Month: March 2014

Three years ago, the UN approved NATO action in Libya to impose a no-fly zone and head off an allegedly imminent bloodbath perpetrated by the Gadhafi regime. Days before this third anniversary, the Libyan parliament basically impeached the Prime Minister following the government’s inability to do anything about armed groups in the east taking control of oil resources. There is veritable power vacuum in the country that continues to generate instability there and throughout the region.

Notably, the US-led NATO action in Libya immediately violated the parameters of the UN Resolution, when the pretense of imposing a no-fly zone quickly manifested into a regime change operation. Clever legal advisers in the Obama administration then made the ridiculous claim that U.S. military action did not count as “hostilities” and thus did not need Congressional approval, as required by the the Constitution and the War Powers Act. The intervention was legally dubious from the beginning.

But how about the practical effects of the intervention? Was it successful? The Republican Party’s manic obsession with the Obama administration’s fumbling in the days following the raid on the State Department’s Benghazi compound has obscured any real debate about the wisdom of the overall intervention. But taking a look at the facts on the ground, it seems eminently clear the consequences of the intervention have gone from bad to worse.

Continue reading “The Libya Intervention Was an Illegal Failure. Thus: Hooray for Intervention!”

The conflict in Ukraine has prompted several level-headed commentators to point out that, of all governments, the U.S. government is in no position to lecture Russia about respecting other nations’ borders. When Secretary of State John Kerry said on Meet the Press, “This is an act of aggression that is completely trumped up in terms of its pretext.… You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests,” one of those commentators, Ivan Eland, responded,

Hmmm. What about the George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq after exaggerating threats from Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” and dreaming up a nonexistent operational link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks. And what about Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada in 1983 to save U.S. medical students in no danger and George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama because its leader, Manuel Noriega, was associated with the narcotics trade?… More generally, Latin America has been a US sphere of influence and playground for US invasions since the early 1900s – Lyndon Johnson’s invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Bill Clinton’s threatened invasion of Haiti in 1994 being two recent examples.

Indeed, Russia isn’t the only country that has brutally regarded its “backyard” as its sphere of influence and playground. This doesn’t make it okay for the Russian government to behave as it has, but as Adam Gopnik observes,

Russia, as ugly, provocative, and deserving of condemnation as its acts [in Crimea] may be, seems to be behaving as Russia has always behaved, even long before the Bolsheviks arrived. Indeed, Russia is behaving as every regional power in the history of human regions has always behaved, maximizing its influence over its neighbors – in this case, a neighbor with a large chunk of its ethnic countrymen.

Eland of course only scratches the surface in mentioning the U.S. government’s unceasing program to control events in its sphere of influence. Some people understand that this program preceded the 20th century; it did not begin with the Cold War. The Spanish-American War, 1898, may come to mind, but I’m thinking further back than that. How far back? Roughly 1776.

Continue reading “Empire on Their Minds”

Bill Kristol is not shy about his fetish for war. His latest piece at the neoconservative Weekly Standard borders on self-parody in the way that it openly longs for a return to a time when Americans were eager to send the U.S. military off on unnecessary, imperialistic adventures.

Kristol is frustrated by the “war-weariness” of the nation. He laments the reluctance on the part of the Republican Party to “challenge” “the idol of war-weariness.”

“A war-weary public can be awakened and rallied,” Kristol cheers. “Indeed, events are right now doing the awakening. All that’s needed is the rallying. And the turnaround can be fast.”

People like Kristol are so blinded by ideology that they breach the etiquette which calls on elite commentators to camouflage their enthusiasm for war with superficial appeals to peace. He loves death and destruction and wars of choice and he doesn’t care who knows it! He is way out of the closet. That he can explicitly call for Americans to be “awakened and rallied” for new wars and not be embarrassed by the Hitler-esque tone of such despicable cravings is an indication of how lacking in self-awareness he is. His foreign policy beliefs are the kind that are not susceptible to reasoning or disconfirming evidence. His worship for the warfare state is religious in its persuasion.

Kristol condemns using war-weariness “as an excuse to avoid maintaining our defenses or shouldering our responsibilities.” In other words, the fact that Kristol’s preferred policies were implemented throughout the Bush administration and it led to war crimes, hundreds of thousands killed, trillions of dollars wasted, region-wide instability in the Middle East, and clear geo-political losses for the United States shouldn’t deter us from continuing to spend more than the rest of the world combined on our military or from “shouldering our responsibilities” of ruling the world through force and war.

