Month: August 2013

The Onion has a commentary up by someone bravely pronouncing his willingness to die for his country. Or…a country.

As a true patriot, I would gladly die in battle defending my homeland. I love my country more than my own life. But I would also be more than willing to give my last breath in the name of, say, Mexico, Panama, Japan, or the Czech Republic. The most honorable thing a man can do is lay down his life for his country. Or another country. The important thing is that it’s a country.

Like those heroes who spilled their blood  fighting for independence against the British Empire, I, too, would forfeit everything to win for my countrymen the right to be governed by politicians in our own capital instead of in a capital located further away. Nothing is more profound or more sacred than to die for one’s country, an adjacent country, or some other, foreign country.

The truth is, there are a lot of countries, each of which is the most noble cause possible to die for…

…Without nationalism, our deaths in the countless wars we constantly wage to defend our own nations against others defending their own nations against us would seem arbitrary, almost meaningless. But as long as we have a higher purpose—the love of whatever country we happen to be fighting for—we will always know we did not lose our lives in vain.

See my previous, non-satirical posts on such issues: The Ism That Won’t Go Away and The Folly of Soldier Worship.

Hosni Mubarak, the former U.S.-backed dictator of Egypt who was arrested and tried after being ousted by a popular revolt two years ago, is going to be released from custody within the next two days.

I read this news this morning, after a piece of mine was published at the Daily Caller arguing the Obama administration is longing for the days when Mubarak ruled Egypt with an iron fist and kept the population subdued. Mubarak’s impending release tends to feed that narrative.

One of the charges against the former U.S. client, that of embezzling funds for presidential palaces, was dropped, prompting the release order. But he still faces retrial for complicity in the murder of approximately 900 protesters during his overthrow.

But remember, it isn’t just Mubarak. The U.S. has close ties to the entire Egyptian military establishment, which has taken over the government this past month, throwing out elected representatives and putting military officials, many with ties to the former Mubarak regime, in their place.

Al Jazeera’s Marwan Bishara:

Egypt is a “major non-NATO ally” with the military to military liaisons at its core. Egypt’s military relationship with the West took off after the 1979 Peace Treaty between Israel and Egypt, rendering Egypt the second-largest recipient of its bilateral assistance after Israel.

This required, among others, a major military and financial investment that totalled $66bn since the peace treaty. The American wooing of the Egyptian generals has cost the US $1.3bn a year since 1987.

Heavy-duty gifts like 1,000 tanks and 221 fighter jets worth billions signified the US’s commitment to Egypt.

In 2011 – the year of the revolution – Egypt received almost a quarter of all of America’s Foreign Military Financing funds.

The American-Egyptian courtship has resulted in, among many things, an Americanised Egyptian defence force.

Over 500 Egyptian officers benefit from the American military education system every year. These include top Egyptian officers, including the country’s defense chief, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who went to the US Army War College in Pennsylvania, as well as the commander of the Air Force, Reda Mahmoud. 

The education stints of the Egyptian officers in US military colleges, the training programs, and the joint military exercises have led to enduring ties between the establishments of both countries.

In the meantime, Mubarak’s old military friends continue to wage violence against people in the streets. Here is a Human Rights Watch video on the happenings:

According to The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, The U.S. Government must suspend aid, particularly military aid, to any country suffering a military coup. (Sec. 508).

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Egypt — the [Egyptian] military does get this $1.3 billion of [U.S.] aid, but it has to be spent purchasing U.S. weapons. And so, all of this money really gets funneled to U.S. defense contractors that are the real big beneficiary of these funds, that have very large lobbying firms in Washington and that lobby very strongly for this aid to keep going. … The Washington Post had a very interesting article today showing that since the 1980s the United States has granted Egypt an extraordinary ability to make these orders with these American defense contractors that are worth far more than the funds Congress has already appropriated. So it’s essentially like this massive credit card that Egypt has, with a limit of billions of dollars. And it’s something called “cash flow financing.” So Egypt can submit these large orders for equipment that will take years to produce and deliver, and it’s under the assumption that U.S. lawmakers will just continue funneling the aid. — Egypt Tensions Escalate as Morsi Detained and Supporters of Army, Brotherhood Hold Rival Protests | Democracy Now!

 

In Oslo, the world’s most important peace prize has been hijacked for war.

In London, government authority has just fired a new shot at freedom of the press.

