Category: News

Making the rounds today is a piece up at the Guardian in which a former top CIA terrorism official admits the obvious: that the drone war if overly broad, kills too many civilians, provokes anti-American hatred, and could inadvertently create terrorist safe havens.

Now Robert Grenier, who headed the CIA’s counter-terrorism center from 2004 to 2006 and was previously a CIA station chief in Pakistan, has told the Guardian that the drone programme is targeted too broadly. “It [the drone program] needs to be targeted much more finely. We have been seduced by them and the unintended consequences of our actions are going to outweigh the intended consequences,” Grenier said in an interview.

“We have gone a long way down the road of creating a situation where we are creating more enemies than we are removing from the battlefield. We are already there with regards to Pakistan and Afghanistan,” he said.

I hate a Roman named Status Quo!

Of course Ray Bradbury would have hated such a man, too. When he wrote these words as part of the gripping dialogue in his 1950 would-be classic, Fahrenheit 451, he was railing against the conformity and emptiness, the non-intellectualism of the times, which — big surprise ! — is really no different than our American society today. He recognized how the mass media had manipulated the American post-war culture like soft playdough until their brains became malleable and were all at once putty in the hands of the establishment. He feared, rightly so, that middle-American dumbification would lead to a dangerous acquiescence to the elite on matters of foreign policy and war. And then it would be too late.

Now, dead on this earth at the age of 91, Bradbury leaves us behind, duly warned and onto Newer Frontiers.

Fahrenheit is a beautiful and searing metaphor — of which we should all have a copy! I wrote about it just recently, in April, comparing his lessons against tyranny and war to the vapidness of today’s science fiction and dystopian romances, like The Hunger Games.

My point then and I will make it now is that like many of us, Bradbury was an expanding man in a detrimentally contracting world. And he was anti-war. Fahrenheit 451 is anti-war, in that it recognizes that when we do not read to understand, that when we discard history and literature and poetry and dismiss sentiment and an active longing for peace, then we forget not just the destruction, but the futility of war. We repeat our mistakes, again and again. It all starts with the marginalization of learning, the vanquishing of knowledge, the burning of a book.

Onward, and upward, Mr. Bradbury, and may we never forget.

From Today’s Downsize DC Newsletter:

While in the midst of pledge drive, I nearly missed one of the few sources of joy in this business: Watching Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton smoke out suit wearing think tankers who would clearly be more comfortable wearing sheets.

In a two part series at Think Progress, we learn that the American Enterprise Institute hosted professional supplicant and fantasist Ayaan Hirsi Ali who boldly asserted that

one of the justifications for Norwegian anti-Muslim terrorist Anders Breivik‘s attacks, explaining that Breivik said “he had no other choice but to use violence” because his fringe views were “censored.”

G-d bless her. Really. Anyone who can say that with a straight face deserves an AEI field trip with

…The David Horowitz Freedom Center, named for right-wing activist David Horowitz, is organizing a trip to Turkey featuring AEI’s Michael Rubin and Robert Spencer, an Islamophobic blogger featured in the Center For American Progress report “Fear, Inc..”

Cost, not including plane fare: 4,650$ (US)

Gharib and Clifton wax a bit earnest with “highlight[ing] AEI’s relationship with these extremist views and raises questions about whether bigoted anti-Muslim sentiment should hold even a tangential place in the Washington discourse.”

Tangential place? It’s the center piece of our foreign policy. Anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Persian bigotry is mainstream, respectable and frankly necessary to maintain The Empire. One cannot continue public support for brutal occupations, the destruction of entire cultures and flying robots which kill children without a sustained campaign of bigotry, ignorance and dehumanization.

Update: Robert Spencer wrote me via Twitter. You can find the exchange here. While none of his offense addresses the issue of racism or the point of the blog entry, he did pen this essay, Time to Get Out of Afghanistan, in March of this year.

Spencer writes,

In ten years, American troops (through no fault of their own, although the same cannot be said of their superiors) have accomplished little or nothing in terms of establishing a stable and democratic government in Afghanistan. This is true despite the loss of thousands of lives of noble and courageous American military personnel who deserved better from those in command, and the wanton waste of billions of dollars. The Taliban is still a potent force — so strong that both Karzai and Obama have made overtures to it. The Taliban’s claim of Islamic authenticity strongly resonates with the Afghan people and provides an ever-renewable wellspring of material, financial, and moral support for these vicious thugs as they bomb girls’ schools, music stores, and other outcroppings of jahiliyya — the infidels’ society of ignorance.

Also:

With the withdrawal of the American troops, there will be many Taliban murders, many more jihads, many more women and non-Muslims victimized. That is an abomination. But we could have never ultimately have prevented it anyway. America’s misbegotten Afghan adventure shows the catastrophic human cost of our national unwillingness to face the unpleasant truths about Islam. It costs us lives and money, and makes us even more vulnerable to jihad attacks than we already were. It’s time not just to bring the troops home from their foredoomed mission, but to begin a searching and encompassing re-evaluation of all our national policies regarding Islam and Islamic states.

Well, I’m humbled. Robert Spencer: Successor to Dorothy Day. My apologies to Mr. Spencer and the entire peace movement for imputing any bigotry or hysterical monomaniacal hatred or suggesting that there is anything untoward in Mr. Spencer’s attitudes toward his brothers and sisters in the middle east and central Asia.

Via Marc Lynch, “a useful addition to the growing body of analysis and argument” in opposition to any direct intervention in Syria from Prof. Eva Bellin and Prof. Peter Krause in the Middle East Brief from Brandeis University (PDF).

Here’s their takedown of why a direct military intervention is a bad idea (this reiterates arguments I’ve made repeatedly):

The Syrian military, while no match for the fullfirepower of the U.S. or NATO, is nevertheless not an insignificant force—and,more critically, it is enmeshed in densely populated civilian centers. To disarmit without inflicting huge human casualties would require not simply an aircampaign, as was the case in Libya, but rather, by some estimates, two to threehundred thousand boots on the ground. Such force would be crucial to fullydefeat the regime’s security forces, enforce civil peace, and prevent the subsequentunleashing of retaliatory massacres by opposition groups. Furthermore, to havelasting impact, such an intervention would have to be prolonged and would require extensive investment in state-building, at great cost.

They also argue that limited intervention, like aiding and arming the Syrian opposition fighters, is likely to exacerbate the conflict, increasing and prolonging the suffering of the Syrian people (and they are sure to point out that the Obama administration is misguidedly aiding the opposition with both lethal and non-lethal aid):

The distillation of historical experience with civil war and insurgency, along with a sober reckoning of conditions on the ground in Syria, make clear that limited intervention of this sort will not serve the moral impulse that animates it. To the contrary, it is more likely to amplify the harm that it seeks to eliminate by prolonging a hurting stalemate.

The paper covers many other points, like the disorganized and fractured state of the opposition and the fact that elements of al Qaeda could exploit Western aid for their benefit.

They also reason that the best way to try to resolve the conflict is to pressure the Russians to drop their support for Assad. As I mentioned in today’s news section (and in previous months), the only way I can see the Russians agreeing to do that is if they have some assurances that Washington won’t swoop into the middle of the political transition and try to replace the Russian client Assad with some American client dictator that better serves their interests. In this sense, what we have here is really a problem of intervention: foreign powers are meddling in Syria on behalf of all sides and this is prolonging the conflict. Such outside support (namely Russian) for internal forces (namely Assad) could stop and so end the violence, but it persists because Russia doesn’t trust that the U.S. will stay out of it. And the U.S. probably wouldn’t stay out of it. So the Syrian people continue to suffer, stuck in the middle of a violent insurgency and a brutal dictatorship.