Post-Election need for a US peace policy

Regardless of which Presidential candidates wins today, the US is in serious need of a expanded peace movement.

The various iterations of the War for the Greater Middle East are urgent topics:

• Erdogan: Syrian Kurd forces used to take Raqqa 'naive' Aljazeera 11/07/2016
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• Disease stalks Yemen as hospitals, clinics devastated by war: WHO Reuters 11/07/2016
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• Yury Barmin, Russia emerges as a center of gravity for Israel Al-Monitor 11/08/2016
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• Howard LaFranchi, Solving Syria: How next US president could pressure Russia in new ways Christian Science Monitor 11/07/2016
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• Stephen Walt, The Great Myth About U.S. Intervention In Syria Foreign Policy 10/24/2016:

[B]y far the worst argument for intervening in Syria is the suggestion that greater U.S. involvement is necessary to preserve U.S. credibility, to maintain its reputation as a distinctly moral great power, or to preserve the respect of allies and adversaries alike. The historical record shows that not intervening in humanitarian tragedies has had little impact on America’s standing in the past, and the same is true today. Indeed, diving deep into the Syrian quagmire is a good way to squander resources and burn up the attention and political capital of America’s leaders, which would in fact make the United States less able to act when challenges to more serious interests arise (as they inevitably will).

To repeat: One can make a coherent case for intervening in Syria, based on the worthy goal of reducing human suffering. But we should reject the idea that the United States should intervene because its own security, prosperity, or reputation is on the line. It’s not. [my emphasis in bold]

Also two more from Stephen Walt, this one on the Afghanistan War, now generally accepted to be the longer war in US history, The 2016 Epidemic of Afghan War Amnesia Foreign Policy 10/16/2016.

And this third one, a hopeful thought, Why Are We So Sure Hillary Will Be a Hawk? Foreign Policy 10/16/2016. He casts doubt on the assumption, which he notes has substantial basis in reality, that Hillary will be hawkish on foreign and military policy. Mainly by arguing that there are good, sensible reasons for her not to be. "Most important of all, none of the places Clinton might be tempted to intervene look easy or appealing."

But without popular and activist pressure, she's unlikely to follow the more restrained path, whether a "realist" version or otherwise. Because there is a huge national security establishment and military-industrial complex that have vested interests in a more hawkish foreign policy.

In this video Larry Wilkerson talks about the civil war in Syria, Larry Wilkerson: A Solution for Syria Will Require the United States to Concede on Assad The Real News 10/31/2016:

Civil war developing in Yemen, US policy looking increasingly irrelevant in the Arab Awakening

The opposition claims that the Yemeni dictator Ali Abdallah Salih is allowing Al Qa'ida in Yemen to take over some areas in order to scare other countries into providing aid against the other rebels challenging the regime.



Here is another instance where we see how the constrictions of the War on Terror framework restricts and complicates the foreign policy options of the United States. Robert Fisk argues that US influence seems to be sharply declining in the wake of the Arab Awakening (Who cares in the Middle East what Obama says? The Independent 05/30/2011):

While Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu played out their farce in Washington – Obama grovelling as usual – the Arabs got on with the serious business of changing their world, demonstrating and fighting and dying for freedoms they have never possessed. Obama waffled on about change in the Middle East – and about America's new role in the region. It was pathetic. "What is this 'role' thing?" an Egyptian friend asked me at the weekend. "Do they still believe we care about what they think?"

And it is true. Obama's failure to support the Arab revolutions until they were all but over lost the US most of its surviving credit in the region. Obama was silent on the overthrow of Ben Ali, only joined in the chorus of contempt for Mubarak two days before his flight, condemned the Syrian regime – which has killed more of its people than any other dynasty in this Arab "spring", save for the frightful Gaddafi – but makes it clear that he would be happy to see Assad survive, waves his puny fist at puny Bahrain's cruelty and remains absolutely, stunningly silent over Saudi Arabia. And he goes on his knees before Israel. Is it any wonder, then, that Arabs are turning their backs on America, not out of fury or anger, nor with threats or violence, but with contempt? It is the Arabs and their fellow Muslims of the Middle East who are themselves now making the decisions. ...

