Month: January 2014

Governments use fear of threats at home and abroad to increase their power and abridge individual freedom. If there is any singular lesson in Antiwar.com’s motto, War is the Health of the State, that is it.

Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, has a must-read piece in the New York Times Opinion Pages that explores how the state uses “fear to induce the rollback of individual rights” and fortify its hold on power.

The 20th century was littered with wars and ethnic cleansings that were propelled in large measure by fear of a neighboring state or political or ethnic group. Given this obvious truth, one might suppose that modern democratic states, with the lessons of history at hand, would seek to minimize fear — or at least minimize its effect on deliberative decision-making in both foreign and domestic policy.

But today the opposite is frequently true. Even democracies founded in the principles of liberty and the common good often take the path of more authoritarian states. They don’t work to minimize fear, but use it to exert control over the populace and serve the government’s principle aim: consolidating power.

…Philosophers have long noted the utility of fear to the state. Machiavelli notoriously argued that a good leader should induce fear in the populace in order to control the rabble.

Hobbes in “The Leviathan” argued that fear effectively motivates the creation of a social contract in which citizens cede their freedoms to the sovereign. The people understandably want to be safe from harm. The ruler imposes security and order in exchange for the surrender of certain public freedoms.

Of course, this has relevance for one of the hottest issues of the day. Everything about the debate over NSA surveillance is based in fear. Politicians warn that Edward Snowden’s decision to inform the American people of what their government is doing in the shadows helps our enemies and endangers our safety. NSA surveillance that encroaches on Americans’ liberty and privacy is justified, they say, because evil terrorists are out to kill us at every moment in every corner of the world.

We’re essentially supposed to take these arguments on faith, considering no one has been able to produce a single piece of evidence demonstrating Snowden’s leaks endangered our security. Likewise, several federal judges, congressional committees, and independent studies have concluded that there is no evidence that the meta-data program, for instance, has done anything to stop terrorist attacks on the U.S.

As Jay Stanley of the ACLU put it recently, “national security is the justification for our security establishment’s existence and powers, but self-preservation, defense of prerogatives and reputation, and expansion of powers is truly mission number one.”

I have repeatedly cited on this blog the Foreign Affairs piece by Micah Zenko and Michael A. Cohen which argued that while foreign threats from terrorists or rival states have gone way down, threat inflation is everywhere on the rise, with politicians, military leaders, media pundits, and everyone in between warning of unprecedented vulnerability and insecurity in a dangerous and threatening world.

“Warnings about a dangerous world also benefit powerful bureaucratic interests,” they explain. “The specter of looming dangers sustains and justifies the massive budgets of the military and the intelligence agencies, along with the national security infrastructure that exists outside government — defense contractors, lobbying groups, think tanks, and academic departments.”

Fear, and the wars enabled by it, whether they’re quiet or loud, cold or hot, is central to the expansion of government power. As Less Antman, speaking at the 2012 Libertarian Party’s National Convention said, “Drowning people in fear is the key to power.”

The excited media coverage of former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s new memoir Duty as an unusually frank retelling of his time in the Bush and Obama administrations caused me to make an exception to my lifelong moratorium on reading the memoirs of politicians or government officials. Reviews and excerpts of the book revealed Gates accusing the Obama White House of being more secretive and centralized than the Nixon-Kissinger White House. He also once suggested banning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from visiting the White House. Gates even revealed, for the first time, that the U.S. had tried to orchestrate the overthrow of Afghan President Hamid Karzai in the 2009 elections. I had to have that book.

I’m about 100 pages into it and so far it is filled with national greatness ideology and a mindless “support-our-troops” mantra in place of thoughtful analysis or strategic thinking, mostly with regard to Iraq. At one point, Gates even rehabilitates the old Bush-era trope that if one doesn’t support the war mission, one can not then support the troops (obviously nothing could be more supportive of U.S. soldiers than to get them out of needless wars of choice like Iraq).

But what really strikes me about Gates’s commentary is that he barely hides the true motive behind the surge. The surge in Iraq was not implemented out of military or strategic necessity, but for blatantly political reasons. The Bush administration was in the second half of its second term and the war was universally recognized as a failure. The aim was to stabilize Iraq enough so that the Bush team could leave office without hanging their heads in defeat, at least plausibly claiming that the war went OK in the end.

And yet, throughout the book, Gates insists that the troops were not fighting in vain. Nothing demonstrates the vanity of the surge better than a review of what is going on in Iraq now, namely a continuation of the sectarian civil war that erupted as a result of the U.S. invasion and post-Saddam de-Baathification policies. The supposed gains from the surge – specifically, that violence had decreased as a result of increased U.S. forces and a temporary alliance with Sunni tribesmen to fight al-Qaeda – were not sustainable for Iraq’s security and simply served as an expedient stopgap for America to avoid the embarrassment of military failure.

Yesterday’s New York Times described the current U.S. strategy as a continuation of the surge policies (minus U.S. troops). The Obama administration is boosting arms support for Iraqi security forces and indirectly arming the Sunni tribal fighters we earlier supported in the “Anbar” or “Sunni Awakening.”

At a command center in western Anbar Province, Iraqi military officials are handing out guns and cash to local Sunni tribal fighters who are battling militants for control of Iraq’s largest province.

The United States, at the same time, is rushing shipments of small arms and ammunition to the Iraqi government and urging the Iraqis to pass the weapons on to the tribes.

As Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki struggles to put down an insurgency led by militants affiliated with Al Qaeda, he has embraced the same strategy the Americans used in 2007, one that has been attempted with varying degrees of success by the authorities here for nearly a century: paying and arming tribal militias to fight as proxies.