And in Washington, the Obama administration continues to escalate its attacks on whistleblowers, journalism and civil liberties.

As a nation at peace becomes a fading memory, so does privacy. Commitments to idealism – seeking real alternatives to war and upholding democratic values – are under constant assault from the peaks of power.

Normalizing endless war and shameless surveillance, Uncle Sam and Big Brother are no longer just close. They’re the same, with a vast global reach.

Last week, I met with the Research Director of the Nobel Committee at its headquarters in Oslo. We sat at one end of a long polished conference table, next to boxes of petitions signed by 100,000 people urging that the Nobel Peace Prize go to Bradley Manning.

The Nobel official, Asle Toje, remained polite but frosty when I urged – as I had two hours earlier at a news conference – that the Nobel Committee show independence from the U.S. government by awarding the Peace Prize to Manning. Four years after the prize went to President Obama, his leadership for perpetual war is incontrovertible – while Manning’s brave whistleblowing for peace is inspiring.

In recent times, I pointed out, the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to some dissenters who were anathema to their governments’ leaders – but not to any recipient who profoundly displeased the U.S. government. Toje responded by mentioning Martin Luther King Jr., a rejoinder that struck me as odd; King received the prize 49 years ago, and more than two years passed after then until, in April 1967, he angered the White House with his first full-throated denunciation of the Vietnam War.

I motioned to the stacks of the petition, which has included personal comments from tens of thousands of signers – reflecting deep distrust of the present-day Nobel Peace Prize, especially after Obama won it in 2009 while massively escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.

We were in the grand and ornate building that has housed the Nobel Committee for more than a hundred years. Outside, a bust of Alfred Nobel graces the front entrance, and just across a small traffic circle is the U.S. Embassy, an imposing dark gray presence with several stories, hundreds of windows on each of its three sides and plenty of electronic gear on its roof. (That intersection is widely understood to be a base for American surveillance operations.) More than ever in recent years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee building’s physical proximity to the U.S. Embassy is an apt metaphor for its political alignment.

Over the weekend, the British government showed more toxic aspects of its "special relationship" with the U.S. government. As the Guardianreported, "The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programs by the U.S. National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London’s Heathrow Airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro." David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, "was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. … Miranda was released, but officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and game consoles."

Assaulting press freedom is part of a comprehensive agenda that President Obama is now pursuing more flagrantly than ever. From seizing phone records of AP reporters to spying on a Fox News reporter to successfully fighting for a federal court decision to compel reporter James Risen to reveal his source for a New York Times story, Obama’s war on journalism is serving executive impunity – for surveillance that fundamentally violates the Fourth Amendment and for perpetual war that, by force of arms and force of example, pushes the world into further bloody chaos.

The destructive effects of these policies are countless. And along the way, for the Nobel Committee, more than ever, war is peace. Across the globe, aligned with and/or intimidated by official Washington, many governments are enablers of an American warfare/surveillance multinational state. And in Washington, at the top of the government, when it comes to civil liberties and war and so much more, the moral compass has gone due south.

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books includeWar Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

Following up on Kelley Vlahos’s brilliant post about the ongoing failure of the U.S.’s vaunted surge in Iraq, an important question arises as to why Iraq remains on the verge of civil war. It is not, as many seem to think, for mysterious and complex reasons that are too difficult to figure out much less solve.

The Sunni-Shia violence in Iraq is, as the International Crisis Group (ICG) puts it, “as acute and explosive as ever” primarily because “Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has implemented a divide-and-conquer strategy that has neutered any credible Sunni Arab leadership.”

The question of Sunni Arab participation in Iraq’s political order that has plagued the transition since its inception is as acute and explosive as ever. Quickly marginalised by an ethno-sectarian apportionment that confined them to minority status in a system dominated by Shiites and Kurds, most community members first shunned the new dispensation then fought it. Having gradually turned from insurgency to tentative political involvement, their wager produced only nominal representation, while reinforcing feelings of injustice and discrimination. Today, with frustration at a boil, unprecedented Sunni-Shiite polarisation in the region and deadly car bombings surging across the country since the start of Ramadan in July, a revived sectarian civil war is a serious risk.

