Month: October 2012

With the news that more than 150 US forces have been deployed to Jordan, in part to “be positioned” as a contingent force “should the turmoil in Syria expand into a wider conflict,” it’s important to note the risk involved. As the New York Times reported:

American officials familiar with the operation said the mission also includes drawing up plans to try to insulate Jordan, an important American ally in the region, from the upheaval in Syria and to avoid the kind of clashes now occurring along the border of Syria and Turkey.

…The Obama administration has declined to intervene in the Syrian conflict beyond providing communications equipment and other nonlethal assistance to the rebels opposing the government of President Bashar al-Assad. But the outpost near Amman could play a broader role should American policy change. It is less than 35 miles from the Syrian border and is the closest American military presence to the conflict.

Carrying out contingent operations in Jordan could have serious implications for a conflict down the road. Washington seems concerned about the outbreak of war beyond Syria’s borders, but even if skirmishes crop up along the Jordanian border as they have along the Turkish border, it doesn’t necessarily mean international war will break out. However, if US forces are there and ready to jump the gun, it might.

Small skirmishes with Syria’s neighbors are not desirable, but nor would it threaten the US, so its a wonder why President Obama sees fit to send US troops to Jordan, especially when its technically done in secret (the Pentagon would not acknowledge the mission, or comment on it, nor will the administration) and without the approval of Congress.

This deployment reminds me of the major US-led military exercise in Jordan this past May. At the time, Michael Eisenstadt, director of the Military and Security Studies program at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, said he “suspect[ed] they’re trying to get kind of a psychological operations bump by [publicizing] this exercise now; it puts more pressure on the regime in Syria.”

And Michael Rubin, an adviser to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld from 2002-2004 and now an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute said the exercise was meant to reassure America’s puppet dictators that we have their back. “One of the perceptions we’re trying to reverse is the perception among many of the Gulf monarchs, and the king of Jordan, that we dumped Hosni Mubarak way too quickly.”

“What this does is send a signal to many of the GCC states that we’re not simply going to turn our backs on all the monarchs,” Rubin says. Building this kind of military-to-military relationship with allied Middle Eastern dictatorships “is an important check against Iran’s military ambitions, and has been a US goal since the 1980s,” he added.

Addendum: Just to add, it’s worth remembering that the US has CIA teams on the ground in Turkey, right on the Syrian border, and they are helping organize and support Syrian rebel fighters, along with our ally in Ankara. If this contingent force in Jordan does anything of the sort, Damascus will feel surrounded and deliberately subverted. How is this not a provocation?

Micah Zenko at the Council on Foreign Relations lists Mitt Romney’s apparent foreign policy principles vis-a-vis his foreign policy speech from yesterday. In part, Zenko’s impressions are compatible with what I wrote about Romney’s speech: that it suggested little to no substantive difference with that of Obama’s. Zenko writes that “Romney’s proposed foreign policy is as detailed as a book cover without the table of contents and supporting text,” and that “voters can assume that a President Romney’s foreign policy would actually closely resemble President Obama’s.”

But Zenko notes a broader, less tangible aspect of Romney’s world view that we got a glimpse of yesterday:

Finally, however, the main distinction is Romney’s repeated conviction that it is the duty and responsibility of the United States to shape and lead the world, which is desperate to be shaped and lead by Washington. “There is a longing for American leadership in the Middle East,” Romney said yesterday. It is exactly this flawed mindset that has repeatedly begot trouble in the past, particularly in the Middle East. This dual belief in U.S. influence and the global craving for U.S. leadership could be dangerous, if Romney acts on its implications.

In other words, Romney wishes to rule the world; to be Commander and Chief of the Earth, not just of the United States. This is consistent with what most people have been able to gather about Romney up to now: he is transparently in this for the fame and power. A political career filled with multiple contradictory convictions, held and espoused depending on when it furthers his quest for ever higher political offices, is the best indicator of this.

Past American Presidents have been equally power-hungry as Romney, but they’ve often had a basic understanding that other nations follow their own interests. If Romney truly does think it’s America’s duty to rule the world, and that the other subordinate nations desperately want to be ruled over, then it will manifest in some ugly ways.

Either that, or this is – yet again – merely one version of Romney that Americans are now being exposed to because it currently suits him politically.

The AP is reporting that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is (pretending to be) concerned about military enforcement of domestic laws throughout Latin America:

Latin American nations must try to use their police and not their military forces to enforce the law, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Monday, telling defense ministers here that the U.S. will help them build their capabilities.

