Month: September 2012

Protests and attacks at US embassy building spread across the Muslim world today, cropping up in Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Israel, Gaza, and Bangladesh.

From David Remnick in the New Yorker:

It is hard to overestimate the risks that Benjamin Netanyahu poses to the future of his own country. As Prime Minister, he has done more than any other political figure to embolden and elevate the reactionary forces in Israel, to eliminate the dwindling possibility of a just settlement with the Palestinians, and to isolate his country on the world diplomatic stage. Now Netanyahu seems determined, more than ever, to alienate the President of the United States and, as an ally of Mitt Romney’s campaign, to make himself a factor in the 2012 election—one no less pivotal than the most super Super PAC. “Who are you trying to replace?” the opposition leader, Shaul Mofaz, asked of Netanyahu in the Knesset on Wednesday. “The Administration in Washington or that in Tehran?”

Last month, Mofaz also accused Netanyahu of waging “an extensive and relentless PR campaign with the sole objective of preparing the ground for a premature military adventure.”

“Mr. prime minister,” he continued, “you’re creating panic. You are trying to frighten us and terrify us. And in truth – we are scared: scared by your lack of judgment, scared that you both lead and don’t lead, scare that you are executing a dangerous and irresponsible policy.”

At this point, Netanyahu seems to have gone rogue, with even his loyal Defense Minister Ehud Barak dialing back the war rhetoric considerably. If Bibi has allies left inside Israel, they are fewer and fewer by the day.

What’s most troubling is that Netanyahu’s clear attempts to fiddle with the US election, using Israeli sway to push the election of a more submissive and hawkish Republican in place of Obama, does not seem to be bothering many Americans. Deference to Israel is so embedded in our politics at the superficial level, that nobody even notices.

Unsurprisingly, increased US military and financial support of the Kenyan government is correlated with increases in human rights abuses, according to Jonathan Horowitz at Foreign Policy, who says that the US “may rightly be criticized for aiding and abetting human rights violations,” like “detainee abuse, denial of fair trial guarantees, extrajudicial killings, or unlawful extraditions.”

Kenya has been one of the largest recipients of U.S. State Department Anti-Terrorism Assistance (ATA) in the world (including $10 million going to the Anti-Terrorism Police Unit in 2003), and has received Special Operations trainings worth several million dollars and FBI assistance to terrorism investigations.

…Washington has funded in large part the development of Kenya’s anti-terrorism capabilities through partnered operations, intelligence sharing, counterterrorism training, military equipment, and surveillance technology. This “light footprint” approach, which dodges the politically unsavory decision of bringing in Western ground forces to the region, nonetheless means that the United States must double its efforts to ensure its security assistance is not contributing to, or legitimizing, human rights abuses.

Washington is essentially boosting the military and “anti-terrorism” capacities of the Kenyan government to keep Kenyan forces in the African Union fighting America’s proxy war in Somalia.

We’re seeing a similar story in neighboring Uganda. Just over a year ago, President Obama sent more than 100 combat troops to Uganda to help Ugandan security forces with domestic security, essentially as a bribe to keep Ugandan military forces the proxy war in Somalia. Since the troop deployment and the increases in aid and military assistance, the Ugandan regime has been “increasingly placing illegitimate restrictions on freedom of expression and peaceful assembly to silence critical voices,” Amnesty International reported late last year. A Congressional Research Service report later revealed the US State Department characterized “the Ugandan government’s domestic record on democracy, good governance, and human rights,” as “deteriorating.”

Funny how that works. Horowitz says the record shows that harsh tactics like the kind we’re supporting all over East Africa are not historically associated with successful attempts at eliminating militant threats, but they instead exacerbate the problems. So not only is US policy encouraging brutal state repression, but it is laying the groundwork for more militancy.

It seems there is a strong possibility that the attacks on the US consulate in Libya, which killed four Americans including the US Ambassador, had much less to do with a dirty anti-Islam movie than with al-Qaeda’s presence in that “recently liberated” country. Very few commentators are discussing this, but it seems this incident revisits the issue of what happens vis-a-vis al-Qaeda when the intervention-addicted US gets involved in transfers of power in the Middle East.

“In Libya,” CNN reports, “witnesses say members of a radical Islamist group [loosely affiliated with al-Qaeda] called Ansar al-Sharia protested near the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi” prior to the deaths of four Americans.

