Month: November 2012

DC Editor John Glaser appeared on RT’s CrossTalk with Thomas Carothers, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Charles A. Kupchan, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Bringing the September 11 attack on the Benghazi Consulate finally full circle today, a new analysis piece is reporting that the reason the Pentagon didn’t respond to a multi-hour attack in a Libyan city is that, shockingly, the US doesn’t have a massive military force deployed in Africa ready for any and all possible adventures.

That’s going to change, of course, and military officials say this has given “new energy” to the call for massive deployments in Africa.

Its mostly uncritically presented, of course. It’s just a formality really: something happened and now the US is going to throw troops at it. That’s the one constant in US foreign policy.

The practical matters are entirely ignored, of whether a US quick-action force inside Africa would really be any closer to Benghazi, a port city on the Mediterranean Sea which is a 90 minute flight from Naples, than the one that’s already in Europe. That the attack was a function of a State Department not taking security even a little seriously and ignoring repeated expressions of concern, that’s out of the conversation too. The US spends an outrageous amount of money on the military, and the idea that any given city on the planet doesn’t have a bunch of US helicopter gunships deployable in a matter of minutes is a shock to the narrative of the all-powerful US military.

The lack of a “quick-reaction force” in Africa should be a function of the complete lack of legitimate US security interests in Africa to justify such a force. Instead its being bemoaned as a failing while officials look for more and more points of military involvement in Africa to justify yet more escalation.

Faced with growing environmental concerns, the Israeli government is looking for ways to allow certain mammals to pass through the West Bank barrier unencumbered. Several groups were citing families of animals, including foxes, separated by the massive wall.

“Many animals that live here, need their habitats, or breeding and feeding areas,” noted one Israeli ecologist. “They can eat in one place but hide in another place. So animals, especially the bigger ones, need open space for their existence.”

Lost among the mammals effected by the wall is the most obvious: humans. Every complaint made about the impact of the barrier on red foxes or the humble hydrax can be made, virtually without change, referring to the Palestinians living in the West Bank.

The barrier has separated families of ibex from one another, and surely families of people who can no longer travel from one village to another without contending with a military checkpoint. An animal may find his grazing area on one side of the wall and his nest on the other, but this is also true of many farmers, who have ended up with their homes on one side of the wall and the bulk of their field left fallow and inaccessible on the other side.

It is remarkable that Israeli courts could be so concerned with the migration of some mammals while its government remains openly hostile to the day to day movements of the most populous mammals in the West Bank. Maybe Palestinians would be better served in the near term in abandoning their quests for equality with Israeli Jews under Israeli law and instead try to at least get legal equality with porcupines first, which appears to be a dramatic improvement from their current situation.