Friday's Paris terrorist attack and the dream of rebooting history

The Austrian news service, Nachrichten.at, the website of the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, ran an editorial on Saturday, Europa in Krieg (Europe At War) 14.11.2015:

Unser Mitgefühl gilt allen Opfern, unsere Solidarität Frankreich.

Dabei hat das wahllose gestrige Morden nicht Frankreich allein gegolten. Es ist ein Anschlag auf Europa, unsere Werte, unsere Form des Zusammenlebens, unsere Prinzipien, die offenen Grenzen, das Nebeneinander verschiedener Kulturen, die Freiheiten. Die Codewörter dazu sind eindeutig: Syrien, Islamischer Staat, radikaler Islam. Unabhängig von der Zahl der Toten, die sich stündlich erhöht, steht der gestrige Tag gleichauf neben 9/11, er wird die globale Politik verändern. Europa befindet sich im Ausnahmezustand. Uns muss klar sein.

Es wird sich wehren und den Kampf aufnehmen. Es wird ihn überall dort führen müssen, wo der Angriff auf unsere Werte seinen Ausgang nimmt. Auch dazu bestehen keine Alternativen.

[All the victims have our sympathy, France has our solidarity.

In the event, the innumerable {sic} murders yesterday did not affect only France. It is an attack on Europe, our values, our form of living together, our principles, the open borders, the co-existence of different cultures, the freedoms. The code words there are clear: Syria, Islamic State, radical Islam. Regardless of the number of dead, that keeps increasing, yesterday stands next to 9/11, it will change global politics. Europe finds itself in a state of emergency. We must be clear.

It {Europe} will defend itself and take up the fight. It will have to conduct it everywhere from which the attack on our value originated. And there are no alternatives available.]

The euro crisis alone should have taught everyone that TINA (There Is No Alternative) can be a bad guide to action. At least, if the goal is to actually solve problems.

This kind of pompous, melodramatic declaration is painfully familiar to Americans. At least to the majority who don't want the Permanent War for Permanent Peace to which Donald Trump, Dr. Ben Carson and the rest of today's Republican Party leaders are committed.

Realism and reason go out the window with this kind of posturing. And it's not just newspaper editors. The French President struck a similar tone (Adam Nossiter et al, Three Teams of Coordinated Attackers Carried Out Assault on Paris, Officials Say; Hollande Blames ISIS 11/14/2015):

“It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, Daesh, against France,” President François Hollande told the nation from the Élysée Palace, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It is an act of war that was prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside, which the investigation will help establish.”

The Oberösterreichische Nachrichten editorial is sadly reminiscent of the war and revenge talk after the 9/11 attacks in the US.

The 9/11 attacks were planned in Germany, but at least we didn't attack Germany. Early indications on the Paris attack Friday are that two of the places "from which the attack ... originated" could be Germany and Belgium. Hopefully, France will have the restraint not to invade either of those two countries. But defending our civilized values by bombing the crap out of some Arab (or maybe Persian) country has become a dreary cliche in American politics. So far, over 14 years after 9/11, our interventions and freedom bombs have left us with civil wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. The "war on terrorism" obviously hasn't done away with terrorism as a form of military conflict. And Europe is already experiencing a refugee crisis, many of whom are fleeing conflicts connected with our Afghanistan War and Iraq War, neither of which are entirely over.

The editorial's comment that the Paris attack "will change global politics" reminds me so much of the comment that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage made to the Pakistani head of intelligence just after 9/11, "History starts today." But history didn't reboot itself. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is still supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, and their long-standing dispute with nuclear-armed India over Kashmir still takes precedence over Washington's demands in their strategic decisions, in which the current Afghan government is a "pro-Indian" danger in their eyes. (James Mann quotes the Armitage comment in Rise of the Vulcans, 2004)

And the justifiable outrage over the Paris attacks won't make any French intervention in Syria any easier. History didn't reboot on Friday any more than it did on 9/11/2001. Many of the current problems in the Middle East go directly back to the ways in which Britain and France enacted their civilizing mission to the Arab countries after they dismembered the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. France got Syria as a colony, uh, "mandate." France and Britain took the lead in their most recent effort to civilize Libya with bombs, which the US joined. Even supporters of that intervention have a difficult time seeing the results as anything but grim.