According to the British think-tank Quilliam, based on what they call “information obtained…from foreign sources and from within Benghazi,” the “assault against the US Consulate in Benghazi should not be seen as part of a protest against a low budget film which was insulting Islam,” but instead as an opportunistic attack “to avenge the death of Abu Yaya al-Libi, al-Qaeda’s second in command killed a few months ago.” Quilliam gives three reasons for this belief:

• 24 hours before this attack, none other than the leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, released a video on Jihadist forums to mark the anniversary of 9/11. In this video, Zawahiri acknowledged the death of his second in command Abu Yahya and urged Libyans to avenge his killing.
• According to our sources, the attack was the work of roughly 20 militants, prepared for a military assault – it is rare that an RPG7 is present at a peaceful protest.
• According to our sources, the attack against the Consulate had two waves. The first attack led to US officials being evacuated from the consulate by Libyan security forces, only for the second wave to be launched against US officials after they were kept in a secure location.

The best guess I have for why the Obama administration chose to intervene in Libya last year against the former US-ally Muammar Gadhafi is that Gadhafi was a dispensable ally, as opposed to other Middle Eastern dictators (like Khalifa, Saleh, and the Saudis) who are indispensable. As Michael Hastings reported, “[P]resident [Obama] apparently shared the impulse to use [my emphasis] Libya to make up for the administration’s slow-footed response to the Arab Spring.” Indeed, its perfectly believable that the Obama administration launched the war in Libya for “credibility” – a public relations stunt for the Arab world’s perception of America.

But the intervention soon proved hasty, despite a refusal on the part of the Obama administration to address serious concerns about an al-Qaeda presence among the rebel militias we were helping to bring to power. Even absent my admittedly speculative ideas about the nefarious intentions of the Obama administration, it is just plain foolish to think such an intervention would have been nice and clean. As The American Conservative‘s Daniel McCarthy writes:

Westerners across the political spectrum have been willfully naive not only about who some of the Arab Spring revolutionaries are — by no means a majority, but quite enough, are extremists of the sort the U.S. has elsewhere been fighting in the vaunted War on Terror — but about the nature of revolution in general, which does not come to a neat conclusion with the death of a monster like Gaddafi. After seeing what happened in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was deposed, everyone should know better. There’s nothing simple about the “transition to democracy.”

The case of Libya is merely one case in a field of many illustrating the Obama administration’s drastically counter-productive policies regarding al-Qaeda. The drone war consistently kills civilians and is daily embittering entire populations of Muslims in Pakistan and Yemen, increasing al-Qaeda recruits and laying the groundwork for more blowback. US policies in Syria come dangerously close to directly aiding al-Qaeda militias, which is due to be a far bigger mess than Libya by several orders of magnitude. Meanwhile, the American military is more present in the Middle East than ever and it is still full of US-backed dictators, and the US approach to Israel-Palestine has not changed and continues to rob the Palestinians out of their land and their livelihoods. All of these issues are reinforcing the same grievances that spawned al-Qaeda. Right now, it’s just one US Ambassador and three nameless Americans. But what comes next?

Update: MSNBC and CNN have all but confirmed that al-Qaeda at least in part organized the attack on the US consulate.

Jerusalem Post:

In an apparent reference to the public spat between the United States and Israel, former IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi told the Calcalist conference on Tuesday that preserving strong ties with the United States is an Israeli security necessity.

“We must preserve ties with the United States. I believe this is a security necessity,” he said.

In the past three years, he noted, US taxpayers have contributed more to the Israeli defense budget than Israeli taxpayers.

Since 2009, that amount is more than $11 billion. Explaining why money needs to be stolen from US taxpayers and given to the only nuclear state in the Middle East, despite the fact that Israeli leaders work directly against US interests – especially when they try to pressure us to launch discretionary wars – is getting harder even for hawks to do.

Kurt Eichenwald reminds us in the New York Times that the infamous briefing declassified for the 9/11 Commission entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” was just one of many, many pre-9/11 classified warnings that an attack was imminent. He writes that “the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed.”

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

So before there were war crimes in the Bush administration, there was criminal negligence. And the neo-cons were blinded by their zeal long before they got a blank check from the worst attacks on US soil ever.

Update: See my blog post from last year’s 9/11: Turning 9/11 into State Worship.