Month: February 2014

Brace yourself: George W. Bush’s former attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, is arguing publicly that the Obama administration’s drone war exceeds legal limits on executive authority. As anyone with a memory of Gonzales’s tenure under Bush knows, this is more than a little ironic.

For example, the Wall Street Journal reports, “Gonzales was a key figure in counterterrorism policies that placed executive power at the pinnacle, often at the cost of individual rights.” Gonzales supported the Bush administration’s denial of habeas corpus rights, torture, and warrantless NSA surveillance. Additionally, “the drone war began under Mr. Gonzales’s tenure, with a 2002 strike in Yemen that killed six people, including a U.S. citizen.”

Writing in the George Washington Law Review, however, Mr. Gonzales says current targeting practices may not be constitutional, and urges the legislative and executive branches to take steps to strengthen protections for citizens.

The 60-page article, “Drones: The Power to Kill,” focuses on President Barack Obama‘s decision to target Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen killed by a 2011 drone strike in Yemen. Mr. Gonzales says that while he believes there was sufficient evidence to justify killing Mr. Awlaki, the decision-making process may fall short of standards established by a series of Supreme Court decisions since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

“The Supreme Court has a role to play. As Justice O’Connor said in Hamdi, ‘a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens,’” Mr. Gonzales writes.

Hamdi v. Rumsfeld is the 2004 opinion by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor that rejected the Bush administration’s claim to hold a U.S. citizen indefinitely as an enemy combatant. Mr. Gonzales was on the losing side of the case, as he was in three other enemy prisoner cases.

…According to remarks by Mr. Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, various groups of “senior officials” and government lawyers determined Mr. Awlaki could not feasibly be captured and that killing him was appropriate.

Such a process may fall short of the Fifth Amendment, Mr. Gonzales said, which prohibits the government from taking a life “without due process of law.”

Let’s put to the side, for the moment, the issue of Gonzales as a walking contradiction. Instead, consider the weight of his claim that Obama’s drone war policies go to far in the way Americans’ constitutional rights. Coming from such a champion of executive power and, let’s face it, acting outside the law, it is much heavier.

But it’s important to note that we needn’t rely solely on Gonzales’s arguments here. Back in October, an investigation by Human Rights Watch found the Obama administration to have conducted the drone war in “violation of international law” on several occasions. Amnesty International also described the drone war as illegal, and called on U.S. authorities to “bring those responsible for unlawful drone strikes to justice in public and fair trials.”

A UN report last year identified serious questions as to the legality of the drone program. “The global war paradigm has done immense damage to a previously shared international consensus on the legal framework underlying both international human rights law and international humanitarian law,” Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, explained. “It has also given a spurious justification to a range of serious human rights and humanitarian law violations.”

A study from the Stanford and NYU schools of law found strong evidence that drone strikes have targeted rescuers running towards bombed sites in follow-up attacks, something the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, has said would constitute war crimes.

Michael Boyle, who was on Obama’s counter-terrorism advisory group in the run-up to the 2008 election, wrote in a study for the Chatham House journal International Affairs that the drone war’s legality was dubious and that Obama “has been just as ruthless and indifferent to the rule of law as his predecessor.”

I could continue. The problem is that no matter how many lawyers, UN officials, academic studies, and former Bush cronies question the legality of Obama’s drone war, in the end the administration gets to choose whether or not to allow these questions to be settled in the courts. So far, Obama’s policy has been to block all attempts at judicial scrutiny in the name of state’s secret privileges.

So, yeah, it can be kind of hard to prove in a court of law whether or not an action is illegal if the government refuses to be subject to those courts. Right, Alberto?

A recent report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace advocates several policy recommendations which aim to rectify the “threat” that a rising China poses to “the foundations of the U.S.-backed global order.” Traditional strategies of “containment,” as used against the Soviet Union in the Cold War, won’t work, the report argues, so Washington needs to “balance” China instead.

The report offers four broad strategies for the U.S. approach to China, all of which are awful and all of which take for granted that U.S. foreign policy ought to be about world domination.

Bolster Regional Actors. By increasing the national power of China’s neighbors, the United States can constrain Beijing’s behavior and limit its capacity for aggressiveness. This investment is in Washington’s best interest irrespective of whether it is repaid in kind because it will diminish China’s ability to misuse its growing strength and increase American geopolitical maneuverability in the Indo-Pacific. But the United States must be wary of Chinese tactics to subvert these efforts.

