Month: February 2013

The military-industrial establishment now calls U.S. soldiers “warfighters.” The problem is, they’re not fighting wars anymore. The U.S. hasn’t been legally at war since September 12, 1945 when the Japanese forces in Southeast Asia surrendered to Allied Commander Louis Mountbatten in Singapore, ending World War II.

So, since they’re not warfighters, what should we call them?

In the news section, I critique some of Senator Rand Paul’s foreign policy speech at the Heritage Foundation yesterday. One aspect of the article that I could not elaborate on is Sen. Paul’s support for sanctions against Iran.

Following his speech yesterday, I was afforded the opportunity to ask Paul a question about about this. The sanctions, I said, are not only strategically ineffective, but they are a cruel form of collective punishment that harm innocent Iranian civilians, without much purpose beyond political points at home. Instead of serving as an alternative to war, as Paul said in his speech, sanctions have historically been a prelude to it.

Here is his response in full:

I believe sanctions are not a prelude to war, but rather a tool to achieve a desired result without war.  While it may be true that others have used sanctions as simply a box to check on the way to war, that does not mean sanctions cannot be used properly. I do not believe they have passed their point of effectiveness, and to say so, to give up on them, may remove one of the last remaining obstacles to a consensus on preemptive war.  I believe sanctions can be enhanced through strategic diplomacy engaging Russia and China. Finally, Iran has recently asked for renewed discussions, some believe this is a direct outcome of the pressure of sanctions.

In addition, I have insisted and been successful in adding language to sanctions assuring that nothing in the legislation is to be interpreted as a decl of war or a use of author of force.

Here, Paul failed to respond to one of the central points in my question, that innocent Iranians are suffering as a result of the sanctions. Unemployment is high, inflation is out of control, the banking industry has all but ground to a halt, and much needed medicine for people with cancer, hemophilia, etc. is being blocked, putting millions of lives at risk, according to the Charity Foundation for Special Diseases, a non-government organization in Iran supporting six million patients.

Paul declined to answer a follow-up question addressing this point.

But of course, the collective punishment aspect is only one part of a larger story. Sanctioned countries almost never change their policies in the direction the sanctioning countries demand. Vali Nasr, Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in D.C. and widely understood as an expert on Iran said just last month that the sanctions have passed the point of effectiveness. Similarly, world-renowned international relations theorist Kenneth Waltz recently wrote in Foreign Affairs that “the current sanctions on Iran can be dropped,” since “they primarily harm ordinary Iranians, with little purpose.”

Nasr said that needlessly keeping sanctions in place will generate “a scenario where Iran is going to rush very quickly towards nuclear power, because they also think, like North Korea, that you have much more leverage to get rid of these sanctions.” In other words, Iran could just dig in its heals if it thinks the sanctions are too draconian and won’t ever let up.

As I’ve written recently, the case of Iraq is instructive. The US-led sanctions on Iraq directly led to the deaths of about 500,000 children, and Washington’s goal was not to make Saddam comply with nuclear standards, but instead to change the regime.

Washington had set out in the early 1990s claiming the purpose of the extreme sanctions on Iraq was to undermine the nuclear weapons program. 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,” report two high level diplomats in Foreign Affairs.

But the US refused to lift the sanctions, and threatened to veto proposals to do so at the UN. “In the spring of 1997, 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.”

We could be seeing something similar in Iran. And while Rand Paul claims sanctions may get us out of war, in reality they are keeping the Iran issue unresolved and kicking the can down the road – as Clinton did until Bush – for someone else perhaps more willing to do something as reckless as start a war on Iran for a nuclear weapons program it doesn’t have.

This week it was revealed for the first time that the CIA has a secret airbase in Saudi Arabia from which it has been launching drone strikes for targeted killings in Yemen for at least the past two years. The news media is reporting, and reiterating for emphasis, that they knew about this secret drone base in Saudi Arabia, but did not disclose it because of an “informal arrangement among several news organizations” not to publish it at the request of senior US officials.

In other words, the Obama administration didn’t want them to report it, so the news media meekly obeyed their masters, and didn’t report it.

To hear the news media explain their reasoning almost makes it sound justifiable. Here’s the Associated Press:

The Associated Press in 2011 agreed to withhold the location of a secret U.S.-run drone base located inside Saudi Arabia after U.S. officials contended that revealing the location would make the base a target of extremists, endangering people directly, and would badly endanger counterterror efforts.