Listening to Obama's 45-minute speech this month – the "kick off' to four whole days of weasel words and puffery by the man who tried to reach out to the Muslim world in Cairo two years ago, and then did nothing – one might have thought that the American President had initiated the Arab revolts, rather than sat on the sidelines in fear. [my emphasis]

One of the complications with Syria, Fisk reports, is that Turkey is worried about a flood of Kurdish refugees bolstering Kurdish anti-government sentiment in Turkey and is prepared to send Turkish troops into Syria to set up a "safe haven" for Syrian Kurdish refugees there inside Syria. And he writes of Yemen:

Amid all these vast and epic events – Yemen itself may yet prove to be the biggest bloodbath of all, while the number of Syria's "martyrs" have now exceeded the victims of Mubarak's death squads five months ago – is it any surprise that the frolics of Messrs Netanyahu and Obama appear so irrelevant?

He reminds us that people in the Arab world really do have a different viewpoint than the American conventional wisdom. Writing about Obama's recent pronouncements on Israel-Palestine:

Then we had the endless waffle about the 1967 borders. Netanyahu called them "defenceless" (though they seemed to have been pretty defendable for the 18 years prior to the Six Day War) and Obama – oblivious to the fact that Israel must be the only country in the world to have an eastern land frontier but doesn't know where it is – then says he was misunderstood when he talked about 1967. It doesn't matter what he says. George W Bush caved in years ago when he gave Ariel Sharon a letter which stated America's acceptance of "already existing major Israeli population centres" beyond the 1967 lines. To those Arabs prepared to listen to Obama's spineless oration, this was a grovel too far. They simply could not understand the reaction of Netanyahu's address to Congress. How could American politicians rise and applaud Netanyahu 55 times – 55 times – with more enthusiasm than one of the rubber parliaments of Assad, Saleh and the rest? [my emphasis]

Fisk reminds us of a bit of history, something that seems to get re-written almost daily in US conventional wisdom:

Of course, cynicism grows the longer you live in the Middle East. I recall, for example, travelling to Gaza in the early 1980s when Yasser Arafat was running his PLO statelet in Beirut. Anxious to destroy Arafat's prestige in the occupied territories, the Israeli government decided to give its support to an Islamist group in Gaza called Hamas. In fact, I actually saw with my own eyes the head of the Israeli army's Southern Command negotiating with bearded Hamas officials, giving them permission to build more mosques. It's only fair to say, of course, that we were also busy at the time, encouraging a certain Osama bin Laden to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan. But the Israelis did not give up on Hamas. They later held another meeting with the organisation in the West Bank; the story was on the front page of the Jerusalem Post the next day. But there wasn't a whimper from the Americans.

And he asks a pragmatic question about the Palestinian quest for UN recognition of statehood as it relates to the Arab Awakening:

Obama warns the Palestinians not to ask for statehood at the United Nations in September. But why on earth not? If the people of Egypt and Tunisia and Yemen and Libya and Syria – we are all waiting for the next revolution (Jordan? Bahrain again? Morocco?) – can fight for freedom and dignity, why shouldn't the Palestinians? Lectured for decades on the need for non-violent protest, the Palestinians elect to go to the UN with their cry for legitimacy – only to be slapped down by Obama.

The United States has to deal with states in international relations. There's a good case to be made that the US should recognize any government that is in practice in control of a country. The idea of formal diplomatic recognition as some kind of reward is a dubious one. It certainly doesn't seem to have proved very constructive in the case of Cuba. And while the Taliban government in Afghanistan was an odious one, it's questionable whether a policy of diplomatic isolation necessarily produced the best result. It's hard to see how a Taliban government with which the US had diplomatic relations could have produced more damaging results that it did with its collaboration with Osama bin Laden's original Al Qa'ida group.