Speaking to a conference of defense ministers from the Americas, where militaries are often used to battle drug traffickers and other guerrilla groups, Panetta said the U.S. realizes that it’s sometimes difficult to decide if a threat requires the use of the military or law enforcement.

“In some cases, countries have turned to their defense forces to support civilian authorities,” Panetta said in remarks prepared for delivery. “To be clear, the use of the military to perform civil law enforcement cannot be a long-term solution.”

What isn’t included in the AP report is that the US has consistently pushed the military in Latin America and knowingly blurred the lines between policing and military-style rule.

This report from the Washington Office on Latin America details “the United States’ persistent, century-long tendency to help the region’s militaries take on internal security roles” and that this tendency “continues with today’s ‘wars’ on drugs, terrorism, and organized crime.”

Despite the occasional examples of disputes and over- reaching discussed in Section I, the Posse Comitatus model has served the United States well. U.S. military and police institutions alike have benefited from the clear separation between their roles and missions.

It is unfortunate and alarming, then, that Washing- ton has supported almost the exact opposite course in Latin America and the Caribbean. For the past century, and continuing today, U.S. assistance has encouraged the Western Hemisphere’s militaries to assume internal roles that would be inappropriate, or even illegal, at home.

[…] The U.S. government is by far the largest provider of military and police aid to Latin America and the Caribbean. Arms and equipment transfers, training, exercises, presence at bases, and military-to- military engagement programs send strong messages about military and police roles. So do diplomatic inter- actions with the region.

Instead of exporting the principle to which the United States adheres, though, these efforts often do just the opposite: encourage Latin American govern- ments to use their militaries against their own people. This is a longstanding tendency in U.S. policy toward Latin America, though it rarely gets framed in terms of the United States’ much different domestic model.

To take a specific example, recent US interventionism in Honduras has markedly strengthened that military’s ability to ravage the domestic populace, while undercutting police. In June, a group of academics from around Latin America plus the US wrote a letter to the State Department railing against the US military presence in Honduras and demanding that aid to the country’s abusive law enforcement apparatus be halted. They argued that “The direct effect of U.S. policy toward Honduras has been to further strengthen the hand of the very people responsible for plotting, carrying out, legitimating, and violently imposing the coup d’état,” among them “the armed forces.” They complained that “military officers who led the coup have been assigned top-level positions within the current administration,” which “has put our poorly respected civil liberties at greater risk by deputizing soldiers to act as police despite their not being trained for that function but instead having been trained to exterminate the enemy.”

Panetta can’t be ignorant of this. But he put a heartfelt expression on his face and pretended to be truly concerned about these trends, even as he helps carry them out.

As noted in the news section today, Israeli intelligence is now hyping IAEA findings from back in August that say Iran has on several recent occasions used the 20 percent enriched uranium – the highest it has and the portion of the program which most riled hawks in the West – to manufacture fuel rods for peaceful medical research in possible cancer treatment. Anonymous Israeli officials are telling select members of the press that this information has resulted in an easing of Israel’s timetable for attacking Iran, but this explanation seems disingenuous.

The Israeli officials claim that their own intelligence has recently proved compatible with the IAEA’s findings in this regard, and that’s why the Israeli leadership has dialed back their war-mongering. But the highest Israeli officials, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, started dialing back the war-mongering in September only after strong and blunt signals from the Obama administration made it clear that no amount of “red line” rhetoric was going to force America’s hand for a war.

The first was statements made by America’s top military official, Gen. Martin Dempsey, who reiterated that the US would not be “complicit” in an Israeli strike. The other incident occurred when Israeli press reports came out saying the Obama administration sent a surreptitious message to Iran promising not to back an Israeli strike, as long as Tehran refrains from attacking American interests in the Persian Gulf.

At the time, Israeli officials didn’t mention anything about Iran’s peaceful allocation of uranium. Instead, they rambled about sufficient US military build ups in the Gulf and effective economic sanctions. “Israel retains its right to make sovereign decisions and the United States respects that,” Barak said. “However, one should not ignore the impressive preparations by the Americans to counter Iran on all fronts.” When these first signs of Israel “dialing back” the push for war were publicized, it was a dramatically abrupt shift, like a light switch.

Israel is widely understood to have overplayed its hand in trying to push the US to war with Iran. And now that their position has officially changed, it seems like this admission about peaceful uranium allocation is an excuse in order to avoid the embarrassment of admitting they lost the poker game with the Obama administration. Again, they are claiming the shift is a consequence of information that Iran is actually using the uranium for peaceful medical purposes, as promised, but they had this information long before the shift took place.