And the Washington Post:

The Washington Post had refrained from disclosing the location at the request of the administration, which cited concern that exposing the facility would undermine operations against an al-Qaeda affiliate regarded as the network’s most potent threat to the United States, as well as potentially damage counterterrorism collaboration with Saudi Arabia.

But the importance of having a drone base in Saudi Arabia really necessitated some public discussion about it – scrutiny which can only be generated if the press does its job and publishes dangerous government actions. Indeed, the existence of US military bases on Saudi Arabian territory has threatened the security of American lives in the past. As Conor Friedersdorf writes:

Osama bin Laden began his jihad against the United States largely because he was incensed that American troops were stationed in his homeland, Saudi Arabia, proximate to Islamic holy sites. The U.S. troop presence began during the Gulf War, when Americans led a coalition to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. “Bin Laden — like many Muslims — considers the continued presence of these armed infidels in Saudi Arabia the greatest possible desecration of the holy land,” David Plotz explained in a Slate article published on September 14, 2001. “That is why he sponsored bombings of the American military facilities in Saudi Arabia, why he has tried to destabilize the Saudi government, and why the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed on August 7, 1998 — eight years to the day after the first American troops were dispatched to Saudi Arabia.”

In 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, the United States announced that it would pull its troops out of Saudi Arabia, though some remain there. In a January 2009 Gallup poll, 60 percent of Egyptians said their opinion of the United States would significantly improve if it moved all military bases out of Saudi Arabia. Forty percent of Syrians, 39 percent of Jordanians, 52 percent of Saudis, 40 percent of Palestinians, 55 percent of Tunisians, 40 percent of Lebanese people, and 30 percent of Algerians agreed. How many millions of people is that?

…It would’ve been nice to publicly debate whether the strategic value of a drone base in Saudi Arabia outweighs the potential for blowback.

It sure would have. But the media’s reluctance to report anything the government doesn’t want prevented such a public debate. By asking the media to keep it secret, the US government wasn’t looking out for American citizens. If it were doing that, the lessons of the past would have led them to decide against putting military bases in such a sensitive territory. Instead, the US government was looking out for itself, and for the Saudi dictatorship.

As Peter Hart at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting writes, this incident is “reminiscent of another decision by the Post to withhold news. In 2005, the paper delivered an explosive story about ‘black sites’ where CIA was interrogating suspects–places where, in many cases, the agency could reasonably expect the prisoners to be tortured. The Post‘s valuable expose was undercut by its decision not to name the countries involved.”

Now that the drone base has been made public, there will be some scrutiny for the Obama administration’s decision. But now it may be too late. Hundreds of “terrorist” “suspects” and scores of civilians have been killed in America’s secret, unaccountable, extra-legal drone war. The ground has been laid for blowback from that alone for years. Now what will the reaction be?

The leaked Justice Department memo detailing the Obama administration’s legal rationale for killing US citizens without charge or trial or judicial review or any publicly available evidence of their guilt has raised a lot of questions.

One of them, which doesn’t get fleshed out in the memo, is whether this kingly authority to play Judge, Jury, and Executioner and deprive Americans of their life without due process of law applies only to Americans abroad or also to citizens that are inside the United States. The memo does say that one prerequisite to putting an American on the kill list is if their capture is “not feasible.” Presumably that wouldn’t happen in the US, but since it isn’t specified in the memo, nobody has really been able to give an informed opinion on this. And even if the authority is not currently used in this way, unless there is an explicit prohibition in the current legal rendering, it could conceivably be used this way in the future.

Micah Zenko at the Council on Foreign Relations cites a really terrifying exchange with FBI Director Robert Mueller from about a year ago:

REPRESENTATIVE TOM GRAVES: So I guess from a historical perspective, does the federal government have the ability to kill a U.S. citizen on United States soil, or just overseas?

FBI DIRECTOR ROBERT MUELLER: I am going to defer that to others in the Department of Justice.

The FBI’s mission is “to protect and defend the United States against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats, to uphold and enforce the criminal laws of the United States, and to provide leadership and criminal justice services to federal, state, municipal, and international agencies and partners.” Mueller has held his position since the week before 9/11 and has been intimately involved in virtually every significant counterterrorism decision of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. If the director of the FBI does not know—or is unwilling to testify under oath—where the U.S. government has the authority to kill its citizens, then who does? It is worth noting that Holder argued that there are no limits to the “geographic scope of our ability to use force.”

Read the whole post, which contains other relevant nuggets like the fact that “President Obama authorized the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen several months before its legal justification existed.”