Month: November 2013

Last week I wrote about the potential for the Obama administration’s Asia-Pivot strategy to inflame anti-colonialist sentiment. I lamented that Washington tries simply to get around this popular opposition to the military surge in East Asia instead of acknowledging that people don’t like to be occupied by foreign militaries.

Cynically, the U.S. has exploited the suffering of the typhoon in the Philippines in order to gain leverage in negotiations with Manila over increased U.S. military presence there. The relief operations performed by U.S. forces are seen as helping to “lubricate” the deal for basing rights, which are one piece of a broader plan to contain a rising China.

According to Robert Farley at The Diplomat, the process of “establishing forward U.S. bases in the Philippines…has moved slowly, largely because of domestic concerns in Manila about a military U.S. presence.”

“Fortunately for U.S. strategic interests (if not the victims of the storm),” Farley writes, “the U.S. Navy’s support in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan may win sufficient goodwill to overcome local opposition to a renewed U.S. military role.”

That is as plain an example of exploitation as you’re going to get. The fact that Filipinos hesitate to welcome the U.S. back onto permanent bases, after kicking us out at the end of the Cold War, should not be belittled. The 1899-1902 U.S. war and occupation of the Philippines was a vicious colonial experiment waged for cynical geopolitical interests. Inclusive estimates that account for excess deaths related to the war say there were as many as 1 million casualties. Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were locked up in concentration camps, where poor conditions and disease killed thousands.

Continue reading “Is the US Exploiting Typhoon Suffering to Win Military Bases in the Philippines?”

For those who have been following U.S.-Israel-Iran relations, the one certainty we’ve come to expect is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will say all kinds of things that aren’t true in order to shift the balance away from peaceful diplomacy and towards war.

In a piece for The Washington Times, I took Bibi’s dubious declaration of the day and put it to the test, asking two technical experts what they thought of it. In short, it’s BS:

In an interview with a German newspaper published Tuesday, Netanyahu said, “The Iranians already have five bombs’ worth of low-enriched uranium,” which they could build within a matter of weeks after making the decision to rush for a nuclear weapon.

Netanyahu’s estimate is a “chalkboard equation that does not match up with the realities of what it would actually take for Iran to breakout,” Daryll Kimball, Executive Director of the Arms Control Association, said in an interview.

“It is designed to create a sense of alarmism,” about the ongoing negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany).

…Muhammad Sahimi, professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Southern California, said Netanyahu’s estimate of a breakout time is “sheer nonsense.”

“Iran does have a significant stockpile of LEU [low-enriched uranium], but it would take 9 months to convert them to crude bombs, and much longer to useable warheads (1-2 years at least),” Sahimi added. “There is no evidence that Iran does have the capability of miniaturizing the bomb for a missile.”

Ali Gharib has written a piece for medium.com that exposes a related point of deception on the part of Israel. Namely, the effort by the Israeli government to grossly exaggerate how much sanctions relief Iran is estimated to get out of this first-phase deal.

Continue reading “Israel Knows How to Derail Iran Negotiations: Lie”

The primary disagreement in U.S.-Afghan negotiations for a status of forces agreement is over whether U.S. occupation forces should continue to be exempt from Afghan law. Last week I pointed out the irony in all this, since Washington is essentially acknowledging that it expects crimes to continue to be committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Kabul has this expectation to, evidently. But that’s not all they have in mind. The experience of Afghans over the past decade of U.S. war is that serious crimes by U.S. forces, even alleged war crimes, often go unpunished.

That’s why Amnesty International is urging this week’s loya jirga, or council of about 3,000 tribal elders, to demand accountability for war crimes in the past and future before they agree to any status of forces agreement:

“The proposed bilateral security agreement offers Afghans a crucial opportunity to press for greater transparency and accountability for war crimes allegedly committed by US troops,” said Horia Mosadiq, Afghanistan researcher at Amnesty International.

“Right now, the lack of transparency means that family members of the hundreds of Afghan civilians killed in night raids and airstrikes by U.S. forces lack any information about the progress of U.S. military investigations, or even about whether investigations are being conducted. This is especially worrying, since in some cases the alleged abuses could amount to war crimes.”

