“Forget the ‘peace process’” and Bomb Iran Already
By Ali Gharib | Lobe Log | September 16th, 2010
In September 2008, The Bipartisan Policy Center issued a report analyzing the Iranian nuclear program and offering recommendations for the U.S. strategic response. This neoconservative “roadmap to war,” as Jim Lobe referred to the report authored by numerous neocons and (troublesomely) Barack Obama’s National Security Council Mid East expert Dennis Ross, argued that diplomatic wrangling over Iran’s nuclear program is useless from the start. They laid out the U.S. preconditions that Iran can not enrich uranium on its soil — knowing enrichment on Iranian soil is a central tenet of that nation’s program. Likewise, they saw sanctions meant to pressure Iran into this position were unlikely to be accepted. So from the neocon perspective, diplomacy and sanctions appear to be mere checklist items on the real agenda of a campaign to bomb Iranian nuclear sites and, perhaps not that much further down the list, a wider campaign aimed at regime change.
Well, Jennifer Rubin, perhaps the most passionate blogger at Commentary’s Contentions blog, is ready to tick those items off the list and move into the final agenda. This is not news, since she has been making essentially this proclamation for some time.
In “Keep Our Eye on the Ball — Iran,” Rubin picks up a New York Post editorial which accuses the UN of bashing Israel while soft-pedaling IAEA accusations by Iran. Rubin naturally agrees. In her mind, no one is harsh enough on Iran and everyone is too harsh on Israel.
Calling the “‘peace process’” — which is always in quotes — “a giant and dangerous distraction,” Rubin writes that “much of the media have lost track of what’s important: Iran and the mounting evidence that the sanctions have been, as conservatives predicted, useless.” She goes on to deride the UN as ineffective, before declaring it’s “[n]o wonder Obama loves the place.”
Then, she finally gets to the point:
[I]t might be a good idea for Jewish organizations to show the same focus as the Post. Forget the “peace process” sideshow and give up the fantasy that the UN or the IAEA will solve our national-security problem for us. The options boil down to : 1) The U.S. uses force; 2.) Israel uses force; or 3.) the Iranians get the bomb. The first is the best of the disagreeable options. It would be swell if American Jewish leaders started making that point.
In her overly-simplistic neoconservative worldview (recalling Dick Cheney’s 2003 proclamation “we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators“), there are only three options: U.S. bombs, Israel bombs, or Iran gets the bomb.
Most notable is her shot at Jewish organizations for being insufficiently hawkish. Rubin’s seeming disdain for Jewish group fits with her recent meme that American Jewish liberalism and its uncrititcal support of Democrats is a “sick addiction.” The phrase is borrowed from a blog post by Rachel Abrams, which Rubin has quoted at least three times. Yet the problem is while Jews have supported Democrats and Obama with overwhelming numbers, many mainstream Jewish organizations are not on board with this sentiment of liberalism. That was exactly the debate raised by Peter Beinart this summer in his New York Review of Books essay — “The Failure of the Jewish Establishment.”
Many Jewish organizations, particularly those with clout in Washington, indeed have a hawkish bent. Consider the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which releases among the most bellicose newsletters one can get in their inbox. Just this month, in fact, JINSA called on Obama to do almost exactly what Rubin prescribes — to “blunt Iran first.” To be fair, JINSA called for a “peace process” after that; Rubin obviously does not.
AIPAC, Washington’s more powerful and somewhat less neoconservative Jewish organization, takes on Iran on a near daily basis, devoting an entire section of its website to the topic. Rubin has been known to call out organizations and individuals, most recently Hilary Clinton, when the the buzz words she finds in others’ comments aren’t repeated in a way she finds acceptable. A few of those phrased: that an Iran with nuclear weapons is “unacceptable” and that “all options remain on the table” (a wink at U.S. military strikes on Iran). Interestingly, AIPAC uses exactly this language in two policy briefings on Iran.
So Rubin’s criticisms of Jewish organizations seem less sound than her haranguing of Jews in general. But the takeaway here is important: She is ready to call out anyone who is not for the immediate bombing of Iran as the way to go, the only way to go. If Commentary is a bellwether of the neoconservative movement — and it is — then their intentions are laid bare by Jennifer Rubin.
Doubling of SOF Night Raids Backfired in Kandahar
By Gareth Porter | IPS | September 15, 2010
WASHINGTON – During a round of media interviews last month, Gen. David Petraeus released totals for the alleged results of nearly 3,000 “night raids” by Special Operations Forces (SOF) units over the 90 days from May through July: 365 “insurgent leaders” killed or captured, 1,355 Taliban “rank and file” fighters captured, and 1,031 killed.
Those figures were widely reported as highlighting the “successes” of SOF raids in at least hurting the Taliban.
But a direct correlation between the stepped up night raids in Kandahar province and a sharp fall-off in the proportion of IEDs being turned in by the local population indicates that the raids backfired badly, bolstering the Taliban’s hold on the population in Kandahar province.
Night raids, which are viewed as a violation of the sanctity of the home and generate large numbers of civilian casualties, are the single biggest factor in generating popular anger at U.S. and NATO forces, as Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal conceded in his directive on the issue last March.
