Month: February 2013

The Lincoln movie is on the verge of picking up a heap of Oscars at the Academy Awards on Sunday night. That movie did not quite capture Honest Abe’s full record. I was raised in a county that was devastated (and lost much of its population) as a result of Lincoln-approved Scorched Earth tactics in the final year of the Civil War. I was raised in a county that was devastated (and lost much of its population) as a result of those tactics. The northern armies treated Confederate soldiers who resisted the barn-burning and crop-burning as war criminals and hanged them. (Some background on the Civil War in Virginia can be found in my memoir riffs in Public Policy Hooligan).

Here is a riff I did on Lincoln for a National Review Online symposium on Lincoln 12 years ago, and a snippet on Abe from Attention Deficit Democracy

James Bovard
Author of Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion & Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years

How can the same people who vigorously support indicting Serbian leaders for war crimes also claim that Lincoln was a great American president?

Lincoln bears ultimate responsibility for how the North chose to fight the Civil War. The attitude of some of the Northern commanders paralleled those of Bosnian Serb commanders more than many contemporary Americans would like to admit.

In a September 17, 1863, letter to the War Department, Gen. William Sherman wrote: “The United States has the right, and … the … power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain. We will remove and destroy every obstacle — if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.” President Lincoln liked Sherman’s letter so much that he declared that it should be published.

On June 21, 1864, before his bloody March to the Sea, Sherman wrote to the secretary of war: “There is a class of people [in the South] — men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.” How would U.N. war crimes investigators react if Slobodan Milosevic had made this comment about ethnic Albanians?

On October 9, 1864, Sherman wrote to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant: “Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.” Sherman lived up to his boast — and left a swath of devastation and misery that helped plunge the South into decades of poverty.

General Grant used similar tactics in Virginia, ordering his troops “make all the valleys south of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad a desert as high up as possible.”

The Scorched Earth tactics the North used made life far more difficult for both white and black survivors of the Civil War.

Lincoln was blinded by his belief in the righteousness of federal supremacy. The abuses and tyranny that he authorized set legions of precedents that subverted the vision of government the Founding Fathers bequeathed to America.

****From Attention Deficit Democracy (Palgrave, 2006):

The more vehemently a president equates democracy with freedom, the greater the danger he likely poses to Americans’ rights. President Abraham Lincoln was by far the most avid champion of democracy among nineteenth century presidents—and the president with the greatest visible contempt for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Lincoln swayed people to view national unity as the ultimate test of the essence of freedom or self-rule. That Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed 20,000 people without charges, forcibly shut down hundreds of newspapers that criticized him, and sent in federal troops to shut down state legislatures was irrelevant because he proclaimed “that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

***

Lysander Spooner, a Massachusetts abolitionist, ridiculed President Lincoln’s claim that the Civil War was fought to preserve a “government by consent.” Spooner observed, “The only idea . . . ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this—that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.”

I was going to resist posting this aggravating video-gone-viral today, but I’ve decided to spread the aggravation around. If I got stuck hearing Ann Coulter speak as if she knows about libertarians and war, then you must too.

John Stossel hosts a show once a year at the International Students for Liberty Conference in Washington, DC. This year he brought on Ann Coulter to, I guess, demonstrate the difference between conservatives and libertarians.

Any human being who starts off a conversation declaring “I’m for Iraq,” has lost all credibility among the rest of us with brains. So, leave aside the ignorant poison she tries to pass off as a point of view.

The video is better for ridicule than for engaging in substantively. But Coulter did, as I presume Stossel intended, crystallize what distinguishes conservatives in general from libertarians (in general). Conservatives perceive other governments and forces as the greatest threat to Americans’ liberty and security, whereas I believe that my own government is the greatest threat to my personal liberty and security.

The establishment left does have an inordinate level of faith and confidence in their own government to regulate markets and organize social programs for the good of the whole. Coulter seems to think so too (although I doubt she’d consider the ubiquitous corporate welfare the wrong kind of government intervention). But people like Coulter are guilty of the same inordinate faith in the realm of foreign policy. The state is equally incompetent, dishonest, and nefarious in that realm as it is in the first one. Most conservatives (with notable exceptions) can’t see that.

Read Nick Gillespie for more on the libertarian reaction to Coulter.

Both Nation reporter Robert Dreyfuss and Harvard professor Stephen Walt point today to a speech given by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in which he explains why America’s rhetoric about returning to negotiations are perceived as dishonest. Do read both of their articles.

