Glenn Greenwald on permanent war and Andrew Bacevich on the IS chapter

Glenzilla talks about the state of the War on Terror in Key Democrats, Led by Hillary Clinton, Leave No Doubt That Endless War Is Official U.S. Doctrine The Intercept 10/07/2014:

Leon Panetta, the long-time Democratic Party operative who served as Obama’s Defense Secretary and CIA Director, said this week of Obama’s new bombing campaign: “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war.” Only in America are new 30-year wars spoken of so casually, the way other countries speak of weather changes. He added that the war “will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.” And elsewhere: not just a new decades-long war with no temporal limits, but no geographic ones either. He criticized Obama – who has bombed 7 predominantly Muslim countries plus the Muslim minority in the Phillipines (almost double the number of countries Bush bombed) – for being insufficiently militaristic, despite the fact that Obama officials themselves have already instructed the public to think of The New War “in terms of years.”

Then we have Hillary Clinton (whom Panetta gushed would make a “great” president). At an event in Ottawa yesterday, she proclaimed that the fight against these “militants” will “be a long-term struggle” that should entail an “information war” as “well as an air war.” The new war, she said, is “essential” and the U.S. shies away from fighting it “at our peril.” Like Panetta (and most establishment Republicans), Clinton made clear in her book that virtually all of her disagreements with Obama’s foreign policy were the by-product of her view of Obama as insufficiently hawkish, militaristic and confrontational.

At this point, it is literally inconceivable to imagine the U.S. not at war. It would be shocking if that happened in our lifetime. U.S. officials are now all but openly saying this. “Endless War” is not dramatic rhetorical license but a precise description of America’s foreign policy. []my emphasis in bold]

If you look hard and know what to look for, you can detect "libertarian" elements in Glenn's article. But the analysis is basically spot on. We do have a state of permanent war.

Andrew Bacevich, author of Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (2010), writes about the Obama Non-War War chapter of the permanent war in Even if we defeat the Islamic State, we’ll still lose the bigger war Washington Post 10/03/2014. Bacevich, an historian and Catholic thinker heavily influenced by Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's outlook on foreign policy, applies his skeptical-minded view to the prospects of the war against IS:

... even as the United States persists in its determination to pacify the Greater Middle East, the final verdict is already in. U.S. military power has never offered an appropriate response to whatever ails the Islamic world. We’ve committed our troops to a fool’s errand.

And worse, the errand is also proving unnecessary. With abundant North American energy reserves now accessible — all that shale oil and fracked gas — we don’t need the Persian Gulf oil that ostensibly made our post-1980 military exertions imperative. For whatever reasons, Washington’s national security elites seem oblivious to the implications these resources have for policy in the Middle East.

No matter how long it lasts, America’s war for the Greater Middle East will end in failure. And when it does, Americans will discover that it was also superfluous.

Bacevich does not have the history-begins-today limitation that seems to infect our star pundits:

As America’s efforts to “degrade and ultimately destroy” Islamic State militants extend into Syria, Iraq War III has seamlessly morphed into Greater Middle East Battlefield XIV. That is, Syria has become at least the 14th country in the Islamic world that U.S. forces have invaded or occupied or bombed, and in which American soldiers have killed or been killed. And that’s just since 1980.

Let’s tick them off: Iran (1980, 1987-1988), Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011), Lebanon (1983), Kuwait (1991), Iraq (1991-2011, 2014-), Somalia (1992-1993, 2007-), Bosnia (1995), Saudi Arabia (1991, 1996), Afghanistan (1998, 2001-), Sudan (1998), Kosovo (1999), Yemen (2000, 2002-), Pakistan (2004-) and now Syria. Whew. ...

We must hope for victory over the Islamic State. But even if achieved, that victory will not redeem but merely prolong a decades-long military undertaking that was flawed from the outset. When the 14th campaign runs its course, the 15th will no doubt be waiting, perhaps in Jordan or in a return visit to some unfinished battleground such as Libya or Somalia or Yemen.

Al Qa'ida's current leader publishes new directions for jihadis - but how much does it matter?

The terms "Al Qa'ida" and variants like "Al Qa'ida-affiliated organizations" is still widely used, even by writers and analysts very critical of the US government's and national-security industry's images of the danger level presented by violent Islamists.

But it's not at all clear to me that even groups that use "Al Qa'ida" as a brand name have much if any meaningful connection to some central organization that is a remnant of Osama bin Laden's organization of that name that staged the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. I sure wish we had better, more confidence-inspiring, critical-minded reporting from mainstream US media outlets that have substantial resources to pursue that kind of story.

Yassin Musharbash reports in Al-Kaidas Chef al-Sawahiri stellt neue Regeln auf Die Zeit 17.09.0213 about a new statement published by Ayman al-Zawahiri, presumed to be the top leader of whatever is left of Bin Laden's original organization. It doesn't sound like there is much of anything new or that offers any insight to any particular conflict or groups directly threatening the United States.

Musharbash notes that even among those with ideological affinities with "al Qa'ida", al-Zawahiri isn't seen as anything like the charismatic figure that Bin Laden once was. Presumably he needs to keep some prestige as encouragement for at least whoever may be helping him hide these days.

A statement from Osama bin Laden in, say, 2002, was obviously significant for whatever clues it might give to the organizations direction. And it was downright weird of the Cheney-Bush Administration to discourage American media from reporting on such statements in any detail.

But what Al-Zawahiri is saying in 2013? I'm not sure it makes much difference to anybody.

Tags: al qaida, terrorism, global war on terror

Obama and Bush

The one thing Dick Cheney couldn't do in the Bush Administration with his "dark side" policies of torture and violations of the laws of war was to have a subsequent Administration that validated those policies by either continuing them directly or by failing to prosecute known crimes. Obama did some of both for him. But the failure to prosecute the torture crimes is the most consequential.

Kevin Gosztola has useful things to say about Obama's laudatory comments for Shrub Bush today at the didication of the Bush Library in 'The World's Most Exclusive Club': Obama's Speech at the Bush Library Dedication FDL Dissenter 04/25/2013. Including this:

... today President Obama has more in common with former President George W. Bush than with Senator Barack Obama, who decided to run for president in the 2008 Election.

That is partly because Senator Barack Obama did not know what it would be like to be the most powerful man in the world. It is also because Obama has bought into many of Bush's counterterrorism policies and that has helped Bush’s legacy in ways that many of his supporters probably never imagined.

Former CIA director Michael Hayden, who served under Bush, has said, "Obama came to embrace Bush's positions. Both Bush and Obama said the country was at war. The enemy was al-Qaida. The war was global in nature. And the United States would have to take the fight to the enemy, wherever it may be." Former vice president Dick Cheney said in an NBC interview in January 2011, "In terms of a lot of the terrorism policies — the early talk, for example, about prosecuting people in the CIA who've been carrying out our policies — all of that's fallen by the wayside. I think he’s learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate." Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who authorized torture at Abu Ghraib, said in September 2011 Obama had accepted much of the Bush doctrine out of necessity.

Jack Goldsmith, who served as an Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) lawyer under Bush, wrote in 2009, "The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit." He argued, "Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric. This does not mean that the Obama changes are unimportant. Packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric, it turns out, are vitally important to the legitimacy of terrorism policies."

Thus, Obama has done what Bush could not do: he has taken policies that were unpopular or reviled and transformed them into something legitimate and acceptable. He also has made the "war on terrorism" more permanent by abandoning the phrase "war on terrorism" and relying on covert operations that involve targeted assassinations by drones or the outsourcing of detentions and interrogations to unsavory characters that national security agencies have allied themselves with (like, for example, in Somalia). [my emphasis]

Not a pretty picture.

Neither his foreign nor domestic policies on the whole have been as destructive as those of the Cheney-Bush Administration.

But he has also largely accepted the framing of both. The foreign policy strategy of world hegemony and not allowing any "peer competitor" country or alliances to arise remains, virtually insuring future wars like that in Afghanistan and more limited military interventions like those in Libya and Syria.

Tags: accountability for torture, barack obama, george w bush, global war on terror, torture

Al Qa'ida: Bin Laden's band or a mythological tradition?

