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Friday, February 26. 2010Tanker DealsWichita Eagle: Tanker contract looks promising: I haven't been counting, so I'm not sure whether this is the 30th or the 300th editorial or op-ed column the Eagle has run in favor of wasting $35 billion taxpayer dollars to give the Air Force something they don't need and that will only be used to get the US involved in foreign conflicts faster than ever. This is a monumentally bad program which can and should be attacked on numerous grounds: it is a colossal waste; the whole program has been fraught with corruption (with one Boeing official, Darleen Druyun, winding up in jail, and several other resignations); and it makes a long-term strategic commitment to extending our worst desires to act as the world's police force. It isn't even much of a jobs program: this editorial, like every other, leads off with promises of jobs: the usual share promised to Wichita has been 1000, although lately Boeing has been backing down on that as they find they need to spread more jobs around to lock up more congressional support. That political clout came in handy in 2008 when the Air Force awarded the contract to Northrop and their proposal to modify Airbus airliners -- a deal which has its own cadre of congressional flacks, starting with Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL). All that political pressure resulted in rebidding the deal on terms more favorable to Boeing. You have to wonder why Boeing's lobbyists even bother to plant so much propaganda in the Wichita Eagle, given that the whole state's congressional delegation has long been bought and paid for. Leading the fight is ex-Boeing employee Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS), who has been obsessing about tankers so long that Bush wound up nicknaming him Tanker Todd. One thing that's curious about all of this is that the current tanker fleet, based on venerable Boeing 707 aircraft that have been periodically upgraded with new wings and engines, are based and maintained here in Wichita, a steady source of jobs that would be phased out with new tankers. Even if Boeing wins the contract, they're always happy to auction the jobs to the highest (or more often the lowest) bidder. They've already wiped out 90% of their Wichita plant, and they moved their headquarters from Seattle to Chicago so the executives would be less likely to run into unemployed plant workers. Meanwhile, they've spread out facilities all over the country, wherever they could find political favor, plus they've pawned much of their work off on China and Japan -- including the wings on their new 787 Dreamliner, something hitherto regarded as the crown jewels of the airframe industry. (They've even sublet their real crown jewels -- their lobbying organization -- to China back in the 1990s to press for "most favorable nation" trade status.) Boeing cooked up the tanker scam about 10 years ago as a way to extend their soon-to-be-obsolete 767 production line. The Air Force didn't have any interest in new tankers, and certainly didn't have any budget for it, so Boeing proposed to finance the tankers privately and lease them to the Air Force, where they'd be buried in the operating budget, away from the more competitive procurement budget. Needless to say, the lease scheme opened up hitherto unimagined avenues for ripping off the government. John McCain played a small role in shooting the lease scam down, but eventually Boeing got the Air Force to put the deal on its procurement wish list, but that wound up inviting EADS into the bidding -- after all, Airbus has their own obsolescent airliners, the US desperately needs European support for its NATO disaster in Afghanistan, and Northrup, with their own roster of paid politicians, was eager to partner with them on a cushy deal. So now we have lobby money flying thicker than ever, but all you ever read is how many jobs would be created -- numbers that seem really paltry compared to the $35 billion outlay -- and maybe a bit about how old the KC-135s are. The antiwar movement has missed a golden opportunity to shoot this turkey down, because it raises so many issues, especially about how we view the future role of the US in world affairs, but also about how business and politics colludes in the US, and how the Defense Department juggernaut keeps feeding conflicts by investing in them. Wednesday, February 24. 2010An Extended AfPak Reading ListPeter Bergen: The Ultimate AfPak Reading List: Bergen's reading list covers Afghanistan (Soviet Invasion from 1979-89, rise and rule of the Talian 1994-2001, and post-2001), Pakistan (general, post-2001 Jihadism), and Al Qaeda (general, 1988-2001, since 2001, media strategy) with some background (underlyilng causes of 9/11 attacks, Islamist terrorism and its intellectual influences). A big chunk of those books have been on my reading list, so I thought I'd consolidate the list from 11 pages to 1, merge the categories, drop the essays (which no doubt are of equal interest), and add links to my book pages (where I have them; [*] denotes an entry in by Book Notes file):
The section on Pakistan is very short, not that there's a lot more to choose from, aside from narrow and rather dated monographs. The omission of Tariq Ali's The Duel is notable both as a substantial book on Pakistan and for what it says about American power as a root cause for the troubles. The section on root causes is also short, and focuses exclusively on terrorist psychology, whereas it should be obvious that at least part of the problem is the US has sent its corporations, military, and spies far from the homeland. No small amount has been written about that, both on the general problems of empire and on specific conflicts -- Iraq and Israel would each swamp the list, Iran and Saudi Arabia would add significantly to it, and there are other hot spots. For the most part I haven't singled out books like that unless they specifically tripped my keyword searches below. Any broad spectrum survey of US politics in the region would include works by Gabriel Kolko, Noam Chomsky, James Carroll, Jonathan Schell, Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich, Stephen Kinzer, Tim Weiner, Dilip Hiro, Tariq Ali, and Michael Klare. Scrounging through the Book Notes file, looking for keywords (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Islam, jihad, al Qaeda, terror), but skipping books focusing on other Arab areas, suggests some additional books. The main thing that's missing above is a better critique on how the US got so tangled up in the Muslim world that it became a target of al Qaeda, and what sort of ideology plays out in the compulsion to revenge 9/11 by waging an indiscriminate war against civilians who had nothing to do with al Qaeda.