Friday didn't "change global politics" in any way that will make an military intervention in Syria and Iraq easier. Outside powers will still have to make choices among supporting the Syrian government, of Daesh/ISIS, or the Al Qaeda affiliate there. They will still have to navigate the conflicting allegiances of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Qatar and Russia.

It's not as though nationalist delusions haven't already done tremendous damage to the EU with the euro and refugee crises, neither of which are over. A massive escalation of war in Syria will make the latter even worse. More border controls, more (literal) walls between countries, more refugees. The actions to come by France and NATO can certainly "change global politics" in some way. Further disintegrative pressures on the EU could definitely have that effect.

If the comment, "Europe finds itself in a state of emergency," is meant for, say, this weekend, it is just routine hyperbole. But if France or the EU were to respond to Friday's attack by creating something like a permanent state of emergency, well, Carl Schmitt will be laughing heartily in whatever nasty precincts of the Great Beyond he currently finds himself.

I see that France is already dropping their freedom bombs, which will surely kill no innocent civilians as the terrorists did in Paris on Friday. (Francia lanza primeros ataques aéreos contra ISIS en Siria La Opinión/BBC Mundo 14.11.2015)

By the way, the Obama Administration is still dropping our freedom bombs in Libya: Libya IS head 'killed in US air strike' BBC News 11/14/2015. Also magically avoiding killing civilian noncombatants, no doubt.

Some basics on the realities of terrorism

Martha Crenshaw of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies has a brief article, "The Long View of Terrorism," in Current History Jan 2014, that summarizes some of the major characteristics of terrorism as we know it today. Its observations are a reminder of how things could have been different after the 9/11 attacks. And should have been, if the Cheney-Bush Administration had not been so determined to use the Global War on Terror (GWOT) as an excuse to invade Iraq and expand the already massive level of military force and interventions.

As she writes, "Cycles of retaliation and escalation are not inevitable." The United States had choices on how best to respond after the 9/11 attacks. And made some really, really bad ones. And is still making them, with Obama Non-War War in Iraq and Syria a continuation of it.

Here she provides some basics about terrorism that easily get lost in the squawking hysteria over the Islamic State in which our politicians and media are currently indulging themselves - when they aren't in squawking hysteria over Ebola. She defines terrorism specifically as "a form of violence that deliberately rather than inadvertently targets civilians." The definition of terrorism itself is contested, of course. Partisan warfare in support of a conventional war effort has included sabotage of bridges and other facilities, guerrilla attacks on enemy troops and assassination of hostile local officials. But the definition Crenshaw uses is probably close to how most Americans think of terrorism today.

Those basics that she brings forward include:

• It was an act of terrorism in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that set off the First World War - in that case because "considerations of prestige and reputation augment territorial and resource rivalries among great powers" came into play around it. A nice way of describing the imperialist, bandit mentality of the great powers in Europea at the start of the First World War.
• Terrorism in her sense was also practiced by radical groups, notably anarchists, in the 19th century. Here her definition perhaps slips a bit as she notes, "Assassination has been a favored tactic from the anarchist terrorism that arose in the 1880s ... to the present day." Heads of government or senior officials like Franz Ferdinand were civilians, but ones with major roles to play in war and the starting of war.
• Counterterrorism is largely a matter of "effective law enforcement and intelligence cooperation rather than offensive military force."
• She designates the 1983 attack on US Marine in Lebanon in 1983 as the starting point of suicide attacks. But she notes 19th century precedents, noting that "Russia's early revolutionaries also prided themselves on dying with their bombs or refusing leniency if apprehended." She specifically makes the argument in that connection that it's incorrect to think of suicide bombings as justified only by "radical Islamist beliefs that justify violence by emphasizing the rewards of martyrdom." Other ideologies and causes have served that role as well. Robert Pape in his 2005 study Dying to Win pointed to nationalism in defending one's homeland as the most common factor motivated suicide bombings. And she warns, "There is no reason to think that future terrorists, of whatever ideological persuasion, will abandon suicide missions."
• The only known terrorist attacks with a "weapon of mass destruction" was the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo's sarin gas attack on Tokyo subways in 1995. That attack was deadly but failed to produce the mass casualties the cult had anticipated. It may be that an anti-government group in the civil war was responsible for the chemical weapons attack on civilian areas in Syria, though Crenshaw states as a fact that the Syrian government was responsible for it. From what's in the public record to date, it's still an unresolved question.
• It remains important to combat the ideologies used to encourage and justify terrorist acts.

