Month: October 2012

If you trust the mainstream account, you’re likely someone who believes that President Obama’s willingness to negotiate with Iran about its nuclear program has provided Iranians with incentive to expand their program and head towards nuclear weapons, right under our noses. But according to two experienced academics and diplomats, the so-called diplomatic opening Obama brought was anything but: “for the past three years, the United States and Europe have stubbornly refused to seek a negotiated solution with Iran,” they write.

At Foreign Affairs, this country’s main establishment journal, Rolf Ekéus and Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer warn that Washington’s approach to Iran mirrors the approach it took to Iraq from 1990 on, reminding us that the goal all along was regime change:

The Iraq War might seem a thing of the past. But nearly ten years after combat began, the United States and its allies are using policies to address the Iranian nuclear challenge that are eerily similar to those it pursued in the run-up to Operation Enduring Freedom. Just as they did with Saddam Hussein, concerned governments have implemented economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and low-level violence to weaken the Iranian regime and prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons, with the long-term objective of regime change.

This perspective clears up the mystery of why the US would impose supposedly punitive sanctions on Iran despite the intelligence consensus that they have no nuclear weapons program and have demonstrated no intention of getting one.

The authors (Ekéus was Executive Chairman of the UN Special Commission on Iraq from 1991 to 1997 and Braut-Hegghammer is Stanton Nuclear Security Junior Faculty Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University) re-run the history of US policy toward Iraq following the first Gulf war in 1991. After the war, the US – with its new, post-Cold War sway at the UN Security Council – pushed through harsh economic sanctions that they said would be lifted as soon as Iraq disarmed and proved through a rigorous inspections regime that it’s nuclear program was peaceful.

Iraq largely cooperated, minus a few bumps in the road, they explain. And “by the first few months of 1997, Iraq had completed the disarmament phase of the cease-fire agreement and the United Nations had developed a monitoring system designed to detect Iraqi violations of the nonproliferation requirement.” Voila! Done deal, right?

No. The US refused to lift the sanctions, and threatened to veto proposals to do so at the UN. “In the spring of 1997,” the authors write, “former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave a speech at Georgetown University in which she stated that even if the weapons provisions under the cease-fire resolution were completed, the United States would not agree to lifting sanctions unless Saddam had been removed from power.”

This, plus some US bombing campaigns, led Saddam to oust international inspectors, providing the Bush administration with enough blind-spots to justify war for regime change in 2003. And now, aggressive US postures towards Iran, just as they did with Iraq, “are making Iran less willing to cooperate.”

“With escalating pressure and open debate in Israel and the United States about an eventual attack, it is unlikely that Iran will be prepared to make unilateral concessions,” they write.

…calling for war while intensifying pressure on Iran, without also clearly defining steps Tehran could take to defuse the tension, removes any incentives for Iran to change its behavior. In the short term, the hostility of Western nations is likely to make it more difficult for Iranian moderates to rein in the nuclear program. And in the longer term, Tehran will increasingly question whether Iran ought to remain within the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in the face of economic sanctions, violence, and isolation. Without eyes on the ground, moreover, it will grow ever more difficult to assess Tehran’s actual progress toward the nuclear weapons threshold. The world could miss the emergence of an Iranian breakout capability, or else blunder into another unjustified war.

The Obama administration, contrary to what we might hear on MSNBC and Fox News, is imitating the Clinton administration’s relentless, rejectionist policies. In Iraq it led to millions slaughtered. Where will it lead in Iran?

In last night’s presidential debate, Romney walked a narrow line of fundamentally agreeing with President Obama on key foreign policy issues while trying to seem tougher. At the same time, he tried to avoid being boxed in as pro-war by Obama, saying things like “We don’t want to get drawn into a military conflict,” and “we can’t kill our way out of this mess.”

