Author: John Glaser

Violence is rising in Iraq:

Eight people, including four policemen, and 27 wounded Tuesday when insurgents burst into the offices of the Diyala provincial council north of Baghdad, police said.

The attack was similar to the assault in March on the officials of the council in Salahuddin province in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit. That attack claimed the lives of more than 50.

The attack began when a suicide bomber set off his explosives at the council buildings’ main checkpoint. Shortly after, a car bomb exploded nearby and four insurgents, wearing police uniforms, rushed into the building and began shooting.

Also, from Peter Van Buren’s blog We Meant Well (listen to his interview with Scott Horton on Antiwar Radio), we have this graph of violence in Iraq over the last six months:

He also notes a list of recent problems with Iraqi democracy, as well as heightened clashes between pro-Malaki (Shiite) forces and anti-Malaki forces (Sunni). Despite the media keeping all this on the downlow, it’s evident that an upcoming “departure” from Iraq is unlikely to come to fruition given promises about stability being a precursor to withdrawal. This is what happens with American wars though, they never end.

Qaddafi forces shelled an oil refinery in the rebel stronghold of Misrata yesterday. It’s likely this was an intentional target, hit in order to undermine an important American interest in the country.

On another note, here’s an interesting read from Foreign Policy on six reasons Qaddafi won’t quit.

NATO forces and their Libyan rebel allies have scored some notable successes over Qaddafi. Eight high-ranking Libyan officers, including five generals, defected to Italy this week. Rebel forcesdrove Qaddafi’s troops back from Misrata last month, ending the suffocating siege of the strategically located city. But despite these advances, neither side appears poised to break out of the months-long military stalemate in western Libya.

NATO is not attempting to bring about a complete military defeat of Qaddafi, which would require a much larger military effort, but is instead trying to impose sufficient costs that his regime either surrenders or collapses. Airstrikes targeting the leadership compound in Tripoli, while ostensibly designed to degrade Libyan command-and-control capabilities, are also likely intended to hit Qaddafi and key regime figures. At the same time, international financial and military assistance to the ragtag rebel forces is intended to bolster the internal revolt against his regime. But targeting elusive (or at times just well-bunkered) regime leaders from the air is hard, and, so far, Qaddafi is showing resilience and resolve — much more than many advocates of intervention expected.

Six factors drawn from recent decades’ experience explain NATO’s difficulties — and why the Libya war could drag on for a long while longer.

The basic thrust is that for various structural and political reasons the NATO campaign in Libya is likely to drag on for a lot longer and there’s not much the U.S. can do about it, which makes me think perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to intervene in the first place.

Update: The House of Reps has just voted 248 to 163 to add an amendment to the current military appropriations bill that would prohibit funds going towards operations in Libya. They still have to approve the bill as a whole and it has not yet been voted upon by the Senate, but this may be a sign that Congress will block Obama from continuing the intervention in Libya. Not clear yet what this means for the NATO operation overall, but Britain seems to be backing away slightly, and a paltry minority of Americans actually support it.

From the WSJ:

A U.S. plan to fund the democratic transition in Egypt has led to a confrontation with the country’s new rulers, who are suspicious of American aims and what they see as political interference in the aftermath of President Hosni Mubarak’s downfall.

Senior Egyptian officials have warned nongovernment organizations that taking U.S. funding would damage the country’s security. The Egyptian government has also complained directly to the U.S.

“I am not sure at this stage we still need somebody to tell us what is or is not good for us—or worse, to force it on us,” Fayza Aboul Naga…

Kudos to the Egyptians. Generally speaking, U.S. aid does not assist in the transition to democracy; it torques a country’s policies, through bribing its leadership, into subservience to U.S. hegemony. Without more resistance to America’s continued unrelenting imposition in that region, Obama  – and whomever comes after him – will continue to pounce on this Arab Spring by supporting those who wish to suppress it.

