The F-22 is not just irrelevant to 21st century warfare; it is a step backwards - a big step, and in more ways than one. A new article by a combat aircraft designer (Pierre Sprey), an aviation author (James Stevenson), and Winslow Wheeler of the Straus Military Reform Project sprinkle a little rain on the F-22 parade in Washington and Texas.
This piece can be found in the January 27 Fort Forth Star-Telegram at
http://www.star-telegram.com/245/story/434931.html, and it is reproduced below.
Posted on Sun, Jan. 27, 2008
The F-22: expensive, irrelevant and counterproductive
By PIERRE SPREY, JAMES STEVENSON and WINSLOW WHEELER
Special to the Star-Telegram
On Dec. 12, the Air Force announced with considerable fanfare at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia that its F-22 fighter had reached "full operational capability." Air Combat Command commander Gen. John Corley called it a "key milestone."
Brimming with pride, a spokesman for the manufacturer, Lockheed, stated: "The F-22 is ready for world-wide operations" -- and then added, "... should it be called upon."
His afterthought makes the point: There are, of course, two wars going on, and the F-22 has yet to fly a single sortie over the skies of Iraq or Afghanistan. Nor has the Air Force announced any intention of sending the F-22 to either theater.
The Air Force is quite right to keep the F-22 as far as possible from either conflict. The airplane is irrelevant to both, and were it to appear in those skies, it almost certainly would set U.S. and allied forces back.
Not only would it impose an unwanted burden on the already overstretched support forces in the region, but its primary mission -- shooting down enemy aircraft -- has no meaning in 21st-century warfare. Al Qaeda and the Taliban have no air force, nor do they want one.
Although the F-22 could carry two bombs to attack ground targets, that capability is so modest that our opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan might not even notice. It also would be ungracious to compare the F-22 to the ridiculously cheap, simple, and quite old A-10 close-air-support aircraft that has been operating in both wars -- and even more ungracious to point out that each A-10 can deliver more than 10 times that load.
Destroying from the air enemy tactical units directly on the battlefield is an essential part of modern warfare -- a mission that the Air Force was forced to embrace reluctantly when it developed the low- and slow-flying A-10, its first and only purpose-built close-air-support aircraft. Data from Afghanistan indicate that U.S. and allied forces might have killed more innocent civilians than the enemy has in the past year, and from Iraq we read report after report of civilians killed as a result of U.S. action. A major part of those "collateral" civilian casualties come from air attacks from aircraft flying too fast and too high to know and positively identify exactly what they are guiding their munitions to.
In a form of conflict in which winning over the civilian population is key to success, F-22 participation -- along with that of other high-flying, high-speed aircraft -- may be much worse than irrelevant.
Corley and other F-22 advocates would leap to argue that in its intended role -- shooting down enemy fighters -- it is unsurpassed. In fact, the airplane's many advocates seek to expand the F-22 buy beyond 2009, when current production is scheduled to end.
Let's pretend for the moment that there exists, or will soon, an enemy air force for which the F-22 would be relevant. How, then, could the F-22 help?
As an individual performer in real-world air-to-air combat, the F-22 is a huge disappointment. The Air Force vociferously disagrees -- based on its untested-by-combat hypothesis that air wars can be fought and won by long-range, radar-controlled missiles fired at enemies you cannot see or reliably identify. If ever the F-22 finds itself in an air war against a serious opponent, all of us will find out who is right.
Three issues matter here:
Force size -- The U.S. Air Force initially decided that to fight any serious opposing air force would require 750 F-22s. For development and procurement, Congress is providing $65.3 billion -- a huge sum. However, because no stakeholder was interested in exercising discipline over the design, weight and cost of each F-22, that $65.3 billion will buy only 184 aircraft. Given the need to maintain a training base in the U.S., and considering the demonstrated daily sortie rate of similarly complex aircraft already in our inventory, the Air Force will be lucky to be able to fly 60 deployed F-22s per day at the start of a major conflict overseas.
