Month: December 2012

In the Shiite neighborhoods of Sitra in Bahrain, these posters are reportedly all over the place:

The picture on the bottom right-hand corner is John Timoney, the ex-US police chief whose expertise was tapped by the US-backed Bahraini dictatorship to crack down more efficiently on peaceful protesters.

The Obama administration, contrary to its own propaganda about being on the side of the people in the Arab Spring, has continued to lend economic, military, and diplomatic support to the tiny Persian Gulf monarch throughout its brutal repression of peaceful demonstrators since early 2011, when forty-seven unarmed protesters were shot and killed with live rounds by security forces.

The Bahraini regime hosts the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which allows the United States to “project power” in the Persian Gulf and patrol the Straits of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world’s seaborne oil passes. That ruthless geo-political advantage is not something the Obama administration is willing to give up for the sake of democracy and human rights.

Bahrain recently banned all protests and demonstration in a dramatic violation of basic rights. But it is only one aspect of the repressive, martial-law type responses from the US-supported dictatorship. Others have included systematic torture, beatings, weaponizing tear gas, imposing curfews, harassing well-known activists, show trials and detentions, and cracking down on press freedoms, among many others.

An editorial from Haaretz explains how Israel is destroying the water reserves of Palestinians in the West Bank as part of an intentional policy to ethnically cleanse the occupied territories “and thus make it easier to annex these areas to Israel.”

Since the beginning of the year, Israel has destroyed 35 rainwater cisterns used by Palestinian communities, 20 of them in the area of Hebron and the southern Hebron Hills. In 2011, Israel destroyed 15 cisterns, and in the preceding 18 months, 29…Usually, the communities whose cisterns were destroyed are a short distance from settlements and unauthorized outposts that enjoy a regular water supply. At the same opportunity the Civil Administration almost always destroys Palestinian tents, animal pens and food storage facilities.

…Leaving Palestinian communities disconnected from infrastructure, declaring large areas as firing zones and destroying cisterns are part of an intentional policy since the early 1970s. Its goal is to leave as few Palestinians as possible in the majority of the West Bank (today’s Area C, under Israeli civil and military control), to expedite Jewish settlement and thus make it easier to annex these areas to Israel.

The European Union opposes Israel’s policies in Area C, which the EU believes sabotages the two-state solution. It also bases its position on international law, which prohibits the demolition of structures that would leave a protected population without food and water and result in their forced dislocation. Basic moral principles, as well as avoiding another head-on collision with our friends, requires that Israel cease and desist from destroying cisterns that are essential for the existence of dozens of Palestinian communities.

Deliberately depriving the civilian population of food and water is only one part of the Israeli strategy to smoke out the Palestinian people: the rate at which Israel is demolishing Palestinian homes and building up Israeli settlements in their place is greater now than ever before. This is the type of cruel policy that has been unilaterally supported by the United States for decades, and is currently being abetted by unprecedented rates of US economic, military and diplomatic aid.

By 2030, the US will no longer be the global hegemonic power, according to the US National Intelligence Council.

In a report called Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, the office of the Director of National Intelligence concludes that, “In terms of the indices of overall power – GDP, population size, military spending and technological investment – Asia will surpass North America and Europe combined.” And “with the rapid rise of other countries, the ‘unipolar moment’ is over and Pax Americana—the era of American ascendancy in international politics that began in 1945—is fast winding down.”

Most notably since the end of WWII, the US has been pursuing global dominance through force and coercion. This project got a boost with the end of the Cold War – that so-called unipolar moment – in which the one great power rival Washington faced abruptly fell apart. The geo-political implications of this prompted euphoria among crafters of US foreign policy. In 1992, the Defense Department circulated what came to be known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, after then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz. “America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era,” the New York Times reported, “will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union.” America’s mission, read the DoD document, would be “convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.”

The primary consequence of unrivaled power and dominance on the world stage is that the US could perpetrate savagery on other states and peoples with hardly any accountability or threat of retaliation. It is comparable to what happens when an authoritarian gains unquestioned power over a single country: no checks or balances, no responsibility for grave transgressions, etc.

Now, because of a mixture of hubris, profligacy, emerging economies, and the rise of non-state actors, “the post-war US approach to strategy is rapidly becoming insolvent and unsustainable,” concluded a recent CSIS report. In some ways, Washington is taking this news kicking and screaming, desperately boosting US military presence in the Middle East and Asia. But “If Washington continues to cling to its existing role on the premise that the international order depends upon it, the result will be increasing resistance, economic ruin, and strategic failure,” according to CSIS.