Khamenei accurately cites a catalog of aggressive policies Washington has leveled against Iran, like “crippling” sanctions, surrounding Iran militarily, supporting Israel as it assassinates Iran’s civilian scientists, waging cyber-warfare, verbal threats of war, supporting Iran’s enemies in a deliberate attempt to undermine the regime, etc. etc. Then he says:

Now the Americans have raised the issue of negotiations again. They repeat that America is prepared to directly negotiate with Iran. This is not new. The Americans have repeatedly raised the issue of negotiations at every juncture. Now their newly appointed politicians repeat that we should negotiate. And they say that the ball is in Iran’s court.

It is you who should explain the meaning of negotiations that are accompanied by pressure and threats. Negotiations are for the sake of proving one’s goodwill. You commit tens of acts which show lack of goodwill and then you speak about negotiations. Do you expect the Iranian nation to believe that you have goodwill?… We do not see any goodwill.

Speaking a day earlier than Khamenei here, President Ahmadinejad summed it up more succinctly: “Take your guns out of the face of the Iranian nation and I myself will negotiate with you.”

And Iran’s UN Ambassador Mohammed Khazaee, in a discussion with former U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Pickering this month, said: “As long as pressure is on Iran, as long as there is a sword on our neck to come to negotiations, this is not negotiations, therefore Iranians cannot accept that.”

It’s not just Iranians who perceive this underlying theme in the US-Iran relationship. American academics and officials, experts in US foreign policy, also recognize it. After the failed talks in 2009 and 2010, wherein Obama ended up rejecting the very deal he demanded the Iranians accept, as Walt has written, the Iranian leadership “has good grounds for viewing Obama as inherently untrustworthy.” Former CIA analyst Paul Pillar has concurred, arguing that Iran has “ample reason” to believe, “ultimately the main Western interest is in regime change.”

And Vali Nasr, former senior adviser to Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan and a leading Middle East expert writes in his new book that, for the Obama administration, “Pressure has become an end in itself.” They spoke of a dual track that consists of diplomacy and pressure, but, Nasr writes, it was “not even dual. It relied on one track, and that was pressure.”

“Engagement,” he adds, “was a cover for a coercive campaign of sabotage, economic pressure and cyberwarfare.”

Walt wonders out loud why the US seems unwilling to let up on the pressure:

So why do so many smart people keep embracing an approach to Iran that is internally contradictory and has consistently failed for more than a decade? I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it has a lot to do with maintaining credibility inside Washington. Because Iran has been demonized for so long, and absurdly cast as the Greatest National Security Threat we face, it has become largely impossible for anyone to speak openly of a different approach without becoming marginalized. Instead, you have to sound tough and hawkish even if you are in favor of negotiations, because that’s the only way to be taken seriously in the funhouse world of official Washington (see under: the Armed Services Committee hearings on Chuck Hagel).

Yeah, it’s that. But it’s also that US grand strategy for a long time has been to maintain its own hegemony in the resource rich Middle East. Dominance, not diplomacy, is the goal.

As has been the case from the beginning, options for intervention in Syria go from bad to worse and the limited meddling by countries on either side is simply prolonging the conflict.

Dr. Florence Gaub, a researcher at the NATO Defense College, writes at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that outside forces can’t end the Syrian civil war. Critically, a political settlement is implausible so long as either side believes they have the upper hand. And, thanks to foreign support, both sides are so emboldened.

“A continuous supply of weapons to both sides—whether from Russia, Iran or the Gulf States—only maintains the parties’ perception that fighting is a better option than negotiating,” Gaub writes. “This explains why, in terms of statistical probability, an external supply of weapons lengthens a civil war.”

This has been known for some time. Hawks in Washington continue to advocate for direct arming of the Syrian rebels (despite ties to officially designated terrorist organizations and documented war crimes), clueless to the fact that the meddling already happening is precisely what has made the conflict so protracted and bloody to begin with.

Kofi Annan, the former UN and Arab League special envoy for Syria, said prior to quitting the post that while Russia had received a lot of criticism for continuing to back the violent President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, “very few things are said about other countries that send arms and money and weigh on the situation on the ground.”

“Syria indeed has become an arena for outside meddling, but the meddling has been far more effective at sustaining the fighting than ending it,” said a report last year from the International Crisis Group. “Because the mission’s success was predicated on finding middle ground when most parties yearned for a knockout punch, few truly wished it well, even as no one wanted to be caught burying it.”

UN rights chief Navi Pillay has condemned the continued flow of weapons from foreign powers to both sides in the Syrian conflict. “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.”

Beyond the proxy war that Syria has become, Gaub writes, direct military intervention “would simply make things worse,” and would not have legitimacy under international law.

The White House has reportedly rejected proposals to directly arm the rebels, a decision Obama is apparently reconsidering. But the US and its European allies have been indirectly aiding the rebels, while their allies in the Arab Gulf states – along with the flow of Libyan arms – are providing weapons. The policies of Washington’s client states are to a large extent the responsibility of Washington, of course. Furthermore, Western support to the opposition has caused the Assad regime’s backers, cautious not to cede a geo-political win to the US, to dig in their heels.