Republican voters might criticize Romney for so eagerly escaping the hard-nationalist, pro-war label, but Romney’s decision here was politically shrewd, as the fickle, fluctuating Massachusetts Governor so often is. He understands what Pat Buchanan pointed out last week: the perceived peace candidate tends to win.

Pew Research Center, for example, found this week that a large majority, 63 percent, want the US to be less involved in the Middle East’s political changes. This is a precept that is simply out of the question for policymakers, including the president.

Truth be told, outside of the election in two weeks, the public is wholly ignored in foreign policy-making. This 2005 study from American Political Science Review assessed multivariate foreign policy preferences and their influence on actual policy, considering business, elite opinion, labor, and the general public. It found that business interests along with elite opinion within the foreign policy establishment basically dictate foreign policy.

The strongest and most consistent results are the coefficients for business, which suggest that internationally oriented business corporations are strongly influential in U.S. foreign policy…Business people (along with experts) are estimated to exert the strongest effects on policy makers overall and, especially, on administration officials…

And as for the public, the researchers favored their models to account for possible miscalculations in their models’ emphasis in popular opinion:

Even with these reduced and refined models, the public does not appear to exert substantial consistent influence on the makers of foreign policy…A more plausible interpretation of these borderline-signifcant coefficients, however, is that the public simply has no effect at all…In general, public opinion takes a back seat to business and experts.

This is par for the course. States have always been self-serving institutions with the aim of furthering their own power and control, in conjunction with their collaborators in the corporate world who benefit from the state capitalist system. Charles Tilly, author of Coercion, Capital and European States, described war as primarily “a means of satisfying the economic interests of the ruling coalition by gaining access to the resources of other states.”

And that’s how it will stay with regard to foreign policy, even if both candidates try to portray themselves as the peace candidate. Meanwhile, both parties desperately maintain our empire, hegemony, and coercive capabilities abroad. The public is a little less interested in that, because it primarily serves the interests of the state, not the people.

Mitt Romney says he wants to massively increase US defense spending by $2 trillion over ten years. According to CNN, that looks like this:

Interesting then, that the Romney campaign’s so-called “Military Advisory Council” is filled with former military men who now benefit from the immense corporate welfare that defense contractors receive. From boldprogressives.org:

• Retired General James Conway: Conway is a retired four-star general. Last year, he was named to the Board of Directors of Textron, which manufactures helicopters and other aircraft and products for the military.
• Retired Navy Admiral James B. Busey: Busey served in the Navy until 1989. After leaving the federal government in 1992, he joined the Board of Directors of defense contractor Curtiss-Wright and left in 2008.
• Retired former commander of United States Strategic Command James O. Ellis: After serving his country, Ellis decided to make a fortune by working for the defense industry. He serves in the leadership of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations and also has a board position at Lockheed Martin.
• Retired Air Force General Ronald Fogleman: Fogleman serves on the boards of Alliant Techsystems, AAR Corporation, Mesa Air Group, Inc., and World Air Holdings.
• Retired General Tommy Franks: Franks, who led the disastrous invasion of Iraq, has his own consultancy called Franks & Associates LLC that specializes in “disaster recovery.” He also works for a private firm that pitches itself as able to respond to a viral pandemic.
• Retired Air Force Commander William R. Looney III: Looney actually campaigns on behalf of for-profit colleges that are under fire for abusing military veterans. Those colleges actually are a huge beneficiary of dollars from the Veterans Administration, and thus represent an often under-looked form of defense contractor welfare.
• Retired Navy Admiral Henry Mauz: Mauz is on the Advisory Council of Northrop Grumman Ship Systems.
• Retired Navy Vice Admiral Mike Bucchi: Bucchi was named president of homeland security contractor Ocean Systems Engineering Corporation in 2005.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the media to question whether this presents a conflict of interest. As a matter of course, rent-seekers who suck from the public teat campaign for candidates they know will shower them with more goodies. That’s uncontroversial.