…The authorities also have taken steps that reinforce perceptions of a sectarian agenda. Prominent officials – predominantly Sunni – have been cast aside pursuant to the Justice and Accountability Law on the basis of alleged senior-level affiliation to the former Baath party. Federal security forces have disproportionately deployed in Baghdad’s Sunni neighbourhoods as well as Sunni-populated governorates (Anbar, Salah al-Din, Ninewa, Kirkuk and Diyala). Al-Iraqiya, the political movement to which Sunni Arabs most readily related, slowly came apart due to internal rivalries even as Maliki resorted to both legal and extrajudicial means to consolidate power.

The ongoing violence is so acute, writes Kelley, that Iraqis are dying in “numbers not seen since the bloody days of 2004.” And while the Sunnis blowing up cars in crowded markets is not to be excused, this crisis has its origins in Maliki’s ruthless marginalization of Sunni rule and his increasing authoritarianism in ruling Iraq.

Maliki, a Shiite, ordered the arrest of his Sunni Vice President Hashemi just as the last U.S. troops left Iraq. The U.S. ambassador to Iraq expressed approval in Januaryof this quest to detain Iraq’s vice president on trumped up terrorism charges, despite a virtual consensus that it was a blatant attempt to eliminate a political rival.

Maliki also betrayed an agreement that would have limited his ability to marginalize the Sunnis and turn the military into a sectarian force and ended up arresting hundreds of former Baath Party members on charges that they were involved in a coup plot. Because of the turmoil, Sunni and Kurdish blocs in the Iraqi parliament committed themselves to a boycott, and later threatened secession.

According to Ayad Allawi, the secular Shi’ite leader of the opposition Iraqiya bloc in parliament, Maliki’s security forces have detained and brutally tortured thousands of political opponents in secret prisons and denied them access to legal counsel.

It is not too much of a stretch to say that if Maliki’s government was more inclusive and democratic from the start, violence would not still be plaguing the country as they are at current levels.

What does this have to do with the U.S.? Well, aside from the fact that a great bulk of Iraq’s problems for the past 20 years are the result of dreadful U.S. foreign policy, the Maliki government’s current allowance from Uncle Sam is about $2 billion, not including the additional billions of dollars worth of military training and equipment.

Washington continues to handsomely reward the Iraqi dictatorship with vast amounts of arms and treasure even as its exclusivist, sectarian policies threaten to drive the entire country into a civil war that could conceivably rival Syria’s. And why are we doing this? Because we’re desperate for “influence” in a region we have dominated since WWII but is now in flux. The crafters of U.S. foreign policy are shaking in their boots, and no amount of bloodshed or despotism will throw them off their course – especially in Iraq.

Think back a couple weeks and recall the political narratives accompanying Obama’s pick for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, the journalist and Harvard scholar at the forefront of the debate over humanitarian interventions for the past decade. Foreign Policy’s John Hudson described Power’s “staunch advocacy of U.S. intervention on moral grounds.” Max Boot said she is a “principled advocate of humanitarian intervention.”

But now that the post-military coup U.S.-backed Egyptian autocracy has slaughtered more than 500 people in the streets, asks Jacob Heillbrunn at The National Interest, where is Samantha Power?

When President Obama visited Cairo on June 4, 2009, he made a special point of declaring that he had come to establish a new beginning between the United States and the Arab world. This beginning, he said, would be based “upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive…they overlap, and share common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.” Now, in Egypt, an authoritarian government, headed by the military, is slaughtering followers of Islam, and what does Obama have to say?

Not much, it appears. What is emerging from the president and his advisers is a few worried murmurs of protest, coupled with studied indecision. Where are the human-rights activists such as UN ambassador Samantha Power? Where is national-security adviser Susan Rice who vowed to stick up for the oppressed after she remained silent during the genocide in Rwanda? Do they agree with Secretary of State John Kerry’s earlier assessment that the military is “restoring democracy” in Egypt?

Examples of the dishonest selectivity of “humanitarian” interventionists are easy to render. Slaughter of innocents only calls for U.S. intervention as a moral imperative if the one doing the slaughtering isn’t one of our allies. That’s a standard in U.S. propaganda as tried and true as the red, white, and blue.

Obama got on the horn earlier today to condemn the violence of the Egyptian military. He announced that the U.S. would call off an upcoming joint U.S.-Egypt military drill, a symbolic gesture considering he did not announce what many were expecting, that the $1.3 billion in U.S. aid would be cut off, in accordance with U.S. law.

Obama insisted, “We deplore violence against civilians.” And he’s really doing something about it, by continuing to support it.