On Iraq, Syria, Iran and U.S. engagement

For all my Fox News viewers, here is a quick primer on what really matters in Iraq (and Syria) now:

Isis has given Iran and the US a rare opportunity for detente, by Ali Ansari

Where is the accountability on Iraq?, by Katrina Vanden Heuvel.

Howard Dean Blasts Media For Featuring Discredited Iraq War Boosters As Experts, by Marina Fang.

Piecing together the shattering Middle East, by David Ignatius.

Obama got it right on Iraq, by Eugene Robinson.

What's the upshot to all this?

First, actions have consequences. Some of those actions date back 100 years. The Middle East never had a system of nation-states with clear borders like Europe, that is until the Western powers drew them up. The invasion and regime change by the U.S. in Iraq has only served to question/break up those borders within Iraq. Iraq is now informally three or four states in one.

And actions to remove the dictator in Iraq had international consequences: it created a power vacuum that favored Iran. This did not start yesterday, or even since Obama became president.

Second, there is no military solution to this, in isolation of regional power politics. The Uncle T's of the world will say this is because Middle Easterners are not "reasonable rational people."  In fact, they are a diverse group of ethnicities, tribes and confessions that were lumped together under borders of somebody else's choosing. Now those borders are under question in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere.  

This means that the U.S. must engage with Iran, the Shi'ite heavyweight in the region, that has had significant influence in Iraq since Dubya's invasion in 2003.  This is not to mention Saudi Arabia and Turkey.  (Israel is a non-factor).  

Conservatives will talk about the "success" of the surge, blah-blah-blah, but clearly the surge was not sustainable, and it did not take into account events in Syria.  

The hallmark of the surge was more U.S. boots on the ground.  Are Republicans seriously advocating for that?  No.  They should clearly state what they are for, instead of simply criticizing our commander-in-chief.

Bergen: Iraq is Dubya's legacy, not Obama's

It's not just "blaming Bush" in order to let Obama off the hook; it's acknowledging the reality that U.S. actions have consequences -- and sometimes those consequences are irreversible.

Having learned nothing, neoconservatives like McCain are saying the U.S. should send troops back into Iraq.  "We had it won in Iraq," McCain just told MSNBC. Had it won! 

Not only is Iran actively involved in Iraq, as before, but now al Qaeda in Syria. Yet McCain says a U.S. residual force would not be under any threat -- "ground combat troops would not be on the ground"!  So what the heck would U.S. troops do there to make a difference?!

McCain's answer, basically, is to do regime change yet again -- "[Maliki] has to be changed; it is an unacceptable situation" -- and bring back the Iraq surge "brain trust" (including old neocons like Robert and Frederick Kagan) to think up a genius solution.  That is, one of our most experienced Senators in foreign policy and military strategy has nothing to suggest except "rinse and repeat" in Iraq, minus the ground troops for which McCain's beloved "surge" were the hallmark.

Pardon my French, but this is a brainless and dickless stance that can never be enacted; it's meant only to make Obama look bad. But kudos, I guess, to Sen. McCain for giving us even this many specifics, since most Republicans won't.

Bush's toxic legacy in Iraq

By Peter Bergen

June 13, 2014 | CNN

ISIS, the brutal insurgent/terrorist group formerly known as al Qaeda in Iraq, has seized much of western and northern Iraq and even threatens towns not far from Baghdad.

From where did ISIS spring? One of George W. Bush's most toxic legacies is the introduction of al Qaeda into Iraq, which is the ISIS mother ship.

If this wasn't so tragic it would be supremely ironic, because before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, top Bush officials were insisting that there was an al Qaeda-Iraq axis of evil. Their claims that Saddam Hussein's men were training members of al Qaeda how to make weapons of mass destruction seemed to be one of the most compelling rationales for the impending war.

After the fall of Hussein's regime, no documents were unearthed in Iraq proving the Hussein-al Qaeda axis despite the fact that, like other totalitarian regimes, Hussein's government kept massive and meticulous records.

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency had by 2006 translated 34 million pages of documents from Hussein's Iraq and found there was nothing to substantiate a "partnership" between Hussein and al Qaeda.

Two years later the Pentagon's own internal think tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses, concluded after examining 600,000 Hussein-era documents and several thousand hours of his regime's audio- and videotapes that there was no "smoking gun (i.e. direct connection between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda.)"

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded in 2008, as every other investigation had before, that there was no "cooperative relationship" between Hussein and al Qaeda. The committee also found that "most of the contacts cited between Iraq and al Qaeda before the war by the intelligence community and policy makers have been determined not to have occurred."

Instead of interrupting a budding relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda, the Iraq War precipitated the arrival of al Qaeda into Iraq. Although the Bush administration tended to gloss over the fact, al Qaeda only formally established itself in Iraq a year and a half after the U.S. invasion.

On October 17, 2004, its brutal leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi issued an online statement pledging allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Zarqawi's pledge was fulsome: "By God, O sheikh of the Mujahideen, if you bid us plunge into the ocean, we would follow you. If you ordered it so, we would obey."

Zarqawi's special demonic genius was to launch Iraq down the road to civil war. In early 2004, the U.S. military intercepted a letter from Zarqawi to bin Laden in which he proposed provoking a civil war between Sunnis and Shia.

Zarqawi's strategy was to hit the Shia so they would in turn strike the Sunnis, so precipitating a vicious circle of violence in which al Qaeda would be cast as the protector of the Sunnis against the wrath of the Shia. It was a strategy that worked all too well, provoking first sectarian conflict in Iraq and later civil war.

Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, regularly attacked Shia religious processions, shrines and clerics. The tipping point in the slide toward full-blown civil war was al Qaeda's February 2006 attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra, which is arguably the most important Shia shrine in the world.

Three years into the Iraq War, AQI seemed all but unstoppable. A classified Marine intelligence assessment dated August 17, 2006, found that AQI had become the de facto government of the western Iraqi province of Anbar, which is strategically important because it borders Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia and makes up about a third of the landmass of Iraq.

In addition, AQI controlled a good chunk of the exurban belts around Baghdad, the "Triangle of Death" to the south of the capital and many of the towns north of it, up the Tigris River to the Syrian border.

Thus AQI controlled territory larger than New England and maintained an iron grip on much of the Sunni population.

In other words, the Bush administration had presided over the rise of precisely what it had said was one of the key goals of the Iraq War to destroy: a safe haven for al Qaeda in the heart of the Arab world.

By 2007, al Qaeda's untrammeled violence and imposition of Taliban ideology on the Sunni population provoked a countrywide Sunni backlash against AQI that took the form of Sunni "Awakening" militias. Many of those militias were put on Uncle Sam's payroll in a program known as the "Sons of Iraq".

The combination of the Sunni militias' on-the-ground intelligence about their onetime AQI allies and American firepower proved devastating to al Qaeda's Iraqi franchise. And so, between 2006 and 2008, AQI shrank from an insurgent organization that controlled territory larger than the size of New England to a rump terrorist group.

But AQI did not disappear. It simply bided its time. The Syrian civil war provided a staging point over the past three years for its resurrection and transformation into the "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria," or ISIS. And now ISIS has marched back into western and northern Iraq. Only this time there is no U.S. military to stop it.

NYT: Russia sent tanks and missiles to separatists in Ukraine

This is the best (and worst) bit from this New York Times story:

A rebel leader, Denis Pushilin, told Russian state television on Friday that the separatists had tanks but that it was “improper to ask” where they had gotten them.

Nope, you never narc on your supplier, that's the first rule of separatist warfare.

To add absurdity to farce, earlier on June 6, the Kremlin propaganda machine "Voice of Russia" said that the Ukrainian army's use of tanks on its own territory against armed and murderous separatists violated the Geneva Conventions.  So... what does Russia call a foreign power sending tanks and artillery into another country, unannounced, to be used by unlawful combatants, and hitting civilian targets?  

The U.S. State Department said, "We are confident that these tanks came from Russia." But that's not all:  "We also have information that Russia has accumulated multiple rocket launchers at this same deployment site in southwest Russia, and these rocket launchers also recently departed."  

Seriously though, what's the U.S., NATO and Europe going to do about this?  The West has Russia dead to rights.  So now what??

"A failure by Russia to de-escalate this situation will lead to additional costs," said a State Department spokeswoman. 

Additional costs?  Oh no, anything but that!  I'm sure Russian President Vladimir Putin is checking his mega-sized wallet right now to see if he can cover the bill.... 

The NYT says "the convoy was too small to serve a military purpose." I think this was a trial balloon. Putin is waiting to see how the West reacts. If they wimp out, Putin will send more tanks and heavy weapons, it's that simple.

(Putin is also doing it, coincidentally or not, just when Iraq's army is imploding; so maybe he figures the U.S. will be too distracted by events there -- and the stupid conservative blamesmanship going on -- to react adequately to events in Ukraine.)

Time to sack up!  Freedom isn't free.  This tinpot dictator must be put in his place, for the sake of liberty and security in Europe and international law.

Russia Sent Tanks to Ukrainian Separatists, U.S. Says

By Andrew E. Kramer and Michael R. Gordon

June 13, 2014 | New York Times

The State Department said Friday that Russia had sent tanks and other heavy weapons to separatists in Ukraine, supporting accusations Thursday by the Ukrainian government.

A convoy of three T-64 tanks, several BM-21 multiple rocket launchers and other military vehicles crossed the border near the Ukrainian town of Snizhne, State Department officials said. The Ukrainian Army reported Friday that it had destroyed two of the three tanks and several other vehicles in the convoy.

“This is unacceptable,” said Marie Harf, the deputy State Department spokeswoman. “A failure by Russia to de-escalate this situation will lead to additional costs.”

A Western official said that intelligence about the movement of the tanks and other weapons into Ukraine was shared on Friday with NATO allies. Secretary of State John Kerry complained this week about the flow of Russian arms to separatists in Ukraine in a phone call to Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister.

The spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Dmitry S. Peskov, said Friday that a Ukrainian armored personnel carrier had crossed into Russia for unclear reasons and was abandoned there. The Russian state news agency reported that the Russian border service said the occupants had then fled back to Ukraine

At the meeting of the Group of 7 industrial powers last week, President Obama warned Mr. Putin that the West would impose “additional costs” on Russia if its provocations were to continue.

The T-64 is an obsolescent tank no longer in active use by Russian forces, but still stored in southwest Russia.

“Russia will claim these tanks were taken from Ukrainian forces, but no Ukrainian tank units have been operating in that area,” the State Department said Friday afternoon. “We are confident that these tanks came from Russia.”

“We also have information that Russia has accumulated multiple rocket launchers at this same deployment site in southwest Russia, and these rocket launchers also recently departed,” the State Department added. “Internet video has shown what we believe to be these same rocket launchers traveling through Luhansk.”

Even before the State Department’s statement, Ukraine was having one of its better days Friday in eastern Ukraine, with government forces winning control of the port of Mariupol, the second-largest city in the separatist region of Donetsk.

The Ukrainian assault in Mariupol left five pro-Russian militants dead and four Ukrainian soldiers wounded, and ended with the hoisting of a Ukrainian flag at City Hall as the military routed the last separatists from the city’s administration buildings.

In Friday’s confrontation, videos posted online showed Ukrainian soldiers standing over captives who were lying face down with hands clenched behind their heads. The videos also showed soldiers displaying trophies of the battle — captured orange-and-black ribbons and shoulder patches of a pro-Russian group, the Russian Orthodox Army — and speaking with prisoners freed from the occupied buildings.

In that pro-Ukrainian forces — volunteer patrols of factory workers, a Ukrainian nationalist battalion called Azov and the Ukrainian military — had controlled most of Mariupol for weeks, the action was as much a propaganda victory as a military one.

In fighting near the besieged town of Slovyansk, a Grad ground-to-ground rocket of the sort said to be in the weapons convoy from Russia killed one person and wounded several others. Residents said the rocket went off course and hit a vegetable market in the village of Dobroyepole.

Over the long term, Ukraine, with its far larger though badly equipped and poorly trained army, has more forces, and it is unclear how long the separatists can hold out without more support from Russia. That is something Moscow cannot offer openly without risking more severe Western sanctions.

The result is misdirection and sleight of hand, and a conflict of endless puzzles and mind games.

The daytime journey of the three tanks through eastern Ukraine, which was filmed in multiple videos and witnessed by Western reporters, could not have been more obvious, and yet the convoy was too small to serve a military purpose. Was it a warning?

A rebel leader, Denis Pushilin, told Russian state television on Friday that the separatists had tanks but that it was “improper to ask” where they had gotten them.

Russia ratcheted up the economic pressure on Ukraine on Friday in their dispute over natural gas supplies and prices. Gazprom’s chief executive, Aleksei B. Miller, said that the company, a state-controlled energy giant, would not negotiate further with Ukraine over gas prices until Kiev paid its debts for past deliveries, and would adhere to a Monday deadline demanding prepayment for future supplies.

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

No to 'humanitarian intervention' in Syria!

Beware "humanitarian intervention!"  Nevertheless, there are significant differences between Syria today and, say, Bosnia-Kosovo in the 1990s. To name a few:

• There was a united, democratic Europe on the borders of the Balkans ready and eager to contain the war;

• Bosnia and Kosovo were separate ethnic-religious enclaves that could be (almost) cleanly separated from Serbia (former Yugoslavia);

• There was UN Security Council resolution 1244 (among others) for Kosovo and dozens of UNSC resolutions for Bosnia & Herzegovina and the Former Yugoslavia that authorized international military action against Serbia, a sovereign state, that had not declared war on the U.S.-NATO;

• Russia was sympathetic to the Serbs but not openly arming and training them and threatening to up the ante;

• There was no al-Qaeda or foreign terrorist presence in the Balkans that couldn't wait to take U.S. arms and use them against us.

Beyond that, Cohen is an unreformed neocon moron who covers it up with a bleeding-heart liberal veneer.  He asks, "Does he [Obama] care that he has let this crisis [in Syria] get out of hand?"  That rhetorical accusation reeks of U.S. arrogance!  As if the U.S. President carries the responsibility of the world on his shoulders, even when U.S. strategic interests aren't at risk!

Even worse, Cohen is a dirty hypocrite. He goes further;

The operative philosophy is that you do what you can when you can. The United States has the muscle. There are few grander causes than the saving of human life.

Oh really?  Is that why Cohen urged on our war of choice in Iraq, (and before that supported the deadly decade-long embargo of Iraq), to savehuman lives?!?  In 2011, Cohen admitted he was wrong to cheer on the Iraq invasion; he said he supported it out of emotion.  Well Cohen is wrong again, he just doesn't realize it yet.  Good thing we don't make war on the advice of hot-headed pundits tapping away on their Macs in their safe, cozy offices.

I'll say it again: Obama's decision to arm the rebels is wrong.  It's another Obama half-measure meant to kind of please everybody.  But at least he's not sending them rockets and heavy artillery that will wind up in the hands of terrorists!

Obama’s increasingly muddled Syria policy

By Richard Cohen

June 18, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-obamas-increasingly-muddled-syria-policy/2013/06/17/6be2a17e-d77b-11e2-a016-92547bf094cc_story.html

What really motivated Boston bombers?

No comment. Just read it!

What Motivated the Boston Bombers

By Gary Leupp

April 25, 2013 | CounterPunch

URL: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/25/what-motivated-the-boston-bombers/

It wasn't Bush or neocons who pushed us into Iraq

Let us not forget that it wasn't just Bushites, talk radio, FOX and neocons who hawked the Iraq war and ridiculed into intellectual or unpatriotic isolation those who opposed the Iraq war:

The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again.

Let us also not forget just how many Americans -- and people throughout the world -- protested the Iraq war before it even started. The invasion of Iraq was a slow-motion train wreck that all of us could see coming months and miles away.

Here's a pretty good description of a real intellectual:

Julien Benda argued in his 1927 book “The Treason of Intellectuals”—“La Trahison des Clercs”—that it is only when we are not in pursuit of practical aims or material advantages that we can serve as a conscience and a corrective. Those who transfer their allegiance to the practical aims of power and material advantage emasculate themselves intellectually and morally. Benda wrote that intellectuals were once supposed to be indifferent to popular passions. They “set an example of attachment to the purely disinterested activity of the mind and created a belief in the supreme value of this form of existence.” They looked “as moralists upon the conflict of human egotisms.” They “preached, in the name of humanity or justice, the adoption of an abstract principle superior to and directly opposed to these passions.” 

The Treason of the Intellectuals

By Chris Hedges

March 31, 2013 | Truthdig

URL: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_treason_of_the_intellectuals_20130331/

Wolfowitz still defends Iraq invasion, 10 years on

Wolfowitz's lame apologetica doesn't even merit a response. Just let it be entered into the record, 10 years later.

Do take note that Wolfowitz, the "brains" behind Dubya's foreign wars, is now a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. John "Yosemite Sam" Bolton, Fred Kagan and Richard "Black" Perle are taking cover there, too.  I guess AEI is where discredited neocons go to die.

Iraq War taught tough lessons, but world better off without Saddam

By Paul Wolfowitz

March 19, 2013 | FOX News

URL: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/03/19/iraq-war-taught-us-tough-lessons-but-world-is-better-off-without-saddam/#ixzz2O1qptst0

Greenwald: Constitution doesn't stop at U.S. border

All you so-called constitutional conservatives and Paulites, here's what the U.S. Supreme Court said in 1957 on the question of whether the U.S. Government is obligated to follow the Constitution beyond its borders:

At the beginning, we reject the idea that, when the United States acts against citizens abroad, it can do so free of the Bill of Rights. The United States is entirely a creature of the Constitution.  Its power and authority have no other source. It can only act in accordance with all the limitations imposed by the Constitution. When the Government reaches out to punish a citizen who is abroad, the shield which the Bill of Rights and other parts of the Constitution provide to protect his life and liberty should not be stripped away just because he happens to be in another land.

This goes for all our constitutional rights:

This Court and other federal courts have held or asserted that various constitutional limitations apply to the Government when it acts outside the continental United States. While it has been suggested that only those constitutional rights which are 'fundamental' protect Americans abroad, we can find no warrant, in logic or otherwise, for picking and choosing among the remarkable collection of 'Thou shalt nots' which were explicitly fastened on all departments and agencies of the Federal Government by the Constitution and its Amendments. Moreover, in view of our heritage and the history of the adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, it seems peculiarly anomalous to say that trial before a civilian judge and by an independent jury picked from the common citizenry is not a fundamental right. . . . Trial by jury in a court of law and in accordance with traditional modes of procedure after an indictment by grand jury has served and remains one of our most vital barriers to governmental arbitrariness. These elemental procedural safeguards were embedded in our Constitution to secure their inviolateness and sanctity against the passing demands of expediency or convenience.

Glenn Greenwald makes clear the absurdity of contrary claims by neocons and Obama admin. officials:

[D]oes anyone think it would be constitutionally permissible under the First Amendment for the US government to wait until an American critic of the Pentagon travels on vacation to London and then kill him, or to bomb a bureau of the New York Times located in Paris in retaliation for a news article it disliked [Republicans would celebrate in the streets! - J] , or to indefinitely detain with no trial an American who travels to Beijing or Lima or Oslo and who is suspected of committing a crime? 

Charles Krauthammer's false statement about the US Constitution

By Glenn Greenwald

March 15, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3ef4e

Rosenberg: Obama's better-managed empire

Here's how Rosenberg sums up the lost promise of Obama's presidency, at least when it comes to America's foreign wars:

It's tragic, really. Obama certainly has the capacity to comprehend the sea of troubles he is sailing on, but he lacks the will, desire, and imagination to steer America into a fundamentally different direction. He cannot even begin to conceive of "no war" as an option - indeed, as Martin Luther King would say, as the only option. He is America's "leader" in a decidedly limited, managerial sense, when history and the American people had cried out for so much more - dare I say it? - For a visionary... Or at least for a leader along the path that visionaries have lit before us. Instead, Obama is a go-along-to-get-along president who shares virtually all of the imperial operational mindsets, even as the ever-mounting costs of empire are tearing the American republic apart. Virtually all the aberrations from constitutional government that the neocons under Bush advanced have been continued under Obama, thus confirming them as bipartisan aberrations.

Which is why, tragically, it's America, indulging its own demons, that continues to make al-Qaeda's case, in a way that nobody else possibly can - certainly not al-Qaeda itself.

It's not America alone, of course. It's simply the way of empire.

The lost promise of Barack Obama

A smarter empire is no substitute for a lost republic.

By Paul Rosenberg

February 19, 2013 | Aljazeera

URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/02/2013217838625713.html

Neocon Kagan: What's Rand Paul's foreign policy?

Answer: not even Rand Paul knows.

Paul represents "hope and change" for the status quo on foreign policy for disenchanted, incoherent Tea Partiers who don't know what they want either. As a result they'll end up with more of the same. Bottom line: they just want a Reagan-lip-syncing Republican to give it to them.

Rand is not his dad: he wants to win; he wants to be establishment. He knows a spoonful of sugar makes the tea taste better....

Rand Paul's conventional stance on foreign policy

By Robert Kagan

February 8, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/XYjwYU

Obama must consider 'zero option' in Afghanistan

Excellent commentary by Michael Boyle. President Obama must seriously consider the "zero option" -- full withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan by 2014 -- for three reasons:

1)  U.S. troops are just targets for the Taliban. So far a sizable U.S. presence there hasn't been able to root them out; a smaller force won't do any better.

2)  Having a base with a small U.S. presence won't equal "influence" over Afghanistan or its government, despite what many Republicans and neocons believe.

3)  Keeping U.S. troops there as advisers/trainers gives Afghanistan's government a scapegoat when its military cannot perform, as well as fosters a "culture of dependency" in the Afghan military that has only 1 out of 23 brigades that are combat-ready.

Here's his upshot:

It is now time for the US to look seriously at the zero option and to develop plans for removing all combat troops, except for a small special operations force to target exclusively on the 100 or so surviving al-Qaida operatives remaining. However many Americans remain there, the war against the Taliban needs to be President Karzai's from 2014 onwards, and the consequences of failure should be owned by him.

After more than 2,156 US troops killed and 18,109 wounded (pdf) since 2001, and more than $590bn given in aid, it is time to call an end to America's war in Afghanistan. With such losses, it is hard to accept that the US war in Afghanistan will end without a decisive victory, but keeping substantial American troops present in the country indefinitely will confer no real political or strategic advantages – while risking death and injury to even more young Americans.

America's 'zero option': the only viable exit from this unwinnable Afghan war

By Michael Boyle

January 10, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3d2bv

Lowry: What U.S. did in 200 years, Egypt must do in 2

NRO's Rich Lowry is not utterly stupid so let me use his latest op-ed as an emblem of right-wing wrongness. His criticisms of President Obama's policies vis-a-vis Egypt suffer from several Amero-centric, neo-con fallacies. Namely:

-  Events abroad happen quickly, in cause-and-effect timelines that correspond neatly to U.S. Presidential policies and tenures;

-  The U.S. has the power to shape events abroad; the exercise of that power is simply a function of U.S. willpower and determination, usually in the form of military action; and

-  America's agreeing to talk to foreign leaders = commiseration with those same foreign leaders = a "man crush."

Next, I don't want to compare Egypt to America, but... let me compare today's Egypt to America.  The American Revolution took 8 years.  It was a country of about 2.5 million, not counting slaves and Indians, a majority of which was loyal to King George throughout.  After that we had the destined-to-fail Articles of Confederation that lasted 8 years before being replaced by the U.S. Constitution.  It could be argued that many disputes left unsettled by the Federalists and Anti-Federalists festered and resulted in the American Civil War 72 years later.  That civil war was followed by Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and eventually the Civil Rights movement, culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, adopted 188 years after the Declaration of Independence.

And that all started in a podunk colony on the ass-end of nowhere in the 18th century.  Compare that to today's Egypt, the most populated Arab country in the world with 84 million people.  What Lowry and other conservative pundits are doing is expressing disappointment with Egypt's failure to transition smoothly and non-violently in the span of 2 years from a brutal dictatorship of 30 years to a simulacrum of U.S. republican democracy that was  perfected over some 200 years.

So let me make obvious the absurdity of the criticism laid at President Obama's feet: that in a mere two years since Mubarak was forced to step down during peaceful protests, the failure of Egypt to transform itself into a peaceful, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state with tolerance and free speech for all, represents a FAILURE of PRESIDENT OBAMA.  Meanwhile, in fact, liberals and non-Muslims in Egypt have been withdrawing from the constitutional convention in protest of the mangled process of its drafting and approval by referendum.  Still, it's Obama's fault that things aren't turning out ideally, now, immediately.

Folks, it doesn't get any more partisan, Amero-centric and short-sighted than this... and all from the editor of the most "intellectual" conservative media outlet around.  So you can imagine what dumber conservatives are saying about U.S. policy vis-a-vis Egypt.  It's completely unmoored from reality.

America needs a huge dose of humility, chased with a swig of its own long and tortured history for study.  Hell, I don't know how things are going to turn out there.  But I sure as hell know that we Americans can't determine the outcome.  That fact may drive many neo-cons and pundits nuts to the point of denial, but that's just the way it is.  

The Brotherhood Delusion 

Morsi consolidates his dictatorship while the Obama administration tells itself bedtime stories.

By Rich Lowry

November 30, 2012 | National Review

URL: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/334475/brotherhood-delusion-rich-lowry

Is Obama too soft on Syria?

Do you think Syria will even come up in tomorrow night's Presidential campaign debate?  If Romney criticizes Obama, it can only be for being "too soft" on Syria and President Assad.  Knowing Romney, he'll probably just leave it at that: an accusation without any supporting facts.

It doesn't seem to me that Americans -- Republicans included -- are clamoring for a third war right now... and the cleanup, occupation, institution-building and development aid in Syria that would come with it (Colin Powell's Pottery Barn rule).  

I don't even hear people besides John McCain and the neocons saying we should arm Syria's rebel militias.  Again, the memory of arming the Taliban in Afghanistan is pretty fresh.  And it would give Putin a green light to arm Assad.  Then we'd be fighting a proxy war with Russia, who has more skin in this game than we do.

Chickenhawks like Jackson Diehl, cooped up at their desks in DC, will have to wait a decade or so until Americans forget how hard it is to pick winners in a civil war, then occupy the country to make sure the winner does the "correct" things.

How Obama bungled the Syrian revolution

By Jackson Diehl

October 15, 2012 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/OBPZWe

Wisdom, not weakness

I hate to direct anybody to V.D. Hanson's stupid commentary on U.S. foreign policy, yet he represents the highest grade of right-wing garbage out there, so I might as well take him down.

It's hard to understand what he is criticizing Obama for, exactly.  For being too soft, certainly.  But on whom?  On Qaddafi?  Oops.  On Syria's Bashar Assad?  Well, they won't come out and say we should start a war with Syria, so what then?  Arm Assad's opponents?  Oops: blowback from angry students is one thing; blowback from armed militants is another.  So that leave us only with more finger-wagging in Assad's general direction.

Or is Obama being too soft on mobs of Arab street protesters?  If so, how could he "get tough" on them?  By bombing them?  By infiltrating them with our spies?  By arming police with tear gas and riot gear?  I'm sure that would calm them down; no blowback potential there, oops.  Then what should Obama do?  More finger-wagging again?

Or, take the recent brutal murder of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya.  Obama said he would track down the killers and bring them to justice, which sounds pretty tough to me.  (And this President actually tracks down killers.)  Hanson and others criticize Obama for an "absence of adequate military security" in Benghazi.  Fair enough.  But isn't that a technical, not a policy, issue?  The U.S. had no diplomatic presence in Libya for years, and so our embassy outposts there have not yet been well-developed.  Moreover, being a diplomat in a war-torn country is a dangerous job; that's what they signed up for. Just like serving in Afghanistan and Iraq is a dangerous job, to which 6,611 U.S. military fatalities there to-date somberly attest.  (V.D. Hanson can claim his share of intellectual credit for putting them there.)

Here's how Obama explained, before the UN on September 25, why he did what he did:

We intervened in Libya alongside a broad coalition and with the mandate of the United Nations Security Council, because we had the ability to stop the slaughter of innocents and because we believed that the aspirations of the people were more powerful than a tyrant. 

And as we meet here, we again declare that the regime of Bashar al-Assad must come to an end so that the suffering of the Syrian people can stop and a new dawn can begin. 

We have taken these positions because we believe that freedom and self-determination are not unique to one culture. 

These are not simply American values or Western values; they are universal values. 

American values?  That kind of talk drives blood-and-guts neocons like Hanson to tears.  Values never gave anybody a hard-on.  

This is all child's play relative to deadly-serious nuclear tensions between the U.S. and Iran, yet Hanson and the Right's criticism of Obama is pretty much the same: Obama is too soft.  OK, what should Obama do then?  Start a third preemptive war in 10 years that would suck in the entire Middle East and send the price of gas sky-high?  Don't like that, you say?  OK, what then?  Yet more finger-wagging?  Oops, it sounds like Obama just did that at the UN:  

Make no mistake:  A nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained.  It would threaten the elimination of Israel, the security of Gulf nations, and the stability of the global economy.  It risks triggering a nuclear arms race in the region, and the unraveling of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. 

The simple truth is that Hanson and his fellow disgraced neocons have no new ideas, they blew their load in Iraq, and now they long for the good ole' days when our President was a gullible gorilla who liked to grunt and beat his chest, and who would ape whatever they whispered in his ear.  The days when a few craven and dependent dictators like Qaddafi and Mubarak might pay attention.

You see, America's super-muscular military might is only effective against regimes, not against oppressed people who have nothing to lose, and already live in privation and terror. U.S. military power cannot secure their health, their dignity, or a job.  Therefore, neocons like Hanson want America to maintain friendly but autocratic foreign regimes.  Without regimes to threaten or pay off, Hanson and Co. have nothing to offer. 

The more difficult truth is that there is nothing "weak" about America's reading the writing on the wall and adjusting.  Sooner or later, Qaddafi and Mubarak were going down.  Sooner or later, Assad will too.  Yes, these Devils We Knew provided some comfort and stability to us in a region we don't understand and don't really care to.  But as these devils come under attack by their own oppressed people, it would be stupid and pointless -- and contrary to our stated values -- for us to stand alone against a tide of self-determination.  Obama should be applauded for not standing behind dictators who were about to fall, vainly propping them up a bit longer.  That was not weakness on his part, it was wisdom.

Finally, the most difficult truth for some Americans is that we cannot direct world events like pieces on a chess board, especially and increasingly not by military means.  We can't (and don't want to, I hope) stop some moron for posting an amateurish film on YouTube; just like we can't stop street protests in more than 20 countries as a result of it.  We shouldn't try.  And we shouldn't wring our hands over our "powerlessness."  Only when all people enjoy liberty will the real work of U.S. diplomacy begin: then they, not their oppressors, will decide whether they stand with the United States.  Meanwhile, we must have faith that our cherished values will prevail, and speak with confidence and consistency about them to the ignorant and the skeptical.  The alternative has been tried... and failed.

President Ethelred 

By Victor Davis Hanson

September 25, 2012 | National Review

URL: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/328332/president-ethelred-victor-davis-hanson

Reply to R. on the Arab 'movie' protests

What does this have to do with Bush?  Seriously.

You have countries in the Arab Spring who said they'd had enough of their current leaders.  What's so scary about it from the neocon/Bushites point of view is that we didn't instigate it.  But in fact the neocons were hoping that democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan would lead to a new wave of democratization in the Arab world. Remember?

Well, here it is, just not as we anticipated, not for our reasons, not on our timetable. And these people are not dumb: they realize that the U.S. gave $ billions to their oppressor in Egypt for decades because he kept the peace with Israel.  They realize that the U.S. didn't give a shit about human rights in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. They realize we were willing to tolerate their oppression for our own geopolitical aims.  

So now we expect them to see us as "allies" because we're all "democratic" brothers now. Not so fast.  In fact it's us that has to prove we give a shit about them and their democracy, and not vice-versa.  They've endured worse than we can ever impose on them.  They have no fear of U.S. power and we just have to get used to that; hence our threats, tantrums and condemnations don't mean shit to people who have endured torture and brutality for the past 2-3 decades.  

You want them all to put on their tri-cornered hats and start reading Jefferson and Hamilton and see us their allies?  Not so fast.  

Beyond that, they have no idea what "free speech" is about.  They all buy into Islam and Islamic rule.  They don't make the connection between tolerance for other religious beliefs and tolerance for other political beliefs, and the relation to their personal political liberty.  Why should they make that connection?  In many of these countries, religion was the only secret outlet they had to organize and express their discontent, allowed within certain boundaries by their oppressor.  They had no "civil society," as such.  If you know development like I do, then civil society is a prerequisite for a normally functioning democracy.  Elections are the veneer; human organization is the guts and the engine.  That was all killed and missing.  Religion was the only avenue of somewhat free expression in these countries.  And so through religion they have learned to express their political discontent.  Thus today the religious freaks have the bully pulpit, because everybody else was killed or jailed.  That's not going to change overnight.

We can't really begin to understand it; we can only admit that we we don't understand it.  We must keep the dialog open.  These people don't give two shits about our drones and our warships; they aren't afraid of anything because they have been through hell already.

These are the populations we're dealing with.  You can call them stupid or backward, but there are objective reasons for their attitudes.  To shake our finger at them and throw tantrums is useless at best, counter-productive at worst.  We need to start from zero with these people.  They are ignorant and brutalized populations with nothing but fundamentalist religious institutions allowed by their dead regimes through which to express their gripes.  They are about 400 years behind our political development.  We can't expect miracles from them.  Just like you wouldn't expect a torture victim with zero education to lead his country. 

Who's the real existential threat to Israel?

This one's worth reading in its entirety.

Netanyahu, Not Iran, Is An Existential Threat To Israel

September 12, 2012 | MJ Rosenberg

One ex-Israeli official put it best. Prime Minister  Binyamin Netanyahu seems to be “going berserk.”

He is demanding that the United States set a “red line” that, once crossed, will automatically initiate a US attack on Iran. He doesn’t even bother to pretend that war with Iran is in US  interests.  He just wants his war trigger. But, and this seems literally to be driving him crazy, he sees the chances for war diminishing every day.

I think his latest tantrum was produced by last week’s  New York Times op-ed by its former executive editor, Bill Keller which stated that even if Iran develops nuclear weapons, they would not necessarily  pose a significant threat to Israel, let alone to the United States.

Keller  merely suggested what Israelis say privately: this whole Iran scare is not about nukes per se, it is about Israel’s fear of losing  the ability to do whatever it wants to whenever it wants to. Bomb Gaza. Bomb Lebanon. Bomb relief ships. Bomb whoever, whenever.

It is about regional hegemony. After all, militarily Israel can more than handle Iran and both countries know that. That is why Israelis do not share Netanyahu’s enthusiasm for war.

Not only do they not want war,  they rightly fear that an attack on Iran would result in thousands of missiles, being launched against Israeli population centers by Hizbullah and Hamas. Even though Defense Minister Ehud Barak promises that only 500 Israeli civilians would be killed (how did he come up with that number), Israelis do not want their kids to be among that number.

None of this seems to matters to Netanyahu, who acts less an Israeli leader than a US neocon.  That is why he is the first Israeli prime minister not even to go through the motions of serious negotiations. He is not interested.

Fortunately, President Obama — like President George W. Bush before him — is standing in the way of an Iran war. Netanyahu’s plan requires the United States to jump in to bail Israel out once it begins a war it cannot finish, but Obama, like Bush, won’t permit it.

So what is Netanyahu to do? He will defeat President Obama (at least in his dreams) and bring in a Mitt Romney under the sway of Sheldon Adelson. He believes Romney would go to war and so he is engineering conflict with the United States to tip the election.

Forget the fact that he can’t do it. The percentage of Jews who vote based on Israel’s perceived desires is 3% at best, and not even that 3% necessarily believes war is in Israel’s interests. Nonetheless, that is what Bibi’s whole game is about.

The irony is that it is unlikely a President Romney would go to war either. With the military opposed, one would have to imagine that Romney would risk American interests (most importantly, young lives) to please a donor and the same neocon claque that led Bush to war with Iraq.

Really? A new Republican president would want to begin his term with another Middle East war? Dream on, Bibi.

The only force in the United States that favors war is the Israel lobby (AIPAC and its satellite organizations), neoconservative pundits and some Christian rightists (although the latter are more enthusiastic about going to war against a woman’s right to choose and gay rights than against Iran). War with Iran could destroy Romney’s presidency and he surely knows it.

The bottom line then is that all Netanyahu is accomplishing with his ugly saber-rattling is threatening the survival of the US-Israel relationship.

Don’t kid yourself. No matter what Obama says publicly, he is furious with Netanyahu. Privately, it is hard to imagine that even Republicans like seeing the United States being treated with such contempt by a tiny country we sustain with $3.5 billion a year in aid (exempt from all cuts, unlike every other program) and UN vetoes that make America look like Israel’s satellite. The only thing that keeps them all quiet is intimidation and campaign contributions. That won’t last forever, particularly as younger American Jews have moved toward  indifference to Israel due to the policies it has pursued since an Israeli fanatic killed Yitzhak Rabin.

Israelis need to wake up. IL Kenen, the founder of AIPAC, called the United States Israel’s defense line.  It is. And Bibi is jeopardizing it.

Binyamin Netanyahu poses an existential threat to the Jewish state. Those who claim to care about Israel need to speak out. Will we really allow this rightist egomaniac to destroy a 2000 year old dream?