This should illustrate the extent to which America’s military industrial complex is embedded in our politics, though. In a Boston Globe review conducted last year, it was found that “750 of the highest ranking generals and admirals who retired during the last two decades” moved “into what many in Washington call the ‘rent-a-general’ business.” “From 2004-2008,” the report found, “80 percent of retiring three- and four-star officers went to work as consultants or defense executives” in our massive military-industrial complex. Among the Globe findings:

• Dozens of retired generals employed by defense firms maintain Pentagon advisory roles, giving them unparalleled levels of influence and access to inside information on Department of Defense procurement plans.
• The generals are, in many cases, recruited for private sector roles well before they retire, raising questions about their independence and judgment while still in uniform. The Pentagon is aware and even supports this practice.
• The feeder system from some commands to certain defense firms is so powerful that successive generations of commanders have been hired by the same firms or into the same field. For example, the last seven generals and admirals who worked as Department of Defense gatekeepers for international arms sales are now helping military contractors sell weapons and defense technology overseas.

And just for the sake of balance, click here to see Tim Carney identify more than 50 (former) corporate lobbyists now working in the Obama White House.

As far as tonight’s presidential debate is concerned, the proceedings are largely predictable, especially since the topic is exclusively foreign policy. In the first two debates, the candidates barely spoke about foreign policy – mindful, probably, that only about 4% of likely voters consider it an important topic.

One reason it is predictable is because of how these debates are executed: formats are planned, moderators are chosen, issues are predetermined. These debates must be arranged as such, otherwise it will be difficult for the candidates to accomplish their goal: to spend 90 minutes reciting well-rehearsed lies and distortions.

The moderator will be Bob Shieffer, who is enough of a stalwart hawk to be so completely blinded by his imperial biases that he incredulously quibbled with Ron Paul last year against the claim that the 9/11 terrorists were motivated by brutal US foreign policy and not by our coveted freedoms. The fact that the CIA, the State Department, the FBI, and all of the academic literature ever written on the subject are in consensus on this issue did not deflate Sheiffer’s intransigence.

Another reason it is predictable is because Americans got something of a preview during the vice presidential debates a couple weeks ago. Vice President Joe Biden and contender Paul Ryan spent a fair amount of time on foreign policy issues and what was clear was that both candidates appeared to argue over everything, but on every substantive issue – including defense spending, Afghanistan, Syria, and Iran – there was no discernible difference in policy between the two.

And we can expect that to be the case tonight as well, for the most part. The punditry are saying this morning that Mitt Romney is expected to lose. This is primarily because he and many other Republicans aim to be on the hawkish side of the foreign policy issues, talking about American military might and ruthless global dominance. But they have found it difficult to go further to the right than President Obama. There’s no room for Romney to be more of a hawk than Obama, and he’s certainly not going to criticize him for being too willing to bomb other countries or expand American military presence around the world.

Here are five issues, central to US foreign policy, that will not be addressed in tonight’s debate:

The (il)legitimacy of the drone war: The administration is in direct violation of several domestic and international laws in its drone war. They have invented a definition of “imminence,” a required element for justifying the use of force for self-defense in international law. They’re ignoring a Reagan-era statute that bans extra-judicial assassinations. And they appear to be violating the decision of the Supreme Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, which said due process must be “accorded to a US citizen deprived of liberty in connection with hostilities (this was ignored, for example, when the administration targeted and killed three US citizens without due process, including a 16-year old boy).

For these and other reasons – like the fact that the drone war in Pakistan and Yemen kills and terrorizes civilians – at least two UN investigators have called the legality of Obama’s drone wars into question. Christof Heyns, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions called on the Obama administration to explain under what legal framework its drone war is justified and suggested that “war crimes” may have already been committed. The UN human rights chief Navi Pillay also called for a UN investigation into US drone strikes in Pakistan, noting their questionable legality and that they indiscriminately kill innocent civilians.