Also found mentions of a bunch of Afghanistan war memoirs: Jon Lee Anderson: The Lion's Grave: Dispatches From Afghanistan; Colin Berry: The Deniable Agent: Undercover in Afghanistan; Christie Blatchford: Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army; Eric Blehm: The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan; Mark W Bromwich: Captains Blog: The Chronicles of My Afghan Vacation; Matthew Currier Burden: The Blog of War: Front-Line Dispatches from Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan; John T Carney: No Room for Error: The Covert Operations of America's Special Tactics Units From Iran to Afghanistan; Jeff Courter: Afghan Journal: A Soldier's Year in Afghanistan; Dayna Curry/Heather Mercer: Prisoners of Hope: The Story of Our Captivity and Freedom in Afghanistan; Ed Darack: Victory Point: Operations Red Wings and Whalers - The Marine Corps' Battle for Freedom in Afghanistan; Lt Gen Michael DeLong: A General Speaks Out: The Truth About the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; Brandon Friedman: The War I Always Wanted: The Illusion of Glory and the Reality of War; Mike Friscolanti: Friendly Fire: The Untold Story of the US Bombing That Killed Four Canadian Soldiers in Afghanistan; Chuck Larson: Heroes Among Us: Firsthand Accounts of Combat from America's Most Decorated Warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan; Joe LeBleu: Long Rifle: A Sniper's Story in Iraq and Afghanistan; Marcus Luttrell/Patrick Robinson: Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10; Malcolm MacPherson: Roberts Ridge : A Story of Courage and Sacrifice on Takur Ghar Mountain, Afghanistan; Sean Maloney: Enduring the Freedom: A Rogue Historian in Afghanistan; Platte B Moring III: Honor First: A Citizen-Soldier in Afghanistan; Craig M Mullaney: The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education; Johnny Rico: Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green: A Year in the Desert with Team America; Mike Ryan: Battlefield Afghanistan; Doug Stanton: Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan; Peter Telep: Direct Action: Special Forces in Afghanistan; Benjamin Tupper: Welcome To Afghanistan: Send More Ammo: The Tragicomic Art of Making War as an Embedded Trainer in the Afghan National Army; Chris Wattie: Contact Charlie: The Canadian Army, the Taliban and the Battle That Saved Afghanistan; Stephen D Wrage, ed: Immaculate Warfare: Participants Reflect on the Air Campaigns Over Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq; Thomas W Young: The Speed of Heat: An Airlift Wing at War in Iraq and Afghanistan; Regulo Zapata Jr: Desperate Lands: The War on Terror Through the Eyes of a Special Forces Soldier; also: Masood Farivar: Confessions of a Mullah Warrior; Emmanuel Guibert/Frederic Lemercier/Didier Lefevre: The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders; Ali Ahmad Jalali: Afghan Guerrilla Warfare: In the Words of the Mujahideen Fighters Patrick Macrory: Retreat from Kabul: The Catastrophic British Defeat in Afghanistan 1842; Matthew J Morgan: A Democracy Is Born: An Insider's Account of the Battle Against Terrorism in Afghanistan; Jules Stewart: Crimson Snow: Britain's First Disaster in Afghanistan (i.e., 1841); Christine Sullivan: Saving Cinnamon: The Amazing True Story of a Missing Military Puppy and the Desperate Mission to Bring Her Home; Vladislav Tamarov: Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story; Mary Tillman: Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman; This list continues to grow at a rapid pace. The stuff I've added is no doubt less selective than the original list, although it also helps fill in critical holes. Overall, this seems like an awful lot of material, but there are a lot of things poorly covered if covered at all: starting with day-by-day political relationships between the US and various Afghani and Pakistani agents; there is little systematic military analysis, especially of damage to civilians; there is little accounting of money spent; there is a massive propaganda snow job to unshovel; there are secret prisons with a legacy of torture; there is the matter of Karzai's miraculous purchase on his office. So the ultimate list is still to come. But this is a start. Saturday, February 20. 2010Optional Wars on TerrorismMatthew Yglesias: A Sensible Response to Terrorism:
The lesson I draw from this is that it is possible to respond to provocations in different ways according to the political interests of those in power. Bin Laden got his war because that's the way Bush wanted to play it. He craved the opportunity to become a War President, and played up his Commander-in-Chief role to the day he left office. What Stack did, however, is far less useful either to Obama or to the Republicans who seem more inclined to spin it into jokes. Even if someone wanted to escalate the event into a war, what could you do? Send drones out over West Texas looking for wedding parties to bomb? Round up random taxi drivers and beat them to death? Those are things we did in Afghanistan, but it's highly unlikely that we'd treat American citizens with that same level of contempt and indifference. Friday, February 12. 2010Two QuestionsI got a letter from someone in the UK asking for my opinions on a couple of things. Don't know why he cares, but I have lots of opinions. He asks:
My first thought about missile defense is that it doesn't work. It's not only that it is a very difficult technical task given the speeds, sizes, and distances which leads to a very complex and finicky system, but also that it's virtually impossible to test to any real degree of confidence. Maybe if you had a lot of incoming rockets you could get some real world practice. Testing against MIRVed ICBMs, even with mock warheads, is prohibitively expensive, not to mention dangerous. Israel has some sort of system for combatting toy rockets from Gaza, but it's a long ways from being reliable. That leads to my second thought, which is what good is a defensive shield system if it can't be trusted as reliable? It isn't exactly useless, but it is certainly dangerous. In particular, it's likely to confuse the chain of command, and it's likely to confuse whoever the enemy is supposed to be. We know, for instance, that both the US and the USSR regarded the other's ABM efforts as destabilizing advances meant to secure a first strike capability -- even if one was certain that the system would fail you couldn't trust the side that was building it to recognize its faults. (Ronald Reagan was the only guy on earth who regarded such systems as benign.) There are other problems, like response time. In order to have a chance of working, response has to be pretty automatic, which runs the risk of taking the decision of starting a war away from the chain of command -- a problem that is all that much worse given that the likelihood of a glitch is greater than the odds of an actual attack. Your economic points are valid enough. It's certainly cheaper to defeat an ABM system than it is to build one, which is yet another reason it's impossible to build a working system against a determined, resourceful foe. On the other hand, rocket science is rocket science, and few nations are actually any good at it (or for that matter B-2-like bombers). More likely a relatively poor nation would try to circumvent rather than