Eric Schmitt and David Kirkpatrick provide more indications that "Al Qa'ida" in its various incarnations today is more a marketing label than anything meaningfully connected to the group led by Osama bin Laden that organized the 9/11 attacks in After Libya, Renewed Questions About the Potency of Al Qaeda New York Times 09/18/2012:

At the heart of the debate is the reality that whatever the continued ability of Al Qaeda or regional groups bearing its name to inflict damage on local or American interests, the terrifying power of its name has also given it a spectral second life as a kind of catchall for Islamist militants. Far-flung militants with little connection to the original group find the use of its name an easy way to exaggerate their threat, and politicians eager to campaign against them — whether in the United States Congress or Arab capitals — share that incentive.

"It is a ghost," said Fahmy Howeidy, an Egyptian commentator. "People here don’t believe that Al Qaeda is this huge scary thing that is moving everywhere and behind everything in the whole world. They think that is American propaganda." [my emphasis]

Obviously, violent groups targeting Americans are a real concern whether or not they use the marketing label "Al Qa'ida". But carrying on a world-wide Long War against a ghost doesn't really make sense.

For political leaders in the United States or the Arab world, both addressing audiences that may have little familiarity with the various schools of ultraconservative or militant Islam, “the big name — Al Qaeda — can mobilize people,” said Diaa Rashwan, an expert on Islamist movements at the state-funded Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “It is very difficult to use another name that people don’t know when you already have this brand.”

“Al Qaeda as an organization, as a command, it doesn’t exist,” Mr. Rashwan said. “There are no orders from Ayman Zawahri coming to jihadists in Libya or Sinai to make something,” though he added, “Since the death of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda has been in a sense reborn because some of its ideas and the model have inspired new militants.”

The extreme secrecy under which both the Bush and Obama Administration have conducted the "war on terror" doesn't make it easier to have a high level of confidence in their claims about the real or mythical "Al Qa'ida".

Tags: al qaida, global war on terror, war on terror

9/11 anniversary 2012

Austria's Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) posted this image of an election poster, presumably from 1945 just after Austria's liberation from Germany, on their Facebook page today. It's titled "11 Years of Fascism" with images of Adolf Hitler and the famous damaged facade of the Karl-Marx Haus of workers' residences that was damaged in the short but bitter Austria "civil war" of 1934 under the "corporate state" (Standestaat) dictatorship of Engelbert Dolfuss (1892-1934).

I doubt that they intended it to be any kind of comment on what has happened to civil liberties and respect for international law in the United States during the last 11 years. And "9/11! 9/11! 9/11!" has been the justification used for it.

It's worth remembering that basically one change in airline policy would have prevented the 9/11 attacks from going down as they did: reinforcing the doors to the pilot's cabin and changing the practice of having the pilots negotiate face-to-face with hijackers.

Obviously, any reasonable response to the 9/11 attacks would have strengthened other security measures, as well, such as the pre-boarding passenger screening.

But we got way more than that. We got a full-blown resumption of the Cold War with two hot wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) with the one in Afghanistan still going. Only this time The Enemy was a nuclear-armed super-power like the Soviet Union but a small band of terrorist that almost certainly no longer exist in anything like the form they did eleven years ago.

It appears that the major progress against the actual Al Qa'ida group of Osama bin Laden was in the early weeks of fighting in Afghanistan, when they were heavily concentrated in Afghanistan and were engaging in conventional battles against the US-backed and largely US-directed Northern Alliance supported by US airpower. If the Cheney-Bush Administration and its Defense Secretary Rummy (Donald Rumsfeld) had been more serious about getting Bin Laden, they might well have gotten him in the battle of Tora Bora in early 2002. Or at a minimum they could have wiped out virtually all his remaining well-trained cadres there.

Now, in addition to "Al Qa'ida" being the chief Enemy for our massive US military establishment and the industries that supply it at a healthy profit, we have a full-blown counter-terrorism industry with big bucks riding on continued public fear, rational or otherwise, of the present-day bogeyman called "Al Qa'ida". Because of the extreme levels of government secrecy under Cheney and Bush, intensified under the Obama Administration, it's virtually impossible for journalists or the general public to have a very good evaluation of the real threat from terrorism. But it's hard to imagine from what we do know that whatever terrorists groups are out there, even ones that have adopted the name "Al Qa'ida" in tribute to the original, that the actual organization that Bin Laden headed on 9/11/2001 continues to exist in any meaningful form.

And they weren't super-spies when they did exist. The 9/11 operation reportedly cost something like $250,000 altogether. They mainly exploited lax security procedures by the airlines, who then ran the pre-boarding passenger screening, and the indifference of the leaders of the Cheney-Bush Administration prior to eleven years ago today. Speaking of indifference, the New York Times just provided us more details of how little they cared about the actual threat of Al Qa'ida in 2001 prior to September 11: Kurt Eichenwald, The Deafness Before the Storm 09/10/2012.

In any case the Obama Administration continues to flog the threat of "Al Qa'ida". Bin Laden's much-celebrated death didn't diminish that. As of today, the federal National Counterintelligence Center's (NCTC) page defining Al Qa'ida reads:

Despite leadership losses, al-Qa‘ida remains committed to conducting attacks in the United States and against American interests abroad. The group has advanced several unsuccessful Western plots in the past two years, including against the United States and Europe. This highlights al-Qa‘ida’s ability to continue some attack preparations while under sustained counterterrorism pressure and suggests it may be plotting additional attacks against the United States at home or overseas.

Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights First has the right idea in 11 Years After 9/11, It's Time to End the War on Terror 09/11/2012:

But fixing the real problem isn't how things happen in politics. So instead of just improving intelligence and communications among government agencies and going after the people who attacked us, the U.S. government embarked on two ill-defined wars, created a massive new "Homeland Security" bureaucracy, doubled the defense budget (not counting the cost of the wars), and created overseas prisons and military commissions to avoid the basic requirements of the United States Constitution.

Some detainees were tortured in those prisons; the U.S. government is still covering it up today.

Much of that response to the 9/11 attacks wasn't only unnecessary, it was downright destructive.

She also points to the practically open sham that is the headline for the ongoing "war on terror": "Although U.S. officials have acknowledged that the al Qaeda that attacked us on 9/11 has been all but defeated, the government has ramped up the war against far-flung al Qaeda affiliates, some of which didn't even exist in 2001." Her conclusion:

Eleven years later, it's time to turn things around. Instead of generating more enemies and motivating more attacks, we should be doing the opposite. Sure, keep using intelligence and law enforcement and diplomacy and development and all the many tools the U.S. government has to track, prosecute, punish and thwart terrorism.

But spending trillions on secret wars, secret trials, offshore prisons and forever prisoners? There's no future in that.

Sounds right to me.

Tags: 9/11, global war on terror, terrorism, war on terror

War on terror, or a Long War war running on fear?

The Washington Post's David Ignatius, one of the Very Serious People in good standing, recently wrote about How Osama bin Laden is winning, even in death 04/27/2012:

In the year since Osama bin Laden’s death, it has been a comforting thought for Westerners to say that he failed. And that’s certainly true in terms of al-Qaeda, whose scorched-earth jihad tactics alienated Muslims along with everyone else. But in terms of bin Laden’s broader goal of moving the Islamic world away from Western influence, he has done better than we might like to think.

Egypt is a case in point: This has been a year of mostly nonviolent democratic revolution. But it has brought to power some Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood groups that share common theological roots with bin Laden. And the al-Qaeda goal of driving the “apostate,” pro-American President Hosni Mubarak from power has been achieved. ...

And the battle is still raging in Yemen, the place that bin Laden believed offered his best chance of victory. The United States just decided to step up its drone war there, which is a sure sign that al-Qaeda poses a significant, continuing threat. [my emphasis]

Marcy Wheeler in We Drone Strike, Ergo We Are at War Emptywheel 04/28/2012 sums up Ignatius' analytical logic: "David Ignatius, DC insider, says we’re ramping up drone strikes, ergo al Qaeda must pose a significant, continuing threat." Courtier journalism at its "best", in other words.

Inatius and Brian Fishman of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and the Obama-friendly New America Foundation joined Judy Woodruff of the PBS Newshour on Monday to talk about the same topic, A Year After Bin Laden's Death, How Strong Is al-Qaida? 04/30/2012:



This idea that Bin Laden is dead and Al Qaida is devastated but Al Qaida still represents a terrible and growing global threat to the United States is so bizarre and delusional that it's advocates have a hard time even pretending to believe it. In a column devoted to the notion that anything that happens in Muslim-majorities countries that even slightly irritates the US is a terrorist threat from Bin Laden's Ghost, Ignatius the Very Serious Person also writes:

As I reported last month, bin Laden was so worried that killing Muslims had tainted al-Qaeda’s image that he proposed rebranding the group with a different name. What bothered bin Laden, he wrote, was that "al-Qaeda describes a military base with fighters without a broader mission to unify the nation."