Nevertheless, McChrystal had increased the level of SOF raids from the 100 to 125 a month during the command of his predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, to 500 a month during 2009. And the figures released by Petraeus revealed that McChrystal had doubled the number of raids on homes again to 1,000 a month before he was relieved of duty in June.
The step up in night raids has been overwhelmingly concentrated on districts in and around Kandahar City. It began in April as a prelude to what was then being billed as the “make or break” campaign of the war.
The response of the civilian population in those districts can be discerned from data on the Taliban roadside bombs and the proportion turned in by the population. Increasing the ratio of total IEDs planted found as a result of tips from the population has been cited as a key indicator of winning the trust of the local population by Maj. Gen. Michael Oates, head of the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO).
But JIEDDO’s monthly statistics on IED’s turned in by local residents as a percentage of total IEDs planted tell a very different story.
The percentage of Taliban roadside bombs turned in had been averaging 3.5 percent from November 2009 through March 2010, according to official statistics from JIEDDO. But as soon as the SOF raids began in Kandahar in April, the percentage of turn-ins fell precipitously to 1.5 percent, despite the fact that the number of IEDs remained about the same as the previous month.
The turn-in ratio continued to average 1.5 percent through July.
There is a similar correlation between a sudden increase in popular anger toward foreign troops in spring 2009 and a precipitous drop in the rate of turn-ins.
In the first four months of 2009, turn-ins had averaged 4.5 percent of IED incidents. But in early May 2009 a U.S. airstrike in Farah province killed between 97 and 147 civilians, according to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. As popular outrage over the biggest mass killing of civilians in the war spread across the country, the ratio of turn-ins fell to 2.1 percent of the total for the month, even though IEDs increased by less than 20 percent.
Then McChrystal took command and ordered a quadrupling of the number of night raids. The turn-in ratio continued to average just 2.2 percent for the next five months.
In Kandahar, as elsewhere in Afghanistan, popular anger at foreign troops was undoubtedly stoked by the inevitable killing and detention of the innocent people that accompanies SOF night raids.
According to the figures released by Petraeus, for every targeted individual killed or captured in the raids, three non-targeted individuals were killed and another four were detained.
Based on past cases of false reporting by SOF units, a large proportion of the 1,031 killed in the raids and identified as “insurgents” were simply neighbours who had come out of their homes with guns when they heard the raiders.
Gen. McChrystal referred to that chronic problem in a statement on his directive on night raids last March. “Instinctive responses” by an Afghan man to “defend his home and family are sometimes interpreted as insurgent acts, with tragic results,” McChyrstal said.
SOF units have routinely reported those killed under such circumstances as insurgents rather than as innocent civilians.
When an SOF unit raided the home of a low-level commander in Laghman province on Jan. 26, 2009, 13 men came out of nearby homes. They were all killed and later included in the tally of Taliban reported killed in the raid.
The problem of false reporting was brought to light most dramatically after a botched SOF raid in Gardez Feb. 12, when two men who emerged from buildings in the compound targeted by an SOF unit were shot and killed. Within hours of the raid, ISAF issued a statement describing the two men as “insurgents”.
That falsehood was later revealed only because the two men happened to be a police official and a government prosecutor. In the same incident, the SOF unit accidentally killed three women, two of whom were pregnant, but reported to headquarters that the women had been found tied up.
McChrystal defended the SOF unit against charges by eyewitnesses that its members had tried to cover up the killing, even after the head of the Afghan interior ministry investigation of the incident publicly declared that the testimony was credible.
The figure of 1,355 insurgents “captured” in the raids given out by the International Security Assistance Force is also highly misleading. In response to an IPS query about the figure, ISAF public affairs officer Maj. Sunset R. Belinsky confirmed that the figure “reflects insurgents or suspected insurgents captured during operations”.
In fact, the vast majority were simply swept up because they happened to be present in a house or compound targeted in a raid.
An ISAF press release Sep. 8 illustrates how such a larger number was accumulated. In a raid on the compound of a suspected “insurgent commander” in Paktika province Sep. 7, the SOF unit ordered all occupants to leave the compound and detained “several suspected insurgents” after “initial questioning”.
U.S. forces in Afghanistan have never released figures on what proportion of Afghans detained as suspected insurgents were eventually released because of lack of evidence. Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone, who reviewed U.S. detainee policies in early 2009, was reported by The Guardian Oct. 14, 2009 to have concluded that two-thirds of the detainees still being held by the U.S. military as Taliban insurgents were innocent.
The claim of 365 “insurgent leaders” killed or captured is also highly misleading.
At his confirmation hearing in June, Petraeus referred to the targets of SOF raids as “middle and upper level Taliban and other extremist element leaders”.
That terminology was later abandoned, however. When questioned about the figure last month, an ISAF official, speaking on condition of anonymity, conceded that it was not clear what authority the targeted “leaders” had. There is no organisational diagram for the Taliban, the official told IPS, and Taliban fighters are not organised in military units.
The vast majority of those “leaders”, it appears, were low level Taliban personnel who are easily replaced.
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.
Saudi splurges on weapons … for what?
