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Archive: POLITICS

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Petri Dish

For the first time in history, announced researchers this May, a majority of the world’s population is living in urban environments. Cities—efficient hubs connecting international flows of people, energy, communications, and capital—are thriving in our global economy as never before. However, the same factors that make cities hubs of globalization also make them vulnerable to small-group terror and violence.

Over the last few years, small groups’ ability to conduct terrorism has shown radical improvements in productivity—their capacity to inflict economic, physical, and moral damage. These groups, motivated by everything from gang membership to religious extremism, have taken advantage of easy access to our global superinfrastructure, revenues from growing illicit commercial flows, and ubiquitously available new technologies to cross the threshold necessary to become terrible threats. September 11, 2001, marked their arrival at that threshold.

[snip]

The ongoing attacks on the systems that support Baghdad’s 5 million people illustrate the vulnerability of modern networks. Over the last four years, guerrilla assaults on electrical systems have reduced Baghdad’s power to an average of four or five hours a day. And the insurgents have been busily finding new ways to cut power: no longer do they make simple attacks on single transmission towers. Instead, they destroy multiple towers in series and remove the copper wire for resale to fund the operation; they ambush repair crews in order to slow repairs radically; they attack the natural gas and water pipelines that feed the power plants. In September 2004, one attack on an oil pipeline that fed a power plant quickly led to a cascade of power failures that blacked out electricity throughout Iraq.

Lack of adequate power is a major reason why economic recovery has been nearly impossible in Iraq. No wonder that, in account after account, nearly the first criticism that any Iraqi citizen levels against the government is its inability to keep the lights on. Deprived of services, citizens are forced to turn to local groups—many of them at war with the government—for black-market alternatives. This money, in turn, fuels further violence, and the government loses legitimacy.

Insurgents have directed such disruptive attacks against nearly all the services necessary to get a city of 5 million through the day: water pipes, trucking, and distribution lines for gasoline and kerosene. And because of these networks’ complexity and interconnectivity, even small attacks, costing in the low thousands of dollars to carry out, can cause tens of millions and occasionally hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.

Iraq is a petri dish for modern conflict, the Spanish Civil War of our times. It’s the place where small groups are learning to fight modern militaries and modern societies and win. As a result, we can expect to see systems disruption used again and again in modern conflict—certainly against megacities in the developing world, and even against those in the developed West, as we have already seen in London, Madrid, and Moscow.

John Robb's full, interesting piece in City Journal

Healthcare For Children: A Given?

As disgusted as I am to learn that the Bush administration has unilaterally imposed rules intended to limit the number of American children who have access to affordable health care, I can only imagine how this must look to someone raised in another country. The fact that millions of American kids lack access to health care must seem downright medieval to the rest of the industrialized world. I mean, we're talking about children here.

I imagine that the average person in Germany or France or Japan would react to this news much the same way we would react to a report that the German, French, or Japanese governments had repealed laws against child sweatshop labor or child pornography. We'd be aghast. And rightly so. But when the President takes steps intended to cut off health care access for children, we simply chalk it up to a policy dispute.

Well I'm sick of it. There is no excuse for a country as wealthy as ours allowing innocent children to go without access to basic health care. And if policymakers take steps that result in a net increase in the number of children without access to care, they have a moral duty to find a way to fix that problem immediately. As far as I'm concerned, the Bush administration is morally responsible for what happens to the children who lose access to health care as a result of these new rules. If any of them die or suffer permanent harm from a condition that could have been prevented with routine care (and it's bound to happen), the Bush administration bears the blame.

The Anonymous Liberal has more to say

DemocratIC Leadership: Continuing Failure

Carl Levin, probably the most influential Senate Democrat on Iraq policy, just returned from a "visit to Iraq." In a joint statement with GOP Sen. John Warner, he pronounced that "the military aspects of President Bush's new strategy in Iraq, as articulated by him on January 10, 2007, appear to have produced some credible and positive results."

While expressing various "concerns," they particularly hailed "the continuing improvement in the ability and willingness of the Iraqi Army to conduct combat operations against the insurgents." Predictably, war supporters on Fox News and elsewhere wasted no time in hauling out the "even-Carl-Levin-admits-we're-winning" claim.