This is already causing problems. The U.S.’s bolstering of all of China’s neighboring rivals has helped exacerbate regional tensions, prompting Japan and the Philippines to take a much more aggressive posture in confronting China. The naval jockeying in the East and South China Seas could be extremely dangerous: “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.

Even if this policy did tend to stabilize things instead of make them more dangerous, the bias underlying this recommendation is that these weaker states are better off under U.S. hegemony than under Chinese hegemony. While some will argue the U.S. has promoted democracy and free markets (contrasted with whatever China would encourage), there’s really very little evidence for that, given the U.S.’s history of backing dictatorships, ethnic cleansing, and corrupt/closed markets.

The report, again, takes for granted the legitimacy of U.S. meddling. Suppose we reverse the recommendations for China, instead of the U.S. Is it legitimate for China to begin to “bolster” all of America’s neighboring rivals in, say, Latin America? Would Washington accept that? No. So, why is it ok for us to do the same?

Selectively Deepen Globalization. The United States should make trade liberalization a top priority. Since comprehensive global liberalization remains a distant goal, Washington should work to quickly conclude key regional trade pacts, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which promise increased relative gains to the United States and its allies vis-à-vis China.

The contradictions inherent in this recommendation are almost laughable. We should impose so-called “free trade deals” that exclude or at least marginalize China vis-à-vis the U.S. and its allies? If it’s “selective” how can we honestly call it “free trade”? More like subtle economic warfare. Not only is this categorically anti-free market, but it represents the interests of Washington’s own global power, not the interests of consumers in the market.

Bolster U.S. Military Capabilities. To preserve its military superiority in the face of growing Chinese power, Washington should invest in improving U.S. power projection capabilities that will allow it to defeat challenges posed by China’s new strategic denial systems and regain U.S. freedom of action in the Indo-Pacific.

Yeah, because that’s exactly what the U.S. needs. After more than a decade of steadily rising defense budgets that have grown some 80 percent in real dollars since 9/11, we need to increase our military capabilities? Defense is eating up more than 60 percent of the discretionary budget, helping to feed a $17 trillion debt that will only become more burdensome as time goes on. We spend approximately as much on the military as the rest of the world combined. We need to do less of it, a lot less. Not more.

Reinvigorate the U.S. Economy. Revitalizing the domestic economy is imperative to sustaining American hegemony. To maintain its global economic dominance, the United States must emphasize labor force renewal, promote disruptive technological innovations, increase efficiency in production, and resolve the political squabbles that prevent Washington from fixing the country’s public finances.

It’s hard to argue with reinvigorating the U.S. economy, but notice again the bias here. The purpose of a healthy, growing economy is so that the government can take more resources from productive people and fortify its own grip on world power. Really? If that’s the real rationale, I’d love to see the president put that in one of his stump speeches. See how it goes over.

Again, military officials in the Pentagon are insisting on cutting superfluous weapons programs that are wasting billions of taxpayer dollars, but Congress refuses to cut because the defense corporations that line their campaign pockets want the money to keep coming in.

The Washington Post:

The Army is pushing ahead on a path that could result in at least partial closure of the two U.S. facilities producing these vehicles — buoyed by a new study on the state of the combat vehicle industry due for release next month.

But its plans could be derailed by a Congress unwilling to yield and an industry with a powerful lobby. They argue that letting these lines idle or close would mean letting skills and technology honed over decades go to waste.

The Pentagon has “really made a turn in that they are now trying to solve million-dollar problems without billion-dollar solutions, but Congress keeps redirecting them,” said Brett Lambert, who oversaw the Pentagon’s industrial base policy until last year. “This is a zero-sum game. For every dollar the Pentagon spends on something we don’t need .?.?. it is a dollar we can’t spend on something we do need.”

One might be inclined to describe this as a problem; some kind of defect in the system. But this is not a glitch: this is how the system works from top to bottom.

This past summer, the armed services committees in both the House and Senate rejected Defense Department requests to shutter military installations in the United States that the Pentagon says it doesn’t want or need. The infamous F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, to take another example, is the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons program in history. Military officials have told Congress for years to scrap it, but Congress tells them to screw off.

The U.S. Air Force has a storage facility in Arizona where it keeps brand new aircraft, vehicles, and equipment worth tens of billions of dollars. They sit there in storage immediately after being delivered “because the military has no use for them.”