Al-Qaeda couldn’t make the transition from violent jihad to nonviolent Islamist politics. That wasn’t its DNA. Bin Laden continued to plan suicide operations against America and its political leaders, and he beseeched Atiyah to find “a brother distinguished by his good manners, integrity, courage and secretiveness, who can operate in the U.S.” Basically, he wanted to keep killing Americans but stop killing Muslims.

This theme of internal reform, which would halt the Muslim bloodshed, is clear in a December 2010 admonition from Atiyah and another deputy, Abu Yahya al-Libi, to the Pakistani Taliban movement known as the TTP: "We stress on the fact that real reform is the duty of all, and to succeed we should look for and correct our actions and avoid these grave mistakes."

According to that, Bin Laden himself, leader of the Al Qaida group that carried out the 9/11 attacks, was so disgusted with the groups that now call themselves "Al Qaida" that before his death a year ago he wanted to distance himself from the name "Al Qaida" because he thought they were ruining his brand. But those same groups and every other Muslim political groups that somehow bothers Washington is a continuation of the Bin Laden/Al Qaida threat.
And it doesn't make jack for sense.

That doesn't prevent him from expanding on that spin in the Newshour interview:

So, from our standpoint, the best thing that happened is that this violent terrorist means of jihad, means of striking against foreign influence in the Muslim world has been discredited.

What you see is still strong is the idea that bin Laden and so many other Muslims have that Western influence is too pervasive. They want it out. And so we have seen in these Arab uprisings over the last year a continuing force for that idea, which was an idea that bin Laden had too.

Making this argument also means ignoring real history, a practice in which our Very Serious People are experienced. Bin Laden may have been all kinds of evil. But the reason he and his fanatical followers originally focused on the US as the "far enemy" that had to be their priority target was that after the Gulf War, American troops remained stationed in Saudi Arabia. And the US carried imposed a major sanctions regime on Iraq for over a decade, with more or less continual bombing, including the very intensive bombing of Operation Desert Fox - surely one of the strangest operational names the Pentagon ever came up with because of its association with Ernst Rommel - in late 1998. All that in addition to the fact that they saw the US as a prime supporter of unpopular and dictatorial regimes like Mubarak's in Egypt. Even if one defends every single one of those actions as necessary and desirable, it makes no sense to ignore that they also included undesirable repercussions. Like Bin Laden's and Al Qaida's view of their jihadist mission.

So maybe it's time for a serious, practical reassessment of the amount of intervention the US is carrying out, especially the drone strikes which may look "surgical" and clean to Americans, but look like war to the people in the village where the bombs explode.

I'll have to give Judy Woodruff credit, here, though. She does press the point in a polite way that Ignatius' argument really doesn't make sense. After getting him to agree that a party like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt that is using a parliamentary path to power doesn't represent the same kind of threat Bin Laden's Al Qaida did, we get this exchange:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Is that how you would see it, Brian Fishman, that it's there, but it's not the direct threat to the U.S. that al-Qaida has been?

BRIAN FISHMAN: Yes.

I think, in many ways, the Arab spring revolutions, especially their -- in Egypt, where it was a relatively peaceful revolution, was a clear repudiation of al-Qaida's ideology and strategy for changing the political dynamics in the Middle East.

But I think it's also important to note that while there is sort of a shared intellectual lineage between the Muslim Brotherhood and groups like al-Qaida, today, al-Qaida looks at groups like the Muslim Brotherhood as its foremost enemy, even more so than the United States, because it sees groups like that as competing for the same constituencies that it wants to lead.

And al-Qaida knows that it's not going to lose a lot of supporters to the United States directly, but it will lose supporters to the Muslim Brotherhood if groups like that are able to demonstrate that they can seize political power, and really influence the way that governance is structured in that part of the world.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And does -- and, David, in a final few seconds, what posture then does the United States have in that struggle between al-Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood?

DAVID IGNATIUS: Well, we're going to keep going after -- the U.S. will keep going after al-Qaida wherever it finds people who are dedicated to the -- violent change and killing of Americans.

Which brings us back to Marcy's characterization of Ignatius' argument: "David Ignatius, DC insider, says we’re ramping up drone strikes, ergo al Qaeda must pose a significant, continuing threat."

For the Very Serious People, the existence of the Long War Against Terrorism creates its own justification.

Tags: global war on terror, long war, osama bin laden, war on terror

Al Qaida a bigger threat than ever? Say what?!?

Actually, President Obama is saying something different. "'Not only were we able to drive al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, but slowly and systematically we have been able to decimate the ranks of al Qaeda, and a year ago we were able to finally to bring Osama bin Laden to justice,' Obama said to cheers." (Caren Bohan, Obama swoops into Afghanistan on bin Laden death anniversary Reuters 05/01/2012) He was visiting Afghanistan. Bohan's report continues:

But even as he asserted in his speech that there was a "clear path" to fulfilling the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and made his strongest claim yet that the defeat of al Qaeda was "within reach," he warned of further hardship ahead.

"I recognize that many Americans are tired of war ... But we must finish the job we started in Afghanistan and end this war responsibly," he said at Bagram airbase outside of Kabul, where only months ago thousands of Afghans rioted after U.S. troops accidentally burned copies of the Koran, the Muslim holy book.

Matthew Schofield Of McClatchy Newspapers presents a less optimistic picture in After Osama bin Laden, al Qaida still a many-headed threat 04/26/2012. After McClatchy bought Knight-Ridder, it continued the high-quality foreign affairs reporting that Knight-Ridder had established on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. But this one makes me worry that the quality may be slipping.

It's generally accepted among Americans, it seems, that the death of the super-duper master terrorist Osama Bin Laden was such a great event that we killed Osama bin Laden that it was a good thing for people to be dancing in the streets and whooping and hollering and gittin' drunk in celebration afterwards. But if Schofield's report is correct, "There is a growing fear, however, that Osama bin Laden’s death didn’t even seriously wound the international terror threat."

That growing fear in Schofield's report comes from named and unnamed terrorism experts. But the legitimate concerns in his report are hard to separate from threat inflation in the expressed opinions of people who have developed a stake in the fight against terrorism that they aren't ready to relinquish.

Richard Fadden, the head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said that this many-headed beast is expected to strike more and more frequently in coming years, and he cited the difficulty of identifying “lone wolf” terrorists — small groups or individuals who self-radicalize.

"It's not easy," he told a Canadian Senate committee this week. "These individuals seem to be a mix of terrorists and people who simply have very big personal problems."

An unexpected example emerged in a Norwegian courtroom last week: Anders Behring Breivik, the anti-immigration nationalist on trial for the murders of 77 people, admitted that he closely studied al Qaida’s methods. He called the group "the most successful revolutionary movement in the world."

This passage reminded me of a scene in George Axelrod's comic play The Seven Year Itch, which provided one of Marilyn Monroe's most spectacular screen roles. In the play, the protagonist Richard Sherman, feeling an exaggerated guilt over a clumsy pass he made at an attractive neighbor the previous night, has persuaded a reluctant psychiatrist visiting in his office to give him a few minutes of a free consultation:

RICHARD I'm desperate, Doctor. Last night after you left, I was just sitting there listening to the ball game ...

DR. BRUBAKER (Outmaneuvered, but still game) This fact in itself is not really sufficient cause to undertake analysis ...

RICHARD No, I don't mean that. I started out listening to the ball game and do you know what I ended up doing?

DR. BRUBAKER I have no idea ...

RICHARD In ended up attempting to commit what I guess they call criminal assault ...

DR. BRUBAKER (Defeated, he takes a pad and pencil from his pocket) From the way you phrase it, I assume the attempt was unsuccessful. ...

RICHARD Thank God! All I did was knock us both off the piano bench. ...

DR. BRUBAKER (A flicker of interest - he begins to write) You attempted to commit criminal assault on a piano bench?

That scene came to mind because that passage of Schofield's report, like Richard Sherman's confession, starts off sounding dire but offers specifics that don't seem to begin to match the buildup.

We're supposed to worry about the increasing influence of the Salafist extremist Muslim group Al Qaida and its dead former leader Bin Laden ... because of Anders Behring Breivik? The anti-Muslim fanatic who shot up a bunch of kids at a social democratic party's youth camp because the thought their Party was too friendly to Muslim immigrants? Does that make jack for sense?