The "trip to Iraq" which Levin and Warner took was so short and so controlled that it makes the Pollack/O'Hanlon jaunt look like a full tour of combat duty. "We completed a very productive two-day visit to Iraq," they said, adding that they spent the whole "two days" meeting with U.S. military commanders (including Gen. Petraeus) at "forward operating bases," as well as with Iraqi politicians. And, you see, they "came to Iraq to assess the progress being achieved by 'the surge.'"

All of that is fine; Senators ought to meet with U.S. military commanders and hear their war reports. And melodramatic, highly controlled trips to war zones is how politicians (and think tank "scholars") behave. That's not new.

But Levin has not -- as his joint statement claimed and media reports recite -- "seen indications that the surge of additional brigades to Baghdad and its immediate vicinity and the revitalized counter-insurgency strategy being employed have produced tangible results in making several areas of the capital more secure." It is patently inaccurate to claim that Levin "saw" anything meaningful. Rather, he simply heard claims voiced by U.S. military officials about U.S. military progress and Iraqi troop improvement – claims the U.S. military has been making for four straight years – and he is now repeating those claims.

More from Glenn Greenwald

HisTorical Perspective: A crucial Difference

On March 28, 1968, Lyndon Johnson’s new Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford, met with a handful of top officials in the Office of the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk. Clifford had just read the twelfth draft of a major speech on the war in Vietnam, written by Johnson’s special counsel, Harry McPherson. He told the others, “This is a war speech. There’s nobody out there on our side for a war speech.” Clifford’s extensive network of friends in the establishment—businessmen, lawyers, the foreign-policy elder statesmen known as the Wise Men—had all turned against the war after the Tet Offensive, the previous January. If the Administration had lost them, Clifford said, it had lost the country. Rusk, who was working a glass of Scotch, William Bundy, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, and Walt Rostow, the national security adviser—the most hawkish of Johnson’s remaining advisers—offered no arguments; they were silent. “I think Harry should go back and write a peace speech,” Clifford said.

McPherson, a longtime Johnson aide from Texas and the sole survivor of the group, is now a lawyer in Washington. He recently told me that he returned from the State Department to his office in the White House and drafted a new speech, at the top of which he wrote “1A.” When he finished, he sent a note alerting Johnson that two speeches now awaited his review, “12” and “1A.” The next morning, Johnson called him and growled, “I don’t want to say this on page five.” McPherson frantically flipped through the two drafts and saw that Johnson was reading from 1A. Without a word, the President had decided to change course on Vietnam. “That was the turning point, as far as I knew,” McPherson said. Two nights later, on March 31st, Johnson told the country that he would halt most of the bombing of North Vietnam, enter into negotiations with Hanoi, and—in a surprise to almost everyone on his staff, including McPherson—withdraw from the Presidential campaign. (This story has also been told in McPherson's memoirs and elsewhere.)

The shift in war policy at the end of the Johnson Presidency turned out to be too little too late, and Americans would fight in Vietnam for five more years. But what’s striking about the moment when L.B.J. finally began to break is the nature of the forces that had led him to it: not just Clifford’s establishment friends and the bipartisan gray eminences of American foreign policy but also newspaper editors in the provinces and the power centers, party bosses like Mayor Richard Daley, of Chicago, moderate Republicans, and, above all, Johnson’s former colleagues in the Senate—his mentor Richard Russell, of Georgia; the majority leader, Mike Mansfield, of Montana; and even Eugene McCarthy, of Minnesota, who, though he was running an insurgent antiwar campaign against Johnson, maintained a back channel to his old friend in the White House. These were not just individuals but institutions that represented a broad center, able to appeal to politicians of both parties and, in a moment of crisis, speak to a truly national interest. “There were structures through which people could influence L.B.J.,” Michael Janeway, the author of “The Fall of the House of Roosevelt,” whose father was a close Johnson adviser during L.B.J.'s Senate years, told me. “In our time, nothing like that exists.”

More from George Packer in The New Yorker

Slipping further down

Pick up the paper any day and you'll find tiny straws in the wind (or headlines inside the fold) reflecting the seeping away of American power. The President of the planet's "sole superpower" and his top diplomats and commanders have been denouncing Iran for months as the evil hand behind American disaster in Iraq as well as Afghanistan.