Crenshaw may place too much faith in drone warfare, writing, "Military force is always an option, from the British in Ireland to Russia in Chechnya to the United States in Afghanistan. Drones and special forces are likely to be the measures of choice in future counterterrorism operations, especially if there is worldwide proliferation of drone technology."

The other side is that drone warfare can also create chaos that provides the potential for escalation. And while propaganda against IS may emphasize its terrorist aspects, the Obama Administration has obviously decided that drones aren't enough to combat it. We also have to continue the Thirty Years War in Iraq and have expanded it to Syria.

Crenshaw also notes:

Before 9/11 hardly anyone in the scholarly or policy worlds thought that terrorism posed a serious threat to national or international security, yet its dramatic repercussions during the "global war on terror" included the invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq, a profound reorganization of US security institutions, and the implementation of a strategy
of worldwide drone warfare.

Or, in other words, the United States reacted to the 9/11 attacks by adopting what is in practice a policy of permanent war.

The United States is powerful enough to keep up such actions for a while. But, as we should have learned long ago, American power has its limits. And there are costs and many complications associated with war. Every technological innovation that is supposed to make war quick and painless for Americans - drones are the current favorite, as we see in Crenshaw's article - fails to take the risk out of war.

The sooner we adopt a more restrained, realistic foreign policy and manage to significantly reduce our reliance on war as an instrument of foreign policy, the better off we will be.

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.

When can we declare the War on Terror over?

The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur looks at the drone war and the effects of the open-ended war on terror in Is This Endless War on Terror The New Normal? 01/20/2013:

Tags: drone war, war on terror

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

An American Muslim woman's reaction to Bin Laden's death

This is the report of a Muslim woman who went to Ground Zero in New York just after hearing about Osama bin Laden's death: Mona Eltahawy, No dignity at Ground Zero Guardian 05/03/2011:

It was minutes after President Obama's announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed, and I was heeding a friend's suggestion that we – both Muslims – take candles and stand in vigil where the World Trade Centre stood before Bin Laden's footsoldiers took it down.

So it was a shock to find hundreds of others had turned that hallowed ground into the scene of a home crowd celebrating an away victory they hadn't attended, the roots of which they were probably not there to experience or were too young to remember.

There was always something sickening about tourists taking pictures of themselves posing in front of that big gaping hole called Ground Zero. "Me at site of mass slaughter, NYC" as holiday photo caption is wrong in every language, surely. It didn't take 10 minutes for the frat party atmosphere to sicken me. Olympic-style chants of "USA! USA!" I could just about take as a freshly minted American, as of Friday. But "Fuck Osama! Ole ole ole!" crushed any ambition of dignity for the thousands killed, many of whom had jumped hundreds of storeys to their deaths, their bodies shattered to pieces close to where we stood.

Taylor Marsh linked to this article on Twitter, grumping that "Mona Eltahawy's 'No dignity at Ground Zero' reveals her inability to understand the American spirit."

Maybe. My inclination when I heard about the news was to think about the victims of the 9/11 attacks and others who suffered directly and indirectly from Al Qa'ida's terrorist attacks. I'm not inclined to treat the news of a death like that as an occasion for yee-haw celebration.

