Month: August 2012

In an editorial this week, the Washington Post displays incredible ignorance of US foreign policy. “When the Obama administration resumed military sales to the Persian Gulf nation of Bahrain in 2012,” the editors naively write, “it explained the decision as an effort to bolster moderate elements in the monarchy, whose Sunni ruling family has resisted demands for greater democracy from the mostly Shiite population.” Since the brutal Bahraini monarchy has continued abusing its citizens and rejecting democratic reforms, the Post wonders “whether the concession to a regime that has been a close U.S. ally paid off.”

It really doesn’t take a Master’s degree in international relations to know that the Obama administration had no intention of “bolstering moderate elements” in Bahrain. The Nobel Peace Prize winner continued giving money and arms to the Bahraini regime precisely so the movement for democratic reforms could be crushed. Common sense leads to this realization – since when does giving riot gear, tanks, helicopter gunships, and a million pounds of ammunition to dictators encourage moderation?

US support for Bahrain doesn’t bolster anything except US control of the Persian Gulf. The US Navy’s Fifth Fleet directs military operations in the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, and Arabian Sea and secures the Straits of Hormuz, through which 40 per cent of the world’s seaborne oil passes. It is one of the largest military forces in the region, with 40 vessels and close to 30,000 personnel. It also sticks in the craw of Iran, the primary bogeyman in the region – i.e., the one who doesn’t follow US orders.

But the Post, along with most in the media, can’t manage to utter the obvious, which is that Washington is interested in propping up dictatorships, not opening up societies with democracy and moderates. But at least the Post is complaining about some of the right things:

As Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner reported in testimony to Congress’s Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission last week, the Bahraini government has continued to prosecute 20 leading political activists; “despite assurances to the contrary,” it obtained the conviction of nine medical professionals who treated opposition activists during demonstrations last year. The country’s best-known human rights activist, Nabeel Rajab, is serving prison time for a tweet that called for the resignation of the hard-line prime minister.

Security forces continue to employ harsh tactics to put down demonstrations in Shiite villages, including what a new report by Physicians for Human Rights calls the “indiscriminate use of tear gas as a weapon.” It said police regularly fire tear gas canisters “directly at civilians or into their cars, houses or other closed spaces” in an effort “not just to disperse crowds but to harm, harass, and intimidate the largely Shia neighborhoods that are home to many protesters.”

After almost four decades, the US has agreed to help Vietnam clean up the deadly poison sprayed all over the country from 1961-1971, Agent Orange. While Washington was needlessly laying waste to the Vietnamese people, they claimed to use the dangerous herbicide to sweep away the heavy vegetation in the jungle and expose the Viet Cong. Honest people had a different way to describe it: chemical warfare.

“One scientific study estimated that between 2.1 million and 4.8 million Vietnamese were directly exposed to Agent Orange,” according to one Congressional Research Service report. “Vietnamese advocacy groups claim that there are over three million Vietnamese suffering from serious health problems caused by exposure to the dioxin in Agent Orange.”

Here’s how the AP story begins:

Vo Duoc fights back tears while sharing the news that broke his heart: A few days ago he received test results confirming he and 11 family members have elevated levels of dioxin lingering in their blood.

The family lives in a two-story house near a former U.S. military base in Danang where the defoliant Agent Orange was stored during the Vietnam War, which ended nearly four decades ago. Duoc, 58, sells steel for a living and has diabetes, while his wife battles breast cancer and their daughter has remained childless after suffering repeated miscarriages. For years, Duoc thought the ailments were unrelated, but after seeing the blood tests he now suspects his family unwittingly ingested dioxin from Agent Orange-contaminated fish, vegetables and well water.

Dioxin, a persistent chemical linked to cancer, birth defects and other disabilities, has seeped into Vietnam’s soils and watersheds, creating a lasting war legacy that remains a thorny issue between the former foes. Washington has been slow to respond, but on Thursday the U.S. for the first time will begin cleaning up dioxin from Agent Orange that was stored at the former military base, now part of Danang’s airport.

Duoc responded to the news thusly: “”It’s better late than never.” Some might say that’s an incredibly forgiving way to react to war crimes that killed millions of his own people and caused his entire immediate family to suffer all their lives.

Duoc might have responded more cynically had he been informed about the reasons the US finally agreed to the clean-up. AP continues:

The $43 million project begins as Vietnam and the U.S. forge closer ties to boost trade and counter China’s rising influence in the disputed South China Sea.