A resolution to the bloodletting is easily within reach, but for the insistence to meddle from the outside.

Oscar-nominated Palestinian director Emad Burnat was stopped at LAX on Wednesday for…uh, being Palestinian, it seems? The TSA took temporary custody of him and his family in an isolated room and refused to let him use his cellphone. They wouldn’t believe he was nominated for an Oscar.

A new Gallup poll found that 99% of Americans see Iran’s nuclear program as a threat to the US national security. They believe Iran’s imaginary weapons program is more of a threat than North Korea’s actual nuclear weapons.

[I wrote about the wild success of Iran war propaganda last year, in a post called The Power of War Propaganda on Iran and Why It Works. The following is excerpted from that post.]

Contrast these beliefs with the facts: The consensus in the whole of the intelligence community in the US (and Israel) is that Iran has no nuclear weapons program and has yet to demonstrate any intention of starting one anytime soon.

But false beliefs persist even when there has been ample reassurances from elite sources in politics, the military, and the news media that Iran has no weapons program. A matter of months ago, the Obama administration marched out their minions, from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, all of whom reiterated the fact that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, despite constant rhetoric to the contrary.

In February the New York Times ran a front page story entitled “U.S. Agencies See No Move by Iran to Build a Bomb.” It reported: “Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.” Again in March, they reported “top administration officials have said that Iran still has not decided to pursue a weapon, reflecting the intelligence community’s secret analysis.” Another in the Los Angeles Times was similarly headlined, “U.S. does not believe Iran is trying to build nuclear bomb.”

Furthermore, even if Iran did have nuclear weapons, there is broad consensus that it would not translate to nuclear war. Officials and expert analysts constantly explain Iran’s leaders are rational, unlikely to provoke a conflict, and have no interest in suicide as a result of nuclear retaliation by the US. The threat from Iran is manufactured.

So can the politicians and the media still be blamed for spreading falsehoods about Iran? In a word, yes. Former CIA officer Paul Pillar, when writing about the misinformation campaign to sell the Iraq war, explained it was “less a matter of instilling any specific mistaken belief than of instilling a mood and momentum.” It was “at least as much a matter of rhetorical themes as of manipulated evidence. The belief was cultivated by repeatedly uttering ‘Iraq,’ ’9/11? and ‘war on terror’ in the same breath.” Despite the official position that Iran has no weapons program and has not demonstrated an intention to build one, most of the political, military, and media elite are constantly regurgitating lines about blocking “Iran” from obtaining “nuclear weapons.” In Obama’s statement yesterday following his latest Executive Order imposing additional sanctions on Iran, he talked about the “Iranian government” and “its defiance” in its nuclear program. A Romney spokesman then came out and said Obama “has allowed Iran’s nuclear ambitions to proceed unimpeded,” and that Obama’s policy and Iran’s ongoing program “has imperiled our allies and jeopardized our national security.”

The administration officials that came out to reiterate the intelligence consensus did so in boring Congressional testimony, which no one watches. The more vociferous and rhetorical politicians going on tirades on the Senate floor or demagoguing on television and reinforcing the belief in Iranian weapons programs, by contrast, get the attention of the electorate. And far fewer Americans read the New York Times frequently enough that they may have caught those few articles dispelling the myth of Iranian nukes, than watch pundits on network news like Fox, CNN, and NBC, for example, which constantly mislead on this question.

Trevor Thrall, also writing in the National Interest in a follow-up post to Pillar’s piece on Iraq war propaganda, said much of the reason such false beliefs persist is because the American people are substantially ignorant of “what’s going on in the United States, much less the rest of the world.”

The 2008 civic literacy survey conducted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, for example, found that fewer than half of all Americans can name all three branches of government and that almost 40 percent of Americans believe the president has the power to declare war. Just 27 percent know that the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits the establishment of an official U.S. religion. The Pew Research Center, which tracks such things in a fruitless effort to find that news consumption improves political knowledge, found ample evidence of American ignorance in its 2007 survey: 31 percent could not name the current vice president (Cheney); 68 percent did not know that Sunni and Shia are two branches of Islam..[etc.]

And when briefly-appearing facts are explained in Washington and the media, it actually doesn’t hold much sway. Back in 2010, Joe Keohane wrote a piece in the Boston Globe about how political science research shows that “facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds.” He cited recent studies which found that

when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

People are not just ignorant, they’re ideological. They’ll believe what they want to believe. Unfortunately, such widespread and impenetrable false beliefs in the realm of foreign policy means that the political leadership can pretty easily launch a war if and when they decide to do so and whether it is warranted or not.