overwhelm the system, in which case the economic differential is a moot point, and the system is even more unworkable. It's also worth noting that in the US missile defense has evolved (i.e., has been molded by selection pressures) mostly as a form of graft. The companies who build it are rewarded for their political clout and are not punished for failures. The US has deep pockets, but nothing that can't be wasted by companies like Boeing. And how deep for how long is a serious question. As for your rogue state scenario, I think you'll find that the critical issue isn't how perfectly defended we are -- no real way to do that, and certainly not with a hacked missile defense shield -- but how aggressive (or reckless) we choose to be. The US was not deterred from attacking Iraq by chemical and biological weapons -- real in 1991, mythical in 2003; on the contrary, Saddam Hussein was deterred from using them. The US has very daunting conventional military force, and if the other side wants to play nuclear, the US can bring that on too, faster and harder than any other nation. Such a strategy may be riskier once the opponent has nuclear weapons, but no recent US president (except maybe Reagan) seems to have been squeamish about sacrificing American lives. On the other hand, there are no rogue states like you mention. No nation can conquer its neighbors and become "a great power." Every such occupation costs more than it's worth. (Iraq taking Kuwait might have been an exception, but Kuwait is contiguous with Iraq, really the same people and culture, and small enough to be manageable -- India taking Goa was a similar example but nobody cared about that.) Nobody has figured out how to practice nuclear blackmail. I suppose you could say that Israel is free to bomb Syria and Lebanon, but Israel's conventional forces have ample deterrence, and Israel doesn't flaunt its bomb. Similarly, the US has fought many wars without bringing nuclear weapons to the battlefield, and has caused incredible amounts of damage. Nuclear weapons are at best difficult and awkward to use. As for terrorism, there are plenty of options besides regime change, and often regime change is a bad strategy. North Korea, for instance, is an awful mess, but you'd have to be a really crackpot pseudo-humanitarian to think invasion is the answer. To sum up, I think missile defense is an insane investment intended to produce a set of undesirable policy options that are unwise and fraught with danger. I see it as a very stupid and unnerving thing to pursue.
I think it's extremely unlikely, almost unthinkable. This has much to do with how Israel's security elites view themselves, and it's not that they're too "moral" to do such a deed so much as that they're too professional. The endstate they want is for the Palestinians to be ground down and invisible -- "an utterly defeated people" -- but more important they really don't want an endstate. The conflict is what holds Israel together, what gives Israelis their identity, and what gives the security elites their unique societal status. It's not surprising they don't want to give that up. On the other hand, if the elites did decide to implement a final solution, I don't doubt that it would be substantially popular among Israelis -- probably only a big minority right now, but it wouldn't be hard to uncork enough terror to sway a majority. One thing to understand is that most Israelis have been systematically terrorized all of their lives -- not by Palestinians, although they've done their part, but by the Holocaust culture, military indoctrination, religious study, all-pervasive hasbara. A good picture of the gap between what the elites know and what the masses fear can be gleaned from Tom Segev's 1967, although since then both sides have gotten much nastier. There are no shortage of political demagogues and "willing executioners" in Israel, but it would take an extreme fluke to flip the elites. For what it's worth, Israel is a pariah state already -- maybe not a North Korea, but the comparisons to South Africa are, if anything, too generous. The more the Palestinians try to court world opinion -- as opposed to trying to fight their way out of their cage -- the more bizarre Israel looks and the more isolated it becomes. That may matter little to the masses who can't see themselves, but the elites will eventually face a self-identity crisis as traditional allies like Europe and the US turn on them. If this really were an existential conflict, they might decide to go down an isolationist path, like Myanmar, but the conflict isn't like that. There's a straightforward deal on the table which would leave the elites secure in a slightly smaller Israel, and if the choice was that or Myanmar they'd be unprofessional not to take it. It will, of course, be Israel's choice: no one's going to impose regime change on them. But South Africa was in a similar situation, and chose to be part of the world rather than apart from the world. I actually think most rogue states would lean that way if given a self-respecting chance. Building anti-missile shields to ensure a nation can't take any recourse against you while you pound them back to the stone age is a crude, expensive, and ultimately ineffective way to solve such problems. Let me add a little more on missile defense. First, recall that in the days and weeks before Sept. 11, 2001, Bush's top priority (having passed his tax cuts) was getting Congress to approve funding for major expansion of anti-missile defense. One of the first conversations we overheard when we went out to lunch in Brooklyn that day was someone saying, "boy, too bad we don't have that anti-missile defense system." I don't recall anyone rejoining with, "oh, come on, the anti-missile defense system is only for real, serious attacks." Fred Kaplan has a good chapter on anti-missile defense in Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. In particular, he says (p. 79):
And (p. 85):
And he follows this with various examples from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the setback that shook Nixon into negotiating the ABM Treaty (pp. 89-90):
I considered working the latter story into my response. In particular, I thought about comparing Bell's scruples to the companies that have been working on Star Wars since Reagan came in. Another interesting sidelight is a story from James Carroll's House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power. In the early 1960s McNamara set up the in-house Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to sort through all the crap the CIA and the military brass were passing off as intelligence. The first head of the DIA was Carroll's father, Lt. Gen. Joseph Carroll, who remained in charge until Nixon's Defense Secretary, Melvin Laird, fired him in 1969. The reason? Carroll refused to remove a statement from an intelligence estimate that said that the Soviet Union wasn't pursuing a first strike capability. Why? Because the statement was needed to justify Laird's ABM system (i.e., the same one Bell decided wouldn't work). Also worth reading is Chalmers Johnson's Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, which focuses especially on space-based weapons schemes (e.g., p. 216):