The American version, known as the Sunni Awakening, coupled with an American troop increase, helped turn the tide of the Iraq war but ultimately, as recent events have laid bare, achieved no lasting reconciliation.

We’re still fighting the Iraq war. To do this, we’re supporting the Shiite dictator in Baghdad, Nouri al-Maliki, as he tries desperately to crush a lingering insurgency and al-Qaeda’s creeping hold on portions of western Iraq. This foolishly ignores the fact that Maliki bears considerable responsibility for Iraq’s continuing descent into chaos. The Sunni-Shia violence in Iraq, as the International Crisis Group (ICG) explained months ago, is “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.” Additionally, many ordinary Sunnis have been radicalized into militants after years of being denied basic rights.

The only disgrace more apparent than Washington’s Iraq policies is the fact that the architects of the policy, both of the invasion and the surge, refuse to admit its abject failure.

Denny Roy, a Senior Fellow at the East-West Center, writes at The Diplomat that the crux of the tensions between the U.S. and China is a contest for power in the Asia-Pacific region. The squabbling over competing sovereignty claims of this or that island chain in the East and South China Seas, he writes, is peripheral to the real battle for regional hegemony.

A Chinese sphere of influence here would require the eviction of American strategic leadership, including U.S. military bases and alliances in Japan and South Korea, U.S. “regional policeman” duties, and most of the security cooperation between America and friends in the region that now occurs. Washington is not ready to give up this role, seeing a strong presence in the western Pacific rim and the ability to shape regional affairs as crucial to American security.

A basic problem, then, is that Beijing wants a sphere of influence, while Washington is not willing to accede it.

I’m reminded of the stark choice put forth in Noam Chomsky’s 2003 book Hegemony or Survival. Relying on official documents, Chomsky warned that it is dangerous that “the declared intention of the most powerful state in history [is] to maintain its hegemony through the threat or use of military force, the dimension of power in which it reigns supreme.”

In the official rhetoric of the National Security Strategy, “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.

One well-known international affairs specialist, John Ikenberry, describes the declaration as a “grand strategy [that] begins with a fundamental commitment to maintaining a unipolar world in which the United States has no peer competitor,” a condition that is to be “permanent [so] that no state or coalition could ever challenge [the U.S.] as global leader, protector, and enforcer.”

Ikenberry went on to say this quest for permanent hegemony threatens to “leave the world more dangerous and divided – and the United States less secure.” America’s current defense posture in Asia – to back all of China’s neighboring rivals in an attempt to curb China’s regional ambitions – is at once an attempt to implement this hegemonic grand strategy and a threat to peace.

“My biggest fear is that a small mishap is going to blow up into something much bigger,” says Elizabeth C. Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations. “If there is a use of force between Japan and China,” warns her colleague Sheila A. Smith, “this could be all-out conflict between these two Asian giants. And as a treaty ally of Japan, it will automatically involve the United States.”

As I’ve written, maintaining global hegemony does ordinary Americans little good. Such an exclusive hold on power in the sphere of international relations is greatly beneficial to political elites and the wealthy entities to which they are closely tied, but not much for the general population. Given this, the question of whether we prefer maintaining hegemony to “all-out conflict” in the Asia-Pacific is pertinent. We can either continue to risk catastrophic conflict between two of the world’s most powerful states, or, as Roy puts it, “accede” to China’s regional ambitions which, after all, mirror America’s own regional ambitions when it was a rising power.

Here’s a rare on the ground look the daily battles being fought between illegal Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank. From Al Jazeera America:

Senator Diane Feinstein took to the floor of the Senate to argue against the bill that would impose new sanctions on Iran in the interim period between the 6-month agreement and a final deal down the road. She said this attempt to foil negotiations is really “a march to war,” that would signal to the Iranians that the real interest of the United States in not in diplomacy, but in regime change.

I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day…

This piece from the New York Times reports on Hamas boot camps in Gaza where teenagers receive military training and repeats oft-cited claims about Hamas textbooks that don’t recognize Israel. It is a one-sided depiction of an ugly reality that exists, of course, on both sides.

Having seen two major Israeli military operations in Gaza in their short lives, many of the teenagers came to this boot camp, which is run by Hamas, the Islamic militant group that has led Gaza since 2007, to prepare for what they see as the inevitable next round.

…The Futuwwa program, which was supported by the Hamas Education Ministry, followed other recent efforts by Hamas to inculcate Gaza’s youths with its militant ideology. Last year, for a required “national education” course in government schools, Hamas introduced its own textbooks that do not recognize modern Israel or mention the Oslo peace accords, which Israel signed with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the mid-1990s.

First of all, why should Hamas’s military training of Gaza youths be any more troubling to us than Israel’s mandatory military conscription of all Israeli citizens starting at age 18? We’re supposed to believe there is a qualitative difference because Hamas is a “terrorist organization” whereas Israel is a state. Obviously, this is a distinction without a difference, given that “terrorism” can come in lots of forms, including state terrorism, which Israel perpetrates all the time.

On the issue of biased Hamas textbooks which don’t recognize modern Israel, the New York Times is being negligent in its journalism. Any balanced article would have mentioned the academic study conducted last year that was, according to the Times‘s own reporting on it at the time, “unusually comprehensive,” and which found that 95 percent of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox schoolbooks don’t recognize Palestine’s borders either. They show “no borders in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, implying that the Palestinian areas are part of the State of Israel,” observed Sigal Samuel at the Daily Beast’s Open Zion.

The academic study found “that each side generally presents the other as the enemy, but it undermines recent assertions by the Israeli government that Palestinian children are educated ‘to hate,'” the report explained.