To Kristol, war-weariness is a kind of ailment that Americans need to be cured of. He calls for war-weary Americans to be rallied to some unspecified military crusade just around the corner. Iran, Russia, China…anything will do, I suppose.

I’m reminded of what Noam Chomsky wrote in his book Media Control about this ailment, or “malady” of being averse to extreme violence and war.

“The Reaganite intellectual Norman Podhoretz defined it as ‘the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force,'” Chomsky writes. “There were these sickly inhibitions against violence on the part of a large part of the public. People just didn’t understand why we should go around torturing people and killing people and carpet bombing them.”

“It’s very dangerous for a population to be overcome by these sickly inhibitions, as Goebbels understood, because then there’s a limit on foreign adventures,” he explains. “It’s necessary, as the Washington Post put it rather proudly during the [first] Gulf War hysteria, to instill in people a respect for ‘martial value.’ That’s important. If you want to have a violent society that uses force around the world to achieve the ends of its own domestic elite, it’s necessary to have a proper appreciation of the martial values and none of these sickly inhibitions about using violence.”

That’s the real threat of our resistance to extreme violence. Anything that puts a limit on foreign adventures is like kryptonite to Kristol and his ilk.

With tensions in Crimea continuing to swell, so too has friction between the United States and Russian governments. On Monday, President Obama issued an executive order instituting travel bans and freezing the assets of Russian government officials believed to be responsible for Moscow’s military action in Crimea. The President further condemned Russia’s actions as clear violations of international law, hypocritically asserting a noninterventionist standard of international diplomacy that his own administration fails to follow.

"Although Russia has legitimate interest in what happens in a neighboring state," the President noted earlier this month, "that does not give it the right to use force as a means of exerting influence inside of that state." Sound familiar? President Obama made a completely contradictory case in favor of foreign intervention in Libya just two years ago, claiming that "[t]here will be times, though, when our safety is not directly threatened, but our interests and values are." Which is it, Mr. President? Can a country intervene if it has a "legitimate interest" to do so, or not?

The President’s hypocrisy in condemning the Kremlin for violating international law is incredible considering that the European Parliament rebuked the US drone program just two weeks ago, deeming it to violate international law by an overwhelming majority of 534 to 49.

Not more than six months ago, the world also watched as Obama pushed hard for congressional approval to engage in a military attack in Syria. Despite widespread dissension within the US, action in Syria would have violated both international law and the United Nations Charter just like Putin’s actions in Crimea. As David Davenport of Forbes explains, the use of poisonous gas in war is outlawed by a 1925 Geneva Protocol, but that doesn’t forbid its use domestically, no matter how heinous. An expanded Chemical Weapons Treaty, formed in 1993, also exists, but Syria is not a member. Further, the UN Charter only permits military force against another country for reasons of self defense or if it is sanctioned by the Security Council, for which the plan in Syria was not.

Clearly Obama’s current cries of international law violations in Crimea don’t carry the necessary weight. Yet, that hasn’t stopped Secretary of State John Kerry from echoing his sentiment in support of sanctions.

Continue reading “Obama’s Calls for Russian Sanctions Reveal Hypocrisy”

More than 90 percent of Crimean voters have voted to join Russia. Putin and the rest of Moscow are praising the power of democracy, however disingenuously, and Obama and all of Washington are condemning the referendum as an illegal act.

As has been true throughout this whole crisis, the U.S. position is fundamentally hypocritical. When Washington condemns the the referendum as a violation of sovereignty and territorial integrity, Russians sort of giggle and point to Kosovo, for which NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 and which voted for full secession and independence in 2008 with full U.S. support.

The most popular reason Americans have for opposing the referendum is the fact that it was held under Russian military occupation and, therefore, how legitimate can it really be? This is a position I agree with: democratic votes should not be influenced by military occupation.

But did these same Americans condemn the democratic elections in Afghanistan and Iraq as being illegitimate because of the nefarious influence of an overbearing U.S. military occupation? Where was this criticism when Kosovo voted for independence while thousands of U.S. and NATO troops continued to base there? Have they been condemning the fact that Washington pressures democratically elected representatives in Japan to swear off any plans to move the tens of thousands of U.S. troops occupying Okinawa, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Okinawans call for an immediate end to that occupation?

