Month: April 2013

During his confirmation process to become Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel delivered a slip of the tongue when describing his support for the Obama administration’s policy of “containment” of Iran. With cameras rolling and Senators ready to pounce, somebody passed Hagel a note, at which point Hagel corrected himself: “I misspoke and said I supported the president’s position on containment. If I said that, I meant to say we don’t have a position on containment,” an embarrassed Hagel said.

The episode was an illustration of how low the bar for war has moved. Nowadays, advocating containment is akin to supporting Iran’s right to obtain and and then drop an atom bomb right on top of Washington. The US “contained” the Soviet Union and Mao-led China with thousands of nukes, but Iran cannot be contained. Not these days: now containment is appeasement. Never mind the fact that many of today’s hawks advocated containment of Iraq in the 1990s before it became fashionable to advocate prevention.

But it’s worth taking a closer look at what “containment” actually means. In the famous Truman-era top secret policy paper NSC-68, which pronounced an expansive and aggressive foreign policy for the Cold War, “containment” is described as “a policy of calculated and gradual coercion.”

“Simply put,” writes Christopher Layne in The Peace of Illusions, NSC 68 stipulated that the ultimate aim of U.S. grand strategy was, by means short of hot war, to eliminate the Soviet Union as a peer competitor by using a preponderant U.S. power to force the retraction of Soviet influence and control from regions beyond the borders of the Soviet Union, and, ultimately, to bring about regime change inside the Soviet Union itself.”

This fits with recent history, too. Prior to the Bush administration’s war of aggression in 2003, Washington viewed Iraq as the greatest threat to US dominance in the Middle East. In Iraq in the 1990s, the policy of “containment” manifested in a progressively draconian economic blockade that destroyed the country, occasional bombing campaigns through a US-led no-fly zone, and an open policy of supporting domestic groups aiming to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Ultimately, this set the stage for regime change in 2003.

“Calculated and gradual coercion.”

If that’s how “containment” played out in Iraq, how is it going to turn out for Iran when even “containment” is considered too dovish? The US has already imposed a cruel set of sweeping economic sanctions aimed at “crippling” the Iranian economy, waged cyber-warfare, aided and abetted terrorist groups advocating the overthrow of the regime, and supported Israel as it carried out illegal assassinations of Iranian scientists. The international negotiations are so far going nowhere, primarily because the US clearly isn’t interested in a deal.

“Just as they did with Saddam Hussein,” wrote two former diplomats in Foreign Affairs last year, “concerned governments have implemented economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and low-level violence to weaken the Iranian regime and prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons, with the long-term objective of regime change.”

Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that the first ever CIA drone strike in Pakistan was not aimed at an al-Qaeda operative plotting to attack the US or US forces in Afghanistan, but rather targeted a man the Pakistani government didn’t like.

Mr. [Nek] Muhammad and his followers had been killed by the C.I.A., the first time it had deployed a Predator drone in Pakistan to carry out a “targeted killing.” The target was not a top operative of Al Qaeda, but a Pakistani ally of the Taliban who led a tribal rebellion and was marked by Pakistan as an enemy of the state. In a secret deal, the C.I.A. had agreed to kill him in exchange for access to airspace it had long sought so it could use drones to hunt down its own enemies.

The bombing killed Nek Muhammad “and several others, including two boys, ages 10 and 16.”

This account serves as further proof that the US rarely knows who it kills in the drone war. Targets are often chosen through a shoddy process of human intelligence and frequently reflect local animosities as opposed to actual threats to the US.

Killing enemies of the state also happens in Yemen. Last year, The Los Angeles Times reported that “the distinction may be blurring between operations targeting militants who want to attack Americans and those aimed at fighters seeking to overthrow the Yemeni government.”

For drone war advocates, the legitimacy of the targeted killing program rests on the notion that those targets pose a threat to America and its forces in neighboring Afghanistan. Careful observers have known for a very long time that this standard is not met.

“Signature strikes” allow the CIA to bomb groups of people exhibiting “suspicious behavior,” a loosely-defined judgement that gives the agency carte blanche to kill whoever it pleases. And once the victims are dead, all military-age males are automatically considered terrorists unless posthumously proven innocent.

According to the leaked Justice Department legal memo, the Obama administration dropped the requirement of “imminence” to justify the use of force.

“The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” the memo states.

And all that’s necessary to decide on a target is for high-level US officials to say the targets are “senior operational leaders” of al-Qaeda or “an associated force.” And we know in at least some cases, like when the CIA does Islamabad a favor, not even this standard is met.

