Month: October 2012

Those arguing for US intervention in Syria have always had a hard time being consistent, but Jackson Diehl’s piece in the Washington Post on Sunday is all over the place. He claims that Obama’s decision in 2009 to re-open the US Embassy in Syria (it had been closed by Bush) “enabled” Bashar al-Assad. Furthermore, the administration’s reluctance to go ahead and unilaterally bomb Syria to smithereens doubly enabled Assad to slaughter his own people.

On the first point, Deihl argues:

The problem with [reopening the US Embassy] was not just the distasteful courting of a rogue regime but the willful disregard of the lessons absorbed by George W. Bush, who also tried reaching out to Assad, only to learn the hard way that he was an irredeemable thug. Yet Obama insisted on reversing Bush’s policy of distancing the United States from strongmen like Assad and Hosni Mubarak — a monumental miscalculation.

Deihl’s dwelling in something of a fantasy land. First of all, how can he speak of “distasteful courting” of authoritarian regimes when it is the express policy of the Obama administration, and Bush before him, to enthusiastically support the region’s most dictatorial governments with billions of dollars, weapons, and diplomatic cover? Surely that outweighs re-opening an Embassy. And Bush never “learned the hard way” that reaching out to Assad was fruitless: indeed, Bush refused in a blind, knee-jerk way repeated requests from General Petraeus to deal diplomatically with Assad. Also to say that Bush distanced himself from Mubarak is laughable.

But the substantive point is that Obama appeased Assad by re-opening an Embassy and not outwardly calling for his destruction. I think we’d be hard pressed to find anyone that seriously thinks a slight change in Obama’s tone towards Assad (nothing substantive about the relationship had changed since Bush) had any effect on the unforeseeable events of the Arab Spring and Syria’s civil war.

With regard to not intervening unilaterally to unseat Assad, Deihl writes:

The State Department’s Syria experts recognized the peril: If Assad were not overthrown quickly, they warned in congressional testimony, the country could tip into a devastating sectarian war that would empower jihadists and spread to neighboring countries. But Obama rejected suggestions by several senators that he lead an intervention. Instead he committed a second major error, by adopting a policy of seeking to broker a Syrian solution through the United Nations.

Really? If only Obama had jumped the gun and invaded or bombed Syria while it was still a relatively small, minority protest movement, all would be better? Deihl is being rather selective in his “Syria expert” analysis, since many academics and intelligence officials with such expertise advocated against direct US intervention from the very beginning.

Deihl tries to make it seem as if Obama had a window to commit to war in Syria, but lost it because now its a messy civil conflict filled with jihadists who want to establish an Islamic sharia state. But Obama “rejected suggestions by several senators that he lead an intervention” because everybody and their mother was advising him that such an intervention would be an utter catastrophe that would make the situation dramatically worse and invite the kind of sectarian civil war that Iraq experienced following the unilateral invasion that toppled the regime in 2003.

Deihl and other rabid interventionists can write articles like this with a straight face, I’m assuming, because of the mantra they keep repeating to themselves: “Every bad thing is due to lack of US militarism.” At the same time, Deihl systematically underestimates the negative consequences of intervention.

Deihl writes that “when historians look back on Obama’s mistakes in the last four years, they will focus on something entirely different: his catastrophic mishandling of the revolution in Syria.” I’m tempted to say I agree, but not for the reasons Deihl thinks. With the news that most of the arms flowing into Syria – facilitated in part by the Obama administration – are going to benefit the jihadist fighters, it seems clear this may be remembered as an instance of blowback, not of appeasement. Even other establishment analysts who support US intervention, like those from the RAND Corp., grant that “a rebel victory could result in Al Qaeda or its sympathizers coming to power in a post-Assad Syria.”

A new study from Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute finds that the number of Pakistani civilians killed in drone strikes are “significantly and consistently underestimated” by tracking organizations which are trying to take the place of government estimates on casualties, which the Obama administration won’t comment on because the drone war is technically secret.

The study “warns that low civilian casualty estimates may provide false assurance to the public and policymakers that drone strikes do not harm civilians.” Many low-ball estimates – like those from Long War Journal and New America Foundation – are due to reliance on news reports, which “suffer from common flaws” like trusting “anonymous Pakistani government officials or unnamed witnesses for the claim that ‘militants’ – rather than civilians – were killed.”

“In the rare but significant cases where on-the-ground reporting has offered evidence of civilian deaths from drone strikes,” the report’s press release said, “the U.S. government has failed to officially respond or provide information about whether it conducts its own investigations into potential civilian deaths. The report calls on the government to investigate reports of civilian casualties, track and release drone strike casualty information, and disclose the standards and definitions it uses to categorize individuals as subject to direct attack.”

