Month: March 2014

In opposing and challenging U.S. foreign policy, there is a tendency among some in the libertarian movement to excuse the crimes and misdeeds of foreign regimes that Washington sees as antagonistic. Fundamentally, I believe this represents a grave bias that has no place in the liberty movement.

Recent statements by Ron Paul have been interpreted by some as being too hesitant to call out Putin for his interventionism in Ukraine. Paul is correct, in my opinion, to place criticism of U.S. foreign policy as a priority over that of other governments (as Americans, that is our responsibility). And we always need to be skeptical of the rhetoric coming out of Washington directed towards America’s ostensible enemies.

But I don’t think it is very libertarian to carry water for Russian policies of military interventionism. This line of thinking was picked up by Alexander McCobin of Students for Liberty. He wrote a perfectly respectful piece disagreeing with Paul on the substance of whether Russia’s incursions and the Crimean referendum were legitimate. In response, Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace wrote a scathing polemic attacking McCobin and pretending like Russian foreign policy is benevolent.

Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com’s Editorial Director, also made this the subject of his column today. I fundamentally disagree with it on many counts.

There are two issues to be addressed here. One is the appropriateness of libertarians condemning governments other than their own. The other is whether or not Russia’s interventionism and Crimea’s referendum were legitimate.

On the latter issue, McAdams and Raimondo argue Russian troops were already in Crimea by mutual agreement. But to say the troops were already there by mutual agreement is to push Putin’s propaganda. Of course, there were thousands (nobody knows exactly how many because they disguised themselves) of extra Russian troops that moved into Crimea that went beyond the mutual agreement. And the mutual agreement was about basing rights in Sevastopol. I don’t believe it granted these Russian troops the right to seize police and military bases, as they did. Some Crimean minorities boycotted the vote, which is their right, but others wanted to vote and couldn’t because they were not sent the vouchers.

Crimeans do have a right to self-determination. And they very well may have voted to rejoin Russia even without Moscow’s meddling and military incursions. But it is just a fantasy to believe this is anything other than an interventionist power grab by Russia. Obviously, this doesn’t mean one ought to support U.S. intervention of any kind. But I think it does mean libertarians, when asked directly, should not defend Putin’s regime.

On the former issue, I believe it is incumbent upon us as Americans to criticize our own government, especially in the realm of foreign policy, before we go off criticizing foreign governments. And while much of the rhetoric coming out of Washington regarding Russia, Iran, China, and other bogeymen is structured to justify more U.S. interventionism, that doesn’t mean the criticisms of those governments are always and everywhere without merit. Just admitting that Russia’s actions are deplorable doesn’t make one an agent of the State Department or in bed with the neocons.

I’m an anti-war libertarian to the bone. But I’m also consistent. There is a lot to criticize about the approach of the U.S. government towards Ukraine. But if the U.S. government conducted the kind of foreign policy Russia has in Ukraine, I would stand in strong opposition to it, as any consistent libertarian should.

Reason’s Jesse Walker posted a rather prescient blog about this earlier this month. It is worth re-reading.

1. It is possible to believe that fascists and other creepy sorts played a notable role in the Maidan uprising and that the revolt was, on balance, a movement for greater freedom.

2. It is possible to believe that the Maidan revolt was a movement for greater freedomand that people elsewhere in Ukraine have legitimate reasons to be aggravated about the new government, and even about the fact that they’re ruled from Kiev in the first place.

3. It is possible to believe that there are Ukrainian citizens with legitimate complaints about Kievand that Russia should not be inserting its military, or indeed any of its influence, into the country.

4. It is possible to believe it’s bad that Russia’s sticking its snout into its neighbor’s affairs andthat it would be dumb for the U.S. to intervene to stop it.

Disagree with any of those combinations of views that you want. But don’t act as though they’re inconceivable. There have been a lot of logical leaps in the debates over the ongoing crisis, particularly—and most dangerously—from the folks who don’t seem able to understand #4.

Bonus: It is possible to believe that the U.S. should stay out of the conflict and that it’s a good idea to allow increased exports of natural gas, not because that will cut into Putin’s power—though that could be a happy effect—but because it’s something the government ought to be allowing anyway.

At the National Interest, Cato’s Ted Galen Carpenter argues Washington’s Eastern European NATO allies “are dangerous strategic liabilities, not assets.” NATO, he writes, has worn out its strategic value and expanding it as we have since the end of the Cold War merely serves to destabilize Europe by provoking Russia and giving us “crises” like Ukraine.

NATO’s relevance to the United States declined dramatically with the collapse of the Soviet Union. One cannot legitimately equate today’s Russia, with an aging, declining population, a military with many antiquated components, and merely the world’s eighth-largest economy, to the capabilities the USSR possessed during its heyday. Russia is a conventional, second-tier power that has some regional interests and ambitions, but it is not even remotely a global expansionist threat, much less a totalitarian expansionist threat.