By Teymoor Nabili | Al-Jazeera | September 14th, 2010
Saudi Arabia is about to buy another $60bn worth of military hardware from the US, and even The Guardian is dutiful in parroting, without question, the accepted western narrative :
The sale, under negotiation since 2007, is aimed mainly at bolstering Saudi defenses against Iran, which the US suspects will achieve a nuclear weapons capability within the next few years. The transfer of advanced technology, mainly planes, is to provide Saudi Arabia with air superiority over Iran.
Ignoring the fact that miltary aircraft (which form the bulk of the deal as we know it) are pretty much useless against a nuclear missile, especially one that does not exist, $60bn buys a mind boggling amount of firepower, so that must mean that Saudi Arabia’s military capacity right now is woefully insufficient compared to Iran’s, right?
Er, no.
Saudi military spending already dwarfs Iran’s by a factor of six. Indeed, by head of population, Saudi is the world’s biggest purchaser of military hardware.
Global Firepower has a direct comparison of the two nations’ military strengths, and it turns out that Iran’s military is only superior in terms of manpower numbers.
So if Iran’s intention is to send waves of soldiers marching across the desert, then maybe Saudi has something to fear.
But when it comes to “air-based weapons”, Global Firepower puts the relative numbers (before this deal) at Saudi 453, Iran 84. (Bear in mind also that Iran’s aircraft are widely described as museum pieces by military analysts, because the sanctions mean that Iran has no access to spare parts or modern technology).
So why does Saudi need 84 new F-15 fighter jets, 70 upgraded F-15s, 70 Apaches, 72 Black Hawks and 36 “Little Birds”, just to fight a land army?
And when you consider the reality that Saudi has the full support of all the US military bases in the region, the suggestion that Riyadh has something to fear from Tehran is laughable.
So if the numbers don’t add up, what about the politics? Well, the suggestion that Iran is keen to invade Saudi Arabia makes even less sense than the suggestion that Tehran intends to attack Israel, and the Arab world knows it.
As King Abdullah of Jordan said recently, the Arab world is much more concerned about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than any Iran issue.
And, as a major survey of the Arab public opinion found recently, the Arab majority not only agrees with King Abdullah but is in fact very sympathetic of Iran’s right to nuclear technology, with a majority saying a nuclear-armed Iran may in fact be a good thing for the region.
Amjad Atalla of New America Foundation has an excellent summary of this whole debate here.
And the American Foreign Policy Project covers many of the myths and nuances of the military and security debates concerning Iran here.
So, if the mainstream media have missed the point, then what is really going on?
Well, with America suffering it’s worst recession in 60 years, the biggest arms contract ever signed would certainly be a welcome boost to earnings in the military industrial sector.
And as I blogged a year ago, Saudi Arabia has always been keen to buy as much favor in Washington as it can, because it’s concerned that any hint of warming relations between DC and Tehran would almost by definition be a threat to Riyadh’s regional hegemony.
The Source of America’s Wars – Kristol Clear
By Maidhc Ó Cathail – My Catbird Seat – September 11, 2010
Americans feeling let down by Barack Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan should take careful note of those who welcomed yet another “surge.” It might help them to identify the source of their seemingly endless wars.
For instance, in a recent Washington Post opinion piece, William Kristol described Obama’s West Point speech as “encouraging.” It was “a good thing,” he said, that Obama was finally speaking as “a war president.”
But if the comments on the Post website are anything to go by, few ordinary Americans take Kristol’s armchair warmongering seriously anymore. After all, as one poster quizzically asked, “A column by William Kristol the neocon that was wrong about everything from 2000-2008?”
Although Kristol, like the rest of the neocons, “erred” about Iraq’s WMDs and Saddam’s links to Al Qaeda and 9/11, it would be a fatal error indeed to dismiss him as a fool.
In order to understand what motivates Bill Kristol’s professed hyper-patriotism, with its consistently disastrous prescriptions, it’s worth recalling how his father, Irving Kristol, reacted to Vietnam War critic Senator George McGovern. The presidential contender’s proposed cut in U.S. military expenditure would, according to the “godfather” of neoconservatism, “drive a knife in the heart of Israel.”
“Jews don’t like big military budgets,” the elder Kristol explained in a Jewish publication in 1973. “But it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States … American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don’t want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.”
American Greatness
Following his father’s advice, William Kristol has been a fervent supporter of massive U.S. military spending. In 1996, he co-authored with Robert Kagan an influential neocon manifesto titled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” It recommended that “America should pursue a vision of benevolent hegemony as bold as Reagan’s in the 1970s and wield its authority unabashedly.
“The defense budget should be increased dramatically, citizens should be educated to appreciate the military’s vital work abroad, and moral clarity should direct a foreign policy that puts the heat on dictators and authoritarian regimes.”
In response, another influential opinion-maker, Charles Krauthammer, hailed Kristol and Kagan as “the main proponents of what you might call the American greatness school.” It is hardly a coincidence, however, that all three advocates of “American greatness” care passionately about what Irving Kristol euphemistically referred to as “the survival of the state of Israel.” Or that many of those “dictators and authoritarian regimes” just happened to stand in the way of Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.
The following year, Kristol and Kagan co-founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a pressure group which sought to advance their “neo-Reaganite” vision. In the late 1990s, they did this mainly by writing letters to Bill Clinton, urging him to oust Saddam Hussein.
In September 2000, PNAC published “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” in which they famously acknowledged that “the process of transformation … is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”
One year later, they got their wished for “new Pearl Harbor” on September 11. The mass murder of almost 3,000 Americans was, as Benjamin Netanyahu indelicately put it, “very good” for Israel.
Kristol’s War
Immediately, Kristol’s Weekly Standard began linking Iraq to the attacks. Writing in The American Conservative, Scott McConnell explained the strategy: “Their rhetoric — which laid down a line from which the magazine would not waver over the next 18 months — was to link Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in virtually every paragraph, to join them at the hip in the minds of readers.”
The “Saddam must go” campaign, begun in a Kristol and Kagan editorial as far back as 1997, became so relentless that Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen dubbed it “Kristol’s War.”
The Iraq War has, of course, also been called “Wolfowitz’s War.” But it could just as aptly have been named after Perle, Feith, Libby, Zelikow, Lieberman, or any of the other pro-Israeli insiders who took America to war by way of deception.
In “Irving Kristol RIP,” Antiwar.com editor Justin Raimondo described Kristol’s legacy as “war, war, and yet more war, as far as the eye can see.”
Unless Americans soon realize that they’ve been deceived by those for whom “American greatness” is merely a means to advance “the survival of the state of Israel,” that legacy promises to be an enduring one.
Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely published writer based in Japan. To read more of his writing, go to Maidhc Ó Cathail: Writing and Analysis.
Barack Obama: Torturer-and-Assassin-in-Chief
By Jacob G. Hornberger | September 9, 2010
The Ninth Circuit’s ruling yesterday in the case of Binyam Mohamed vs. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. confirms two things: the U.S. government wields the omnipotent, unreviewable power to torture people and, two, that Barack Obama, despite his much ballyhooed pre-election campaign hype about “change,” is actually just serving George W. Bush’s third term in office.
The plaintiffs’ claims against Jeppesen arose out of the CIA’s infamous kidnapping and rendition program, in which the CIA kidnaps people and then transports them to brutal foreign regimes for the purpose of torture. According to the plaintiffs’ complaint, which the Court was required to accept as true for purposes of ruling on the defendant’s motion to dismiss, the victims were subjected to horrible medieval-like torture techniques, such as breaking of bones, cutting into sexual organs, and pouring of painful liquids into open wounds.
The U.S. government intervened in the case, claiming that the suit should be dismissed based on the “state-secrets doctrine,” a pernicious doctrine that is found nowhere in the Constitution but which, the Court held, trumps the due process provisions of the Bill of Rights.
The government claimed that to allow the suit to go forward would entail the disclosure of government secrets, which would supposedly threaten national security.
The government’s position, however, which the court unfortunately bought into, is sheer nonsense. The state-secrets doctrine does nothing more than protect government officials from having their wrongdoing disclosed to the American people. That’s its purpose. That’s its effect.
Contrary to the government’s plea and the Court’s holding, the government’s secrets regarding its torture and rendition program have nothing to do with so-called national security. National security is invoked in order to protect federal officials from criminal and civil liability for their commission of serious crimes.
What should the Court have done? It should not only have let the case go forward, it should have expressly ordered that the plaintiffs were fully entitled, through pre-trial discovery, to delve into every nook and cranny of this dark, nefarious program and to disclose everything about it to the American people and the people of the world. At the end of this road, the nation would continue to stand, in fact on a much more solid moral foundation.
No doubt there would be some insecurity suffered by CIA agents and their enablers, similar to the insecurity that CIA officials undoubtedly felt after being convicted of serious crimes regarding kidnapping, rendition, and torture in Italy. But the security of federal officials who have engaged in wrongdoing is not the same as the security of the nation.
After the John Kennedy assassination, the U.S. government ordered all documents in the case to be kept secret from the American people for 50 years, based on the ludicrous notion that national security was at stake. The claim was ridiculous. The documents were kept secret for one purpose only: to hide from the American people the overwhelming evidence that contradicted the official findings of the Warren Commission. When much of the hidden evidence was finally released in the 1990s, in the wake of the storm produced by Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, the nation remained standing. National security was never at stake. What was at stake was government credibility, which, deservedly, received serious blows from the disclosure of what the government had claimed were national-security secrets some 30 years before.
The Ninth Circuit’s ruling confirms that we now live in a country in which the president and his military and paramilitary forces can torture anyone they want with impunity. Add to that the president’s claim of power to assassinate anyone he wants. How is all this different from any ordinary totalitarian dictatorship? Sure, the torturer-and-assassin-in-chief is democratically elected, but so what? What difference does that make to the victims?
The Constitution called into existence a federal government with limited, enumerated powers. If a power wasn’t enumerated, it couldn’t be exercised. Where are the powers to torture and assassinate people? One searches the Constitution in vain for them. Moreover, how can a ludicrous “state-secrets doctrine,” which appears nowhere in the Constitution, trump the express restrictions on power that the American people imposed on federal officials with the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment?
Ultimately, the root of this evil weed lies in U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. Empire goes abroad and stirs up hornets’ nests. That produces rage among the victims, which then manifests itself in terrorist retaliation. The terrorist retaliation is then used as the excuse by federal officials to ignore the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by claiming omnipotent powers to wage “war on terrorism,” including the power to torture people and the power to assassinate people.
Americans would be wise to pull the evil weed out by its root, which means dismantling America’s overseas military empire, bringing all the troops home from everywhere and discharging them, abandoning all overseas bases and relinquishing any ownership or leasehold rights to such properties, dismantling the standing army and military-industrial complex, and restoring America’s founding principles of anti-militarism, anti-imperialism, anti-interventionism, and a limited, government constitutional republic to our land.
US Government Report Argues for Police Force for American Interventions Overseas
By Matthew Harwood | t r u t h o u t | 07 September 2010
In May 2009, the federally financed RAND Corporation published a 183-page report, “A Stability Police Force for the United States: Justification and Options for Creating US Capabilities”. The report, conducted for the US Army’s Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI) at the Army War College, examined the need for a “stability police force” (SPF), which it described as “a high-end police force that engages in a range of tasks such as crowd and riot control, special weapons and tactics (SWAT) and investigations of organized criminal groups.” Most soldiers do not possess the specialized skills an SPF officer needs to prevent violence, the report notes. “Most soldiers are trained to apply overwhelming force to secure victory, rather than minimal force to prevent escalation.” The SPF would also train indigenous police forces, much like what occurs today in Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to the study led by Terrence K. Kelly, a senior researcher at RAND, the United States clearly needs an SPF. “Stability operations have become an inescapable reality of US foreign policy,” the report states. The RAND report estimates that creating such a paramilitary police force would cost about $637 million annually, require about 6,000 personnel and that it should be headquartered inside the US Marshals Service (USMS), not the US Army.
“Of the options considered,” the RAND report argues, “this research indicates that the US Marshals Service would be the most likely to successfully field an SPF, under the assumptions that an [military police] option would not be permitted to conduct policing missions in the United States outside of military installations except under extraordinary circumstances and that doing so is essential to maintaining required skills.” The idea here is that members of an SPF would be a “hybrid force” and could be embedded in police and sheriff departments nationwide to retain their policing skills when not deployed overseas. When needed, a battalion-sized SPF unit could be deployed in 30 days.
This recommendation did cause a small number of libertarians to take notice of the report after it was published because of the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids using the military for domestic policing inside the United States. Libertarian William Grigg blogged on LewRockwell.com that he feared that an SPF could be used domestically. “If ‘peacekeepers’ end up patrolling American streets, they probably won’t be foreigners in blue berets, but homegrown jackboots commanded by Washington,” Grigg wrote. Chris Calabrese, a legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, was less fearful of an SPF, but he told Truthout that the report’s recommendation to headquarter “a super police force that would be deployed both foreign and domestically in the US Marshals Service” did violate the spirit of the Posse Comitatus Act.
“In essence, you have this force that would in theory be a civilian force that would be part of the US Marshal Service but they would be deployed as part of the Army and the military forces,” Calabrese said. “That would be their primary deployment purpose. Their civilian purpose would be secondary. They describe it as a training purpose. So who does this police force work for then?”
Talking to WorldNetDaily in January, Kelly did say an SPF could be deployed in the United States, although that’s not what their primary purpose is.
“If there were a major disaster like Katrina it could be deployed in the U.S. but that’s not the purpose of the research,” he said. “It’s important to point out that the goal was to create a force that’s deployable overseas. If it’s to be used in the United States it would be a secondary thing and then only in an emergency.”
The RAND Corporation would not make any of the report’s authors available for an interview. Emails to the USMS asking for a comment on the report and its recommendations also went unanswered.
Calabrese also said there are practical concerns behind such a force outside of the Posse Comitatus Act. “It’s also somewhat strange,” he said. Calabrese wonders what would happen when SPF personnel get called up from wherever they’re embedded to deploy overseas. “What happens to all the police work they’re doing domestically?” he asked.
But the RAND report has more implications for the future of US foreign policy than it does about the militarization of police inside the United States. It signals that some defense and peace intellectuals believe that the United States will continue to intervene in fragile and failing states. After listing the stability operations that the United States has participated in since the end of the cold war – Panama (1989), Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1995), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003)and Haiti again in 2004 – the RAND report notes this trend will continue. “There are several countries where the United States could become engaged in stability operations over the next decade, such as Cuba and Sudan,” according to the report. – Full article
America’s Economy Is Not Here to Pay for Wars
By Jason Ditz | Lew Rockwell | September 8, 2010
In a recent speech at Wayne State University in Detroit, America’s top military commander, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen declared that the most serious threat to America’s national security is the national debt. His argument for this was that the debt and its deleterious effect on America’s economy could hinder the growth of military expenditures.
Mullen further lamented that current estimates have the federal government paying some $600 billion in interest on the debt in 2012 adding, “That’s one year’s worth of defense budget.”
But America’s civilian economy isn’t just something to be taxed to pay for war, and America’s civilian population is not just a collection of potential recruits and sources of revenue for the military. The military is supposed to be here to serve America, not the other way around.
And without downplaying the various serious economic consequences of America’s national debt, Admiral Mullen’s comments betray a very disturbing (and increasingly common) view of the American economy as little more than fuel for its ever-growing war machine.
In fact the $600 billion interest payment is coming in no small part because Admiral Mullen and the rest of the military’s leadership has been pressing for unprecedented increases in military spending. Now, having spent America’s economy to the brink of ruin, Admiral Mullen has the nerve to complain that the harm he has already done is hampering the harm he intends to do.
It isn’t even true, incidentally, that the $600 billion is “one year’s worth of defense budget.” Not anymore it isn’t. In fact President Obama is seeking over $700 billion for fiscal year 2011, and that is one budget item that, whether there is a Republican or Democrat in office, we always expect to grow.
But just 10 years ago it would’ve been two years worth. In 2000 America was spending around $300 billion on its military. That was by far the biggest military budget on the planet. If America still had a $300 billion military, it would still be the largest by far.
Instead America is barreling into the future with a military budget that rivals the rest of the world combined, and an endless wish list of very expensive new military goals. Is it really such a mystery that this is unsustainable?
The purpose of Admiral Mullen’s visit and his assorted talks in Detroit were to admonish local industry leaders that the “patriotic” thing to do was to hire more former soldiers, while insisting that “industry, community and military leaders share the same goals.” One wonders how industry and community leaders feel about an endless series of wars bankrupting the nation, but it can only be assumed that they feel differently than the admiral does.
Though many Americans are reluctant to openly criticize the nation’s military leadership in time of war, Admiral Mullen’s comments make it very clear how little regard he has for us and it is high time we, as Americans, make it clear that this country cannot and will not be sacrificed at the altar of a series of wars whose only goal seems to be fleecing the American taxpayer of an ever growing portion of what he produces. We’ve been down that road for the past decade and we can all see where it has led.
Blair Reveals Cheney’s War Agenda
By Robert Parry | September 6, 2010
Ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s new memoir offers the expected rationalizations for his joining in an illegal, aggressive war against Iraq, even to the point of quibbling about the death toll. But Blair does reveal how much more war was favored by Vice President Dick Cheney and the neocons.
In A Journey: My Political Life, Blair depicts Cheney as believing the United States was at war not only with Islamic terrorists but with “rogue states that supported them” and that “the only way of defeating [this threat] was head-on, with maximum American strength.”
Cheney wanted forcible “regime change” in all Middle Eastern countries that he considered hostile to U.S. interests, according to Blair.
“He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it – Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,” Blair wrote. “In other words, he [Cheney] thought the world had to be made anew, and that after 11 September, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.”
Over the years, there have been indications of this larger neoconservative strategy to attack America’s – and Israel’s – “enemies” starting with Iraq and then moving on to Syria and Iran, but rarely has this more expansive plan for regional war been shared explicitly with the American public.
Usually, the scheme could be found only in obscure neocon policy papers or as part of Washington scuttlebutt. After the Iraq invasion, a favorite neocon joke was whether to next head west toward Damascus or east to Tehran with the punch line, “real men go to Tehran.”
Under this neocon plan, once “regime change” was achieved in Syria and Iran, then Israel’s front-line adversaries, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, would be left impoverished and isolated. Israel could dictate settlement terms to the Palestinians and incorporate the Jewish settlements on prime West Bank land into a Greater Israel.
A Clean Break
The early outlines of this aggressive concept for remaking the Middle East predated the 9/11 attacks by half a decade, when a group of American neocons, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, went to work for Israeli Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu during his 1996 campaign for prime minister.
The neocon strategy paper, called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” advanced the idea that only regime change in hostile Muslim countries could achieve the necessary “clean break” from the diplomatic standoff that had followed inconclusive peace negotiations.
Under the “clean break,” Israel would no longer seek peace through mutual understanding and compromise, but rather through confrontation, including the violent removal of leaders such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
The plan called Hussein’s ouster “an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right,” but also one that would destabilize the Assad dynasty in Syria and thus topple the power dominoes into Lebanon, where Hezbollah might soon find itself without its key Syrian ally. Iran also could find itself in the cross-hairs of “regime change.”
But what the “clean break” needed was the military might of the United States, since some of the targets like Iraq were too far away and too powerful to be defeated even by Israel’s highly efficient military. The cost in Israeli lives and to Israel’s economy from such overreach would have been staggering.
In 1998, the U.S. neocon brain trust pushed the “clean break” plan another step forward with the creation of the Project for the New American Century, which urged President Bill Clinton to seek the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
However, Clinton would only go so far, maintaining a harsh embargo on Iraq and enforcing a “no-fly zone” which involved U.S. aircraft conducting periodic bombing raids. Still, with Clinton or his heir apparent, Al Gore, in the White House, a full-scale invasion appeared out of the question.
The first key political obstacle was removed when the neocons helped engineer George W. Bush’s ascension to the presidency in Election 2000. However, the path was not fully cleared until al-Qaeda terrorists attacked New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, leaving behind a political climate across America for war and revenge.
Though Hussein had no hand in 9/11 and rejected al-Qaeda’s religious extremism, Bush and Blair clambered onboard for an invasion of Iraq. Their differences were mostly tactical, such as whether to present the WMD case to the United Nations or to simply act unilaterally with the so-called “coalition of the willing.”
According to Blair’s memoir, hardliner Cheney opposed going to the UN at all, but Blair argued that the move was politically necessary and won over Bush during a visit to Camp David on Sept. 7, 2002.
“Once George declared he was in favour of going the UN route, the visit relaxed,” Blair wrote. “Dick Cheney had been there for part of the time, and made it clear he was not for going down the UN route. He was unremittingly hard line.”
Common Ground
But Blair explained that Cheney’s aggressive attitude differed from the Bush-Blair approach only by degree, not fundamentally. In that regard, Blair said he considered Cheney as unfairly maligned by progressives and many centrists.
“To those on the left, he is, of course, an uncomplicated figure of loathing,” Blair wrote. “Even for the middle ground, they tend to reach for the garlic and crucifixes. You have to go pretty far right to find Dick’s natural constituency.
“My take on him was different from that of most people. I thought he had one central insight which was at least worth taking seriously. He believed, in essence, that the U.S. was genuinely at war. … [And his response was] we’re coming after you, so change or be changed.”
Though acknowledging that Cheney’s “attitude terrified and repelled people,” Blair expressed a degree of solidarity with the former vice president, saying:
“I did not think [Cheney’s position] was as fantastical as conventional wisdom opined. It is one struggle. Our enemy has an ideology. It does threaten us. The ultimate answer is in the spread of democracy and freedom. It is even possible to conceive of this, in different language, as being a progressive position, certainly where removing someone like Saddam was concerned.
“My problem with the way he put it and wanted to do it was that the manner of doing it was incomplete. Precisely because the war was based loosely around an ideology, the fight had to be waged and won at the level of ideas and in a way that would appeal not to us, but to those who had fallen or might fall prey to that ideology.
“In other words, it couldn’t be a hard-power strategy alone. It had to encompass more than military might. It had to engage the people out in the Middle East, in the Muslim world, and had to build alliances within that world.
“This wasn’t some namby-pamby peacenikery; it was a critical part of winning.”
In other words, Blair saw Cheney’s determination to overthrow U.S.-disliked leaders in the Middle East as more a problem of PR tactics than core strategy.
Despite the widespread impression that Cheney’s grandiose neocon scheme for remaking the Middle East through warfare represented an extreme vision, Blair indicated that he and other supposed moderates shared Cheney’s broader determination to replace anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli governments across the Middle East with more compliant regimes under the banner of “democracy.”
That, in turn, suggests the danger of a wider regional war has not fully abated.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com
Taliban: Withdrawal of oocupation forces must precede shura
Paktribune | September 6, 2010
PESHAWAR: Rejecting the formation of high council for peace by the Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the Taliban Sunday said due to occupation of the country by the foreign forces such councils could not bring any fruit.
Taliban spokesman Qari Muhammad Yousaf told the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) about 150,000 foreign soldiers had occupied Afghanistan and the foreigners were carrying out the activities of the state from ordinary issues to the parliamentary election affairs. “In such conditions what does formation of high council for peace mean,” he questioned.
“Formation of a new shura in the name of peace is a repeat of the former failed experiences. The shura makers and its members are slaves of others and they have no power,” he remarked.
The spokesman repeatedly said that neither the Afghan authorities had the power nor the peace council would have the supremacy, adding Afghanistan had been occupied and the foreigners were running everything.
Asked by the AIP that if the aforesaid shura was given power and authority, then would the Taliban be ready for negotiations with the shura, he said the real reason behind the conflict was presence of foreign forces. “All problems are because of the presence of occupying forces. All the problems will be resolved after the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan.”
Hebron: soldiers convert Palestinian home into military base
Israeli soldiers have erected tents on the roof of the Salayma family’s home and are occupying the building
6 September 2010 | ISM Media
Al Baqa’a, HEBRON – On Friday the Israeli army raided a Palestinian house in Hebron and converted it into a military base, forcing a family of 14 to move into the first floor of their home.
The following day the soldiers took over the roof as well. Yesterday an ISM activist visited the Salayma family in Al Baqa’a, east of Hebron, and spoke to Salem Salayma about the situation.
He said that now the roof has been taken over, soldiers have been on and off the roof constantly. Yesterday morning, at about 8am, six soldiers carried out some kind of exercise around our house, running up the hill, sitting in shooting positions and moving up and down the road. He added that sometimes the army move around in the area, walking or driving, and all the families in the area are very scared. When they see soldiers, they close the house, and stay inside because they fear the soldiers themselves – as well as the settlers who have been moving around the area regularly since the shooting of four settlers last week, and have carried out several attacks on Palestinians.
