Month: September 2012

Economist Robert Higgs famously described the ratchet effect, in which the state uses crises of one kind or another to expand government’s power and scope. Often times a crisis will give the state the opportunity to establish measures previously planned for, but difficult to impose absent some disaster that supposedly necessitates it.

Josh Rogin reports at The Cable that the State Department had planned to increase the US military presence in Libya long before the recent attacks on the consulate building that killed four Americans. And now the crisis appears to have expedited those plans.

Prior to the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the State Department and the Marines Corps had been discussing deploying Marines to guard the U.S. Embassy in the Libyan capital Tripoli “sometime in the next five years,” according to the Marine Corps.

…The State Department won’t discuss the specifics of its security posture in Libya before the attack, but the Marine Corps has briefed congressional staffers on the issue, for example in a Sept. 13 email obtained by The Cable.

“Typically, when a new embassy is established, it takes time to grow a new [Marine Corps Embassy Security Group] detachment,” wrote Col. Harold Van Opdorp, director of the Marine Senate Liaison office, in the e-mail. “[In conjunction with] the State Department, there is discussion about establishing a detachment in Tripoli sometime in the next five years.”

Rogin writes that “out of the 285-plus US diplomatic security facilities worldwide, 152 have Marine Corps detachments,” but the plan is to increase this considerably.

“Overall, the plan is to grow the number of MCESG detachments worldwide to 173. It is also important to note the detachments are charged with protection of the chancery.  Perimeter security is the responsibility of the HN [host nation] police/security forces,” Van Opdorp wrote.

The first crisis in Libya that Washington took advantage of was the supposedly impending mass slaughter Gadhafi was going to commit against the Libyan people. This concern was probably inflated. As the Cato Institute’s Ben Friedman wrote in the National Interest back in April:

Along with many commentators, President Obama and his aides insisted that Qaddafi promised to slaughter civilians in towns that his forces were poised to retake last March. Thus, intervention saved hundreds of thousands of lives. A minor problem with this claim is that Qaddafi’s speeches actually threatened rebel fighters, not civilians, and he explicitly exempted those rebels that put down arms. More importantly, if Qaddafi intended to massacre civilians, his forces had ample opportunity to do it. They did commit war crimes, using force indiscriminately and executing and torturing prisoners. But the sort of wholesale slaughter that the Obama administration warned of did not occur—maybe because the regime’s forces lacked the organization needed for systematic slaughter.

I have sufficiently debunked the humanitarian rationale for the NATO air war in Libya elsewhere, but suffice it to say that Washington doesn’t decide to go to war unless they perceive the interests of the state can be furthered. So the Libya crisis was used to justify a war which helped put in place a regime more deferential to US interests. Immediately following the attack on the consulate, the Obama administration – true to the ratchet effect – ordered more drones over Libyan skies, sent in at least 50 additional US Marines, and had an American warship equipped with Tomahawk missiles patrol the coast of northern Libya. Ultimately, the more resources allocated to US foreign policy in Libya, the stronger Washington’s foothold in that country will be. And whatever other crises occur, don’t expect US power and force to recede in Libya in response.

 

On the surface, it seems like conservatives were for spreading democracy in the Middle East if it was a Republican president imposing regime change and continuing to support dictatorship throughout the region, but against it if it is a Democratic president imposing regime change through no-fly zones and trying desperately to suppress spontaneous democratic movements throughout the region in favor of obedient dictatorships.

The clip is funny and deftly exposes how hypocritical and substance-less the political punditry is in this country. But what’s missing is the fact that these superficial debates framed purely by the political winds were and are based on mass delusions. In the Bush administration, the great fiction was that US foreign policy was ever aimed at democracy. In the Obama administration, the illusion is exactly the same.

It’d be nice if the political debates in this country could be crass and hypocritical about what’s actually going on, as opposed to what isn’t.

The Obama administration has a good thing going. They get to run a futuristic drone war that operates above the law and allows them to bomb people outside any official theater of conflict, even if they are American citizens with Constitutional rights to due process. When the drone war produces a juicy nugget that is perfect for some jingoistic war propaganda, they get to sing it from the mountaintops. When the press asks them uncomfortable questions about it, however, or when concerned parties file suit against the administration, they get to say the drone program is classified and avoid any public or legal scrutiny.

Tomorrow, the American Civil Liberties Union will be in court with the government, specifically the CIA, over this little scam they’re running. The ACLU has tried to file Freedom of Information Act  requests to get information on the drone program and its legal basis, but the government has said ‘no, it’s secret.’ The ACLU is now returning fire in court, arguing that if administration officials get to selectively talk about the drone war in speeches and to reporters, it can’t then turn around and say the program is too secret to comply with FOIA requests.

“The notion that the CIA’s targeted killing program is a secret is nothing short of absurd,” said ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer, who will argue the case before a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Appeals Court. “For more than two years, senior officials have been making claims about the program both on the record and off. They’ve claimed that the program is effective, lawful and closely supervised. If they can make these claims, there is no reason why they should not be required to respond to requests under the Freedom of Information Act.”