Veronique de Rugy, over at National Review, writes that “it’s not always Congress and the defense industry — sometimes it’s the White House that pushes back against defense cuts that the Pentagon proposes.”

In other words, politicians in Washington are serving their true constituents. Not the general electorate, but the Masters of War who “build the big guns” and “the death planes,” but who also cozy up to politicians, cash in hand.

Despite Obama’s promise in last week’s State of the Union address that he will veto any bill that heaps additional sanctions on Iran while the interim agreement is still in place, hawks in the House of Representatives are still pushing for it.

Indeed, a mixture of hawkish Republicans and Democrats in Congress are aligned with AIPAC and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their belief that the interim deal reached with Iran in the P5+1 talks in Geneva is tantamount to appeasement and will inevitably lead to a nuclear-armed Iran.

The Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin is criticizing the Obama administration for not wanting to preventively bomb Iran. Richard Grenell at Fox News argues the interim agreement is too favorable to Iran, “allowing the Islamic Republic to forego full and verified suspension before negotiations even begin.”

President Obama and his team caved further to the Iranians by agreeing to a deal that rewarded sanctions relief and other benefits without getting any actions from Iran first.

In trusting the Iranians to stop their secret enrichment activities and come clean to the IAEA inspectors at a later date, Obama shows his naivety.

I suppose I was the naive one, considering I actually believed such obviously false statements couldn’t possibly be published at FoxNews.com.

The argument that Iran got sanctions relief without any curbs on its nuclear program is so baseless as to be laughable. Jessica Tuchman Matthews of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace explains:

Continue reading “The Mindlessness of Iran Hawks”

In the policy and think tank worlds, we’re told Obama’s “pivot” to Asia is essential for America’s national interests and that, indeed, continued U.S. military presence throughout the Asia Pacific region is vital for both the U.S. and its allies. U.S. allies need to be reassured of our protection racket and Washington must compete with a rising China for regional hegemony…or else!

Robert Kelly, Asia expert and professor of international relations at Pusan National University in Korea, disagrees. In a recent post over at the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter blog, Kelly reiterates a point he has been “banging away at for a while“…

that the pivot is an elite project that only activates the US foreign policy community and think tank set; that most Americans know little about Asia, perceive it mostly as an export platform for cheap stuff at Walmart, and do not really care that much; that the pivot is wildly over-rated in Asia as a some major strategic shift of the US against the Middle East; and that America hardly ‘needs’ Asia as Asian commentators love to intone.

…Always remember that Asian states need the US a lot more than the U.S. needs them. US regional allies need it to hold back China, and even China needs Americans to buy all their exports and provide a savings safe-haven. Sure, Americans benefit from cheap Asian exports and lending, but that is a lot less important. Almost all of Asia’s growing economies are so deeply based on exporting to the West that a cut-off would lead to economic chaos and political turbulence. This is one of the many reasons why Asian exporters should rebalance toward local consumer demand. But so long as Asia’s mega-exporter oligarchs persists with the ‘tiger’ model of export dependence, the U.S. has enormous leverage. Where would Sony, Samsung and so on be without the American consumer?

Hence in both security and economic affairs, the relationship is highly asymmetric, and those who tell you otherwiseare trying to cover the weaknesses of many Asian states and their desperation for U.S. attention with bravado that America ‘needs’ Asia. As I have been trying to argue on my blog for awhile, if Asians do not want the US in Asia, it is no big deal for US security, and it is an economic blow far worse for them than it is for America.

Elsewhere, Kelly writes that “U.S. alliances shouldn’t be charity.”

America is too broke for that; global hegemony and endless war are corroding American domestic liberalism far too much for freebies; and unburdened allies who don’t feel a sense of limits in dealing with the US can easily pull us into unwanted trouble (see: Israel or the endless infantile scrapping between Korea and Japan).

…If we have to have a $13 trillion dollar debt and the NSA listening to all our phone calls, then we can push allies to do a lot more. Hegemony is not healthy for the US at home, and I see no reason for America to become a prussianized semi-imperial state for foreigners’ defense…

More than anything else, America’s expansive foreign policy is to blame for systematic civil liberties abuses and bigger government here at home. Domestic encroachments on liberty are part and parcel of having a limitless national security state. So, no…we don’t need a surge in Asia.