So imagine, when President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan arrived in Washington a couple of weeks back and promptly described Iran as "a helper and a solution" for his country, even as President Bush insisted in his presence: "I would be very cautious about whether or not the Iranian influence in Afghanistan is a positive force." At almost the same moment, Iraq's embattled Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki paid an official visit to Iran, undoubtedly looking for support in case the U.S. turned on his government. Maliki "held hands" with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, met with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, and called for cooperation. In response, all President Bush could do was issue a vague threat: "I will have to have a heart to heart with my friend, the prime minister, because I don't believe [the Iranians] are constructive.... My message to him is, when we catch you playing a non-constructive role, there will be a price to pay." (Later, a National Security Council spokesman had to offer a correction, insisting the threat was aimed only at Iran, not Maliki.) Then, to add insult to injury, just a week after Bush and Karzai met in Washington, Ahmadinejad headed for Kabul with a high-ranking Iranian delegation to pay his respects to the Afghan president "in open defiance of Washington's wishes." Think slap in the face.

What made this little regional diplomatic dance all the more curious was the fact that Karzai and Maliki are such weak (and weakening) American-backed leaders -- Maliki of a government in chaos whose purview hardly extends beyond the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, and Karzai, sometimes dubbed the "mayor of Kabul," as head of a government visibly losing control over even the modest areas it has ruled. In another age, each would have been dubbed an American "puppet" and yet, here they were, defying an American president in search of support from a hated regional power on whose curbing Bush has staked what's left of his presidency.

Much more about the decline of American power at TomDispatch

Warmongers

Michael Ledeen -- who once told me that he only supported the Iraq War because it provided momentum and pre-positioning of American military forces to then go after Iran -- is not going to feel self-actualized until America unleashes a considerable portion of its arsenal against the nation and people of Iran.

I'm not a pacifist. I have to admit that there might be circumstances in which war with Iran is our last and only option -- but we are far, far away from that situation.

I'm particularly worried that there are bad guys in Iran who so desperately want to consolidate their political positions inside Iran that they see a hot conflict with the U.S. and/or Israel as "helpful". It's also clear that Vice President Cheney as well as his followers inside the administration and his ideological following in Washington's think tank sector want war to pump up their eroding political position.

But Ledeen, James Woolsey, Norman Podhoretz, and others want war now with Iran. They want the bombs to fly. They are obsessed with delegitimating the important diplomatic efforts of Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad, and others. They despise Defense Secretary Bob Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- and they are increasingly offering defamatory comments about George W. Bush himself at their small dinner parties and neocon gatherings.

[snip]

...remember that on the night of 9/11/2001, Tehran was the only place in the Middle East where thousands of people walked out into the streets holding candles and expressing grief and empathy for Americans who died that day. There are many in Iran who identify with America and are inspired by our country (though less so under current US political leadership).

Also, remember that former Ambassador and now RAND strategist James Dobbins successfully recruited Iran to play an important and constructive role in the Bonn Conference that was necessary to stabilize Afghanistan in 2002. Iran worked with us and did not need to. Yes, Afghanistan is coming apart at the seams now, and Iran may be playing both sides, but this is a function of America's failing, not Iran's designs and machinations.

More from Steve Clemons at his Washington Note site

The Wrong Strategy

The American flag is burning again in Pakistan. Angry masses are protesting the recent remarks made by Democratic Presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama to deploy US soldiers on Pakistani territories and to take unilateral action based on intelligence inside Pakistan. Senator Obama’s comments echo growing consensus among policy makers about Pakistan’s commitment to fighting Al-Qa’eda and the need to demand “results” from Pakistan.

Conventional wisdom maintains that Pakistan is teetering on the brink of extremism and that the authoritarian regime of Pervez Musharraf is our only hope of preventing a nuclear-capable militant Islamic state from emerging in South Asia. This is the understanding with which the Bush Administration has proceeded since 2001. The difference now is that we are moving towards a unilateral approach.

This conventional wisdom was wrong before and is dangerously wrong now. It ignores the significant contributions made by Pakistan in capturing or killing the majority of Al-Qa’eda leadership. It also ignores the salient facts that Pakistan has time and again rejected traditionalist Islamic parties within its political spectrum - who have never managed to garner more than a few percentage of electoral votes - and that a robust consensus exists in Pakistan against militancy and extremism in Islam. Last month, we saw protests across Pakistan against the radicalization of Islamabad’s Lal Masjid mosque. Unilateral actions, or the mere threat of it, can destabilize not only the US-Pakistan strategic alliance but derail the tentative steps Pakistan has recently taken towards democracy.