The Guardian:

The ACLU’s demand for details of the programme – including documents related to its legal justification drawn up by the department of justice – is aimed at prompting a national debate on the scope of the drone programme and how it is used. Its legality is a particular issue. The memorandum justifying the legal basis for the targeted killing has now been requested by at least 10 members of Congress and three different lawsuits but it remains so secret that that acknowledging its existence is a classified matter. “The public has a right to decide for itself whether or not the programme is lawful or moral,” Jaffer said.

I’d be hard pressed to find a more clear-cut case of violating the checks and balances intended in the Constitution. Congress has been sidestepped and ignored. The court’s have been circumvented through absurd and contradictory state secrets privileges. Unfortunately, brave and independent federal judges like Judge Katherine B. Forrest, who tried to block enforcement of the government’s new detention powers in the NDAA, are few and far between. Still, the ACLU has a pretty strong case, so we’ll have to see if the judges in the DC Circuit Appeals Court tomorrow get pressured into granting the Executive Branch the power to skirt all accountability and wage a secret, lawless war.

A hidden camera that caught Mitt Romney speaking at a private fundraising dinner has grabbed a lot of media attention today. Network news is focusing primarily on a single portion of the candid-camera speech in which Romney derides “47 percent” of the population who doesn’t pay income taxes and therefore will automatically vote for Obama. This should be really effective at grabbing that 5 percent of swing voters, Ol’ Mitt. Truthfully, this is one of the most poorly run campaigns I’ve seen in a long time.

But there are other parts of the video not being talked about as much. Via David Corn at Mother Jones, Romney also talks – off the script! – about Iran, Israel-Palestine, and broader foreign policy issues. They are shocking in their ignorance.

On Iran, Mother Jones reports, “He repeated the tough talk he has issued on the campaign trail, but he also provided an odd reason for drawing a red line with Tehran about its nuclear program”:

I’ve heard a lot of outlandish reasons to consider Iran a threat, but sending Hezbollah to Chicago with a dirty bomb is almost record-breaking in its absurdity. First of all, Romney uttered these words in the context of giving Iran a “red line” in its nuclear enrichment past which it could not avoid US military action, but, as David Corn writes, he “didn’t appear to understand that a dirty bomb—an explosive device that spreads radioactive substances—does not require fissile material from a nuclear weapons program. Such a bomb can be produced with, say, radioactive medical waste. If Iran’s nuclear program poses a threat, it is not because this project will yield a dirty bomb.”

Furthermore, this ridiculous scenario recklessly overestimates the capabilities of Hezbollah and the stupidity of Iran. In the context of their nuclear program, Iran is interested in deterring military threats from the US and Israel – not in committing national suicide by provoking a nuclear war for which they are pathetically outmatched.

On Israel-Palestine, Romney said he was convinced of two things (1) the Palestinians don’t want peace, only the destruction of Israel, and (2) the conflict is unsolvable, and so he would make no effort as president to solve it.

Again, we see a dramatic lack of basic understanding about the issue here. Here’s Ali Gharib’s response to this:

These objections are not obstacles to peace, as Romney suggests, but rather functions of a two-state solution—except for Syria and Jordan bordering the West Bank, which are functions of reality. No sovereign country would cede control of its air space. As for Israel’s thin waist, Martin van Creveld, who has more strategic chops than Romney in his little finger, convincingly argues that “strategic depth,” as permanent occupation is known to Israeli rightists, is a canard: “Israel can easily afford to give up the West Bank” with “negligible” risk. Keeping the territories is what poses the risk—permanently subjugating millions of Palestinians and denying them citizenship political rights is untenable—and it’s a fate Romney seems contentedly resigned to.

Indeed, much of Israel’s insistence to keep up the occupation of the West Bank lies in the kind of dogmatic, uncompromising ideology Romney assigns to the Palestinians. The true Israeli objection to settlement is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “committed to the retention of most if not all of the West Bank,” Harry Siegman, President of the U.S./Middle East Project, has written, “as are most other members of his government, most of whom belong to the ‘Whole Land of Israel Caucus’ in Israel’s Knesset.”

Indeed, the Prime Minister’s Likud Party Charter declares Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza “the realization of Zionist values” and that the whole of the West Bank and Jerusalem belong to Israel (“The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river”). I don’t believe there’s anything in there about Iran infiltrating the West Bank to launch attacks on Israel.

The concerns that informed voters have repeatedly expressed about Romney, that he hasn’t much clue about foreign policy, are reaffirmed by the release of these videos.

Update: Mother Jones has now posted the entirety of Romney’s hidden camera speech. See it here. One notable quote from a portion on foreign policy: “For me, everything is about strength, and communicating to people what is and is not acceptable.” Can you envision a more authoritarian articulation of grand strategy?

The Obama Administration is creating yet more new computer viruses, according to growing evidence collected by major anti-virus makers. Those viruses start out attacking sites in the Middle East but remember, they don’t stay that way.

The Stuxnet Worm started out targeting industrial computers in Iran. In the end it was attacking industrial computers in dozens of countries, including the United States. We get blowback from all kinds of wars, but this new “cyber warfare” nonsense inevitably ends with direct attacks on American targets by the US government.