But I don't regard all the celebratory reactions as reflecting some unworthy impulse. Bin Laden had been built up by the Bush Administration, both political parties and the media as the Hitler of the 9/11 attacks. I certainly felt a feeling of relief at hearing of his death. It did represent for me something like a concluding moment for the "9/11 period," though obviously not all the alleged perpetrators in custody have been put on trial yet.

And I hope that a lot of people do feel that Bin Laden's death should be something like V-J Day for the War On Terror. Al Qa'ida at its most effect was never "Hitler," never an existential threat to the United States. It's long past time to end the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, pull out of the Libya War before we get more deeply involved and start treating peacetime terrorism like the domestic and international law enforcement problem that it is.

Tags: osama bin laden, terrorism, war on terror

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

Overreacting and reacting foolishly to jihadist terrorism

Jessica Stern, an actual expert on terrorism, wrote back on 09/11/06 (The Song Remains the Same Foreign Affairs Web site):

Long-time students of terrorism are quite familiar with fluctuating public attitudes toward the subject. Before 9/11 we were seen as eccentrics, rambling on obsessively about a supposedly non-existent threat. Afterwards, we were seen as Cassandras, with our worries suddenly taken very seriously indeed. Despite the shift in popular attitudes, however, the professionals' views didn't change all that much. Before, they thought the probability of a major attack was real but relatively low, and they think the same thing now.

The one area where all the Roundtable participants [a Foreign Affairs roundtable on terrorism] seem to agree is that terrorists aim to make us react in ways that threaten our security, in essence doing their work for them. This is sometimes referred to as an "auto-immune response" to terrorism: They attack us, we attack ourselves in response. The jihadists behind 9/11 set out to provoke us into taking actions that would reduce our security, prestige, and moral authority, and measured against that objective, they did pretty well. One can point this out, however, without making light of the continuing threats that the jihadists pose. (my emphasis)

Tags: global war on terror, jessica stern, terrorism, war on terror

Some real unanswered questions about the 9/11 attacks

You don't need to be a 9/11 "Troofer" to think that Gerald Posner has some legitimate questions in this post: The CIA's Destroyed Interrogation Tapes and the Saudi-Pakistani 9/11 Connection Huffington Post 12/07/07.

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

"Military Ministry"

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) was started by Mikey Weinstein to challenge the Pentagon's institutional promotion of Christianist activism in the armed forces. Or, as Weinstein puts it, Christian dominionism.

The MRFF has recently released a report about the Military Ministry of the Campus Crusade for Christ and its aggressive program of Christian proselytizing in the US military. Dated 10/31/07, the report is titled, Government Paid Missionaries for Christ. The title is taken from a phrase that, according to the report, is commonly used by the Military Ministry. It quotes a strategy statement from Valor Ministry, one of several branches of the Military Ministry group:

The Valor ROTC cadet and midshipman ministry reaches our future military leaders as their initial entry points on college campuses, helps them grow in their faith, then sends them to their first duty assignments throughout the world as "government-paid missionaries for Christ".

This video at the Military Ministry Web site as of this writing, "Global War on Terror", shows a long presentation by retired Gen. Bob Dees, who directs the group. He presents a highly ideological version of the "global war on terror" with generous snippets from some FOX News propaganda film. It's very clear in this talk that Dees' rightwing view of the "war on terror" as a religious war against Islam is an integral part of his version of the Christian message. It's a highly, explicitly political message, political as in a very narrow, conservative ideological view of foreign and military policy.

Dees says, "These troops that are gathering before a patrol in Baghdad, they're not worried about being politically correct, they are worried about being God-correct." And, "Our mission is to transform the nations of the world through the militaries of the world starting with the United States armed forces." And it's clear that he's not talking about converting the militaries to the sort of radical pacifism practiced by people like, say, Jesus of Nazareth. But what did he know? He was just some Jewish agitator from a long time ago who hung out with workers and whores. He didn't know anything about fighting Islamunistofascistdefeatocratists.

This video from the MRFF Web site gives some background on Weinstein's concerns about officially-sanctioned aggressive proselytizing in the military.

Tags: bob dees, christian right, christianism, global war on terror, mikey weinstein, military ministry, military religious freedom foundation, war on terror