One implication of these developments is that it shows how much of a manufactured threat the Iranian nuclear program has been all along. How can the threat be a ticking time bomb with a short fuse that will soon mean the destruction of Israel one day, and the next day it’s something that doesn’t even need to be in the headlines? Iran doesn’t present anywhere near as large a threat as US and Israeli leaders have let on. But pretending it does provides Israel with a benefit: As former CIA Middle East analyst Paul Pillar has written, “the Iran issue” provides a “distraction” from international “attention to the Palestinians’ lack of popular sovereignty.” If every high-level diplomatic meeting with the Obama administration focuses on Iran, Israel can continue to rob Palestinians of land and rights unencumbered.

For several months now it has been known that the US is cooperating with its allies in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to provide aid and weapons to the rebel fighters in Syria. While the US has sent “non-lethal” aid to the rebels – like money, communications gear, and intelligence – it was also sent the CIA to the Turkish-Syrian border to funnel weapons coming primarily from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to various rebels. In recent weeks, the Obama administration has redoubled these efforts, sending more spies to help organize the Syrian rebels and tens of millions more in aid.

As this has been happening, officials in Washington have expressed trepidation about sending weapons, given the fact that the rebels have committed war crimes and are increasingly fighting under the banner of al-Qaeda. Last week, the New York Times reported that these concerns prompted Saudi Arabia and Qatar to start to limit the weapons being provided to the rebels: “…they have been discouraged by the United States, which fears the heavier weapons could end up in the hands of terrorists.”

To some, it wasn’t clear whether the US and its clients in the Gulf were avidly committed to actually using the Syrian rebels as proxies to overthrow the Assad regime, or whether it was more of a PR campaign to show they were “doing something.”

Now up at the BBC, there is clear evidence that Saudi weapons are in fact making it to the rebels: “Three crates from an arms manufacturer – addressed to Saudi Arabia – have been seen in a base being used by rebel fighters in the city of Aleppo.” One BBC reporter on the ground in Aleppo snapped this photograph:

What was in the crates is unknown, says the BBC’s Ian Pannell, who has been in Aleppo, as is how they ended up there.

But their presence clearly suggests that someone in the Gulf is actively helping the rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, our correspondent says.

…Privately, opposition sources have confirmed to the BBC that they are receiving assistance from Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The report from the Times that weapons to the rebels were somehow being limited suggests that its possible to be a little bit pregnant. The rebels are either receiving arms or they are not. The question of how much or what kind is immaterial to the moral and strategic implications of such a policy.

The United Nations has consistently objected to this “covert” arming of the rebels, saying it is not only wrong (because of who the rebels are and what they have done), but also that it is counterproductive in that it is fueling added violence. In July, UN rights chief Navi Pillay said “The ongoing provision of arms to the Syrian government and to its opponents feeds additional violence,” she said in the text of remarks made to the Security Council. “Any further militarization of the conflict must be avoided at all costs.” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon just reiterated this again, saying he was “deeply concerned” by the continued flow of arms to both sides, despite international embargoes. “I urge again those countries providing arms to stop doing so. Militarization only aggravates the situation,” he added.

It’s Monday and no one’s attacked Iran yet, so that means its time for hysterical headlines. Today’s comes courtesy of the Associated Press and the redoubtable George Jahn, who never met a non-story with the word Iran in it that he couldn’t turn into a countdown to Armageddon.

Think tank: path to Iran nuke warhead 2-4 months

What it sounds like: Iran, who we all know is already on the path to a nuclear warhead because George Jahn and everyone else has been telling us so for years, will have a nuclear warhead in 2-4 months (sometime between December and February).

How the story starts: “Iran could produce enough weapons-grade uranium to arm a nuclear bomb within two to four months but…”

What is actually happening: ISIS, the source of a lot of Iran’s “totally might” stories over the past several years, has estimated that if Iran actually tried to start making weapons-grade uranium (which they’ve never done before) and was successful, and rededicated their entire civilian uranium enrichment program to making weapons-grade uranium, could theoretically have enough for a single bomb in four months. Of course, the IAEA is monitoring those centrifuges and would know about such a change instantly.

So if Iran made that uranium, and if they ever figured out how to make a warhead for it (which ISIS concedes would take much, much longer) it might conceivably have a single nuclear weapon at some point in the far-flung future, suitable for doing very little because it wouldn’t have been tested yet, and if they did blow it up underground and test it, they wouldn’t have it anymore and would have to start enriching up another one.