In fact, he gives an example of a doomsday weapon: a rocket that could launch "a dumptruck full of gravel" into orbit, where it would suffice to destroy every satellite, including the NSA's and the military's eyes and ears, as well as most of our global telecommunications bandwidth, plus handy things like GPS. Missile defense would also produce space debris, starting with the test phase. Tuesday, February 2. 2010Quoting ProtinI got a short piece of mail from Art Protin in New Zealand:
Art was still in New Jersey at the time. I drove to New York the first week of September, 2001, and dropped my car off at his house in Madison for safekeeping (and cheap parking) before taking the train into the city. I had stopped to see friends on the way out, and expected to see more on the way back, but my main purpose was to hook up with Robert Christgau and build his website. Laura flew to New York for a short rendez-vous. We did some sightseeing, and she was scheduled to fly back to Wichita on the 11th. Didn't happen, as you know. We were staying with a friend in Brooklyn when the planes hit the World Trade Center. From our perch above Grand Army Plaza, we could see the flaming towers and an endless parade of shocked people trudging home. Laura eventually got out, as did our host, Liz, leaving me alone in the apartment. We spent the first few days largely glued to the TV, an indication of the horrors to come. I recall John Major pointing out that Britain could teach America a few things about terrorism, and a smiling Benjamin Netanyahu who couldn't help but opine that this was good news for Israel. I recall Hillary Clinton standing on the Capitol steps daring them to come back and finish her off. I recall clips of Palestinians celebrating, and grainy black/white of a rocket attack in Kabul fueling speculation that Bush had already started to strike back: "America Strikes Back" replaced "America Under Attack" as the theme script on the bottom of the television screen. After Laura and Liz left, I shut the TV down. I spent two, maybe three weeks in New York: wandering the streets and bookstores -- remarkably empty of any relevant books; I went to some worried peace demonstrations; I hacked the website together; I saw friends and attended to some family matters -- my niece, Lucy Fishman, was killed at work in the WTC, and we were all shocked and despondent over that. Still, it was probably the least worst place to be at the time. It was, after all, real -- unlike the hysterical war fever whipped up all over the rest of America. When I finally left New York, I took the train to Jersey City, and Art drove in and picked me up. He asked me what my thoughts were on "9-1-1" -- the first time I had ever heard it referred to as that. I don't remember what I said, but recall that he saw sending troops to Afghanistan as falling into a trap. It wasn't inevitable at the time, although we now know that Bush never considered not going to war -- that he was itching to play his commander-in-chief role for all the political capital, not to mention glory, he could muster. And the preëmptive attacks on peaceniks and pragmatists had already begun, so relentless and dogmatic that Susan Sontag got trampled for wondering whether the definition of "cowardice" really was hijacking planes and smashing them into buildings. That Bin Laden saw 9/11 as a trap to lure the US into war in Afghanistan isn't surprising. The notion of Afghanistan as the "graveyard of empires" is a little overworked. Britain and the Soviet Union failed mostly due to internal rot -- the economic folly of empire did them more harm than the nicks and bruises of primitive arms wielded by desperate fighters. The more apt formulation is Jonathan Schell's "unconquerable world." Still, the US is only slightly less vulnerable to the same rot -- the net effect of being able to hand on longer is that we wind up suffering more in the end. Even before I got Art's mail, I had planned on posting a similar extract from Omar Bin Laden's PR tour, this one published in the Feb. 4, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone (p. 70):
Osama bin Laden is probably less disappointed with Obama these days, for while he isn't as knee-jerk trigger-happy as McCain, he reasons his way to the same insane conclusions. There are people who would argue that Obama is the "same as he ever was" -- Paul Krugman used that title for a post -- but I wonder whether that Somali pirate incident early in his term wasn't a turning point. Obama approved sniper attacks that killed pirates holding a ship captain. In all likelihood, that was the first time Obama got so close to blood on his hands, and it played well in the press -- made him hero of the day. Since then his favored weapon has been the only slightly less intimate drone-fired rockets, which he has used even more promiscuously than Bush did. Regardless of immediate satisfactions, the one thing Obama can rest assured of is that he will never be criticized by Republicans for digging a deeper hole in Afghanistan. After all, they are the party that wants to see the US government fail, and nothing the state can do is more guaranteed of wasteful failure than war in Afghanistan. In a follow-up note, Art added:
Art just emigrated to New Zealand, a rather extreme move that is certainly not a vote of confidence in the future of the USA. Some useful links on the US military budget (and related topics):
PS: Juan Cole links to this piece about how Osama bin Laden dreamed of enticing the US to fight him in Afghanistan, and how he welcomed the US invasion of Iraq. Sunday, January 31. 2010More KillersThinking about yesterday's post, I came up with a few more things to say about assassination policies. One thing that's notable about Israel is that the program of targeted assassinations against Palestinian leaders took off right after Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Jew. Rabin's assassin wasn't what we'd call a "lone madman"; he was the all-but-inevitable response to a public campaign by right-wing rabbis calling for Rabin's blood. The campaign worked so well that Rabin's party and successor lost the following election, allowing Benjamin Netanyahu to take power and substantially wreck the Oslo Peace Process. In other words, assassination worked, both for its immediate intentions and as a warning to any future Israeli politicians who might be tempted to "give land for peace." So it's little wonder that Israelis see assassination as effective policy. Of course, assassinations go way back in Israeli history, all the way to Israel's founding war in 1948 when UN mediator Folke Bernadotte and UN observer André Serot were assassinated by future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's Lehi organization. While Israel likes to talk about all the "terrorists" they've knocked off, the occupation of peacemaker has proven every bit as precarious. One can only speculate as to how much historical impact Israeli assassinations have had, although at a bare minimum they have often served as pretexts for further killing. And it should be obvious by now that the idea that Israel can subdue Palestinian resistance by decapitating its leaders is impossible folly. Rabin is a trickier case: on the one hand, he was extremely cynical in his Oslo machinations -- shaking hands with Arafat while at the same time continuing to grow the settlements that produced his killer. Still, no subsequent Israeli politician has risked even going as far as Rabin promised toward