Osama bin Laden's Al Qaida organization of 2001 was a network of terrorists under Bin Laden's general operational control. Bin Laden is dead. The group that was "Al Qaida" in 2001 is essentially non-existent now. The President just said that "we have been able to decimate the ranks of al Qaeda." And in the paragraph that following the one about Breivik, Schofield is reporting the same thing:

Anti-terror experts see the al Qaida influence extending even as the core of the organization is thought to be down to an estimated 100 or fewer followers in its traditional home of Afghanistan and Pakistan’s ungoverned tribal areas. A Pentagon spokesman said that even that estimate could overshoot the total number who sleep in Afghanistan on any given night, which might be no more than a few dozen.

But wait!, as the narrator on the campy 1960s Batman TV show used to say:

"What we're facing today is a much, much larger global threat," said Seth Jones, an expert at the RAND Corp. who’s advised the Pentagon on Afghanistan and Pakistan. "It’s a more dispersed threat. The threat is decentralizing to a broad network of groups. Al Qaida inspires, but doesn't control, and they work with locals."

What I take from Schofield's report is that there are still anti-American terrorists out in the world. Some of them use the brand name "Al Qaida". But even his sources trying to pump up the threat find it difficult to make any coherent case that they are the group that attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 9/11/2001.

So, the logical question is, why do we still need a Cold War level (or higher) of military spending to protect us from the Dead Terrorist? And was Bin Laden's group really even enough of a threat to justify such a massive military establishment? Because that's still the chief bogeyman our national security establishment is using to justify this massive military investment.

What's actually happening is that the US adopted a global-dominance foreign policy strategy after the end of the Cold War, which means we can't allow any "peer competitors" to arise in the world and that being able and ready to intervene in a massive way anywhere in the world is a constant need. A less grandiose foreign policy would require something different.

But under the current foreign policy strategy and the chronic threat inflation that goes with it, it makes a twisted kind of sense when Schofield quotes some guy explaining that a radical group in Nigeria that I'd never seen mentioned before "has already hurt our national interests."

But we still need to be asking, if the War on Terror after 10 years leaves us having to tremble for our lives every time there's a shoot-out in Nigeria or local clans in some godforsaken corner of the Yemeni desert start raising hell with each other - isn't there something wrong with our approach?

Tags: global war on terror, war on terror, osama bin laden

September 11 retrospective: Chances missed

Anatol Lieven wrote about the risks and opportunities in the American and Western response to the 9/11 attacks in Strategy for terror Prospect 10/20/2001, which he says was written "a few hours after the attacks." (A somewhat revised version of this essay was included in James Hege, Jr. and Gideon Rose, eds, How Did This Happen? (2001) that somewhat confusingly makes it sound like it was written after the October 7 start of the Afghanistan War.)

Even in retrospect, I still think this was a true statement for the immediate aftermath of 9/11: "On the assumption that the perpetrators are identified and traced to some physical space a ferocious military response will be necessary. Not to do this would be to betray the victims and display weakness." It was, as he said, "the worst terrorist attack in history and the worst attack of any kind ever directed against the American mainland."

But this observation now looks like a description of opportunities terribly squandered:

A hardline response from the US is appropriate in the short-term. Moreover it would be wrong to execute any significant policy shifts that could be construed as a victory for the terrorists. ... Above all, a new US policy needs to be shaped by three linked realisations. First, that since the end of the cold war, there has come into being the basis of a unified world system in which the world’s other leading states are partners, not enemies, and in which all these states are under threat from similar forces. In other words, there really is the makings of an "international community" - or would be, if the US could stop acting as if it alone constituted this community. The community is based on shared adherence to western-led modernity. The only categorical opponents of this modernisation project are indeed religious maniacs - who are not to be found in Moscow or Beijing. Second, that with the exception of certain middle eastern states, the real threat to the world order comes not from states, but from below: from alienated populations. And third, since the US cannot occupy and police the Muslim world in the struggle against Muslim terrorism, it is essential to have the co-operation of leading Muslim states. This is something which was already emphasised by the aftermath of the attacks on Khobar Towers and the USS Cole. [my emphasis]

He didn't get the following exactly right. But he was correct in identifying the core problem, the fact that the American military establishing really has a strong self-perpetuaing dynamic, as John Kenneth Galbraith patiently insisted for much of his adult life:

The failure, until now, to move away from the cold war has its roots not only in various forms of inherited bigotry, but also in very strong interests within the US security establishment. This establishment was a product of the cold war, and it needs a cold war-type enemy: huge, identifiable, and, most importantly, armed with either high-tech conventional arms or with old-style nuclear missiles. Hence the endless insistence on the danger of a restoration of the Soviet Union. [my emphasis]

We need to be fair to Lieven on this. Who knew that the national security establishment and the many private firms that profit from it could recreate and bogeyman called "Al Qai'di," one based only in small part on the real existing organization lead by Osama bin Laden in 2001, that could serve as well or better than the nuclear-armed Communist Soviet Union to justify military spending at higher levels than the peak of the Cold War?

He made the following pragmatic observations that are also a reminder of opportunities lost:

One way of combating the kind of attacks we saw is of course better security in the US; but this will not necessarily prevent a terrorist attack, as long as that terrorist is prepared to die. In the end, the key to fighting this war successfully has to be good intelligence - and given the difficulty that American agents have of penetrating the world of the Islamist extremists, for such intelligence the west desperately needs Arab and Muslim allies. The Saudis in particular will have to be persuaded to drop the decades-old strategy begun by Saudi Arabia’s founder, King Ibn Saud, according to which the House of Saud has turned a blind eye to Saudi-based radicalism beyond the borders of the kingdom, as long as the radicals do not cause trouble within Saudi Arabia itself.

The help of leading Muslim states will also be essential if there is to be an invasion and occupation of some part of the Muslim world. For, in their different ways, the US bombardment of targets in Sudan and Afghanistan, and the aftermath of the Nato bombardment of Yugoslavia, have shown the inadequacy of long-range bombardment when it comes to destroying enemies on the ground, who are dispersed and hidden in a friendly civilian population. [my emphasis]

It's not that these aspects were entirely neglected. On the contrary, most of the real successes in the "Global War on Terror" (GWOT) have come from police and intelligence work, not from blowing up Muslims in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and whereever else the US military may be operating without public knowledge. It didn't come from creating a sado-masochistic torture regime in Guantánamo and our "black site" prisons, either, although many Republicans including Dick Cheney were happy to know that such twisted acts were occurring.

It's worth noting here that the United States, even with a government more deeply concerned with human rights and encouraging democracy abroad than either the Cheney-Bush or the Obama Administrations, has limited ability to pick and choose which government we deal with. I can't see that the diplomatic isolation of Cuba and Iran for decades has in itself yielded useful results.

What the US should have been doing and should do now is cooperate with governments, even nasty ones, on anti-terrorism while taking very seriously basic human rights concerns. Torture is a crime. And despite Obama's irresponsible and illegal decision to give effective amnesty ("Look Forward, Not Backward") to American torture perpetrators, the torture issue isn't going away. Dick Cheney may be doing a profitable book tour. And there's no guarantee of which individuals will eventually be put before a court on torture charges from that Adminsistration. Torture goes to the hear of the rule of law. There will be an historical and legal reckoning for the Bush Administration's torture crimes. The tragedy and shame is that it should have come from the American government itself. A large portion of the American Constitution will remain in abeyance until there is a real reckoning with the torture crimes.

One reason for the emphasis on conventional military action in the American response to terrorism is what Lieven himself says at the start of this essay, that the 9/11 attacks were "a very serious act of war, conducted by a formidably cruel, brave, fanatical and well-organised enemy with a terrifying capacity for both savagery and self-sacrifice." (my emphasis) I thought that at the time. German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder used the phrase "act of war" immediately after the attacks in offering his unlimited support for the US in responding to it. (Schröder soon found that applying limits was indeed necessary!)

In retrospect, this understanding was wrong. It was a spectacular act of terrorism by a small, fanatical group acting on behalf of a demented religious ideology, not on behalf of a state. But by framing it immediately as a war, it lead to the consequences we now no so well. And we surely don't know all the consequences, since a pathological attitude toward government secrecy prevailed during the Bush Administration and, tragic to say, has been intensified under the Obama Administration.