That reality should have impelled the United States to give NATO a retirement party at the end of the Cold War, transferring responsibility for Europe’s defense to the principal European powers and, gradually, to the European Union. Instead, U.S. and NATO leaders scrambled to find an alternative mission to keep the alliance in business. They soon settled on an especially dangerous one—expanding NATO into Central and Eastern Europe, eventually to the borders of the Russian Federation itself. Critics warned that such a move created needless new risks for the United States, and that some of the commitments virtually invited a challenge from Russia once it had regained some strength. That is precisely what has happened, and Biden’s reassurances threaten to make a perilous situation even more so.

It is not insignificant, as Stephen Kinzer recently wrote, that the U.S. “has brought 12 countries in central Europe, all of them formerly allied with Moscow, into the NATO alliance,” in what he calls a relentless pursuit of “encircling Russia.” And let us not forget that Washington wasn’t planning to stop at those 12. Georgia and Ukraine, among others, were in the running, no doubt. The fact that nationalist hawks in Washington don’t have the ability to perceive the likely consequences of U.S. expansion and intervention, doesn’t make a strong counter-action from Moscow any less likely.

The diplomat George Kennan, essentially the architect of Washington’s Cold War containment policy, predicted it easily in 1997, when he said, “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected…to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

In the New York Times, Ben Macintyre reviews the new book by Richard Overy The Bombers and the Bombed. Macintyre gives a summary of Overy’s myth-busting about the Allied bombing of Germany. Indiscriminate bombing of civilians, instead of sticking to military targets, is usually defended as (1) a response to similarly indiscriminate bombing campaigns by the Germans, like in the Blitz, and (2) the only way to completely bring down the Nazi regime.

“Overy demonstrates, however, that the tactic of bombing urban areas had been put into action by the British before the Blitz,” Macintyre reports. And as for the second justification:

[T]hough the devastation left ordinary Germans demoralized, exhausted and frightened, the bombs did not provoke internal collapse or social implosion; the German people were not bombed into revolution. In the cruellest irony, the hardship and terror may even have solidified the Nazis’ grip on the populace: “The effect of the bombing was not, in the end, as the Allies hoped, to drive a wedge between people and regime, but the opposite, to increase dependence on the state and the party.”

Of course, this is by no means to say that the Allies were in the wrong while Nazi Germany was somehow better behaved. WWII was a massive conglomeration of evil acts of mass murder on all sides, and Nazi Germany was the epitome of that evil. But there is a valuable lesson in reviewing Allied war policy critically in this fashion.

The staying power of Allied propaganda has proven remarkably durable. Most people nowadays think back to WWI and frame it as a needless conflagration in which millions were used as cannon fodder for the small-minded and narrow self-interests of competing European states. Very little moral compulsion remains attached to the war effort on any side in that conflict.

WWII, however, is different. Most people still consider the Allied war effort a saintly battle for the freedom of the world. Political and military leaders of the time are still revered as heroes. Purging Europe of Nazis and fascists was, uncontroversially, a welcome result. But this shouldn’t delude us into framing the conflict as a purely Manichean, good vs. evil dichotomy, as it is so often framed in the public.

As U.S. General Curtis LeMay, commander of the Tokyo fire bombing operation, admitted, there were war criminals on all sides. “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal,” he said. “Fortunately, we were on the winning side.”

If Overy’s scholarship on this is right, and the two main moral and strategic justifications for Allied indiscriminate bombing of civilians don’t hold up to scrutiny, it may represent the beginnings of a broader understanding of WWII that is closer to the one we have about WWI, or closer to LeMay’s characterization. And that is for the better.

The Egyptian court has just handed down one of the most grotesque sentences in Egyptian history, condemning 529 people to death in one fell swoop. The US State Department said it was "shocked" and that the verdict defies logic. “While appeals are possible, it simply does not seem possible that a fair review of evidence and testimony consistent with international standards could be accomplished with over 529 defendants after a two-day trial,” a State Department official said. Amnesty International issued a condemnation, and CODEPINK has launched a campaign to pressure the Egyptian government to overturn the verdict and respect political dissent.

The court sentenced supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi for their alleged role in the murder of a single police officer in the southern city of Minya last August. In addition to the murder, the 529 defendants were accused of attempting to kill two other police officers and attacking a police station. The incident occurred after the military overthrew President Morsi in July 2013 and violently broke up two pro-Morsi encampments in Cairo, leaving nearly 1,000 people dead and arresting some 16,000 people, including most of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership.

The court held two sessions. In the first session, the judge angrily shouted down requests by defense lawyers for more time to review the prosecution’s case. In the second session, the judge barred defense lawyers from even entering the courtroom. “We didn’t have the chance to say a word or to look at more than 3,000 pages of investigation to see what evidence they are talking about,” attorney Khaled el-Koumi told The Associated Press.

A senior official involved in courtroom security, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that 154 defendants were in the courtroom in a cage, and upon hearing the verdict, screamed at the judge "You butcher!" The rest of the defendants were tried in absentia.