Salayma, who is in his forties, lives with his family who in total number 14, including 4 children. At present 5 family members are living on the second floor of the occupied house, and 9 are on the first floor. Now, the family has been ordered to vacate the upper floor by next Sunday, so the soldiers can expand their military base. The only reason given for the takeover of the Salayma home has been “security reasons” and no alternative provisions have been made for the family. Since their arrival soldiers have been using the house’s bathroom, water and electricity, without asking.
United Nations personnel logged a report from the family yesterday and Salayma says he wants to hire a lawyer to prevent the military from taking over his house. However, any court case would not happen for at least two weeks and by that time the military occupation of the house will likely be complete.
Salaymi, has not been out of the house since the soldiers came, because he fears for his family. He is also deeply worried however because this means he is losing the income he needs to support his family since he has not been able to go to work. He has also been unable to attend prayers.
Analysts: Iraq war ‘partly to blame’ for financial crisis
Stiglitz and Bilmes: Recession will be longer because of war
The financial crisis that rocked the world in 2008 and still reverberates today was “due at least in part” to the Iraq war, which also made it more difficult for the government to react when economic problems happened, argue two prominent policy makers.
In an article in Sunday’s Washington Post, former Clinton-era economic adviser Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University public policy lecturer Linda J. Bilmes say that the Iraq war forced the US to take on more debt than it had to, and caused in part the rising oil prices that resulted in large amounts of money flowing out of the US economy.
To counter the effects of those trends, fiscal policy makers had to keep interest rates unnaturally low, causing the securities and real estate bubbles that burst at the start of the recession, the authors say.
The authors also amended their assessment from several years ago that the Iraq war’s true cost is around $3 trillion, saying new information suggests that the cost goes “beyond” that estimate.
Saying what might have been is always difficult, especially with something as complex as the global financial crisis, which had many contributing factors. Perhaps the crisis would have happened in any case. But almost surely, with more spending at home, and without the need for such low interest rates and such soft regulation to keep the economy going in its absence, the bubble would have been smaller, and the consequences of its breaking therefore less severe. To put it more bluntly: The war contributed indirectly to disastrous monetary policy and regulations.
The Iraq war didn’t just contribute to the severity of the financial crisis, though; it also kept us from responding to it effectively. Increased indebtedness meant that the government had far less room to maneuver than it otherwise would have had. More specifically, worries about the (war-inflated) debt and deficit constrained the size of the stimulus, and they continue to hamper our ability to respond to the recession. With the unemployment rate remaining stubbornly high, the country needs a second stimulus. But mounting government debt means support for this is low. The result is that the recession will be longer, output lower, unemployment higher and deficits larger than they would have been absent the war.
Stiglitz and Bilmes estimate that about a quarter of the debt increase the US saw during the first five years of the war are attributable to the war — about $900 billion of a $3.6 trillion rise in the debt. They also estimate that the war added about $10 to the cost of a barrel of oil, amounting to a cost of $250 billion to the US economy.
In articles in the Times of London and the Washington Post two years ago, Stiglitz and Bilmes estimated that the cost of the war, including the costs to the US economy, amounted to $3 trillion. At the time, the Pentagon questioned their assertion.
“It appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war’s broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low,” the authors state.
“Reimagining history is a perilous exercise. Nonetheless, it seems clear that without this war, not only would America’s standing in the world be higher, our economy would be stronger,” the authors conclude.
Featured Video
Houthis Don’t Have to Conquer Saudi Arabia to Make It Pay
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Newly Released FBI Docs Shed Light on Apparent Mossad Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks
By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | May 17, 2019
NEW YORK — For nearly two decades, one of the most overlooked and little known arrests made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was that of the so-called “High Fivers,” or the “Dancing Israelis.” However, new information released by the FBI on May 7 has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the “Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- UK whines about losing billions to ‘Putin tax’
- Baghaei to Rubio: Distorted narratives cannot erase US record of broken commitments
- Houthis Don’t Have to Conquer Saudi Arabia to Make It Pay
- MOE: Nearly 22,000 Students and Education Workers Killed
- Guterres in Islamabad: Genocide, cowardice, and the cage of Imran Khan
- Johnson, Marandi say Yemen holds upper hand over Saudi Arabia
- False flags won’t save aggressors, Iran FM spokesman says
- The Makkah Pact Enters Into Force: The End of American Dominance or Its New Form?
- NATO’s top generals gather in Kiev
- EU’s continuing expansion – greater threat to Russia
- If Americans Knew
- Report: Ceasefire Slows Killing but Leaves Devastation Intact
- Country Music Singer Zach Bryan Breaks Attendance Record at Robert Kraft’s Gillette Stadium While Wearing ‘Free Palestine’ Shirt for Second Night in a Row
- Three years of death and devastation: Israel’s war on Gaza in pictures
- Why Hamas believed the status quo was more dangerous than its 7 October gamble
- Debunking Israel’s latest list of ‘terrorist’ journalists in Gaza
- In Gaza, focus is on survival, “every step is a struggle” – Daily Update
- Three Years of Genocide: How America’s Israel-First Media Filtered Out the Truth
- Israeli war chief briefs ministers on potential war against Palestinian Authority
- New Report: Israel Killed nearly 21,000 Palestinian Students and Education Workers in Past Three Years
- Israel’s flailing chatbot army
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