On July 20th, 2007, a pivotal decision in Pakistan’s civil and political history came from its Supreme Court. It reinstated Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry who had been summarily dismissed by Pervez Musharraf on March 9th, 2007, almost certainly because Chaudhry had authorized investigations into the “disappearances” of civilians at the hands of military intelligence branch of the Army. Subsequently, the Court ordered the release of many political prisoners – most notably the opposition leader Javed Hashmi who was jailed in 2003 for criticizing Pervez Musharraf.

This triumph of independent judicial oversight and civil society over military power came only after thousands of lawyers, civil officers and professionals led the march into the streets in support of Chaudhry. Soon enough, thousands became hundreds of thousands and the cause of Chaudhry became a cause for democracy across Pakistan. The news media withstood state violence and censorship and refused to shut down their coverage.

These are encouraging signs of democracy that we need to explicitly support. Longtime observers of Pakistan’s history will remember that in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, we provided material and political support to the erstwhile Islamist dictator General Zia ul Haq, as part of the Cold War raging in Afghanistan against Soviet forces. But, we Americans abandoned Pakistan throughout the 1990s -- which crippled the democratic and civilian governments and strengthened militarization and Talibanization in the region. We must not repeat this history. Our current support for the dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf, and threats of military deployment or sanctions is, thus, exactly the wrong strategy both for our long-term global interests and for the people of Pakistan.

Manan Ahmed's full piece can be read at Juan Cole's group blog

"It’s the kiss of death...(t)he minute you are counted on or backed by the Americans, kiss it goodbye, you will never win."

–Turki al-Rasheed, a Saudi reformer, commenting on Amin Gemayel's recent loss in the Lebananse by-elections.

via Belgravia Dispatch

Bad News From Britain

Sweeping new guidelines barring military personnel from speaking about their service publicly have been quietly introduced by the Ministry of Defence, the Guardian has learned.

Soldiers, sailors and airforce personnel will not be able to blog, take part in surveys, speak in public, post on bulletin boards, play in multi-player computer games or send text messages or photographs without the permission of a superior if the information they use concerns matters of defence.

They also cannot release video, still images or audio - material which has previously led to investigations into the abuse of Iraqis. Instead, the guidelines state that "all such communication must help to maintain and, where possible, enhance the reputation of defence".

More from Glenn Greenwald

Another Failed Policy

The riddle of American foreign policy in the Middle East this week became even more puzzling, following the announcement of major new military aid and sales packages to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and smaller Arab countries. The totals will top $70 billion over the coming ten years. The United States justifies this as part of its policy of fighting radicalism and terrorism, supporting moderates, and promoting an Arab-Israeli peace process.

It might also help the Man on the Moon learn to make really fine New York-style cheesecake.

American foreign policy in the Middle East combines impressive persistence with wildly erratic swings. It changes with the season and the political climate:

• promote and then ignore Arab democratization;
• boycott and then speak with Syria and Iran;
• disregard then actively engage in Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations.

Simultaneously, it adheres to sacred principles, such as:

• Israeli military superiority over all the Arabs;
• sure access to oil;
• protecting friendly Arab regimes.

Such diplomacy, which is at once consistent and kaleidoscopic, generates a mish-mash of contradictions that only reinforce the low-quality policies of Arabs, Israelis and Iranians. The combination has resulted in frightening trends in the Middle East in the past generation: continued militarization, polarization, radicalization, and frequent destabilization.

This week’s latest American approach to the Middle East perpetuates this legacy, which is closely linked to several new factors in recent years: the messy war in Iraq, the increased regional clout of a nuclear Iran, and the growing strength of Arab mainstream Islamist political movements. Also, the Middle East sees the vulnerability of some Arab governments to economic and political stresses, ethnic and religious challenges to centralized state identities, widespread Arab skepticism of “democracy promotion” attempts, and the continued expansion of small but violent terrorist groups broadly reflecting Al-Qaeda-like worldviews.