Lieven also points to that perenniel failure of American foreign policy, the need to have a real peace settlement between Israel and Palestine. While noting that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a major problem for US relations with the Muslim world, he reminds us, "To blame Muslim-based terrorism on Israel would be unfair and inadequate." It is part of the cause of such terrorism, even far removed geographically from Israel-Palestine. He points to severe development problems in the Arab world as having created the breeding ground for jihadist appeals. BAsed on his own research and reporting from Pakistan, he describes the appeal as follows:

In these depressing circumstances, adherence to a radical Islamist network provides a sense of cultural security, a new community and some degree of social support-modest, but still better than anything the state can provide. Poverty is recast as religious simplicity and austerity. Perhaps, even more importantly, belief provides a measure of pride: a reason to keep a stiff back amidst continual humiliations and temptations. In the blaring, stinking, violent world of the modern "third world" Muslim city, the architecture and aesthetic mood of the mosque is (like the Catholic churches in central America described by Graham Greene in The Lawless Roads) the only oasis, not only of beauty but of an ordered and coherent culture and guide to living. Of course this is true ten times over for a young male inhabitant of an Afghan, Chechen or Palestinian refugee camp.

Tags: 9/11, afghanistan war, anatol lieven, global war on terror, gwo, terrorism

American citizen Dangerous terrorist almost assassinated

Margaret Coker, et al, reported for Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal that the Obama Administration just tried but failed to assassinate US citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki: Strike Marked Yemeni Cleric 05/06/2011. Despite the Murdoch-y headline, Al-Awlaki is a US citizen. Here's how they report it, relying on an anonymous "Yememi account," whatever that may mean:

According to a Yemeni account of Thursday's strike, the U.S. launched two separate attacks aimed at Mr. Awlaki in the southern province of Shebwa, which is considered an AQAP [Al Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula] stronghold.

The missiles killed two suspected AQAP members but missed their intended target, Mr. Awlaki. Although the strike was conducted by the military, the operation—like the bin Laden raid—appears to be the result of close cooperation between the Department of Defense, the CIA and Yemeni officials.

Yemen officials said the U.S. fired twice at Mr. Awlaki in two attacks spread over about 45 minutes. In the first, the U.S. fired three rockets at a pickup truck in which Mr. Awlaki and a Saudi national and suspected al Qaeda member were traveling outside the village of Jahwa, located some 20 miles away from the Shebwa provincial capital, according to local residents and the Yemeni security official.

Two Yemeni brothers, who were known by local residents for giving shelter to al Qaeda militants, rushed to the scene of the attack. Mr. Awlaki switched vehicles with them, leaving the two Yemenis in the pickup. A single missile from the U.S. rocket then hit the pickup truck, killing the Yemenis inside.

Mr. Awlaki escaped in the other vehicle.

The writers draw this conclusion:

The strike sends a clear message that despite turmoil in the Middle East and the success of the bin Laden operation, the U.S. is resolved to ratchet up an aggressive campaign targeting Mr. Awlaki and other members of his group.

They repeat the US claims about Al-Awlaki and his supposed role with the so-called Al Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula group.

But this is problematic, to put it mildly. This is an American citizen who has been sentenced to death by assassination by the US government, with no trial and no judicial vetting of the evidence by which he has been sentenced to death.

And not to worry about the two brothers who were erroneously killed instead. According to the Journal, they were "known by local residents for giving shelter to al Qaeda militants," so they obviously deserved to die anyway. At least that's the logic of the targeted-assassination world. If we believe the anonymous "Yememi account." And the US government's un-vetted evidence against Al-Awlaki.

For now, the Global War On Terror goes forward!

Tags: anwar al-awlaki,, global war on terror, targeted assassination

Language and war

Our press corps will be gossiping and giggling for weeks over the controversy Gen. McChrystal just kicked up with one type of language: Gen. Stanley McChrystal Called to White House Over Derisive Remark; Aide Resigns Politics Daily 06/22/2010; Lauren Freyer, McChrystal Ordered Back to Washington Over Article AOL News 06/22/2010. The interview that stirred the controversy appears in The Runaway General by Michael Hastings Rolling Stone 06/22/2010.

But what I mainly want to highlight in this post is an article by Robert Fisk on war and the corruption of language, a perennial but always-current topic, Fighting talk: The new propaganda Independent 06/21/2010. He takes note of how the once-mocking phrase "winning hearts and minds" has now been rehabilitated:

We Western journalists – used yet again by our masters [here he means the Pentagon and the British Defense Ministry] – have been reporting our jolly generals in Afghanistan, as saying their war can only be won with a "hearts and minds" campaign. No one asked them the obvious question: Wasn't this the very same phrase used about Vietnamese civilians in the Vietnam War? And didn't we – didn't the West – lose the war in Vietnam? Yet now we Western journalists are using – about Afghanistan – the phrase "hearts and minds" in our reports as if it is a new dictionary definition, rather than a symbol of defeat for the second time in four decades. [my emphasis]

And he focuses on how "terror" has become a magic word and more:

We are in love with the word, seduced by it, fixated by it, attacked by it, assaulted by it, raped by it, committed to it. It is love and sadism and death in one double syllable, the prime time-theme song, the opening of every television symphony, the headline of every page, a punctuation mark in our journalism, a semicolon, a comma, our most powerful full stop. "Terror, terror, terror, terror". Each repetition justifies its predecessor.

Tags: global war on terror, terrorism

Long War, dead-or-alive

From George Stephanopoulos' interview with National Security Advisor James Jones, This Week 05/10/09:

STEPHANOPOULOS: President Karzai also said while he was here that he believes Osama bin Laden is alive. Yet President Zardari of Pakistan says he thinks bin Laden is dead.

What is the best U.S. intelligence right now?

JONES: I think the best intelligence is that we gauge our reaction based on what intelligence we have. And it is inconclusive. Secondly, we wait and see how long it has been before we've seen him actually make a statement, release a video, and make our judgments on that.

The truth is, I don't think anybody knows for sure. [my emphasis]

So, I see a couple of possibilities here. One is that Osama bin Laden is the latest Hitler, heading a powerful and potent worldwide network of terrorists called Al Qa'ida with whom we are fighting a Long War, and who present a military threat comparable to - or probably greater than - either Nazi Germany in alliance with militarist Japan, or the nuclear-armed Soviet Union.

Another possibility is that he could be dead.

And Obama's National Security Advisor isn't really sure which one is the case.

Yet neither case seems to make any difference in the massive military budget that continues as though the Cold War never ended.

More accurate would be Andrew Bacevich's formulation, that the Cold War was part of what we now call the Long War. And a great deal of the perceived threat and constant threat inflation is less a reason than a justification for a military establishment that is largely self-justifying and driven by domestic political ideologies and economic interests.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, let me ask you about that, because we saw some audio tapes from Osama bin Laden in both January and March of this year, and it's my understanding that U.S. intelligence thought that those were authentic.

JONES: Mm-hmm.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So what has changed since then to make the intelligence inconclusive?

JONES: Well, as of March, they thought it was authentic, but we don't have any firm information that says that that has changed one way or the other. So I think we'll just continue to press on and we'll see what happens there.

STEPHANOPOULOS: What does your gut tell you?

JONES: I -- my gut -- I would like to know conclusively if that's not the case. And I think we have that evidence.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Does it matter any more if he's dead or alive?

JONES: I think it matters symbolically to the movement, for sure. But it's clear that that movement has been resilient in replacing their leaders as quickly as we are able to capture or eliminate them.

But I think symbolically it would be a very big thing if he weren't.

In that last comment, it's not clear whether he means "it would be a very big thing" if Bin Laden weren't dead or if he weren't alive. And in terms of ideology and military policy, I'm not at all sure it matters. Because, as he said, "that movement has been resilient in replacing their leaders as quickly as we are able to capture or eliminate them". So the Long War must go on.

It's probably worth clarifying here that in saying this, I'm not going all Noam Chomsky or anything. I'm only interested in left purism when the left purists are producing useful ideas. The idea that there is no essential difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties today, or that the larger problems of the Long War make any differences between the parties on foreign policy minor or irrelevant, is not part of my way of looking at the world.

Essentially, that pitch is associated with third parties that hope to win adherents by trying to transcend the politics by which actual decisions are made in the United States on public policy issues. But even promoting a third-party alternative doesn't have to dogmatic and unable to make a distinction between the two dominant parties.