The Afghan leaders taking part in the Loya Jirga should insist that the proposed BSA provide for the protection of civilians in accordance with international law.

“Loya Jirga participants should require the Afghan government to report regularly to parliament about steps the U.S. authorities have taken to investigate alleged war crimes, bring suspected perpetrators to justice and provide reparations to victims and survivors,” said Mosadiq.

“Despite the widespread allegations of violations of international humanitarian law by U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the US authorities have only brought a handful of cases to trial.”

This is unlikely to happen. I get the sense that these loya jirgas called for by the Kabul government are more political theater meant to add perceived legitimacy to Kabul’s agreements with Washington, rather than some real, deliberative, representative process.

In fact, another loya jirga, called by some a “counter-jirga,” was held earlier in November. About 3,000 Afghan politicians, mullahs, students, and locals attended, according to the Afghanistan Analysts Network. The attendees condemned the upcoming jirga as “predetermined” and “ordered” from Kabul. Posters on the  walls at the event read, “A Loya Jirga called by the government in the current situation of insecurity cannot represent the people of Afghanistan” and “The people of Afghanistan will never allow foreign soldiers to rule their land and do whatever they want.”

I’ve been a guest in Colorado Springs, Colorado, following a weeklong retreat with Colorado College students who are part of a course focused on nonviolence. In last weekend’s Colorado Springs Gazette, there was an article in the Military Life section about an international skype phone call between U.S. soldiers in Kandahar, Afghanistan and sixth grade girls at a private school in Maryland. ("Carson Soldiers Chat With Friends" November 17, 2013 F4)

Soldiers from Fort Carson’s Company C Headquarters and Headquarters Battalion, 4^th Infantry Division had been receiving care packages and handwritten letters from sixth grade girls at a private school in Brooklandville, MD. The project led to a late October video chat session which allowed the soldiers and students to converse.

I read in the article that one of the US soldiers in Kandahar assured the girls in Maryland that girls in Afghanistan now have better access to education than they did before the US troops arrived. He also mentioned that women have more rights than before.

On November 21^st, I’ll participate in a somewhat similar skype call, focused not on soldiers in Afghanistan but on the voices of young Afghans. On the 21^st of every month, through Global Days of Listening, several friends in the US arrange a call between youngsters in Afghanistan and concerned people calling or simply listening in from countries around the world. I long to hear the optimism expressed by the Fort Carson soldier reflected in the Afghan Peace Volunteers’ words. But our young friends in Afghanistan express regret that their families struggle so hard, facing bleak futures in a country racked and ruined by war.

According to Ann Jones, who has reported from Afghanistan since 2002, UNICEF’s 2012 report statesthat "almost half the "schools" supposedly built or opened in Afghanistan have no actual buildings, and in those that do, students double up on seats and share antiquated texts. Teachers are scarce and fewer than a quarter of those now teaching are considered "qualified," even by Afghanistan’s minimal standards. Impressive school enrollment figures determine how much money a school gets from the government, but don’t reveal the much smaller numbers of enrollees who actually attend. No more than 10% of students, mostly boys, finish high school. In 2012, according to UNICEF, only half of school-age children went to school at all. In Afghanistan, a typical 14-year-old Afghan girl has already been forced to leave formal education and is at acute risk of mandated marriage and early motherhood. A full 76 percent of her countrywomen have never attended school. Only 12.6 percent can read."

Continue reading “Enlightenment”

I am mystified by all the whooping on the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Most of the commentators seem to believe that Lincoln was an honest man touting the highest ideals.
The fact that warmongers like George W. Bush and Obama purport to idolize Lincoln should be a warning sign to attentive folks.

Massachusetts abolitionist Lysander Spooner offered the most concise refutation to 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.”

The main lesson from the Gettysburg address is – the more vehemently a president equates democracy with freedom, the greater the danger he likely poses to Americans’ rights. 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.”

Lincoln’s rhetoric cannot be judged apart from the actions he authorized to enforce his “ideals”:

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.”

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. His abuses set legions of precedents that subverted the vision of government the Founding Fathers bequeathed to America.