The failure and cruelty of the Iran sanctions: While Iran will certainly be talked about, the issue of sanctions will only range from harsh to harsher. What will not be discussed is the fact that sanctions have historically failed to change the policies of the targeted regime, and indeed appear to be failing to change the Iranian regime’s policies as well. Especially ignored will be the horrible humanitarian consequences that have already begun to manifest in Iran: The Charity Foundation for Special Diseases, a non-governmental medical organization supporting six million patients in Iran, has warned publicly that the sanctions are putting millions of lives at risk by causing deep shortages of medicines for diseases like hemophilia, multiple sclerosis and cancer.

“The sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic of Iran have had significant effects on the general population,” UN Secretary General warned in a statement earlier this month, “including an escalation in inflation, a rise in commodities and energy costs, an increase in the rate of unemployment and a shortage of necessary items, including medicine.”

“The sanctions also appear to be affecting humanitarian operations in the country,” he wrote. “Even companies that have obtained the requisite licence to import food and medicine are facing difficulties in finding third-country banks to process the transactions.”

This, all while the consensus view in the entire US and intelligence community is that Iran has no nuclear weapons and has not made the decision to begin to develop nuclear weapons, which they are years away from technologically anyways.

Government secrecy and surveillance powers: Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the Obama administration has led one of the most secretive, over-classified, and surveillance-prone governments in a long time – maybe ever. And again, Romney would only try to appear less transparent, so this topic will not be discussed tonight.

In 2011, the federal government spent $11 billion just on keeping secrets from the American public (this number did not include costs incurred by the CIA and the NSA and other spy agencies, because those figures are classified). The worst of government secrecy has occurred under the Obama administration, which has hailed itself as the most transparent administration ever. According to the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), the government made a whopping 76,795,945 classification decisions in 2010, an increase of more than 40% from 2009. Document reviews conducted by ISOO in 2009 discovered violations of classification rules in 65% of the documents examined, with several agencies posting error rates of more than 90%.

The Obama administration has fought tooth and nail to keep the details of its surveillance activities hidden from the public. But documents recently released by the Justice Department after years of litigation with the ACLU have revealed that “federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans’ electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability.” Homeland Security has also recently been found to have illegally spied on peace activists.

The idiocy of aiding the Syrian rebels: The conflict in Syria has primarily been framed by both parties as a humanitarian crisis that America is morally obligated to intervene in militarily. What most Americans don’t know – and won’t find out at tonight’s debate – is that the rebel fighters that the US is aiding and helping send arms to have committed war crimes and are increasingly fighting under the banner of al-Qaeda groups intent on setting up a Salafi Islamist state if the Assad regime falls. The US military and intelligence community is aware of these concerns, but still the Obama administration has not stopped the aid, which is by most expert accounts only serving to prolong the conflict and worsen the humanitarian situation. The Romney campaign agrees with this policy, but has hinted that it would try to get more weapons to these al-Qaeda fighters if elected. This has blowback written all over it.

US-backed Israeli crimes against the Palestinians: Simply put, US economic, military, and diplomatic support of Israel enables the Israeli leadership to commit blatant crimes, in direct violation of international law. The Likud Party, now in power in Israel, currently receives $3 billion a year from Washington and all the vetoes the UN Security Council can take. But the Likud Party Charter declares Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza as “the realization of Zionist values” and describes the whole of the West Bank and Jerusalem as belonging to Israel. This not only goes directly against official US support for a negotiated two-state solution, but it violates international law prohibiting forced relocation of occupied people and the settlement of conquered or occupied lands.

The strictly-imposed Israeli blockade on Gaza, also, violates international law prohibiting collective punishment and is creating a humanitarian crisis in the small strip. Recently released documents show that the Israeli military meticulously and callously calculated the number of calories Gaza residents would need to consume in order not to starve, and used those calculations to inform how to impose a harsh economic blockade, as if Gaza residents were dogs in a cage. But this is a banished issue, and will not be mentioned at tonight’s debate.