Obama's foreign policy is an enormous improvement over the crudely militarized version practiced by the Cheney-Bush administration. Not only did that administration seem to view foreign policy primarily as a matter of wars and military threats. They also went a long way toward organizationally transferring important elements of foreign policy from the State Department to the Pentagon. The elaborate pretense by President Bush that in his decisions on war policies in Iraq that he was simply executing the recommendations of his generals was a prominent reflection of that. In a healthy democracy with a vigorous independent press - as opposed to our ailing democracy with a broken press - that would have been considered outrageous. Having our Savior-General Petreaus go up the Hill as the primary spokesperson for that administration's Iraq policies is a related and equally outrageous example.

The very fact that Obama himself states clearly that he as the elected President makes the decisions about military strategy in our ongoing wars is an enormous improvement. The fact that is stands out as significant in any way is a measure of how disastrous the previous eight years really were. Since the most important element of US foreign policy is nuclear disarmament, the fact that Obama intends to actively pursue it is the most welcome kind of change from the Cheney-Bush policy of an open-ended nuclear arms race and unconstrained proliferation. Except, of course, when we needed some excuse to attack an oil-rich nation whose government was being insufficiently cooperative.

Tags: global war on terror, james jones, long war, osama bin laden, war on terror

Benjamin Barber's Fear's Empire

There's no complete substitute for reading books and articles written near the time of a particular historical event. Because the perspective and tone, as well as the reminders of what was known and unknown at the time, tell you a lot that may get lost or blurred in accounts written later.

Benjamin Barber's Fear's Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy was first published in 2003 after the invasion of Iraq. Those were the "Mission Accomplished" days, when Bush and his preventive war doctrine were riding high and the neocons were eager to spread the war to Iran and Syria as quickly as possible. Barber wasn't on their side. In 2004, the paperback edition was published with a new preface by Barber, which gives a feel for how quickly the picture had changed. Much of the criticism and the warnings that Barber had made in the original edition had been validated already by events. It was obvious to anyone whose mind hadn't been bleached clean by OxyContin that while the initial invasion may have looked like Ken Adelman's promised "cakewalk", the occupation was going to be a very different matter.

As Barber puts it in the new preface:

Just a year into what was to be a happy story of liberation vindicated, the preventive war strategy was in tatters. It had unraveled more or less along the lines foretold by skeptics in the media, cautious warriors in the Pentagon, and scholarly Islamics [sic] in academia well before President Bush took his coalition of the willing roaring into Iraq in quest of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and the head of Saddam Hussein.

You may notice that Benjamin Barber has not been one of the authorities that you see on TV a lot when the talking heads convene to discuss the Iraq War. By the conventions of our broken media, having been right about the problems, risks and criminal nature of the preventive war in Iraq disqualifies someone from being taken as a serious foreign policy analyst. While having been wrong, even spectacularly wrong, remains a sign of one's seriousness on such matters.

Barber's book takes a look at the doctrine of preventive war and its internal contradictions. Although he specifies that preventive war is against international law, what he emphasizes in Fear's Empire are the practical problems in the Bush Doctrine (which really should be called the Cheney-Bush Doctrine). Some of them were evident before the invasion of Iraq. The administration's militant rhetoric and Bush's designation of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the "axis of evil" did not make Saddam and his government step down and flee the country and invite the Americans in to occupy the place, which is surely the only way that Cheney and Bush would have been persuaded to not launch the war. But it did scare North Korea into thinking the US was about to target it militarily, which led to six years of diplomatic conflict, the building and testing of their plutonium bomb, and finally this year to an agreement that more-or-less returns things to the situation in 2002.

Barber also points out that "containment" as it came to be discussed as a reasonable alternative to the Cheney-Bush preventive war doctrine was not all it was cracked up to be. But he doesn't use that as an argument for preventive war. On the contrary, he reminds us that the containment policy that governed the decades-long nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union had its own high levels of risk and wasn't nearly as stable as it often appears in memory. Military containment is no substitute for a sensible engagement with the world.

Barber as a political theorist has focused a lot of the issues of globalization, of which he is an engaged critic. In other words, he recognizes the reality of globalization, appreciates its value and warns that retreating into isolationism or unilateralism is not a viable or sensible solution. But he also explains here that globalization as it was been promoted by the US, even under the Clinton administration, has in practice treated economic freedom in the form of "free market" neoliberalism, aka, the Washington Consensus, as equivalent to democracy. And it's not

Barber favors a strategy that encourages the development of democracy in other countries by more non-coercive means, such as international support for public education systems in developing countries, with the support not tied directly to immediate US political policies. He also emphasizes that a system of international law and a consistent recognition of national sovereignty are part of what constitutes democracy in the international system, even when some of the individual governments are not democratic internally. Barber argues that what is still often called the anti-globalization movement would more accurately be described as the "democratize globalization" movement. But he stresses repeatedly that the notion that the United States can quickly implant democracy in non-democratic Muslim countries like Iraq by invading sovereign nations in preventive wars is not founded in reality. It's an arrogant, foolish dream, even when it's decked out with the grand idealistic rhetoric favored by the neocons.

The book's title refers to a central point Barber makes about terrorism. Terrorism's real goal in to spread terror, i.e., fear. The Cheney-Bush administration found it convenient for their own authoritarian purposes to maximize the American public's fear in response to the 9/11 attacks. They got their war in Iraq, they got their huge increases in military budgets to fund militarily useless projects like the "missile defense" boondoggle, they put the torture policy and their massive warrantless domestic spying program into effect, Halliburton and Bechtel and Blackwater got big-bucks crony-capitalist-type deals for work in Iraq. And, of course, major oil multinationals are finally getting their contracts for Iraq's oil. (see U.S. Advised Iraqi Ministry on Oil Deals by Andrew Kramer New York Times 06/30/08)

The experts who specialize in such things tell us that some kind of major new terrorist attack in the US is as inevitable as earthquakes. And the "experts" must know what they're talking about, right? In any case, it is actually worth remembering that such an attack is probable, though it may come from home-grown white supremacists or some cult group rather than Sunni Salafi terrorists like Al Qa'ida. McCain's lobbyist buddy Charlie Black got caught rather flat-footedly talking about the effect such an attack might have on this year's Presidential election. But I hope the Democrats are giving some serious thought to how they would handle such an event, also. Because whenever such an attack comes, one main thing we the public as well as any of our elected representatives who care about the good of the country need to do is: find ways not to panic. Fear is human and normal. But it can also lead people to do and support self-destructive things. Barber writes of the political hysteria in the US leading up to the Iraq War:

Democratic outcomes depend on democratic struggle and the readiness of citizens - or those who would be citizens - to wage it. This is the core meaning of citizenship. Noisy dissidents like Abou Jahjah in Belgium or Michael Moore in the United States (who disrupted the 2003 Academy Awards by waving his Oscar and ranting theatrically about a "fictitious war" and a "fictitious president") are not betrayers of democracy; they are civic alternatives to fear. When they are silenced, fear succeeds, and the victory of fear is the triumph of terrorism even if terrorist cells are broken and terrorist agents destroyed, even if the nations that harbor and support them are subjected to the awesome power of the American colossus and collapse. When citizens fail, imperious leaders are able to match fear for fear with their adversaries, and all too quickly there are no citizens - only masters and their subjects. At the height of the American campaign against Baghdad, civic dissent in America seemed to many to have been put on hold. Criticizing the president who had put American troops in harm's way on the basis of palpable deceptions and blatant lies somehow was equated with betraying the troops the president put in harm's way. Preventive war was doing a better job at preventing democracy than preventing terror. (my emphasis)

And in his conclusion he writes, in a passage relevant to the next major terrorist attack and to the continuation of a foreign policy based on fear and militarism that John McCain represents:

If Americans cannot find their way out of fear's realm, they are lost. No friendly European ally will dissuade them from the course of war, no adversarial rogue state will seem puny enough to ignore. Since fear is about perception not reality, the terrorists can win without firing a shot. They need only stoke the American imagination - or stoke the imagination of those in government and the media entrusted with stoking the public's imagination. Nine-eleven was a horrendous day that exacted a terrible price from individual American families, and (we are promised) there will be others. But as an assault on America's powerful common body, such attacks are as bee stings to a grizzly bear, momentary flashes of pain easily brushed off with the swipe of America's massive paws. America cannot at once be as powerful as it boasts and as vulnerable as it fears. Its power belies its fear - or should. This is not to minimize the personal tragedy visited on terror s victims or argue that the war against terrorism should not be fought. It is only to maintain a perspective that remembers terrorism is a function of powerlessness and hurts the powerful only as they allow themselves to be hurt. Democracy defeats terrorism because democracy makes imagination into a tool of empathy and action, depriving it of the anxieties that beset it when it is otherwise idle or taken in by fear's grim games. (my emphasis)

Tags: benjamin barber, fear's empire, global war on terror, iraq war, terrorism, war on terror

How incompetent are Dick Cheney and George Bush?

