U.S. needs an intervention on guns

About half of America is insane about guns and the other half cannot cure their illness:

There have been fewer than 20 terror-related deaths on American soil since 9/11 and about 364,000 deaths caused by privately owned firearms. If any European nation had such a record and persisted in addressing only the first figure, while ignoring the second, you can bet your last pound that the State Department would be warning against travel to that country and no American would set foot in it without body armour.

In fact, if we take the entire history of U.S. warfare vs. the past 50 years of gun deaths, our national sickness looks even worse:

The figures from Congressional Research Service, plus recent statistics from icasualties.org, tell us that from the first casualties in the battle of Lexington to recent operations in Afghanistan, the toll is 1,171,177. By contrast, the number killed by firearms, including suicides, since 1968, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI, is 1,384,171.

Porter believes it's time for the rest of the world to intervene and stop the bloodshed in America, since we Americans are mentally and physically incapable of ending it ourselves.

American gun use is out of control. Shouldn't the world intervene?

By Henry Porter

September 21, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3jxv3

Cohen: Where's liberals' outrage over Syria?

Neo-interventionist and "liberal" pundit Richard Cohen continues his assault on liberals' heartstrings, pleading with them to attack Syria:

I pick on the American left because it is liberal and because that suggests empathy, concern and internationalism. The American right is now going through one of its periodic bouts of lunacy, reverting to a comfy isolationism-cum-selfishness that has often characterized it. (I should note, though, that back in the late 1930s Norman Thomas, the six-time socialist presidential candidate, supported the isolationist America First movement.) Still, I look to liberals to make common cause with the underprivileged, the unfortunate and the weak. If that doesn’t describe the people of Syria, then what does? Can the United States help them? We certainly could have. We certainly didn’t.

Once again, I advise all pundits and editorial page editors to read their own newspaper. If Cohen did, he would have read an interview a week ago by the WaPo's Ezra Klein with Congressman Alan Grayson, who summed up the futility of limited U.S. military intervention in Syria:

So, a) Assad has so much [military] stuff, b) the Russians will replace it, and c) we don’t want to weaken him too much. Sometimes there is no solution to the equation.

Interventionist liberals like Cohen -- and now add Christiane Amanpour -- who cry, "We must do something!" don't seem to care too much what that something is, or what it will achieve.

Beyond that, Cohen's unapologetic assertion that the U.S. is indeed the world's policeman is, well, stunning. It's so 2001. 

The inescapable truth is that the world needs a policeman. The inescapable truth is that only the United States can play cop. We have the wherewithal. A further inescapable truth is that evil exists and needs to be fought. We should always proceed cautiously and prudently, aware of mission creep, complexity and our own limitations. I have always thought, maybe naively, that these were values embedded in the very soul of American liberalism. It seems I am wrong.

Yes, and thank God you are wrong.  It's hard to believe anybody who calls himself a liberal would dare to put this in print. "We have the wherewithal"?  "We should proceed...aware of our own limitations!"  Hello!  We have almost $17 trillion in national debt, about 10 percent of it from the Afghanistan-Iraq debacles. And Cohen wants us to put a third war on the nation's credit card?!  We have a U.S. Military that is overstretched and thinned out at the junior office ranks, the backbone of our fighting force. And what if we need to fight a war where our security or interests are actually at stake?!  Folks, this is the road to empire, overreach and collapse.  

Where’s the moral outrage?

By Richard Cohen

September 13, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/18UzZVi

U.S. missiles won't end Syrian war

Eliot Cohen has a deplorable record as a neoconservative academic who advised Condooleeza Rice and Dick Cheney before and after the disastrous invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.  Eliot is coyly mum here on whether he thinks Obama should send U.S. troops into Syria.  

Nevertheless, the man who favors "preemptive war" is giving a wise preemptive warning (that's redundant) to U.S. policymakers: we can't lob a few missiles into Syria and hope to change anything there.  

We ought to stay out of it entirely.  

UPDATE (28.08.2013):  Looks like the US and UK, at least, are going to war with Assad in Syria.  They want to do a limited Kosovo-style air war with "punitive military strikes."  That's the key phrase. They're not pretending that these strikes will affect the direction of the civil war or even prevent more civilian casualties; the West just wants to slap Assad on the wrist for his alleged use of chemical weapons in violation of international law.

This seems like a desperate attempt to remain relevant on the international stage without actually doing anything.

