to Libya’s wells of water and oil—is unnerving. Since Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the NTC chairman, declared an end to the civil war last October, the violence in the south is worse than it was during the struggle to oust Qaddafi. Hundreds have been killed, thousands injured, and, according to UN figures, tens of thousands displaced in ethnic feuding. Without its dictator to keep the lid on, the country, it seems, is boiling over the sides.

…Both sides speak of arming for the battle ahead. Photographs of mutilated cadavers displayed on mobile phones ensure that the scars remain open. The graffiti that raiding Zwarans left on Riqdaleen’s walls threatened to turn the town into a “second Tuwagha,” the site inhabited by pro-Qaddafi black Libyans that militiamen from Misrata, further east, ethnically cleansed in the fall. “We don’t see a new Libya,” the Riqdaleen town councilor told me. “We’re starting to regret. The Berbers want us out.”

The issues in Libya have spread throughout the region. The displaced have fled to neighboring countries in all directions. At the same time, arms flows coming out of Libya (some 20 million guns are estimated to be circulating in Libya,” Pelham reports) are getting into the hands of unsavory groups. A UN report released in February assessing ”the Libyan crisis” said the impact of the NATO-backed rebel victory over Gadhafi “reverberated across the world” in “such neighboring countries as Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Mali, Mauritania, the Niger and Tunisia,” which, “bore the brunt of the challenges that emerged as a result of the crisis.” The bulk of the Sahel region “had to contend with the influx of hundreds of thousands of traumatized and impoverished returnees as well as the inflow of unspecified and unquantifiable numbers of arms and ammunition from the Libyan arsenal.”

Pelham writes: “Libya’s turmoil is acquiring continental significance.”

Aside from that, no official in Washington has dared answer for the serious violation of human rights, including torture and extra-judicial killings, that NATO’s proxies have committed.

A surprising testimony from Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) when pit up against the right-wing jingo Rep. Peter King (R-NY) on CNN. Woolsey says the drone war is creating more enemies than it is eliminating and that America is setting itself up for blowback. She also threw in some commentary about how hypocritical is the U.S.  use of drones, considering Washington would not allow other nations to engage in this kind of lawless, borderless, remote-control war.

“It’s such a trend to dehumanize warfare. It’s machines and computers doing the job. You know what, Candy, this is not video games, these are real people and it’s real death and we’re making real enemies around the world by continuing with the drone strikes,” Woolsey told CNN’s Candy Crowley on “State of the Nation.”

The congresswoman said instead the country should be investing in “a different kind of security” and warned of unforeseen repercussions from the drone program.

“We’re setting a standard for all other nations that when they’re ready if they want to, they can send drones at the United States,” Woolsey said, adding later that “what goes around comes around, and those drones are going to come right back at us.”

I have to part ways with Woolsey on this notion of “helping other countries with their development needs” and what not, but she’s on the right track regarding drones. See here and here for more of the growing chorus of official and expert opinion saying the drone war is murder, blowback, or both.