The report focuses on how news reports as well as these tracking organizations can get sloppy when identifying civilian casualties. But it leaves out how the Obama administration has chosen to count civilians. According to the New York Times, the administration “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants…unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”

Academia seems to have begun to pay more attention to the drone war. Follow up reading this study by reading last month’s study from the Stanford and NYU schools of law – Living Under Drones.

Politicians technically use the same language as us, but many of their words have very different meanings. In last week’s vice presidential debates, for example, Joe Biden said, “We are leaving [Afghanistan]. We are leaving in 2014, period. Period.” Micah Zenko at the Council on Foreign Relations reminds us how the words “leaving” or “withdrawal” mean something very different in politics:

The full withdrawal of all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan is not the current position of the Obama administration. On October 3, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the appointment of Ambassador James Warlick, deputy special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, to lead the negotiations for an agreement that would keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan for an undefined period of time. Reportedly, “Western officials have mentioned the residual American force as ranging from a few thousand to some 20,000.” In addition, some U.S. policymakers assume that Afghanistan will serve as hub for special operations raids and drone strikes into Pakistan.

Actually, a similar deceit is being peddled about Iraq. The Obama campaign constantly claims that they ended the Iraq war and brought all the troops home. In fact, they tried desperately to keep thousands of troops there, and simply got kicked out – only then deciding to pick up this narrative of ending the occupation.

But even that aside, the claim that “we left” is not true. As Zenko writes, “The United States currently has 225 troops, 530 security assistance team members, and over 4,000 contractors to equip and train Iraqi security forces.” And it’s worth remembering these Iraqi security forces we’re training have essentially been used as a secret police force for the increasingly authoritarian Maliki to attack, detain, and torture his political opponents and crack down harshly on public dissent.

In political campaigns, politicians can talk all they want about a full US withdrawal of Afghanistan. But technocrats have long admitted publicly that there will be no withdrawal. In a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations almost a year ago, under secretary of defense for policy at the Department of Defense Michèle Flournoy, explained that “2014 is not a withdrawal date—it’s an inflection point.” Afghans at that time “are still going to need support from the international community,” she said, and the U.S. has “been negotiating a strategic partnership agreement with the Afghan government that would lay out an enduring strategic partnership far into the future.”

Enduring partnership. Great. Of course a major problem is that so long as any foreign occupation exists in Afghanistan, and so long as any Kabul government is propped up from abroad, the insurgency will remain alive and well. The insurgency has persisted for 11 years despite the efforts of the world’s most advanced military. And all signs tell me they will continue to fight to oust the occupier even after a “withdrawal” (which we now know really only means a smaller occupation).

While electoral politics tends to suck the oxygen out of the room (and apparently out of many people’s brains) in these last few weeks before an election, a number of U.S. citizens committed to ending the wars took to the streets this week. Demonstrations in at least 38 cities in the U.S. as well as in some foreign countries — most notably Code Pink’s courageous peace march in Pakistan — are marking the 11th year anniversary of the longest war in U.S. history.

Veteran Michael Prysner accurately described the heartbreak of the current situation in Afghanistan as a “lost war and pointless mission” that is now sacrificing “life and limb for (nothing but) a slow-motion retreat” for politicians and generals to save face. The broader situation throughout the Middle East appears bleaker still inasmuch as the original congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that began the war on Afghanistan has been expansively interpreted to now encompass covert “special forces operations”, cyber warfare, and drone bombing in at least five other countries. Additionally the recent National Defense Authorization Act even allows indefinite detentions of American citizens.

Naturally, more than a few of us have begun to lose hope in any American politician getting the country out of the wars, quagmires and messes created by other politicians. However, by recalling Lord Acton’s immutable principle as well as Eisenhower’s warning about the corrosive impact of the Military Industrial Complex, we see that the lower levels of city and state governments are inherently more reachable and less subject to corruption than the higher and more powerful levels of federal government. The notion that more real hope exists at the grassroots, civil society and city council level is being borne out.

Ask yourself and then your city council: “What mostly trickles down: prosperity or austerity?” This week residents of my city (Apple Valley), as in other Minnesota cities and local governing bodies, will ask our city council the following questions:

1) Can we spend trillions on war without cutting essential services on the local level?

2) Tell us about “Community Development Block Grants.” Has our city seen cuts?

3) What are the ramifications? How much does the federal government spend on war and how much on local communities in the US?

4) How many local tax dollars have been spent to fund recent wars and an escalating Pentagon budget while local needs go unmet?