The Obama administration is peddling two scenarios for a potential war in Syria. With news and official statements this week repeating uncorroborated allegations that the Assad regime is moving and mixing elements of chemical weapons and possibly loading the materials into bombs, administration officials warn that the US could intervene militarily (1) if the regime uses these weapons on its own people, and (2) if the danger that these chemical weapons could get into the hands of Islamic militant groups becomes too great.

While it is true that the Obama administration may intervene under scenario (1), public statements to this effect are misleading. Consider Bilal Y. Saab, Executive Director of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis, on why Obama’s supposed red line on the use of chemical weapons “lacks credibility.”

Why has the United States drawn a red line here and not elsewhere?

Obama’s words could reflect a humanitarian concern and a moral responsibility to prevent the further loss of life in Syria. Yet the president has not reacted forcefully to the tens of thousands who have already perished without a single poison being used. Chemical weapons are considered weapons of mass destruction, and if used effectively, could kill in the thousands. But so can fighter jets, helicopters, tanks and artillery—and they already have.

Indeed, chemical weapons draw international alarm, but they are no more a threat to civilian life really than what has already been going on in Syria. Additionally, in order to intervene on this basis, the US would have to justify it under the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, which is controversial to say the least. And the intervention would rest on even shakier legal basis because it would be unlikely to receive full support at the UN Security Council.

Even then, the US lacks feasible military options. A no-fly zone is likely to put more civilians at risk, and bombing the chemical stockpiles would be about as bad as Assad unleashing them on his own targets. If the US were to move in with ground forces to secure the weapons, it would take at least 75,000 troops, and any limited mission to secure the weapons would lend itself to mission creep and eventually turn into regime change with no viable interim government, which would then turn into a long and bloody occupation costing hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars as it did in Iraq.

What about scenario (2)? The Obama administration is playing it off like this is the less important of the two scenarios for intervention, but I’m betting its the more important one, just not for public consumption. In August, Obama said “We cannot have a situation in which [chemical/biological weapons] are falling into the hands of the wrong people.” On Wednesday, Secretary of State Clinton reiterated that “Our concerns are that an increasingly desperate Assad regime might turn to chemical weapons, or might lose control of them to one of the many groups that are now operating within Syria.” Israel’s vice prime minister Moshe Yaalon said on Thursday, “There is speculation that the chemical arsenal will fall into the hostile and irresponsible hands of the likes of al-Qaida or other terrorist groups.”

For those of us that can remember the Bush administration’s justifications for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, this scenario should sound familiar. Three international relations scholars, Paul R. Williams, J. Trevor Ulbrick, and Jonathan Worboys, explain in Foreign Policy how “the Obama administration risks resurrecting the much-maligned Bush Doctrine of preemptive self-defense.”

Under international law, a state may only invoke its right of self-defense in the case of an actual or imminent attack. After the 9/11 attacks by al Qaeda, however, the Bush administration asserted a right of preemptive self-defense against terrorist groups and states that harbor them or could supply them with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Many states and experts rejected this justification for the 2003 Iraq war because Iraq could not be linked to WMDs or the 9/11 attacks. Unlike Iraq, Syria has CBW and has forged a close partnership with Hezbollah. Nevertheless, preemptive self-defense still suffers from the same theoretical deficiencies it did in 2003. The doctrine has a weak basis in international law and its legal recognition would improperly justify the use of force by powerful states.

The Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq was an outright war crime, resting as it did on fudged evidence of a non-existent threat and, of course, no credible justification of self-defense. The situation with Syria right now isn’t exactly identical, but it’s notable that the Obama administration’s calculations for intervention rest on the same, almost universally reviled war criminal logic as the Bush administration.

In some ways, the current situation is even messier. The Obama administration has explicitly refused to comment “on the specific intelligence” on Syria’s chemical weapons that inflamed so much bluster this week, but Syrian officials continue to emphatically deny any suggestion that they are planning on using them.

“Syria stresses again, for the tenth, the hundredth time, that if we had such weapons, they would not be used against its people. We would not commit suicide,” President Bashar Assad’s deputy foreign minister said on Thursday, adding that the West was whipping up fears  as a “pretext for intervention.”

Finally, the US may not have found itself in a situation where Islamic extremist militants in Syria could get a hold of chemical weapons if – for example – the US hadn’t been bolstering these groups as part of the rebel opposition. So, there’s that.