Syria will require more than cruise missiles

By Eliot A. Cohen

August 26, 2013 | Washington Post 

URL: http://wapo.st/17fduK8

Cato: Beware proxy wars

Here's a Cato Institute scholar saying what I've already said, but since the messenger matters to conservatives as much as the message....

The danger of America's 'proxy war'

By Erica D. Borghard

August 14, 2013 | CNN

The past few months have been difficult for the Syrian rebels as government forces, bolstered by Iranian support and Hezbollah fighters, have routed anti-Assad fighters around Damascus and Homs. However, recent reports suggest Syria’s rebels have successfully seized the key Minakh air base in Aleppo and are orchestrating a push to challenge Bashar al-Assad’s control of Latakia, a regime stronghold. If the rebels can consolidate these reported gains, it would certainly suggest a shift in momentum.

Yet the seesawing dynamic of the Syrian civil war suggests that these advances are likely to prove fleeting, and U.S. policymakers should not point to them as evidence that the Obama administration’s decision to arm the rebels represents sound policy. In fact, providing arms to the Syrian rebels is unlikely to decisively tip the scales to their advantage. As I argued in a recent Cato Institute paper, the United States is instead likely to be dragged into a more extensive involvement later – the very scenario advocates for intervention claim they are trying to avoid.

Waging war by proxy, whereby states provide nonstate groups with arms and other resources in exchange for fighting on the former’s behalf, is an attractive policy option for states when they are hesitant to use force directly. In this case, the Obama administration’s decision to arm the Syrian rebels is taking place in a broader context of American retrenchment and public wariness about extensive foreign interventions.

Advocates of arming the Syrian rebels claim that U.S. policy objectives in Syria can be achieved at a relatively low cost without forcing the United States to commit to a large-scale intervention. However, the very aspects of proxy warfare that appeal to states – their covert, indirect and informal nature – also create the conditions for unwarranted commitment by states to conflicts.

First, the United States could become locked into a path of increasing involvement in the Syrian conflict through the institutional incentives that are present in covert operations. While the White House publicly announced on June 13 that the U.S. government was initiating a program of lethal support to the Syrian rebels, it was in fact already authorized under current covert operations law. Accordingly, the president can authorize covert action, provided he or she informs congressional intelligence committees, and is not required to make the nature of the operation known to the public.

What this means is that the specific parameters of the U.S. intervention in Syria remain vague and underspecified.

The secrecy surrounding aid to the Syrian rebels creates a real risk that the U.S. could get locked into even greater commitments in Syria later. Delegating authority for alliance management to bureaucrats, the CIA in the case of Syria, and providing them with a broad and ill-defined mandate to execute policies, impinges on political leaders’ abilities to use threats to influence the behavior of their nonstate allies. Specifically, proxies will not take threats to withhold or moderate support seriously if the political leaders making the threats cannot rein in the individuals responsible for executing them.

Second, the United States could get trapped in an over-commitment in Syria through erroneous understandings of credibility and reputation. The fact is that despite claims by some policymakers, U.S. credibility is not at stake in Syria. The idea that Obama’s failure to adequately support the rebels would undermine the administration’s reputation for resolve in other arenas is misguided because Syria does not threaten core U.S. national security interests. Other states assess credibility based on a state’s power and interests in the issue at hand, on a case-by-case basis, rather than past behavior. Iran, for example, should not infer from Obama’s actions in Syria that the United States would not stand firm with regard to its nuclear program.

The rebels’ military vulnerability exacerbates these two problems. Their military deficiencies raise the question of what the United States should do if they are still unable to achieve and maintain pivotal military gains on the ground after receiving U.S. arms. As it becomes apparent that U.S.-backed rebels cannot complete the job, the United States will be tempted to escalate its involvement in the civil war to achieve its political objectives.

One thing should be clear: the United States should not have initiated a program to provide arms to the Syrian rebels. If our government is not careful, it will get sucked into an even deeper – and extremely costly – international commitment.

Gingrich: Neocons may now be non-interventionist

Gee, whaddya know?  Maybe old neocons can learn new tricks!

I wonder though if Newt's change of mind could have anything to do with shifting political winds on the Far Right -- Newt's political provenance and final refuge -- towards libertarian isolationism?   

I do have a bone to pick with Gingrich's aside that, "[W]e really need a discussion on what is an effective policy against radical Islam, since it’s hard to argue that our policies of the last 12 years have [sic] effective."

How does one measure our effectiveness?  No more 9/11s?  Number of Americans killed?  Number of attacks by Islamists, period?  Number of Islamist terrorists killed?  What's the metric?  Whatever it is, I'd argue we've been doing pretty well.  (You can find a data base of 40 years of terror attacks against the U.S. here.)

One could certainly argue that America's means of fighting terrorism -- drone strikes, domestic spying, sanctioned murders, renditions and torture in secret prisons, etc. -- exceed the scale of the threat we face, and do more harm than good.

But more important, we non-interventionist liberals must part ways with the Gingrichs, Pauls and Cruzes when they continue to state, all too casually, that the U.S. is at war with Islam.  We are not even "at war" with radical Islam.  We're not at war with anybody, constitutionally or operationally speaking.  It's possible to argue we're not even fighting al Qaeda anymore.  Needless to say, we must continue to seek out, thwart and kill or arrest those who threaten to attack, or attempt to attack and kill us.  Period.  

Declaring war on a whole religion or a religious sect is stupid and self-defeating.  Four hundred years of Christian Crusades against Muslims followed by 120 years of war between Catholics and Protestants should have taught the West as much.  

Radical Islam, whether home-grown or foreign, is not a threat to America, a priori or sine exceptione.  And terrorism is not an enemy that we can fight a war against.  

We Democrats and liberals must not sanction stupid bumper-sticker generalizations about the world that lead America into trouble.  

UPDATE (08.12.2013): The American Prospect ran an article on August 9 on the same topic, making many of the same points I did: "Neocons vs. Non-Interventionists: Let the Games Begin!"  If the GOP is going to have a debate on foreign policy, I predict it will be quiet and internal.

Newt Gingrich rethinks neoconservative views on U.S. military interventions

By Ralph Z. Hallow

August 4, 2013 | Washington Times

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a leading neoconservative hawk and staunch supporter of Israel, says the U.S. military interventions he has long supported to promote democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere have backfired and need to be re-evaluated.

“I am a neoconservative. But at some point, even if you are a neoconservative, you need to take a deep breath to ask if our strategies in the Middle East have succeeded,” the 2012 Republican presidential hopeful said in an interview.

Mr. Gingrich supported the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but he said he has increasingly doubted the strategy of attempting to export democracy by force to countries where the religion and culture are not hospitable to Western values.

“It may be that our capacity to export democracy is a lot more limited than we thought,” he said.

Mr. Gingrich at times has expressed doubts about the U.S. capacity for nation-building, but he said he now has formed his own conclusions about their failures in light of the experiences of the past decade.

“My worry about all this is not new,” Mr. Gingrich said. “But my willingness to reach a conclusion is new.”

Mr. Gingrich said it is time for Republicans to heed some of the anti-interventionist ideas offered by the libertarian-minded Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, and Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, tea party favorite and foreign policy skeptic.

“I think it would be healthy to go back and war-game what alternative strategies would have been better, and I like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul because they are talking about this,” Mr. Gingrich said.

Mr. Paul, a longtime critic of neoconservatives on foreign policy, argues that war must be a last resort and never should be used for nation-building.

In a June 24 column in The Washington Times, Mr. Paul wrote that Americans were told for many years that the radical Taliban would return to power quickly unless U.S. forces remained in Afghanistan.

“Well, guess what, after 12 years, trillions of dollars, more than 2,200 Americans killed, and perhaps more than 50,000 dead Afghan civilians and fighters, the Taliban is coming back anyway!” Mr. Paul wrote.

He noted a similar pattern of radical resurgence in Iraq after American forces withdrew.

As far back as December 2003, Mr. Gingrich was questioning the follow-up for the successful U.S. invasion.

“I am very proud of what [Operation Iraqi Freedom commander Gen.] Tommy Franks did — up to the moment of deciding how to transfer power to the Iraqis. Then we go off a cliff,” he told Newsweek magazine. He said the point should have been “not ‘How many enemy do I kill?’, [but] ‘How many allies do I grow?’”

He also noted his past wariness about U.S. military interventions, often telling audiences that “we could directly guarantee democracy in Iraq and not stay a day longer than needed in Korea.” “Korea has been a 63-year engagement,” he added with a laugh.

Mr. Gingrich argued less than two years ago that President Obama should have “quietly tried to push” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak out of office.

But he now questions whether even U.S. indirect intervention in Egypt to back the overthrow of the longtime Egyptian leader and U.S. ally might have been a mistake. “Here’s a simple question: ‘Is Egypt really better off than going back to Mubarak since it’s hard to argue that the Muslim Brotherhood’s dictatorship is better than Mubarak?’” Mr. Gingrich said.

The former speaker added that U.S. military action in Syria would risk a repeat of interventionist foreign policy mistakes.

“I explicitly would not go into Syria,” he said. “I would look at the whole question of how we think of the governments in other countries,” he said.

He said the result may be another military dictatorship in Egypt and that would be better than rule by the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood.

“It’s hard to argue the chaos in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Lebanon make for a better future,” Mr. Gingrich said.

The fear of many in the United States and Israel is that the Arab Spring is bringing not Western-style democracy but simply replacing secular authoritarians with militantly Islamic religious governments that are hostile to Israel and the U.S., he said.

“I certainly would have allied myself in the 1970s and 1980s with the strategy of intervention and defeating the Soviet Union, but there is definitely a reflection point for conservatives and Republican Party leaders on how we have approached our major national security questions,” Mr. Gingrich said. “I am not alone in asking the question: ‘Are we making progress after the Arab Spring?’”

A top official in the George W. Bush administration, which oversaw the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns and occupations, offered partial agreement with Mr. Gingrich.

“People want to know if Gingrich has really changed his opinion — his point of view — because if he has it will make an impact,” said former Bush political director Matt Schlapp.

“There are plenty of conservatives and Republicans who think that those decisions to go into Afghanistan and Iraq were overly aggressive,” said Mr. Schlapp. “But I believe the vast majority of Republicans are hoping these life-and-death decisions we made in Afghanistan and Iraq were the right decisions to combat terrorism.”

Mr. Gingrich said the U.S. “should begin to focus narrowly on American interests” rather than on attempting to change systems of governance abroad to our liking.

“I think we really need a discussion on what is an effective policy against radical Islam, since it’s hard to argue that our policies of the last 12 years have effective,” he said.

Mr. Gingrich repeated comments he expressed in an interview on Laura Ingraham’s radio show supporting Mr. Paul in his extended contretemps with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a fellow Republican. Mr. Christie sharply criticized what he called the “esoteric, intellectual debates” he said Mr. Paul and his allies were staging in the face of the need for stronger security polices in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I consistently have been on the side of having the courage that Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have, and I think it’s sad to watch the establishment grow hysterical, but, frankly, they’re hysterical because they have no answers,” Mr. Gingrich said on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

Mr. Gingrich predicted that Mr. Christie’s attack was the “first sign” of more to come from the party’s foreign policy establishment.

“The establishment will grow more and more hysterical the more powerful Rand Paul and Ted Cruz become,” Mr. Gingrich said. “They will gain strength as it’s obvious that they are among the few people willing to raise the right questions.”

Greenwald: 434 wrongs don't make a right

Glenn Greenwald implores us to remember Rep. Barbara Lee's lonely "no" vote in Congress in 2001, just three days after 9/11, when cooler heads unfortunately did not prevail.  

Here's her speech on 9/14 explaining her vote; you can clearly hear her holding back her tears in the beginning:

All too predictably, she suffered for being right in a time when everybody wanted to be wrong.  

A Washington Times op-ed said she was "a long-practicing supporter of America's enemies - from Fidel Castro on down." 

Conservative activist David Horowitz said, "Barbara Lee is not an anti-war activist, she is an anti-American communist who supports America's enemies and has actively collaborated with them in their war against America."

Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin called her "treacherous."

Glenn Greenwald notes that Lee "was deluged with so many death threats that she was given around-the-clock police protection."

Let's learn from Barbara Lee's profile in courage and not repeat past mistakes. We mustn't get involved militarily in Syria!

Barbara Lee and Dick Durbin's 'nobody-could-have-known' defense

By Glenn Greenwald

May 7, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3fk37

How fast we forget 'lessons learned' in Iraq!

Now here we have the "liberal" Washington Post's foreign affairs commentator Richard Cohen repeating his past mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq -- mistakes he admitted to and regretted on the 10th anniversary of 9/11!

Once again he is urging the U.S. to get involved in a Middle Eastern war.  (The original title of his op-ed was, "Deadly delay on Syria.")

What skin does the U.S. have in this game?  Why should we take sides in a civil war, when the eventual victors, whoever they may be, are going to be pretty unsavory and undemocratic by our standards?  Haven't we learned anything?

Conservative MSM haters, take note, this is the real media bias when it comes to U.S. foreign policy: only "fools" talk about peace and non-interference, while the "realists" and grownups in Washington talk about how fast we can get our hands bloody.

UPDATE (03.21.2013):  Here's a look at the unsavory characters whom we'd be arming in Syria, if John McCain, et al, got their way.

Does Obama have a plan for Syria?

By Richard Cohen

March 19, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/WzSJWS

Buchanan: Reaping what we sowed abroad

The Fruits of Intervention
By Patrick J. Buchanan
October 30, 2009 | Human Events

If we had it to do over, would we send an army into Afghanistan to build a nation?

Would we invade Iraq?

While these two wars have cost 5,200 dead, a trillion dollars and a divided America facing an endless war, what have we won?

Gen. Stanley McChrystal needs 40,000 to 80,000 more troops, or we risk "mission failure" in Afghanistan. At present casualty rates -- October was the worst month of the war -- thousands more Americans will die before we see any light at the end of this tunnel, if ever we do.

Pakistan, which aided us in Afghanistan, now has a war of its own to fight. Its army is in a battle in South Waziristan, while the country is wracked by terror bombings, the latest in a Peshawar bazaar that specialized in women's clothing and jewelry and toys for kids. So horrific was the toll even the Taliban and al-Qaida denied any role in it.

The 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq are, after almost seven years, to begin pulling out two months after January's election. But a hitch has developed. Iraq's parliament missed the deadline for setting the rules. At issue: Will voters be allowed to choose individual candidates, or will they be allowed only to vote for slates of candidates?

Gen. Ray Odierno implies that postponement of the election may mean postponement of U.S. withdrawals.

Ominously, in August, terrorists bombed the foreign and finance ministries in Baghdad, and last week blew up the Justice Ministry and Baghdad Provincial Governorate. And the Kurds are now claiming their control of oil-rich Kirkuk is non-negotiable, which crosses a red line in Baghdad.

Next door, a terror attack by Jundallah (God's Brigade) in Iran's southern province of Sistan-Baluchistan killed 40, including two senior commanders of the Revolutionary Guard.

An enraged Tehran pointed the finger at the United States, as there have been charges the CIA has been in contact with Jundallah as part of President Bush's destabilization program to effect "regime change."

But Barack Obama has been in office for nine months -- and he would never authorize such an attack on the eve of a critical meeting on Iran's nuclear program. Moreover, the State Department condemned the Jundallah bombing as terrorism and offered public condolences to the families of the victims.

But if we didn't authorize this, who did?

Was the timing of this attack coincidental? Were these just freelance secessionists on an operation unrelated to the U.S.-Iran talks? Or is someone trying to torpedo the talks and push Iran and the United States into military collision?

For this was a provocation. And whoever carried it out and whoever authorized or abetted it wishes to dynamite the U.S.-Iran negotiations, abort a rapprochement and put us on a road to war.

Speculation is focusing on the Saudis, the Gulf Arabs and the Israelis, who have been accused, as has the United States, of aiding PJAK, a Kurdish faction that has conducted raids in northern Iran.

If we have any control of these organizations, we should shut them down. With U.S. armies tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan, and America conducting Predator and cross-border attacks in Pakistan, provoking a war with Iran would be an act of madness.

Looking back, how has all this fighting advanced U.S. national interests? We have a "democratic" Iraq that is Shia-dominated and tilting to Iran. We have an open-ended war in Afghanistan that will likely do for Obama what Iraq did for Bush. But we can't pull out, it is said, for if we do, Kabul falls and Afghanistan becomes the sanctuary for an Islamist war to take over Pakistan and its nuclear weapons.

And if that should happen, it would indeed be a crisis.

And so, how has all this intervention availed us?

We ran Saddam out of Kuwait and put U.S. troops into Saudi Arabia. And we got Osama bin Laden's 9-11. We responded by taking down the Taliban and taking over Afghanistan. And we got an eight-year war with no victory and no end in sight. Now Pakistan is burning. We took down Saddam and got a seven-year war and an ungrateful Iraq.

Meanwhile, the Turks, who shared a border with Saddam, have done no fighting. Iran has watched as we destroyed its two greatest enemies, the Taliban and Saddam. China, which has a border with both Pakistan and Afghanistan, has sat back. India, which has a border with Pakistan and fought three wars with that country, has stayed aloof.

The United States, on the other side of the world, plunged in. And now we face an elongated military presence in Iraq, an escalating war in Afghanistan and potential disaster in Pakistan, and are being pushed from behind into a war with Iran.

"America rejects the false comfort of isolationism," said George W. Bush in his 2006 State of the Union. And we did reject that false comfort. And now we can enjoy the fruits of interventionism.