Most Americans like the idea that we should promote democracy in the world, and so do I. But once we get below the level of that grand generalization, things get a lot stickier. The plain fact is that a lot of US democracy-promotion efforts are hard to distinguish from attempts at subversion of the government of a hostile nation-state. Supporting economic development and educational programs through genuinely independent international agencies should help move things in that direction.

But the US is a long way from a serious effort at that kind of thing. We try to promote "civil society" in countries like Iran we regard as hostile, which means in practice supporting opposition groups, including the occasional terrorist band. We claim we're supporting freedom and democracy when we enter a conflict like the Libyan civil war. But the shining democratic credentials of the opposition groups haven't yet become apparent.

We would be better off avoiding wars whenever reasonably possible, which was certainly the case with the Iraq War and the Libya War. And using conflict-resolution efforts like those the Carter Center effectively applies in many areas of the world to diffuse conflicts before they break out into civil wars. Every case is unique, of course. But there has to be some way the US can do a better job of having good relations with dictatorial regimes like those of Hosni Mubarak or Muammar Qaddafi and yet make clear our support for democratic aspirations even in those countries.

Dictatorial regimes do things that the US perceives as being in our interests. Egypt has maintained peaceful relations with Israel since 1978, generally considered a big victory for US foreign policy. Preventing wars is a good thing. Libya gave up its nuclear weapons program voluntarily. It would be foolish for the US not to reward those countries somehow when they do things we want them to do, especially on major policy issues. One of the concerns about the Libya War is that it may lead aspiring nuclear proliferaters to doubt whether it's more in their interest to give up such programs than to push them to fruition in order to be able to deter invasion by the United States.

But those rewards don't have to be so heavily tilted toward giving the dictators in question the military goodies they want so badly. And sticking to international law and basic human rights considerations is good policy. Egypt and Syria were two of the countries who cooperated with the US in the "special rendition" portion of the Cheney-Bush torture program, in which those targeted for torture were sent there to be tortured. When you cooperate with another regime in that kind of dirty business, it makes it hard to cut them loose, even when they are tottering. Because they know stuff. In the case of the torture program, the figure of speech "they know where the bodies are buried" is probably very literally true.

Tags: robert fisk, bush doctrine, yemen

They hate us for our freedoms? Yemen edition

We're not just firing rockets in Yemen. From Alice Fordham, Yemen: wrong lesson from Iraq Prospect (UK) 10/08/2010:

... the US military has reportedly proposed investing more than $1bn in Yemen’s security forces over the next five years. But what are they investing in? Yemen's government may technically be democratically elected, but most analysts say it wields no power. Influence lies with President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his cronies, vastly rich men, much of whose money is said to come from siphoning oil revenues, while a third of Yemen’s population starves. Saleh once said that ruling Yemen was like "dancing on the heads of snakes," keeping the various conflicting factions — tribes, secessionists, Islamists, the elite — subdued with a mixture of money and force. This has kept him in power for over 30 years, and many believe that losing him would plunge the country into chaos. Yet this system is only capable of maintaining the status quo, not enacting reforms. Without reform, Yemen — with its nosediving economy, dwindling oil reserves, demographic explosion and conflicts with northern rebels and southern secessionists — is only a few steps away from chaos.

This also doesn't sound good:

A senior US diplomat told me that Yemen is, in effect, the new testing ground for counterterrorism on the cheap. The interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said, had ruined America and would be the single biggest factor in its declining influence in the coming decades.

The Yemen strategy is closer to historical US and British policies of supporting known, if suspect, regimes in Latin America, the middle east and southeast Asia. Such an approach has yielded mixed, sometimes awful, results. The problem with this solution in Yemen is that it delegitimises the government in the eyes of many Yemenis, who are already deeply anti-western. Supporting the military without feeding the people of the world’s third-hungriest country sends a clear message that America cares only about its own security. And while imposing democracy by force is a terrible way to help a country, as long as Saleh’s ineffectual regime is kept on life-support, Yemen will continue to collapse around it.