The group is among some 1,200 Muslim Brotherhood supporters on trial; a second group of 683 Morsi supporters is due to go on trial on March 25, including the leader of the group, Mohamed Badie, and the head of its political wing, Saad al-Katatny.

Continue reading “Egypt Kangaroo Court Sentences 529 Morsi Supporters to Death”

In September 2012, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. government considers cyber-attacks to constitute acts of war that can justly be countered with conventional retaliation.

“Cyberattacks can amount to armed attacks triggering the right of self-defense and are subject to international laws of war, the State Department’s top lawyer said Tuesday,” the report stated clearly.

The hypocrisy of this position was obvious at the time, given what we knew about U.S. cyber-warfare against Iran and other enemies of the state. But the flagrant hypocrisy was all the more apparent following revelations from documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

According to reports this week in the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and elsewhere, the NSA conducted cyber-warfare against the Chinese company Huawei, created “back-doors” and “obtained information about the workings of the giant routers and complex digital switches that Huawei boasts connect a third of the world’s population, and monitored communications of the company’s top executives.” The Times puts it succinctly enough:

American officials have long considered Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, a security threat, blocking it from business deals in the United States for fear that the company would create “back doors” in its equipment that could allow the Chinese military or Beijing-backed hackers to steal corporate and government secrets.

But even as the United States made a public case about the dangers of buying from Huawei, classified documents show that the National Security Agency was creating its own back doors — directly into Huawei’s networks.

American officials, particularly members of the Obama administration, have for years stood on their pedestal in Washington, DC and condemned China for its cyber-warfare and espionage of the U.S. government and American businesses. In secret, though, they are acting in precisely the same way.

Given the State Departments conclusion that “cyber-attacks” violate international law and can trigger “the right to self-defense,” one has to assume the U.S. government believes China is justified in bombing Washington…right? If not, there has to be something terribly wrong with the logic of the U.S. position.

Back in October, two George Washington University professors explained in Foreign Affairs that the leaks of Snowden and Manning “undermine Washington’s ability to act hypocritically and get away with it,” an essential ingredient in exercising world power. “This system” of American power “needs the lubricating oil of hypocrisy to keep its gears turning,” they explained. But the recent leaks show that Washington is “unable to consistently abide by the values that it trumpets.”

Rep. Mike Rogers, one of the most doggedly pro-NSA figures in Congress, is once again making claims for which he presents zero evidence and which contradict findings from the intelligence community. Specifically, he is going on television to claim Edward Snowden is a double agent for the Russians.

New York Times:

A top congressional intelligence official said on Sunday that American counterintelligence officials are virtually unanimous in believing that Edward J. Snowden is “under the influence of Russian intelligence services.”

That suggestion came from Representative Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the Intelligence Committee.

Mr. Rogers had previously raised the possibility that Mr. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, might be working for Russia, though the congressman has yet to offer any evidence. His assertions on Sunday, however, were his most sweeping to date.

“Every counterintelligence official believes that,” Mr. Rogers said on the NBC News program “Meet the Press.” “You won’t find one that doesn’t believe today he’s under the influence of Russian intelligence services.”

Actually, I know of one official who doesn’t believe Snowden is working with Russian intelligence services: Rick Ledgett, the guy who leads the NSA’s task force on Snowden’s leaks. That task force, according to a Reuters report, “found no evidence that [Snowden] had help either within the NSA or from adversary spy agencies.”

The FBI has also concluded that Snowden “worked alone.” Indeed, in the final paragraph of the New York Times article reporting on Rogers’ latest allegations, it is reiterated: “There has been no public indication that investigators for the F.B.I., the N.S.A. or the Pentagon have uncovered evidence that Mr. Snowden received assistance from any foreign intelligence service.”

So what the hell is Mike Rogers talking about? Notably, Rogers has also made other outlandish allegations on the NSA scandal, claiming last month that Glenn Greenwald had been “selling his access to information” for his own “personal gain.” When he said this, I called his office and was directed to the House Intelligence Committee’s Spokesperson Susan Phalen, who insisted, “Chairman [Rogers] does not make such statements casually.” When I pressed her for one iota of evidence for these very serious claims, she said she “can’t divulge.”

In other words, there is no evidence. And the claims Rogers has been making about Snowden directly contradict the findings of both the FBI and the NSA. So why is he making these claims?

I have some guesses. One guess is that he is trying to demonize Snowden for propaganda purposes and thereby turn public opinion against him. This is especially plausible after the demonization of Russia following Ukraine crisis, since hatred of Russia is higher than at any time since the Cold War. Another possibility is that he is trying to stoke outrage and gather support within the government to violate Snowden’s asylum, use force to apprehend him, and punish him, thereby discouraging further leaks and staving off the momentum for reform.

The real tragedy here is that no interviewer ever seems to be willing to exhibit the slightest skepticism when Rogers makes these evidence-free claims. The willingness of the press to simply take his words for granted because he is the chairman of the House intelligence committee is astounding.