The dark shadow over the US Constitution

One of the utterly forseeable consequences of the attempt by Cheney and Bush to create a parallel universe of Cheney "justice" has been that once established legal processes were blown off for the "war on terrorism" POW's, aka, "unlawful combatants", you have to recreate some kind of system from the bottom up. And if it goes wrong, what do you do?

So the US wound up with a bunch of detainees, many of whom the military knew from the start were anything but Al Qa'ida terrorism experts. After violating their rights in various ways, including torturing them and creating evidence against them derived from interrogations of others using torture, they can't return them to the established legal systems without risking having all charges dropped because of official misconduct. Because that's the only real way established systems of law have to handle prosecutions based on torture and manufactured evidence. But if you let some of them go and they get involved in terrorist activities subsequently, will the politicians and generals involved be accused of letting it happen?

Once you substitute artitrary police-state measures for the rule of law, there's no easy way to get those cases back on a legal track. If Cheney and Bush had operated under international legal requirements, they would have had to place the cases of the Afghanistan captives before an impartial tribunal to determine whether they should legitimately be considered prisoners of war. And if those detained had been allowed any semblance of due process, many of them would have been released very soon for complete lack of evidence against them.

In fact, some former American prisoners are becoming violent Islamic activists after being released. But the pro-police-state partisans only pointed to that risk as a possible consequence of not applying the rule of law to them. Like Bush partisans generally, they try to pretend that the only risks lay in not doing what the administration wants and ignore the risks of the administration's actions.

And part of the risk was that the extra-legal processes themselves would motivate people to become terrorists. Tom Lasseter reports for McClatchy in Militants found recruits among Guantanamo's wrongly detained 06/17/08 on some instances of that actually happening:

A McClatchy investigation found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantanamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam — thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them — and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists.

The radicals were quick to exploit the flaws in the U.S. detention system.

Soldiers, guards or interrogators at the U.S. bases at Bagram or Kandahar in Afghanistan had abused many of the detainees, and they arrived at Guantanamo enraged at America.

The Taliban and al Qaida leaders in the cells around them were ready to preach their firebrand interpretation of Islam and the need to wage jihad, Islamic holy war, against the West. Guantanamo became a school for jihad, complete with a council of elders who issued fatwas, binding religious instructions, to the other detainees. (my emphasis)

The debate over such measures is often cast as liberty-vs.-safety. What doesn't get emphasized prominently enough is such discussions is that police state measures may be brutally efficient in suppressing domestic opposition. But they go hand-in-hand with secrecy, incompetence, and corruption.

If Lasseter's report is correct - and he has a far better record than most of the talking heads who appear of television as Serious Experts and mainstream icons like the recently deceased and newly-canonized Tim Russert - then that model of Cheney-Bush "toughness", the torture prison in Guantánamo became an important training ground for terrorist leaders.

Remember just after 9/11, when then-Attorney General and torture support John Ashcroft warned that there could be thousands of Al Qa'ida "sleeper" agents in the US? Those thousands never turned up. In fact, of the terrorist cases prosecuted under the war-on-terror administration in the United States, most of them were cases of people like the Lackwanna crew in New York who had, at best, tangential contacts to actual terrorist groups.

It could well turn out to be that the most the Guantánamo torture prison, the crown jewel of Dick Cheney's effort to replace the US Constitution with Republican Party police-state rule.

This is how the tough, hard, manly Republican Party protects your security, people. And at the same time, their torture policy lets all those Muslims and Arabs in the world see what the "superior values" of good Christian American white people look like and how much better they are than those inferior Islamic values.

Lasseter's article is well worth reading. If Congress had paid more serious attention to the articles from McClatchy (then Knight-Ridder), they might well have blocked the invasion of Iraq to begin with. The A********* P**** doesn't want bloggers to even link to their articles. And it made me think, why are we linking to them anyway? Shouldn't we give priority to news services and reporters who actually showed they can do real journalism when most of the Establishment press willingly became war cheerleaders and conduits for crass war propaganda?

This is really pretty amazing to me. Lasseter interviewed - real journalists do real research! - Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, who was "until recently" was the commander of the Guantánamo torture center. And Buzby acknowledged that his facility had a terrorist cell operating from there! ""We have that full range of (Taliban and al Qaida) leadership here, why would they not continue to be functional as an organization? I must make the assumption that there's a fully functional al Qaida cell here at Guantanamo." (my emphasis)

One of the two official reasons we invaded Aghanistan was the Iraqi regime's links to Al Qa'ida, which turned out to be non-existent. But in Cheney's ultra-secure Guantánamo facility which has existed outside the normal legal framework of American law subject to the arbitrary will of Cheney and Bush, "a fully functional al Qaida cell" is operating?

Issa Khan, a former prisoner there interviewed by McClatchy in Pakistan, points out the painfully obvious. "A lot of our friends are working against the Americans now, because if you torture someone without any reason, what do you expect?"

Real journalism is still done at American news services. There's just far too little of it.

Tags: global war on terror, guantánamo, tom lasseter, torture, war on terror

The US and war in Somalia

Somalia (CIA World Factbook map)

This past week, the US made another air strike on Somalia. From the fact that the terrorist leader, Aden Hashi Ayro - who most people in the United States had surely never heard of - was reported killed by his own group, al-Shabab - which most people in the US had also never heard of - I would assume for now that the target of this targeted assassination was killed.

The following reports provide details of the story: U.S. kills Al Qaeda-linked militant, but elsewhere terrorism grows by Scott Peterson and Rob Crilly Christian Science Monitor 05/02/08; US airstrike kills head of al-Qa'ida in East Africa by Steve Bloomfield Independent 05/02/08; U.S. missiles kill al Qaeda chief in Somalia, 10 others by Mohamed Olad Hassan AP/San Francisco Chronicle 05/02/08; Attack on Terror Target Sheds Light on Somalia's Instability PBS Newshour 05/01/08. This story from 2007 provides additional background U.S. Involvement in Somalia PBS Newshour 01/26/07.

The US is involved in a proxy war in Somalia, and is even intervening directly, as in this targeted assassination. Not surprisingly, the Cheney-Bush administration claims they were attacking "Al Qa'ida", which the Republicans like Maverick McCain are increasingly using as a catch-all term for an endless sea of enemies, not just the terrorist band headed by Osama bin Laden. The tactic of targeted assassination itself, though a standard practice of Israeli counterterrorism operations and therefore assumed by many Americans to be effective, is problematic in itself. Getting rid of the old leader doesn't necessarily ensure that what comes afterward will be better, for instance.

Congress, the media and the public should also be paying more attention to this. A tangential involvement in a situation like Somalia may sometimes make sense. But "mission creep" is always a big risk. One consequence of the civil war in Somalia, which is also now mixed with an anti-occupation resistance against Ethiopian troops in Somalia, has been to create an enormous humanitarian crisis. This is one of many things that can draw the US deeper and deeper and spread our military commitments more and more thinly in locations and situations that may really be marginal to American interests.

The 05/01/08 Newshour report puts the action in a context rarely seen in American news reports. An Islamic regime took power in Somalia in 2006. The US then encouraged Ethiopia, a primarily Christian nation, to intervene in Somalia and oust the "Islamic Courts" regime, as it was called. Ethiopia did so, and briefly became a heroic image for our Republican war-lovers, who pointed to the Ethiopian army as an example of how the US should kick butt.

If any of them are still paying attention, there may have been more to learn from Ethiopia's action than just the fact that they quickly succeeded in ousting the undesired regime and installed an Ethiopia-friendly one. As ITV reporter Jonathan Miller reports on the Newshour:

Ethiopia invaded Somalia with America's blessing at the end of 2006 to oust a short-lived Islamist government. Since then, the country's descended further into madness.

The Islamists are now the insurgents. ...

The Somali Mujahideen, proud to have been designated a terrorist organization by the United States of America, they're now an official franchise of al-Qaida central. Al-Shabab, as they're known, are battling what they call the "infidel Christian occupier, Ethiopia," and what they brand its puppet regime.