trading "land for peace." It is easy to imagine anyone trying to follow in Rabin's footsteps meeting the same fate. As it happens, Israel evidently managed to kill Hamas leader Mahmoud al Mabhouh a few days ago, committing the murder in Dubai, one of the Arab countries Israel has had relatively friendly relations with. For more details and analysis, see Paul Woodward: Hamas to Israel. This sort of thing should be deeply embarrassing and discrediting, but with Israel in this age of shoot first, talk never, it's likely to be taken as business as usual. No doubt you can even find someone to call you antisemitic if you doubt Israel's right to murder their enemies in foreign countries. One more thing that occurs to me: it is striking how opposite the US Bill of Rights is to counterterrorism dogma, but it should not be surprising. The Bill of Rights was written as much as anything to express Americans' disgust with British Occupation. Nearly every specific right contrasts explicitly with British policy in attempting to suppress rebellion. British Occupation law evolved somewhat over the following century-and-a-half, up to the legal system Britain used to rule over Palestine, which Israel kept pretty much intact, also to rule over Palestine. But the essential policies were recognized early and maintained to the end of the Empire, basically because the British never found anything that worked better. The word "terrorist" is a relatively recent invention, but as William R. Polk shows in Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq, the revolt that led to the Bill of Rights had all the markings of the insurgency Israel has struggled to put down for more than 60 years. We've lost track of this because we've lost track of the rights our nation was founded on. And this has happened less because fascist-leaning politicians like to pick on the Bill of Rights than because we've increasingly come to identify with occupation regimes -- such as we are running in Iraq and Afghanistan, and such as our model and hero Israel. This is the essential background for Glenn Greenwald: Nostalgia for Bush/Cheney radicalism. It seems ironic that Greenwald should wax nostalgic for Ronald Reagan's recognition of legal restraints during a period when there was arguably more terrorism around the world than we have now -- especially given all the laws Reagan broke in the Iran-Contra affair. But Greenwald is right that Obama is producing a far more egregious record. The difference is that Obama inherited a couple of failing occupations, and conventional counterinsurgency theory depends on trampling precisely those rights that our Constitution is based upon. How far we've sunk since Reagan, as documented here, is troubling, but even more so is Greenwald's insistence that Obama has gone even further astray from constitutional principles than Bush/Cheney did. Part of this can be chalked up to heckling from the idiot gallery, as in the notion that we're coddling terrorists by putting them on trial. Part is no doubt the inertia of a state that for the last eight years has primarily been shaped around the selection pressures of occupying hostile countries. But still we're left with the real question of whether Obama's abdication of the principles behind our Bill of Rights reflects his lack of will or his lack of interest. Both prospects are troubling. Saturday, January 30. 2010Killers in AmericaGlenn Greenwald: Presidential assassinations of U.S. citizens: I don't normally pay a lot of attention to lawyers who get all worked up over how Bush (and now Obama) trample the constitution allegedly to keep us safe from the terrorists that American policies work so hard to motivate, but for some reason this article struck a nerve. I'm bothered not merely by a hit list to take out American citizens, although the constitution is pretty explicit in that case -- look for the words "due process" and pay some attention to everything that surrounds it. Equally bothersome is the hit list to take out foreigners. I suppose that if you had a Congressional declaration of war -- which we don't -- that would be constitutional, but it wouldn't be any more justifiable. I find it difficult to think of any circumstances where the any state would be justified in assassinating anyone -- your own citizens or foreigners. Not too long ago most Americans agreed with that. Certainly we've had more than our share of politically significant murders. (In fact, a jury just convicted one such murderer this week here in Wichita, something that was handled with constitutional due process, as opposed to, say, obliterating the terrorist's car with a Hellfire missile.) We had also seemed to learn a lesson that having our government going around trying to kill foreign politicos was either embarrassing (as in the Kennedys' obsession with Castro) or worse (cf. Vietnam, Chile, Indonesia). Nor did we appreciate it when the guy we empowered in Chile started blowing up people in Washington, DC. Until 9/11 and Bush, it was illegal for US presidents to order assassinations; now it's in vogue. What happened? One part of it is the neocons' Israel envy. Israel has practiced "targeted assassination" for many years now, and they've gotten increasingly sloppy about collateral damage. (Whereas once they took out an enemy with a booby-trapped telephone, nowadays they think nothing about dropping a couple of 1,000 lb. bombs on a house full of children.) But it's also just sunk deep into the culture, almost casually so. I'm reading David Neiwert's The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, and he has plenty of examples -- like Ann Coulter wishing Timothy McVeigh had blown up the New York Times instead of that federal building in Oklahoma City, or urging us to invade Arab countries and kill their leaders. (This was back in 2001, before we actually did just that, so it's hard to laugh her off as a humorist.) Friday, December 11. 2009Nobel WarriorI've often felt that it would be much more straightforward to give a Nobel Prize for War than one for Peace. The criteria would be much simpler and self-evident, and the competition would be stiff enough to ensure a steady stream of contenders. Moreover, you'd eliminate such embarrassing contradictions as giving a peace prize to someone consistently associated with war throughout his career -- Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson come to mind, by far the most belligerent US presidents of the first half of the 20th century. Still, virtually no past Nobel Peace Prize recipient has embarrassed the prize more quickly and more thoroughly than Barack Obama this year. Since being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize he has launched the steepest escalation of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan in eight years of fruitless fighting, increased a US military budget that already accounts for more than half of the world's military funding, and backpedaled on every sentiment he had expressed on human rights, liberty, justice, and freedom from the fear of war. Adding insult to injury, he took the opportunity in Oslo to lay out his philosophy of righteous war based on a doctrine of American righteousness that is laughably at odds with the last sixty years of history. He could just as well been awarded a Nobel Prize for War, and his speech would have worked just as well. Paul Woodward: How America won the Nobel Peace Prize. Speech analysis, including the stock line about how we were attacked on 9/11, and how that makes our war in Afghanistan just. This keeps being accepted thoughtlessly, but the basic facts are:
I've never read a convincing "just war" theory, but most efforts I have seen to sanctify war due to special conditions of cause and conduct wind up confirming that the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are in fact unjust. That Obama didn't reach the same conclusion just exposes the shallowness of his thinking. Woodward's conclusion:
Juan Cole: Top 5 ways Obama can redeem his Nobel. Still searching for a silver lining, Cole proposes:
Right now, I'd say that only one of those five (no war against Iran) is better than a 50-50 proposition. The use of drones over Pakistan has increased under Obama, with another event much bragged about this week -- killing some alleged Al Qaeda muckety muck and a bunch of fellow travelers. The only thing that keeps this from having the lowest odds is that Obama could be vetoed by Pakistan and (less likely) Afghanistan, where it is political poison. The others are long shots: the US has been building infrastructure for permanent presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the hawks don't seem to be much concerned with such deadlines. As for a Palestinian state, Obama will have to buck a lot of conventional wisdom and political pressure, which thus far he not only hasn't shown the backbone for -- he's acting more like its prisoner (cf. Stockholm Syndrome). Andrew Sullian: The Tragedy of Hope. Here's a more sympathetic reading of Obama's Nobel speech -- key point is Sullivan's observation that "Obama is far more conservative than his predecessor." That means far more to Sullivan, who likes to think of himself as a conservative and a realist, than it does to me. I don't doubt that all this carefully considered nuance has some rigor and value, but it doesn't take long to get reduced to simplistic slogans, like Obama's neocon-approved syllogism: Evil, Nazis, Al Qaeda, wage war in Afghanistan. Even if you do believe that there is Evil in the world, it's hard to see how joining it helps. Tuesday, December 8. 2009Recycling HistoryMatthew Yglesias: Strange Victory: More opining on the Iraq surge. I still believe that if you look at the timeline on the surge, you'll find elevated violence all the way from the start to Petraeus's congressional testimony, then a big drop in the violence level a month or so later, when effectively the surge was called off. We now know that the main reasons for the reduced fighting was the Mahdi Army ceasefire and the turning of Sunni Awakening groups against Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and that those key strategic shifts occurred before the surge itself got underway. What actually happened, then, was two contrary trends: aggression against US forces was reduced diplomatically, except inasmuch as AQI Iraq may have tried to pick up the slack from other Sunni groups to fortify its claim as the main resistance to US occupation; meanwhile US aggression increased local resistance to the point that overall violence was still up. When the US surge sloshed back, the reduced violence trend was able to predominate. The best face you can put on the surge is that it may have focused pressure on beating down AQI, but even there it's more likely that the Sunni Awakening had more effect. Still, it's become dogma among the right punditocracy and the whole military propaganda arm to credit the Surge with turning Iraq around. And there's nothing like misunderstanding the last war to get you off on the wrong foot next time. The military's solution for Afghanistan is not just the usual 30,000 extra troops. They hope to duplicate as much of the script as possible, even though there are differences in almost every detailed respect -- except, of course, those 30,000 troops. So the interesting part of this post isn't "the hardened conventional wisdom about the surge in Iraq." It's the quote from Brian Katulis interviewing Mowaffaq Al-Rubaie, who was al-Maliki's national security adviser during the surge:
Of course, Afghanistan is different from Iraq. In Afghanistan it's the rural areas, especially the Pashtun-dominated rural areas, you'll want to keep U.S. troops away from, because that's where most of the people live. Paul Woodward: Obama wanted a surge, he's getting a surge, and it feels good: A short summary of the New York Times 4,660 word article on Obama's decision process for Afghanistan. One thing from the Times article I found striking was the reference to Gordon Goldstein's McGeorge Bundy book, Lessons in Disaster. In it, Bundy observes that the dominant characteristics of the two presidents he served under were that Kennedy wanted to be seen as smart, whereas Johnson wanted not to be seen as a coward. As we go through Obama's process, we see that he bought into both sides: he wants to be seen as smart, but also wants not to be a coward. His big problem is that there is no middle ground -- certainly none on the far side of the globe. Wednesday, December 2. 2009Fascist NationMatthew Yglesias: A Center-Right Nation. If you discern that Obama's decision to send 30,000 additional troops to the front in Afghanistan is an act of political discretion, you need to acknowledge the political forces you're trying to appease. The fact that Obama didn't order up the troops immediately on the recommendation of the military officers in the field suggests that he at least didn't automatically believe that more troops and more money are the obvious solutions to problems that even the military brass agree are fundamentally political -- unlike, say, people like John McCain, simpletons who always cheer whatever the generals and admirals tell them. Obama certainly knows better, but he's gone along anyway. I suppose you can argue that he's always been a true believer in the Afghanistan War, but you can also argue that his position all along has been conventional political thinking. Back in 2001 there was a popular rush to war, and staking Afghanistan as the "right war" compared to Iraq in 2003 proved shrewd without exposing himself as a peacenik. It's not clear even now that his position isn't primarily shrewd politically even though the war in Afghanistan has become vastly unpopular. The problem is that too many people, even ones who disparage the wars, still cherish the military. Yglesias takes this as confirming the canard that the US is a "center-right nation." I'm more inclined to conclude that this shows that the US is a fascist nation, at least in the core sense that fascists love uniforms and inflicting violence against enemies both foreign and domestic. Yglesias contrasts Obama's political quandry in disagreeing with the military to other hypothetical scenarios:
The thing I find galling about Obama's escalation here is that he's squandered an opportunity to try to turn this imbalance around. He is, after all, president of the nation and leader of the party that has substantial majorities in both houses of Congress. He has approval polls over 50%, and more than 50% of all Americans oppose an expanded war in Afghanistan. Back during the 2008 campaign he had an eloquent line about wanting to change how Americans think about war. Yesterday he had a golden opportunity to do just that, and he wasted it. He repeated all the hoary lines about 9/11 and safe havens and how the national interest involves bombing Afghan farmers but doesn't entail providing health care insurance to 50 million Americans. He went on and on about how America is a force for freedom around the world, about how we seek no spoils, how we're never an occupier -- news, I'm sure, to the Philippines, Cuba, most of Central America, and today the hosts of over 800 US military bases scattered all around the world. The low point was when Obama proclaimed his decision not as president but as commander-in-chief. Not only has he continued most of Bush's policies, he's even adopting Bush's fantasies. The Constitution specifies that the governing body responsible for deciding whether and when we go to war is Congress, but a long series of presidents have usurped this fundamental law, to the extent that war policies are scarcely ever debated in our once-democratic institutions. The great irony here is that while it's become fashionable on the right to accuse Obama of fascism, the one instance where he can actually decide policy dictatorially is the one he chooses to implement the right's policy. Make no mistake about this: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, indeed all the wars big and small the US fights abroad -- the force-feeding of the military, the elevation of military security over social and economic security -- are agendas to bolster the political right and to hamstring the left. They work on many levels, ranging from propagandizing martial values to sucking discretionary spending away from social and economic needs. If Obama had anything like the progressive agenda he is often charged with, he'd realize the trap he is setting for himself and for his supporters, and he'd use his formidable powers to turn this country away from war and toward peace and social justice. He'd do this if for no other reason than because his political life depends on it. But he's can't grasp this fundamental fact, probably because he can't conceive of changing anything profound. The notion that Obama would emerge as some sort of transformational president always struck me as fanciful, still even I had no idea how hollow he'd turn out to be. Wednesday, November 18. 2009SuicideNancy A Youssef: Suicides on record pace in Army; reasons unclear. Some body counts: 102 in 2006, 115 in 2007, 140 in 2008, another 140 with a month-plus to go this year. Of course that doesn't include Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who acted plenty suicidal in killing 13 soldiers at Ft. Hood. There's more to this than shell shock: "About a third were by soldiers who had never deployed to war zones, and 40 percent of those who committed suicide had seen mental health specialists." The official shortfall of reasons invites speculation. My own is that while a peacetime army may just be a job, constant engagement in war is at odds with every desired norm in American life. It used to be that young people could see military service as a stepping stone to a normal life -- providing useful skills and experience, discipline, after which they would get jobs and build families. More and more it's a dead-end job, not to mention a deadly one, tearing them away from family and community that become increasingly difficult to relate to. And it certainly doesn't help that the wars themselves are pointless and helpless -- increasingly so as counterinsurgency doctrine takes hold, putting soldiers in quandries where their own instincts for self-preservation are recognized as counterproductive. That the military shrinks aren't much help is no surprise. They have an intrinsic conflict of interest between their pateients and their employer's need to keep the war functioning -- not that they've ever been much good at either, even if you discount Hasan as an example. I don't have the figures handy, but there are many more suicides of ex-soldiers, plus various other crimes -- most likely far in excess of background statistics. Soldiers have always had a hard time adapting to normal civilian life, not least because the skills and instincts that are selected for in war are of such little use in peace. But I think there's more to this. Wars are still common around the world, but they are far removed from everyday experience here in America. Roosevelt effectively militarized civil society in the US during WWII, but ever since then the gap betwen military and civilian cultures has broadened, until today when -- despite much jingoism from politicians and pundits -- they have become totally estranged. I can't say that that's a bad thing. Even though America has had more than its share of wars, up through WWII we always acknowledged that war was an abnormal period, something to be reversed and recovered from as quickly as possible. The Cold War, like earlier imperial obsessions of powers like Britain and France, changed that by turning war into a harmless but perpetual spectator sport -- something that happened to other peoples in other lands, even though we usually had a betting interest and a participation increasingly carried out by mercenaries. Casualties are risks of the trade, making them relatively easy to rationalize even though most of us find them unfathomable -- hard, that is, to imagine why anyone would pursue such risky trade. Suicide, on the other hand, suggests that the practice of soldiering is not just risk: it's profoundly self-destructive. I don't know whether such statistics will move the general public -- least of all that segment that claims to honor the troops -- but they're certainly raising some concerns within the military. One of the main reasons the US got out of Vietnam was that the war was tearing the army to shreds from the inside -- the drug abuse, criminality, most of all the fragging. It looks like we're approaching that point again, even with the added insulation of an "all volunteer" army. If the shocks of suicide and murder convince this military to pull back from its hopeless misadventures overseas, at least some US soldiers will not have died in vain. That's more than the returning dead from Afghanistan and Iraq can hope for. And if they convince Americans to put a halt to the dehumanizing and self-destructive enterprise of waging foreign wars, so much the better. Bureaucracies are known for putting self-preservation above all else, but sometimes we have to recognize when one is no longer needed. It's time to mothball the Dept. of Defense before they hurt themselves, and us, even worse. Tuesday, November 17. 