So instead of the federal government coming to their senses about the need to do something about their poisoning of several generations of innocent Vietnamese, they agreed to the clean-up as part of their selfish, power-seeking statecraft against a rising China. It just doesn’t get vulgar than that.

At 8:16 on the morning of August 6, 1945, the world got a glimpse of its own mortality. At that moment, the city of Hiroshima was obliterated by a fireball that sent waves of searing heat, then a deafening concussion, across the landscape. Three days later [Aug. 9], a second bomb hit Nagasaki. … [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower said in 1963 “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

… Besides the Manhattan Project’s internal momentum was an external motive. Its leaders had to justify the $2 billion ($26 billion in today’s dollars) expense to Congress and the public… Byrnes…warned Roosevelt that political scandal would follow if it [the atomic bomb] was not used. … “How would you get Congress to appropriate money for atomic energy research [after the war] if you do not show results for the money which has been spent already?” …the U.S. had produced two types of bombs–one using uranium, the other plutonium. Whenever anyone suggested that the moment the bomb was dropped the war would be over, [bureaucrat] Groves countered, “Not until we drop two bombs on Japan.” As [historian] Goldberg explains… “One bomb justified Oak Ridge, the second justified Hanford.”Hiroshima was hit with the uranium bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy”; the plutonium bomb, “Fat Man,” was used against Nagasaki.

From Why We Dropped The Bomb By William Lanouette, CIVILIZATION, The Magazine of the Library of Congress, January/February 1995

It’s hard for Americans who identify with the U.S. Government to accept the idea that that organization could have engaged in such horrendous acts – twice in three days – without pristine motives. Here’s what Vietnam era U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara – who was part of Gen. Curtis LeMay’s command when the bombs were dropped – thought about it: McNamara: “He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals.”

As far as war criminals go, unfortunately we still have them.

The attack in the Sinai on Sunday was followed by a wild round of accusations from nearly everyone in a desperate attempt to exploit the incident for their own state interests.

Even though Hamas strongly condemned the attack as a “heinous crime,” Israel saw fit to shell Hamas-controlled Gaza soon after the attack and also closed one of the main border crossings that allowed aid into Gaza. In turn, some Hamas figures suggested the attack was carried out by Israel’s Mossad in order to raise tensions between Egypt and the Palestinians or perhaps to use as an excuse to hit Gaza. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood also had these suspicions of Israeli involvement, although Morsi apparently just believed it to be a rogue terrorist group. Meanwhile, the Israeli Ambassador to the US, “perhaps operating on general instructions to blame Iran for anything it can possibly be blamed for,” according to Paul Pillar, issued statements that Iranian-backed terrorists carried out the attack, even after Tel Aviv had said al-Qaeda was responsible. (h/t Issandr el Amrani)

From the reports I’ve read, Washington has been largely silent, partly because they have precarious leverage at the moment and partly because one effect of the attack was to give more power and control to the Egyptian military, which Washington kind of likes since it is playing both sides in Egypt. Nevertheless, the flurry of blame thrown around should make clear how eager governments are to use fringe terrorist attacks as a pretext to carry out their own measures of aggression and control.

On another note, it’s important to address the terrible Egyptian-Israeli policies that have bred the kind of frustration that motivates such attacks. As Roi Maor writes, “This latest attack is also another reminder of the dangerous regional spillover effects from policies on the Palestinian issue in general, and Gaza in particular.” And Egyptian blogger Issandr el Amrani: “Ending the blockade of Gaza, pushing for Palestinian reconciliation, restoring order in Sinai and addressing its inhabitants’ grievances: this is what has to be done to avoid a repeat of this.”

Barbara Slavin at Al-Monitor reviews the new book by David Crist, The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran. Crist is a US Defense Department historian and a lieutenant colonel in the US Marine Corps Reserve whose father was one of the early leaders of US Central Command – all of which gets him exclusive access to testimony and documents not previously made public. One of the book’s revelations:

The George W. Bush administration considered cooperating with Iran over removing the regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003, but opposition from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top civilian aides, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney, torpedoed a draft proposal by then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Instead, Rumsfeld’s office advocated getting rid of the Iranian government, too, in part by supporting an “Iranian National Congress” of exiles on the model of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. At loggerheads internally, the Bush administration failed to approve any policy toward Iran in its first term. Iraq became a quagmire and Iran-backed militias killed hundreds of Americans.

This sounds a lot like the kind of chatter relayed by General Wesley Clark in 2007, who was told by someone in the Pentagon that the Bush administration was thinking early on about regime change in seven countries in five years (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran).

See Crist speak about his book to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy: