Month: May 2013

The central defense of the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi attacks last year is that they shouldn’t be blamed for making so many inaccurate statements about it being a spontaneous protest against an insulting video rather than a premeditated terrorist attack because even the CIA talking points held that it was the former.

Well yeah, because the White House and State Department edited the original talking points to delete any mention of it being a premeditated attack by Islamist militants. ABC News:

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department.  The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

Specifically, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland requested the CIA cut out the following passage:

The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya.  These noted that, since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out the individuals has previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.

Nuland wrote that information should be taken out because it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?”

The original CIA draft did say that the attacks appeared to have been “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo [against the insulting video]” but also that the Agency could confirm the involvement of “Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qaeda.”

References to al-Qaeda-affiliated groups were taken out and were therefore completely absent from administration commentary in the days following the attack.

This does seem to be a case in which the government fiddled with the truth in order to protect itself from public scrutiny. And while Republicans are aghast at the effrontery of the administration, their gripe seems to be entirely political. They see a chance to hurt the Democrats politically in this, even as the important aspects of the Benghazi incident – like the fact that it was blowback resulting from U.S. interventionism – get completely ignored.

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY), Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, Thomas E. Ricks, meet David Sirota. Sirota, meet the other three people in the United States who regret the 40 years of conscription-free living Americans have enjoyed.

Over at Salon, Sirota, a liberal author and blogger (who took some flak last month for his less-terrible “Let’s Hope the Boston Bomber is a White American”) has asked, as is fashionable every 6-12 months, “Was ending the draft a mistake?” The subhede elaborates: “Without conscription war has become an abstraction, enabling a new “era of persistent conflict”. Drones didn’t do that, warmongering politicians didn’t do that, weak Congresses that gave the power to make war to the executive branch didn’t do that. Nope. It was ending the draft.

This column contains the same sentiments about the draft advocated by Gen. McChrystal, Ricks, and (incessantly) Congressman Rangel. Namely, if everyone, black white rich poor (now) men women, suffered the effects of war together, people would stop fighting them so damned often. (Sirota even uses Dwight Elliott Stone, the last man forced into Vietnam, to cement his case that the draft should menace everyone. Poor Stone apparently grew to embrace this idea years after trying desperately to evade conscription.)

The idea that the draft would stop perpetual war  is tempting to consider for a minute. After all, wasn’t it that sword of Damocles hanging over every middle class kid that finally made Americans say enough was enough during Vietnam? Isn’t it worth a try?

No. Because you don’t end mass-murder by enslaving enough people to maybe, eventually, piss off the masses.

War drones, for all their horrors, are at least not hundreds of thousands of enslaved men forced to fight. Piloting drones requires training. Most aspects of warfare now require much more training than in Vietnam days. This is one reason the draft is no longer popular among government. Nor is it popular among respondents to Gallup polls.

Sirota’s short piece is not as obviously offensive as Rangel’s alarming February comments about going into the military  screaming and coming out saluting the flag. But it’s nasty and sneaky and scary all the same. He’s too timid to say “Let’s Draft Our Kids” as Ricks did in The New York Times last year. Some want a draft — or “national service” — because they believe that 18-year-olds belong to the country, not themselves. Those national greatness morons — or just people who think terrorists are that powerful —  are more similar to Sirota than he might think, and they’re more honest. Sirota ends his piece with:

Well-meaning people can certainly disagree about whether a modern-day draft is a good idea or not (and it may not be). But 40 years into the all-volunteer experiment, it is clear that ending conscription was as much about giving citizens the liberty to abstain from as about quashing popular opposition to martial decisions. By design, it weakened our democratic connection to the armed forces, a connection that is the only proven safeguard against unbridled militarism.

Experiment. The implication that not enslaving men aged 19-26 is a fluke, tried, and now to be discarded. Never mind Richard Nixon, or the military, or anyone else’s motives in lifting the threat of military service off of the general population in order to make war “an abstraction.” Consider the definition of the draft — the mandate that you serve the government in the most servile fashion. You are more directly the hand of the state than in any other job.

And you may die. In Vietnam, 30 percent of the men killed were drafted (around 17,000 people). Countless men also signed up knowing they were going to be forced into the armed forces, in order to pick the least loathsome choice of branch. To say nothing of 2 million Vietnamese killed during the war, look how many American men were sacrificed  and how many — men and women, if Rangel had his way — would it take next time in order to stop the next war?

Ostensibly Sirota’s motivations for wanting a draft are good; the end of the worst thing in the world. But they’re twisted. Instead of starving the beast of militarism he wants to shove a few thousand people down its throat until it (hopefully) chokes.

Would it work? It’s possible. But it didn’t work during the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. Or, it didn’t work in time for scores upon scores of thousand of men. What about them? Isn’t preventing their enslavement and slaughter also a part of opposing war?

If people suggesting a return to conscription are serious about ending war and all its miseries, they will stop spinning their wheels on bullshit columns like Sirota’s; stop coyly suggesting unpopular plans that make them sound grave and determined; and they will start opposing war, period.

It’s pretty clear at this point that the Obama administration explicitly misrepresented what they knew to be the truth about the September 11, 2012 attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya that killed four Americans including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens.

In yesterday’s hearings, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) publicized a heretofore classified State Department email describing the attack as a premeditated assault by Ansar al-Sharia, a group that “is affiliated with Islamic terrorists.” Note, this email was sent on September 12th, a day after the attack and preceding several official administration statements that the attack had been the result of a spontaneous protest against a YouTube video depicting the prophet Mohammad.

Congressional Republicans have been up in arms at the Obama administration for not having enough security at the Consulate and for not being up front about whether the attack was a protest gone awry or a premeditated attack.

But the controversy kind of just stops there. Few Obama critics in Washington have any idea why the administration would knowingly mislead on the Benghazi attacks.

I can only speculate, but my best guess is that they wanted to avoid the political costs of another terrorist attack on American interests that was only made possible because of the U.S.-NATO bombing war in Libya aimed at toppling the Gadhafi regime. The decision to change the regime in Libya and excite the civil war had long-ranging consequences, from destabilizing the entire north African region to bolstering the presence and influence of al-Qaeda affiliated groups.

According to a book written by former Navy SEAL Jack Murphy and former Army Ranger Brandon Webb, the Benghazi attack was retaliation for the secret raids Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan directing on militias in Libya at the time.

Fox News:

“Brennan waged his own unilateral operations in North Africa outside of the traditional command structure,” the book says, calling it an “off the books” operation not coordinated with Petraeus and the CIA.

The authors then claim that these raids were a “contributing factor” in the militant strike on the U.S. Consulate and CIA annex on Sept. 11.

The raids, they said, “kicked the hornets’ nest and pissed off the militia.”

Benghazi was blowback. Is it any wonder the Obama administration tried to cover it up? No. But what is amazing is that Republicans are so allergic to acknowledging blowback as a phenomenon that it has barely entered the debate.

Writing at Time magazine in response to an article by John McCain advocating US intervention in Syria, Zbigniew Brzezinski – not exactly a peacenik – argues that “the Syrian conflict is a sectarian war in a volatile region whose potential to spread and directly threaten American interests would only be increased by U.S. intervention.”

The struggle is between forces funded and armed by outside sponsors, notably Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran. Also participating are foreign religious groups not directly controlled by the sponsors, namely the Sunni Salafists and Iranian-aligned militias, not to mention intensely anti-Western al-Qaeda fighters. American involvement would simply mobilize the most extreme elements of these factions against the U.S. and pose the danger that the conflict would spill over into the neighborhood and set Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon on fire.

…Broader regional fighting could bring the U.S. and Iran into direct conflict, a potentially major military undertaking for the U.S. A U.S.-Iran confrontation linked to the Syrian crisis could spread the area of conflict even to Afghanistan. Russia would benefit from America’s being bogged down again in the Middle East. China would resent U.S. destabilization of the region because Beijing needs stable access to energy from the Middle East.

…The various schemes that have been proposed for a kind of tiddlywinks intervention from around the edges of the conflict—no-fly zones, bombing Damascus and so forth—would simply make the situation worse. None of the proposals would result in an outcome strategically beneficial for the U.S. On the contrary, they would produce a more complex, undefined slide into the worst-case scenario…

Leaving aside the media, which barely knows how to respond to foreign conflicts except to rally U.S. intervention, there exists only a small minority in Washington that advocates taking further action in Syria. Namely, the McCain-Graham faction and the part of the Republican party that follows their lead. Establishment voices in Washington, like the Obama administration, the Defense Department, the Aaron David Miller‘s and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s, are largely against it.

That’s how obviously stupid a U.S. war in Syria would be: even Beltway analysts know it.

Our new Contributing Editor Lucy Steigerwald appared on HuffPost Live today to discuss the Obama administration’s apparent embrace of an “an FBI plan for a sweeping overhaul of surveillance – laws that would make it easier to wiretap those who communicate using the Internet.”

Also appearing on the panel was The Cato Institute’s always great Julian Sanchez.

See here, here, and here for more on Obama’s terrible record on domestic surveillance

The dispute between China and Japan over territorial claims to the Senkaku/Diaoyu island chains has become the front line in the Sino-Japanese realpolitik rivalry. But it is at least as much about the geo-political contest between the U.S. and China, with Japan as a proximate instrument of American power in East Asia.

President Obama’s so-called ‘Asia pivot’ is an aggressive policy that involves surging American military presence throughout the region and backing basically all of China’s rivals in a nationalistic scheme to block China’s rise as a world power. Included in this scheme is beefing up U.S. naval presence in the region’s vital waterways and reaffirming America’s security arrangements with countries like Japan. If Japan’s security is ever threatened, say our defense treaties, America will go to war on their behalf.

This understandably rattles China. A 2012 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies predicted, correctly it turns out, that 2013, “could see a shift in Chinese foreign policy based on the new leadership’s judgment that it must respond to a U.S. strategy that seeks to prevent China’s reemergence as a great power.”

“Signs of a potential harsh reaction are already detectable,” the report said. “The U.S. Asia pivot has triggered an outpouring of anti-American sentiment in China that will increase pressure on China’s incoming leadership to stand up to the United States. Nationalistic voices are calling for military countermeasures to the bolstering of America’s military posture in the region and the new US defense strategic guidelines.”

And America’s role in Sino-Japanese tensions became even more explicit with news today that Japan lodged a diplomatic protest after Chinese state media “published a commentary by two Chinese government-backed scholars who said ownership of the Ryukyu islands should be re-examined,” Reuters reports. The Ryukyu islands are separate from the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute, resting further northeast. Importantly, the Ryukyu islands include Okinawa, the location of the biggest U.S. military base in all of Japan, holding about 50,000 U.S. military personnel.

The controversy prompted an ostentatious exchange:

“China cannot accept Japan’s so-called negotiations or protests,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a regular briefing.

“The relevant scholars’ academic articles reflect attention and research paid by China’s populace and academia to the Diaoyu Islands and related historical problems,” Hua said.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a regular briefing in Tokyo on Wednesday that the islands were Japanese territory.

“Japan lodged a stern protest that we can by no means accept the article in question if it reflects the Chinese government’s stance,” Suga said.

China had responded to Japan by saying that the piece was written by scholars as individuals, Suga said.

The Chinese scholars claimed the Ryukyu islands were a “vassal state” of China’s Ming and Qing dynasties before they were annexed by Japan. Whether that has any legitimacy whatsoever, I don’t know. But it is probably not so coincidental that the conspicuous claim to even more territory long claimed by Japan also holds 50,000 U.S. military personnel.

The attempt by the United States to debilitate China for the sake of its own global hegemony has predictably emboldened China. Beijing and Tokyo have nearly come to blows in the recent past over conflicting territorial claims, but only after being inflamed by the U.S.-China rivalry in the background.

Late last year, a Chinese think-tank predicted that military conflict between China and Japan might be inevitable, thanks in part to US meddling in the Asia-Pacific region.

As for the Senkaku Islands, the report explained that Japan’s right-wing groups, which have gained strength through the country’s two decades of a sluggish economy called “the lost 20 years,” regarded U.S. policy of “pivoting to Asia” as the best opportunity to nationalize the islands. In September, Japan purchased three of the five Senkaku Islands, called the Diaoyu Islands in China, from a private landowner.

…“Japan’s nationalization of the Diaoyu Islands destroyed the framework for keeping a balance, which means ‘shelving a conflict,’ ” a Chinese diplomatic source said.

A veteran Chinese diplomat warned back in October that the US is using Japan as a strategic tool in its military surge in Asia-Pacific aimed at containing China and is heightening tensions between China and Japan. Chen Jia, who served as an under secretary general of the United Nations and as China’s ambassador to Japan, accused the US of encouraging a militaristic response by Japan. “The US is urging Japan to play a greater role in the region in security terms, not just in economic terms,” he said.

The U.S. shouldn’t have a military presence in Japan and shouldn’t be subsidizing Japanese defense. Washington has kept up its massive military presence throughout East Asia in order to keep geo-political rivals weak and maintain its own dominance. U.S. troop presence doubly antagonizes China in the already threatening context of Obama’s Asia-Pivot and U.S. meddling in the peculiar territorial disputes in the region that are none of America’s business only makes things worse, while giving Washington an excuse to police that part of the world just as it tries to do so in the rest of the world.