2009Jockeying AfghanistanMatthew Yglesias: Public Skeptical of Afghanistan Troop Increase: The interesting figure here isn't the lack of enthusiasm for digging even deeper graves in Afghanistan; it's the partisan breakdown, with 63% of Republicans favoring escalation vs. 26% of Democrats, and 60% of Democrats ready to bring troops home vs. 26% of Republicans. We've known most of this all along. Rank and file Democrats are to the left of their elected leaders on most issues, with war and health care and banking regulation and the pervasive influence of money conspicuous. The interesting thing is the split within the Republican ranks: the antiwar block is still sizable even though the party leadership is so firmly prowar a big chunk of the hawks may just be playing follow the leader. Ask yourself why? Sure, Republicans are more enamored of war, but more importantly war is their preferred stance for domestic politics. Having lost the Congress and the presidency, they've made no gestures toward reconciliation. They're engaged in scorched earth retreat mode, sniping at Obama whenever possible, resisting every effort Obama makes at carefully crafted consensus compromise, taking their "tea party" theatrics to the streets to make up in volume what they lack in numbers. Their main thrust has been nihilism: given how brazenly they've prayed for Obama's failure, it would be sensible to take their fervor for more war in Afghanistan as a cynical attempt to trap Obama: on the one hand, more war would discredit him with the base of his party; on the other, the more Obama invests in the war, the more personal its inevitable failure becomes. Republicans have a lot of Bush legacy to get the public to forget, and one way to do that is to foist responsibility (for war, economy, etc.) onto Obama. You can see here why Obama's people are reading books about Vietnam. The wars may be different, but the political playbook is the same -- except it really isn't. That would be clearer if Obama ever decides to get out in front and lead his party, instead of casting sidewise glances at it while pretending he embodies a consensus that doesn't exist. But even if he doesn't lead he may still survive. This time the Silent Majority is against the Republicans. Saturday, November 14. 2009Back From the OzarksGot back from my week-long driving trip, a loop through Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Saw four cousins, ages 66-84, and my last aunt remaining on my mother's side of the family, aged 94. Only one of my stops had a working internet connection, so I've mostly been out of touch -- which I can't say I missed. Didn't listen to much. Didn't even get much reading done. Was good to see them all, to talk about old times, and to remember other mutual loved ones, not least ones no longer with us. We went to two cemeteries, where three of my mother's seven siblings are buried. One thing I want to note is that, with little or no encouragement from me, all four cousins were strongly opposed to continuing the war in Afghanistan. One was a political science professor with well tuned liberal sensitivities who came of age trying to stay out of Vietnam. Another is nowhere near as savvy but picked up a populist edge from her father back in the Great Depression and has rarely if ever been fooled by a war pitch. The other two are more surprising: Oklahoma vets from WWII-Korea, one devoutly religious with a bunch of active military in his family, the other a hard-working butcher who owned his own business. Both felt strongly that we have no business over there, and that if Afghans want to fight we should just stay out of their way. I'm not sure this consensus holds for subsequent generations. I didn't go around canvassing, but did hear one blanket condemnation of all Muslims and I got a lecture on premillennial dispensationism, something I've heard reports of but have rarely (at least since my paternal grandfather died) been able to associate with otherwise sane acquaintances. In fact, there is an awful lot of ignorance and misinformation going around, backed by unshakeable confidence in sources as dubious as Fox News and the Word of God. That anyone ever manages to see through all that fog is remarkable, mostly hinging on simple concepts like "we have no business being there" or "other people should fight their own wars." Tuesday, November 10. 2009Deficit Neutrality for War?Good line in a Matthew Yglesias post (the part I italicized -- the rest is for context):
The war isn't now, nor has it ever been, played politically on a level playing field. It was never subject to CBO budget estimates. No one behind it ever fretted about its budget impact. And it's not as if we hadn't been down this same road before in Vietnam. The post, by the way, is about Robert D. Kaplan, chief warmonger at The Atlantic. Saturday, November 7. 2009Homeland SecurityFort Hood, Texas, an Army major, a psychologist with considerable experience treating post-traumatic stress disorder in soldiers back from tours of Iraq and Afghanistan, himself assigned to ship out to Afghanistan, goes on a shooting spree, killing 13, injuring 31. He is, perhaps significantly, a muslim, one increasingly suspicious of the US wars in muslim lands. Islamophobes have seized on this point. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that they are right: that every muslim in the US armed services, and for that matter in the US at large, is a ticking time bomb, liable at any moment to turn in his (or her) seemingly normal life for a final act of terrorism. Isn't the stated rationale of US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to prevent acts of terrorism just like that? Then consider this shooting -- about the same practical effect as a median suicide bomber -- as evidence. Here at least, very clearly, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has made us less safe at home. One thing I'm struck by in watching the coverage is that nearly everywhere the cameras turn they run into more muslims -- many and perhaps most native citizens like Hasan. The special profiling that Fox broadcasters have been calling for would be impractical even if it wasn't unwise -- evidently Hasan himself was subject to a good deal of harrassment, and, well, you see how much good that did. Any effort at more effectively policing American muslims is going to drive more over the edge. (Of course, the same thing happens when we try to police Afghan muslims, but they're in Afghanistan, which would be out of harms way if we weren't there harrassing them.) On the other hand, given that further policing is both impractical and unwise, the only real thing we can do about the problem is to reduce the conflict: stop sending more troops and building more bases, start bring troops and materiel back home, change the rules of engagement to be less aggressive. One thing we're very bad at is estimating the compound effects of war. A lot of US soldiers have come home damaged and have wound up killing themselves and/or others. Hasan's case is anomalous in several respects: he hadn't gone, but had treated many people who did, and he evidently had an unusual degree of empathy with the native casualties of these wars -- which quite frankly were little more than the frivolous vanities of politicians intoxicated with their sense of power. Still, those costs add up, even if we never learn how to reckon them. One more thing to take home is that the "all volunteer" army needs to let people out at any time for any reason. One thing we forget is that one of the main turning points which convinced the military to quit Vietnam was the fragging of officers by draftees. (Such events were certainly underreported. I had a cousin who was shot and killed inside his tank, allegedly by his own gun accidentally discharging, a story that nobody quite believed.) If making such allowances makes it harder to start or sustain future wars, so much the better. No war is worth fighting if you can't get people to fight it willingly. Indeed, free choice in the matter provides a sanity check, which is something we need now as much as ever. |
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