Dov S. Zakheim at the National Interest:

The Obama administration has already announced that it will issue $1 billion in loan guarantees to help Egypt borrow on the world markets at favorable rates. Washington has also stated that it will convert $1 billion of Egyptian debt into “investments.” American assistance should be welcomed by a people more than three quarters of whom, according to a poll by the International Republican Institute, view their current economic circumstances as either “somewhat bad” or “very bad.” But that is not the case at all […] America is held in such low esteem by the Egyptian public that a recent Gallup poll found over half its respondents opposed to their government accepting aid from Washington.

Egyptians have a conscious disdain for America’s lavish support of their dictator these past 30 years. Numerous issues lead them away from what the U.S. would prefer for the leading Arab state: namely, standing up to Israel and advocating for Palestinian rights and engaging Iran diplomatically, among others.

The interim government in Egypt still has very serious problems, with 7,000 civilians jailed since Mubarak’s ouster and remaining pressure to give many of them military trials as opposed to civilian. Egypt has surprisingly still not lifted the emergency law so hated during Mubarak, abuse of civilians during the protests has still gone unaccounted for, and laws that restrict freedom are still in place. Many elements of the Mubarak regime are still present in the governing authorities and U.S. intervention in Egypt’s internal affairs will almost surely secure their places there for good.

Katrina vanden Heuvel at The Nation:

As we debate an exit from Afghanistan, it’s critical that we focus not only on the costs of deploying the current force of more than 100,000 troops, but also on the costs of maintaining permanent bases long after those troops leave.

This is an issue that demands a hard look not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but around the globe—where the US has a veritable empire of bases.

According to the Pentagon, there are approximately 865 US military bases abroad—over 1,000 if new bases in Iraq and Afghanistan are included.  The cost?  $102 billion annually—and that doesn’t include the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan bases.

In a must-read article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, anthropologist Hugh Gusterson points out that these bases “constitute 95 percent of all the military bases any country in the world maintains on any other country’s territory.”  He notes a “bloated and anachronistic” Cold War-tilt toward Europe, including 227 bases in Germany.

Amen. One can easily view the current timidity on the slow, surgical removal of fixed fractions of U.S. troops from Afghanistan as overly modest. But the extent of the restricted debated in this country about foreign policy becomes even more brazen once we recall what the debate should include: retracting our 1,000+ base, 135 some odd country military empire.

This perfectly exemplifies the intensity of American nationalism, which makes U.S. officials incapable of recognizing the principle of universality. Hypocrite is a much simpler term: focus on the crimes of others, ignore your own.

During an hour and 40 minute meeting Friday with Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, [California Rep. Dana] Rohrabacher informed the Iraqi leader that his House subcommittee was investigating the killing by Iraqi troops of 35 Iranian dissidents on Iraqi soil in April…

The Orange County conservative, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on oversight and investigations, later told reporters that the “massacre” was probably a crime against humanity. The charge, which often refers to a massive crime against civilians, was first leveled against accused Nazi war criminals during the Nuremburg Tribunal after World War II.

Rohrabacher also asked Iraq to consider at a later stage repaying some of the costs of the 2003 U.S. invasion and the occupation that followed. Iraq’s government spokesman publicly responded that Iraq would pay not “a cent.”

So as we invade, overthrow and occupy Iraq, ravaging the country with careless savagery in countless instances and kill – by conservative estimates – well over one hundred thousand people, the Iraqi troops (trained, funded and equipped by us) are the ones who have committed a crime against humanity on 35 Iranians and additionally need to pay reparations to their dominating military occupiers. What a world…

Glenn Greenwald has a brilliant piece up today on what seem to be the real reasons behind the war in Libya: oil.

Much of the war has actually seemed extremely odd, as if it didn’t match up. There seemed to be many more reasons for the administration not to get involved. Why, Greenwald asks, in the middle of debt crises “and when polls show Americans solidly and increasingly opposed to the war — would the U.S. Government continue to spend huge sums of money to fight this war?” Wasn’t there a big risk in not seeking congressional approval, thus going forward with an illegal war? Why, in an Arab Spring which makes this contradiction so obvious, would we attack Qaddafi for behaving exactly the way we pay other allies to behave? Didn’t Washington see considerable risk in engaging in a third/fourth outright war in against a Muslim country? Wasn’t there some concern, even if only for PR purposes, within the administration that the rebels on whose behalf we would ostensibly fight this war have direct ties to al-Qaeda? Did Obama not calculate a future political vulnerability of engaging in what he knew would be deliberate mission creep, or as Greenwald says, that the real goal of the war was “exactly the one Obama vowed would not be pursued — regime change through the use of military force”?