At the same time, we will also ask our City Council to consider putting the following draft resolution on their formal agenda:

City councils prove receptive

Undoubtedly there are some mayors and city councilpersons who might want to shrug off the responsibility of connecting these dots despite the fact that their cities and city residents are the ones paying the price of these costly national wars. But it shouldn’t be necessary to bring our tents or camping gear to make city officials seriously think about this. Already several major cities around the country including Los Angeles, CA, Philadelphia, PA and Hartford, CT have signed on. The U.S. Conference of Mayors passed a similar resolution in June of 2011. Also, the “Women Legislators’ Lobby,” including 36 MN women legislators, signed a letter calling for “responsible cuts in military spending.”

Yesterday, October 10, 2012, the Saint Paul City Council voted unanimously to pass the resolution calling for a reduction and redirection of military spending back to local communities! The St. Paul City Council joined a statewide week of action during the 11 year anniversary of the Afghan War. This resolution was brought forward by the Minnesota Arms Spending AlternativesProject (MN ASAP). MN ASAP is a non-partisan citizen-based initiative using a simple resolution process to build political support to shift federal spending priorities from war to meeting essential needs. MN ASAP’s goal is to build sufficient political power and influence statewide from representatives at all levels of government and from non-governmental organizations and civic groups to effectively demand a shift in priorities from war spending to meeting essential needs.

The group Minnesota Arms Spending Alternatives Project (MN ASAP) is approaching city councils around the state, asking them to connect the dots between federal military spending and cuts to local city council budgets, i.e. Community Development Block Grants, which come from the Federal Discretionary Budget.

Activists around Minnesota — in St. Paul, Minneapolis, Eagan, Apple Valley, Mounds View, Circle Pines, Lakeville, and Duluth (so far) — have been pursuing their council members via email, phone calls, office visits, or by speaking during the public hearing sessions (open microphone sessions). In Minneapolis, a majority of council members have individually endorsed the resolution and it is hoped an official vote will soon be scheduled there. Also noteworthy is the personal endorsement of our resolution by Rep. Keith Ellison who urges the Minneapolis City Council to debate and vote in favor of our resolution.

(Co-written with Nathan J. Ness, Director of MN ASAP: originally appeared on Huffington Post.)

David Rothkopf at Foreign Policy revives an issue I thought might at least temporarily dissipate after the official “dialing back” of Israeli leaders’ pressure for a US war on Iran. He says the Obama administration has discussed a US-Israeli “surgical strike” on Iran’s nuclear installations:

The strike might take only “a couple of hours” in the best case and only would involve a “day or two” overall, the source said, and would be conducted by air, using primarily bombers and drone support. Advocates for this approach argue that not only is it likely to be more politically palatable in the United States but, were it to be successful — meaning knocking out enrichment facilities, setting the Iranian nuclear program back many years, and doing so without civilian casualties — it would have regionwide benefits. One advocate asserts it would have a “transformative outcome: saving Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, reanimating the peace process, securing the Gulf, sending an unequivocal message to Russia and China, and assuring American ascendancy in the region for a decade to come.”

First of all, this changes nothing about the Obama administration’s resistance to Israel’s pressure for war, and in fact the dialing back of Israeli pressure, however temporary, is still occurring. Rothkopf is describing a contingency, which the US military always plans for.

But note Rothkopf’s and his mysterious source’s definition of a “successful” strike. It would have to “knock out enrichment facilities, set the Iranian nuclear program back many years, and do so without civilian casualties.” Unfortunately, none are these are the expected result of a US strike. As a recent report by former government officials, national security experts and retired military officers concluded last month, the Iranian nuclear program is too redundant for a simple surgical strike that takes “a couple of hours” to delay the program for any considerable way. The report also said that the attack would increase Iran’s motivation to build a bomb, in order to deter further military action and that “achieving more than a temporary setback in Iran’s nuclear program would require a military operation – including a land occupation – more taxing than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.”

So that does away with the first two criteria. How about the third? Well, as a study from the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics recently found, an attack that tried to take out more than four of Iran’s main enrichment facilities would shoot the immediate casualties to an estimated “10,000 people.” And according to a 2009 study by the Center for International and Strategic Studies “any strike on the Bushehr nuclear reactor will cause the immediate death of thousands of people living in or adjacent to the site, and thousands of subsequent cancer deaths or even up to hundreds of thousands depending on the population density along the contamination plume.” Even civilians in neighboring countries would be effected: “Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates will be heavily affected by the radionuclides.” So much for that.

Also note what Rothkopf quotes his source, an advocate of the attack, as saying: it would have a “transformative outcome: saving Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, reanimating the peace process, securing the Gulf, sending an unequivocal message to Russia and China, and assuring American ascendancy in the region for a decade to come.” Notice how none of that has anything to do with a nuclear weapons program – the supposed justification for a war. Instead, its all about maintaining geo-political dominance in the region. I’m always charmed when war planners are honest with themselves.