Tags: yemen, us foreign policy

Real security and security rituals

By the time this post publishes, I expect to be through security and in flight from Munich to the US. I'm not looking forward to the security routine. And I'm disturbed at the alarmist language and military solutions that the Obama administration is putting forth in response to the Christmas Day half-wit terrorist attempt.

I want to see the US get smarter and more efficient with airport security measures. That doesn't mean adding new ritual humiliations for passengers that have no real security value. Above all, it means having well-trained security personnel. According to news reports, both in the US and the EU, official checks of airport security show that screeners often miss actual weapons concealed in luggage being taken through the checkpoints. In Germany, airport security is still largely outsourced.

Sen. Jim DeMint is trying to prevent unionization in the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Here in the real world, unionization would push management to do what they should be doing anyway: professionalizing airport security with good training and good pay and benefits to reduce turnover and maximize the number of experienced people doing the job. Having airport security be a starter job or a temporary refuge from unemployment is just not adequate. The best technolgy in the world won't do its job without qualified security people running it.

The better the technology gets, in fact, the more we will need well-trained and well-qualified people using them. Ritual measures like not letting people get up to go pee for the last hour of the flight can have the effect of simultaneously increasing passengers' anxieties while detracting from more effective security measures, even lulling security people into a false sense of security. Even necessary measures can have a large amount of ritual involved, something of which we all should be aware. Because ritual can become like a magical invocation, making us feel safe for the moment when maybe we should be a bit more alert. That's especially important in the case of airline security personnel. Just because they are going through the paces on inspections doesn't mean that they shouldn't be paying attention to other things.

I don't know enough about the potential for psychological profiling, although on the face of it, it makes sense. The Israelis are said to have good experience with it. But then, not every Israeli security measure that is admired by American Republicans is necessarily as effective as claimed. But I do know that with training, security personnel can learn to get better at detecting what might be a weapon, or noticing signs of trouble, like someone displaying high anxiety inappropriately. But this also gets back to the qualifications and training of the security staff. Without that, it can quickly turn into lazy racial profiling or security people interpreting normal irritation at the ritual humiliations of going through the security line as "contempt of cop". Management has a big role, too. If security success starts to be measured by, say, the number of suspicious-looking people searched, then security staff will start looking for excuses to search people rather than focusing on more likely risk factors.

The country-based screening the US just instituted seems to be a good example of a ritual that's likely to insult and annoy people without adding much to real security, or maybe even distracting screeners from more meaningful risks. Juan Cole calls that idea a "truly W.-level stupid thing" for reasons he explains in Obama to fix Security Flaws; but Could he Please Fix Stupid Racial Profiling? Infomred Comment.

One thing that might at least marginally help security that I would like to see instituted anyway is to minimize the amount of luggage passengers are allowed to carry into the cabin. The airlines' fairly recent habit of charging for luggage per piece has encouraged people to take way more stuff into the cabin. It would probably reduce terrorism risks at least marginally to reduce the amount taken into the cabin, and it would certainly make boarding and off-boarding more convenient. Also, there's less heavy stuff to fall on passengers heads that way.

No one seems to be talking any more about having security people on board flights. Did we send them all to Afghanistan?

Sucurity concerns and fears don't make concerns over privacy and personal dignity go away. Giving low-paid, inexperienced people the authorit5y to make anyone they want strip their clothes off is not a pleasant thought.

The terherty body-screen devices detect hidden items by their effect on natural body heat. Objects blocking the bod's normal reflection of the terahertz waves show up in the scanning. These device operate in the wavelenght between infrared light and microwaaves. Sweaty clothes or clothes of some unusual design can yield false positives. The more common x-ray based scanners supposedly subject the person being scanned to something like 1/20 of the excess radiation that a transatlantic passenger experiences during the flight. And the manufacturers of those machines wouldn't lie about that, would they?

But full-body scans using current technology aren't a magic solution, either. For information on some of its limitations, see Confusion reigns as US security is stepped up by Guy Adams The Independent 01/05/10.