Well, the Washington Post published a story yesterday describing the newfound relationship the Bush administration began to form with Qaddafi since 2004, one that included reviving the presence and cooperation in Libya of U.S. oil companies who had been eager to capitalize on the expected 43.6 billion barrels of oil in reserves there. Starting a few years ago, however, the relationship began to sour as Qaddafi gradually took national control of the production and business of oil.

Even before armed conflict drove the U.S. companies out of Libya this year, their relations with Gaddafi had soured. The Libyan leader demanded tough contract terms. He sought big bonus payments up front. Moreover, upset that he was not getting more U.S. government respect and recognition for his earlier concessions, he pressured the oil companies to influence U.S. policies.

In late February 2008, Mulva was “summoned to Sirte for a half-hour ‘browbeating’?” from Gaddafi, according to aU.S. State Department cable made available by WikiLeaks. Gaddafi “threatened to dramatically reduce Libya’s oil production and/or expel … U.S. oil and gas companies,” the cable said.

Now, this troubled marriage and the promise of billions of barrels of oil have been dashed by the fighting and Gaddafi’s refusal to relinquish power. Much is at stake; oil industry executives say companies such as ConocoPhillips and Marathon have each invested about $700 million over the past six years.

This shouldn’t be a particular surprise to anyone. This is how U.S. policy has been implemented for a very long time. Since the very realization that the U.S. had toppled Saddam in Iraq, oil companies pounced on their gift from Bush war policy (some headlines: Oil Companies Look to Future in Iraq; Foreign Oil Giants Bid on Iraq’s Resources; Oil Companies Reject Iraq’s Contract Terms; Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back; Exxon, Dutch Shell Win Iraq Oil Contract). In a momentary lapse, the Bush administration’s 2007 draft of the Status of Forces Agreement in Iraq (eventually rejected) was explicit as it detailed a prolonged and continued US troop presence in Iraq and called for “facilitating and encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments.”

U.S. imperialism in Iran is an even more dramatic parallel with Libya. In 1951, when the democrat prime minister Mohamed Mossadegh made moves with the Iranian parliament to nationalize the oil industry which had been previously spearheaded by British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (British Petroleum’s precursor), relationships similarly began to sour. So in 1953 through a process of murder, bribery, secrecy, propaganda, and terrorism, the United States through the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government and installed the Shah who ruled with authoritarian brutality for nearly three decades. The motives were similar: to use force to ensure and facilitate the exploitation of Iranian energy markets, with priority towards rent-seeking American corporations.

Other directly analogous examples abound throughout the history of U.S. foreign policy. And now its Libya’s turn, and the American people await the end of combat operations and the beginning of the selection process by which imperial policy decides who shall rule Libya (that is, who will be most friendly to American interests). Yet, as Greenwald explains,

one WikiLeaks “diplomatic” cable after the next reveals constant government efforts to promote the interests of Western corporations in the developing world.  Nonetheless, the very notion that the U.S. wages wars not for humanitarian or freedom-spreading purposes, but rather to exploit the resources of other nations for its own large corporations, is deeply “irresponsible” and unSerious.  As usual, the ideas stigmatized with the most potent taboos are the ones that are the most obviously true.

Update: I should have popped this link in here as well. Last month McClatchy reported on Wikileaks cables which revealed an oil deal emerging in the last few years in Libya that U.S. officials didn’t like. The Italian oil company Eni, the largest corporation in Italy and one in which the Italian government holds a 30 percent stake, was wagering a deal with the Russian oil company Gazprom, with which Vladimir Putin is connected. In the deal, Eni would have given Gazprom access to Libyan oil and helped Gazprom build a pipeline across the Black sea. The leaked cables reveal U.S. officials plotting ways to prevent such a success from a Russian oil giant. War was never mentioned in the cables, but since the start of Obama’s intervention in Libya, the deal has officially been put on hold.