There is a question about just how much the referendum in Crimea would have differed without Russian troops and it very well may be the case that it would not have differed much, given the large ethnic Russian majority there. The U.S. will continue, nevertheless, to condemn the vote and retaliate on the margins by digging in its diplomatic heels in Kiev and by sanctioning Russian officials (with no utility).

The reason is not one of principle, as the Obama administration claims, but of spite. Russia seems to have won this geo-political spat, and Washington isn’t going to take it laying down.

But perhaps they should. “Although Westerners (and the Ukrainian government) profess the importance of defending Ukrainian territorial integrity,” writes Taras Kuzio in Foreign Affairs, “most Ukrainians wouldn’t seem to mind letting Crimea go.”

“[M]ost Ukrainians,” Kuzio explains, “have always been ambivalent about Crimea.”

The region was transferred from Russian to Ukrainian control in 1954, and Russians still feel a much stronger sense of attachment to the region, and specifically to the port city of Sevastopol, than do Ukrainians. Some Ukrainians even believe that Crimea has a right to secede, although they may have wished that Crimea had done so in more orderly fashion. “If there is a clear majority of the people on a certain territory that do not want to accommodate themselves with the state they live in,” Ukrainian writer Mykola Riabchuk said before the Russian incursion, “they should have a right to secede, which would require some negotiations, international mediation, referendums, and post-separation settlements for national minority rights.”

The interim Ukrainian government is too weak to do anything about the referendum, even if Crimea meant enough to them to start such a dispute. The U.S. has little to no leverage and is only continuing down the road of hostility and confrontation with Russia out of spite. And whatever validity rests in the U.S. condemnation of legal violations and Russian occupation is undermined by the fact that it is entirely insincere, given America’s routine practice of precisely the policies for which they now condemn Russia.

When I boarded the plane to Cairo, Egypt, to make sure everything was in place for the women’s delegation headed to Gaza, I had no reason to think I’d end up in a jail cell at the Cairo airport and then violently deported.

The trip was in response to a call from women in Gaza to CODEPINK and other groups asking us to bring 100 women from around the world to Gaza for March 8, International Women’s Day. They wanted us to see, firsthand, how the seven-year Israeli blockade had made their situation intolerable. They talked about being unable to protect themselves and their families from frequent Israeli attacks and how the closing of the borders with both Israel and Egypt has made it impossible for them to travel abroad or even to other parts of Palestine. They wanted us to witness how the shortages of water, electricity, and fuel, coupled with severe restrictions on imports and exports, condemn most of the 1.6 million Palestinians in Gaza to a life of misery.

So we helped put together a 100-women delegation with representatives from France, Belgium, Switzerland, Australia, the UK, Ireland, Canada and the United States. The delegates, who ranged in age from 18 to 84, included Nobel Peace Prize winners, doctors, writers and students. We were also bringing hundreds of solar lamps and boxes of medical supplies for the women.

The only ways to enter Gaza is by land – either via the border with Israel or Egypt. Israel restricts entry to non-governmental and official delegations, so our only option was to go through Egypt. CODEPINK had already organized eight delegations to Gaza via Egypt since 2008, so we thought we knew the ropes. We had organized these delegations during Mubarak’s reign and after the revolution, but not since the July 2013 coup that toppled the government of Mohamed Morsi.

As in the past, we furnished the Foreign Ministry and the local Embassies with all the information they requested to get the delegates the necessary permits to cross the Sinai (which has become a dangerous place) and cross into Gaza. They said as long the situation was not too dangerous in the Sinai, they would help us get safely to the border. Otherwise, we would celebrate International Women’s Day together in Cairo.

I went early, on March 3, as part of the logistics team. When I arrived at the airport in Cairo, I was taken aside and put in a separate room. First I was told "no problem, no problem, just checking the papers, just 10 minutes." After 5 hours I realized that there was, indeed, a problem, as I was taken to a jail cell at the airport. Never once was I told what the problem was. Thank goodness I had hidden my phone and was able to get the word out about my plight over Twitter. Friends and family started immediately contacting the US Embassy for help.

Continue reading “Medea Benjamin: Why I Didn’t Make It to Gaza for International Women’s Day”