Somalia has become a magnet for global jihadis. In 15 months, 750,000 of Mogadishu's residents have fled. If this had happened anywhere else, one U.N. head of mission says, it would have triggered international outrage. Instead, all it's triggered is the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe. (my emphasis)

So, did the Ethiopian intervention prevent a new "state sponsor of terrorism" from securing its rule? Or did it create a situation where new jihadis are being trained, where Al Qa'ida is expanding its prestige and maybe its actual organaization, generate a humanitarian disaster, and further inflame Arab and Muslim public opinion against the US for backing a black Christian nation (Ethiopia) in invading and occupying an Arab Muslim nation (Somalia)?

Andre Le Sage of the National Defense University told the Newshour:

.. we do have to recognize that al-Shabab has really become the hard-line faction, targeting international aid workers, preventing humanitarian assistance from arriving in Somalia, targeting international journalists that have been there, and also targeting peacemakers, Somali peacemakers that are trying to broaden the base of the transitional federal government. ...

Al-Shabab is a very diverse movement, and I don't think we can talk about it as a single, hierarchical organization.

Since the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, al-Shabab and the insurgency itself has splintered. And it really covers much of southern Somalia at this point. It operates in various pockets where it's able to find support and it's able to find refuge. And it is providing protection for the al-Qaida East Africa cell.

I think we need to recognize the importance of this. Al-Shabab on its own is a major threat in the Somali context. It becomes an international threat, a threat to international peace and neighboring countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia, by providing succor to al-Qaida's East Africa cell.

Even La Sage's comment here, which refers to an undefined "East Africa cell" of Al Qa'ida, gives an idea of the complexity of this particular guerrilla movement, which certainly doesn't sound like some unified body under the command-and-control of Bin Laden from his cave in Bumrush, Pakistan or wherever he is.

Ahmed Samatar of Macalester College adds:

I think the issue in Somalia, really, in the fundamental sense, is not about al-Shabab or a particular militant group. That's really the top soil.

Deep underneath, the real question is the reclamation of Somali national identity, and history, and institutions. There's a national resistance movement going on in Somalia. And the focus of that national resistance movement is that Somali transitional federal government, which was created by the Ethiopian government, that really has no legitimacy, nor does it have any competence, and then, of course, the Ethiopian invasion.

Invasion by itself is a very violent business, and the Somali people are responding to that in a variety of ways, and al-Shabab are one of those responses.

Miller's portion of the Newshour report gave an illustration of how invasion and the subsequent occupation can be quite violent:

In the latest round of fighting, more than 200 civilians reportedly wounded, the last count, at least 120 killed, many women and children among them.

Even those who've survived 17 years of civil war here say it's never been this bad.

Outside, the damaged homes of Hassan and his little brother and all those who'd made it to Madina Hospital last week, Mogadishu looking ever more like a ghost town.

Local people say Ethiopian and Somali troops [of the Ethiopian-allied government] rampaged through this residential neighborhood looking for Islamist insurgents following an attack on their base. They left death and destruction in their wake.

The Newshour report of 01/26/07 is interesting to see here 15 months later:

As part of the global war on terror, the United States has followed a policy in Somalia - through both military operations and diplomatic efforts with the international community - to prevent the lawless country from becoming a haven for terrorists.

Working in conjunction with Ethiopia in early 2007, the United States used military force in Somalia for the first time since 1994 in an attempt to kill terrorist suspects hiding in the south. Officials confirmed a second airstrike two weeks later.

The first U.S. airstrike on Jan. 8 followed a swift Ethiopian intervention in late December 2006 that drove the Islamic Courts Union, suspected of harboring al-Qaida members, into the mangrove swamps of southern Somalia.

Kenyan troops - also working in military cooperation and sharing intelligence with the Americans - sealed off their border with Somalia while U.S. Navy ships patrolled the coast to cut off escape routes by water.

The effort revealed a high level of cooperation between the United States and its regional allies - especially Ethiopia - and, for the first time, a U.S. base in Djibouti was used to conduct military operations. (my emphasis)

At that time, we had just had a victory for Our Side in pursuit of the US policy "to prevent the lawless country from becoming a haven for terrorists". What could be wrong with that?

Now Jonathan Miller reports, "Somalia has become a magnet for global jihadis." Which of course, means they are now an important front in the Global War on Terror, right? This is how mission creep is occurring for the US in Somalia. In practice, it's considerably harder to get out of these situations than to get into them.

As Peterson and Crilly report for the Christian Science Monitor, the State Department's most recent report on terrorism focuses on our ally Pakistan as the place where Al Qa'ida is having its most important success in reconstituting itself. It's unclear to me how getting ourselves more and more deeply involved in the civil war and anti-occupation resistance in Somalia is a sensible use of American power at this point.

The most recent State Dept. Country Reports on Terrorism 2007 was released on April 30. Somalia is discussed in Chapter 2, on Africa:

Somalia's fragile central government, protracted state of violent instability, long unguarded coastline, porous borders, and proximity to the Arabian Peninsula made the country an attractive location for international terrorists seeking a transit or launching point for conducting operations in Somalia or elsewhere. Despite the late 2006 defeat of the Council of Islamic Courts (CIC) in Mogadishu by Ethiopian and Transitional Federal Government (TFG) forces, the ensuing low-level conflict [bureacratese for "guerrilla warfare"] that engulfed Mogadishu and parts of south central Somalia for the remainder of the year continued to make Somalia a permissive operating environment and safe haven for both Somali and foreign terrorists. The extremist al-Shabaab (The Youth), the militant "shock troops" of the CIC whose radicalism and violent means led to the CIC's undoing, initially dispersed and fled south along the Kenyan border. Al-Shabaab, some of whom are affiliated with AQ, consists of radicalized young men, between 20 and 30 years of age. A few of its senior leaders are believed to have trained and fought with AQ in Afghanistan. Al-Shabaab extremists participated in attacks against Ethiopian and TFG security forces. Al-Shabaab and other extremists were also behind suicide bombings, the use of landmines, remote controlled roadside bombs, and targeted assassinations against Ethiopian and TFG security forces, other government officials, journalists, and civil society leaders. The African Union Peace Support Mission (AMISOM), which deployed in March to secure the air and sea ports and presidential compound, lost six soldiers to extremist attacks during the year.

Among the foreign AQ operatives believed to have enjoyed protection by the former CIC and al-Shabaab leadership were individuals wanted for the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and a 2002 hotel bombing in Kenya, including Fazul Abdallah Mohammed (aka Harun Fazul), and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan. At the end of the year, Ethiopian and TFG forces remained nominally in control of Mogadishu and southern and central Somalia, though institutions of government remained weak and ineffective. Regional efforts to bring about national reconciliation and establish peace and stability in Somalia are ongoing. The capability of the TFG and other Somali local and regional authorities to carry out counterterrorism activities was limited. (my emphasis)

So, our Ethiopian-backed intervention has generated a guerrilla war aimed at Ethiopia and the pro-Ethiopian Somali government, the government itself is weak and ineffecitive, and the internal strife "continued to make Somalia a permissive operating environment and safe haven for both Somali and foreign terrorists".

By Cheney-Bush standards, that would constitute "Mission Accomplished". But how those results actually help American interests is very unclear to me.

The administration made a big point of the supposed connection between Aden Hashi Ayro and those people supposedly involved in the bombing of the American embassy in Kenya a decade ago to established a direct American interest in targeting him for assassination. I haven't noticed in any of the news reports any evidence that the individuals supposedly involvled in the Kenya bombings were affected in any way by this targeted assassination last week.

Peterson and Crilly also note:

US special forces have been operating around Somalia's borders; Mr. Ayro survived an airstrike last year. Indeed, Thursday's airstrike was the fifth by the US since the 2006 collapse of the short-lived Union of Islamic Courts (UIC)government. David Shinn, former US ambassador to Ethiopia, says it appeared to be the first to take out a key target, though he question edits impact.

"This development is going to undermine the ability of the Shabab to carry out attacks in Somalia until they can reorganize themselves," he says. "But I just don't see it having animpact on overall peace in Somalia."

So: We're carrying out air strikes against a country with which we are not formally at war and whose nominal government is supposedly friendly to us. We're 1-4 in the number of these brilliantly targeted high-tech assassination operations that actually took out their intended targets, possibly all of which blew up civilian noncombatants. The guy we apparently did kill on Thursday was a bad guy who seems not to have been targeting American interests in any direct way. Since he's dead, he can't give us any information about those Kenya embassy bombers he was supposedly connected with in some way.

This just does not look very impressive to me.

Tags: ethiopia, global war on terror, gwot, somalia, war on terror