A press release from the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights:

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay on Friday urged all branches of the United States Government to work together to close the Guantanamo detention centre, saying “the continuing indefinite incarceration of many of the detainees amounts to arbitrary detention and is in clear breach of international law.”

“I am deeply disappointed that the US Government has not been able to close Guantanamo Bay, despite repeatedly committing itself to do so,” Pillay said. “Allegedly, around half of the 166 detainees still being held in detention have been cleared for transfer to either home countries or third countries for resettlement. Yet they remain in detention at Guantanamo Bay. Others reportedly have been designated for further indefinite detention. Some of them have been festering in this detention centre for more than a decade. This raises serious concerns under international law. It severely undermines the United States’ stance that it is an upholder of human rights, and weakens its position when addressing human rights violations elsewhere.”

Commenting on the current hunger strike by Guantanamo detainees, Pillay said that “a hunger strike is a desperate act, and one which brings a clear risk of people doing serious lasting harm to themselves. I always urge people to think of alternative, less dangerous, ways to protest about their situation. But given the uncertainty and anxieties surrounding their prolonged and apparently indefinite detention in Guantanamo, it is scarcely surprising that people’s frustrations boil over and they resort to such desperate measures.”

Pillay noted that four years ago she warmly welcomed President Obama’s announcement immediately after his inauguration that he was placing a high priority on closing Guantanamo and setting in motion a system to safeguard the fundamental rights of the detainees. She welcomed a White House spokesman’s reiteration of this commitment last week (27 March), citing Congressional legislation as the prime obstacle.

“Nevertheless, this systemic abuse of individuals’ human rights continues year after year,” she said. “We must be clear about this: the United States is in clear breach not just of its own commitments but also of international laws and standards that it is obliged to uphold. When other countries breach these standards, the US – quite rightly – strongly criticizes them for it.”

The Obama administration’s response to such sweeping criticisms of their indefinite detention policies has largely been to ignore them. ‘What? We’re criminals? Oh, hush up.’

For two of the best write-ups of this Gitmo hunger strike, see Carol Rosenberg at theMiami Herald and Antiwar.com’s own Kelley Vlahos.

(h/t Kevin Gosztola)

In response to increasing cross-border collaboration between al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and Jabhat al-Nursa, AQI’s offshoot in the Syrian rebel opposition, the Iraqi government informally requested the US conduct drone strikes against the militants, The Associated Press reports.

Now, the White House has already directed the CIA to increase its cooperation and backing of Iraqi state militias to fight al-Qaeda affiliates there and cut off the flow of fighters pouring into Syria. There are already plenty of problems with boosting support for Iraq’s security forces, which have essentially been used as a secret police force for Maliki to attack, detain, and torture his political opponents.

But “conducting kinetic operations for [Iraq] could quickly draw the United States into creating additional enemies out of what are domestic and regionally-focused terrorist groups,” writes Micah Zenko at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“The CIA already serves as the counterterrorism air force of Yemen, and, occasionally, Pakistan. It should not further expand this chore to Iraq,” Zenko adds.

According to the AP report, the Obama administration refused to respond to Iraq’s appeal “until the Iraqi leadership’s top level makes a formal request, which hasn’t happened.”

Aside from the problem of getting even more irreparably mired in regional conflicts that don’t directly concern us, there are several factors that should preclude Obama from taking Baghdad up on its request.

First, if we start bombing Jabhat al-Nusra along the Iraq-Syria border, it will redirect the attention of militants preoccupied with Iraq and Syria towards the US. And judging by the drone war’s record elsewhere, the campaign would undoubtedly lead to additional civilian casualties, giving an additional boost for jihadists.

The second issue Zenko brings up is the lack of legal basis for just bombing the Iraq-Syria border because Baghdad asked us to. But really, Washington doesn’t give a hoot about following the law; it does what it wants. The Obama administration’s legal justifications for the drone war in Pakistan and Yemen – which were always incredibly thin – unsurprisingly gives them incredible latitude.

According to the leaked Justice Department legal memo on targeted assassinations, all that’s necessary is for the US government to say the targets are “senior operational leaders” of al-Qaeda or “an associated force.”

At variance with international laws, the Obama administration dropped the requirement of “imminence” to justify the use of force.

“The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” the memo states. In other words, it is irrelevant to Obama that Jabhat al-Nusra and AQI are domestically focused on Syria and Iraq and not the US. They need not be a threat to justify bombing, or so goes the doctrine.

The Los Angeles Times reported last month that the CIA had already begun sizing up Islamic extremists in the Syrian opposition for drone strikes. So an official, formal request by the Iraqi government might just give the Obama administration the opening it wants to open up yet another front in its endless, unlimited drone war.