Each one of these trends is exacerbated, not diminished, by the pro-military, pro-Israel, and pro-Arab autocracy policies the United States now reaffirms and intensifies. As if to ensure that its policies backfire and promote popular Arab, Iranian and even Turkish resistance, rather than acquiescence, Washington also routinely lumps together very different movements and sentiments in the region: the most powerful and legitimate Islamist movements (Hamas, Hizbullah), two very different state leaderships (Syria and Iran), and the equally distinct extremist terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda. By seeing these forces as a common foe, and countering them with tens of billions of dollars of advanced weapons for Arab states, humiliatingly subjected to Israel’s approval, Washington guarantees another failed policy.

Rami G. Khouri's full piece can be found here

Unmitigated Gall

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, embracing an appointed Palestinian prime minister here in the West Bank, said Thursday that the United States still supported democracy in the Middle East. But she defended the American refusal to recognize the earlier, elected, Hamas-led government.

Standing next to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, during a news conference here, Ms. Rice said, “We believe strongly in the right of people to express themselves and their desires, in elections.” But, she added, once elected, “ you have the obligation to govern responsibly.”

Coming from the inept, dishonest poster girl for the most irresponsible Administration in U.S. history, I don't know how those present were able to keep from vomiting.

NY Times

Two-thirds

LAST week, Judge Nancy Gertner of the Federal District Court in Boston awarded more than $100 million to four men whom the F.B.I. framed for the 1965 murder of Edward Deegan, a local gangster. It was compensation for the 30 years the men spent behind bars while agents withheld evidence that would have cleared them and put the real killer — a valuable F.B.I. informant, by the name of Vincent Flemmi — in prison.

Most coverage of the story described it as a bizarre exception in the history of law enforcement. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior by those whose sworn duty it is to uphold the law is all too common. In state courts, where most death sentences are handed down, it occurs regularly.

My recently completed study of the 124 exonerations of death row inmates in America from 1973 to 2007 indicated that 80, or about two-thirds, of their so-called wrongful convictions resulted not from good-faith mistakes or errors but from intentional, willful, malicious prosecutions by criminal justice personnel.

Richard Moran is a professor of sociology and criminology. His full Op-Ed can be read in the NY Times

Erik Prince's Blackwater

The founder and owner of Blackwater, Erik Prince, the 38-year-old heir to a fortune made by his father (a Michigan entrepreneur who invented the illuminated car sun visor), is not, legally, a villain. It doesn’t make him a villain that he is a privately educated, avowedly devout Roman Catholic, a former member of US Navy special forces and the father of six children. It doesn’t make him a villain that he has declared: ‘Our corporate goal is to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did to the postal service.’ It doesn’t make him a villain that he is part of the right-wing Republican DeVos-Prince dynasty of Michigan, which has bankrolled radical Christian evangelical movements that campaign against homosexuality, abortion and stem-cell research. The fact that he was an intern in the administration of the elder President Bush, but found him too liberal and backed the extreme right-winger Pat Buchanan to replace him, doesn’t make him a villain; nor does the fact that he has given a quarter of a million dollars in campaign contributions to Republican politicians. It doesn’t make him a villain that he donated half a million dollars to an organisation set up by Charles Colson, a felon convicted for his role in the Watergate scandal, to get prisoners to become born-again Christians in exchange for better jail conditions (in 1996, Colson floated the possibility of a Christian coup against the re-elected President Clinton). Nor does it make Prince a villain that, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when survivors were desperate for food, drinking water, shelter and medical supplies, his company flew ammunition into New Orleans to supply the groups of heavily-armed mercenaries it had rushed to the disaster zone. It is true that he helps fund campaigners against high taxation and welfare spending, while the hundreds of millions of dollars Blackwater has taken in fees since 2001 have come almost exclusively from the US taxpayer. Yet this does not make him a villain.

A man who hires a squad of elite lawyers to fight to protect his company from liability for anyone’s death, foreign or American, anywhere overseas, despite at least one incident of Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq shooting dead an innocent man; despite the death in Fallujah of four Blackwater mercenaries to whom the company hadn’t given proper armoured vehicles, manpower, weapons, training, instructions or maps; despite the death of three US servicemen in Afghanistan at the hands of a reckless Blackwater aircrew, who also died: well, casual observers might think this would render Erik Prince a villain. Yet it would make him a villain only in some liberal, humanistic, ethical sense. In the eyes of American law, Prince has done nothing villainous; on the contrary, he is a patriot and a Christian, which is to say, a good man.

James Meek's full piece in the London Review of Books

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