On a more macro level, making wars against Muslim countries for no good reason hurts airport security by generating more terrorists. Even if the Obama administration, like its predecessor, prefers to say that Muslim terrorists are just evil and want to kill people and not talk about how their own foreign policies and wars contribute to the motivation of terrorists. Having a motivation doesn't make someone less evil or deadly. But it's worse than foolish not to try to look realistically at factors that animate terrorist attackers.

Of course, the biggest thing that would decouple us from the toxic politics in much of the Middle East would be a crash program of developing alternative evergy sources to oil, renewable ones being the most reliable. How many Middle Eastern and South Asian wars do we have to have before that because a major part of our foreign policy strategy?

Going into panic mode every time some terrorist case pops up has to be an encouragement to terrorism in itself. Because, well, the purpose of terror is to terrorize. Gene Lyons gives an excellent summary of the problems of media terrorism hysteria in Terrorized by the media Salon 01/06/09.

Der Spiegel 1/2010 (04.01.10) reprorts that the bombmaker for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's underwear bomb came from Saudi Arabia, though they don't cite the source for that particular bit of information. Saudi Arabia, that would be the country from which most of the 9/11 attackers came. Osama bin Laden's home country. Is it even necessary to ask why we aren't bombing or invading Saudi Arabia?

Yemen, on the other hand, is another story. On that point, see The Indepedent editorial, The world must tread carefully in Yemen 01/04/10.

On current security-hysteria matters, see also:

Spencer Ackerman, Three Cheers For A Law Enforcement Approach To Terrorism FDL Attackerman 01/08/10

The Terror Trap The Nation editorial 01/07/10

Tags: terrorism, yemen

Our peace President is looking a lot like a war President

Glenn Greenwald summarizes our current active wars and quasi-wars as follows in Cause and effect in the "Terror War" Salon 12/28/09:

Actually, if you count our occupation of Iraq, our twice-escalated war in Afghanistan, our rapidly escalating bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, and various forms of covert war involvement in Somalia, one could reasonably say that we're fighting five different wars in Muslim countries -- or, to use the NYT's jargon, "five fronts" in the "Terror War" (Obama yesterday specifically mentioned Somalia and Yemen as places where, euphemistically, "we will continue to use every element of our national power"). Add to those five fronts the "crippling" sanctions on Iran many Democratic Party luminaries are now advocating, combined with the chest-besting threats from our Middle East client state that the next wars they fight against Muslims will be even "harsher" than the prior ones, and it's almost easier to count the Muslim countries we're not attacking or threatening than to count the ones we are. Yet this still isn't enough for America's right-wing super-warriors, who accuse the five-front-war-President of "an allergy to the concept of war."

It's a fact of our foreign policy, which if anything is now becoming more pronounced under Obama, that, as Glennzila puts it, "Whether justified or not, we are constantly delivering death to the Muslim world."

And he broaches the subject that should be obvious but is still largely taboo for our Pod Pundits:

Just look at the bloodthirsty sentiments unleashed among Americans even from a failed Terrorist attempt. What sentiments do we think we're unleashing from a decade-long (and continuing and increasing) multi-front "war" in the Muslim war? ... Ultimately, we should ask ourselves: if we drop more bombs on more Muslim countries, will there be fewer or more Muslims who want to blow up our airplanes and are willing to end their lives to do so? That question really answers itself.

Juan Cole gives some more specific background on the conflict in Yemen in which the US is intervening in an increasingly active way (Top Ten Middle East Crises, 2009 Informed Comment 12/29/09):

Yemen fell apart, facing a Shiite Huthi rebellion in Saada, in which Saudi Arabia is now intervening, as well as tribal/ fundamentalist opposition and the reemergence of a vital al-Qaeda movement in Maarib. Conflict over water and other rural resources drives this descent into a failed state. This one spilled over on Detroit when al-Qaeda in Yemen responded to US and Yemeni army attacks on Maarib by targeting a Northwest Airliner on Christmas day.

Tags: yemen,
us foreign policy