That number would shrink as inevitable combat attrition and maintenance down-time take their toll. But even that generously estimated initial 60 sorties per day would not be a meaningful force against the major threat air force that the F-22 advocates hypothesize to make the F-22 relevant.
Pilot skill -- We can expect that same tiny F-22 force to attrite all too rapidly in combat because the Air Force funds only 10 to 12 hours of flight training for F-22 pilots per month. That amount of realistic training is completely inadequate. At the height of their prowess in the 1970s, the Israelis gave their fighter pilots 40 to 50 hours of flight training per month.
The history of air warfare shows that the most important determinant of who wins an aerial dogfight is pilot skill, not aircraft performance. Because they have raided pilot training accounts to feed increasingly voracious procurement programs (such as the F-22), Congress and the Air Force have virtually guaranteed high pilot losses in any hypothesized, large-scale air-to-air war.
When we buy ultra-expensive fighters such as the F-22 that gobble up already scarce training and support funds, we make our own pilots more vulnerable. If the advocates of more first-line fighters for the U.S. were serious about winning air wars and saving pilots' lives, they would double (and then triple) the amount of money available for pilot flight training before spending a penny on new aircraft. Instead, Congress cut Air Force training accounts in the new Department of Defense Appropriations Act by $400 million.
Cost -- The current plan is to buy 184 F-22s for $65.3 billion, or $354.9 million per aircraft. The Air Force contends that such a calculation is unfair; it distributes the cost of all testing and development -- thus far -- equally to every aircraft.
The Air Force contends that a more meaningful calculation for a prospective purchase is what it calls "flyaway" cost, which considers the development cost to have been sunk and that the only cost that should count now is the "cost to go." That cost, the Air Force contends in an October "fact sheet" on the F-22, is a mere $159.9 million per fighter.
Even at the Air Force's advertised price, the F-22 remains history's most expensive fighter aircraft. Considering the tiny inventory and reduced pilot training that the unprecedented cost implies, it's still no bargain.
The Air Force has failed to reach a point in F-22 production where it can be bought more efficiently. There is no "bargain" in going beyond the 184 that the taxpayers have already paid for.
The most telling characteristic that Lockheed and the Air Force are pushing to acquire additional F-22s is demonstrated in recent newspaper articles and advertisements. Nowhere do these items talk about a dangerous threat that makes more F-22s mandatory. Instead, they address how money for additional F-22s would be spent for defense corporations and jobs in more than 40 states.
Perhaps these articles and advertisements really have it right: Congress' lust for pork, and the perverted thinking that jobs and profits (not the threat) should drive defense spending, will determine the size of the F-22 fleet.
Not so fast ...
Deputy Editorial Page Editor J.R. Labbe, writing Jan. 20, took a sharply contrasting viewpoint, arguing that the "F-22, with its speed, maneuverability and stealth ... is the ideal first-day fighter against enemy air forces. It blows the screens off the porch and kicks down the doors on Day 1 to make sure that nothing jumps up to contest air superiority."
She noted the argument that the Raptor is an aircraft for yesterday's wars but asserted that "in the zeal to respond to the tactics of today's enemy, the United States can't be too quick to dismiss the potential for a well-funded nation-state to turn into tomorrow's adversary."
Read the entire column at www.star-telegram.com/212/
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Tuesday, January 29, 2008
McCain win would mean war with Iran
McCain win would mean war with Iran
by David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Global Research, January 28, 2008
Raw Story
"More wars" could prove to be the oddest of all presidential campaign slogans. Especially if it works.
Presidential candidate John McCain shocked observers on Sunday when he told a crowd of supporters, "There's going to be other wars. ... I'm sorry to tell you, there's going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there will be other wars."
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asked old-line conservative Pat Buchanan about McCain's remarks, saying, "He talked about promising that more wars were coming. ... Is he so desperate to get off the economic issue?"
Pat Buchanan replied that McCain never used the word "promise" but simply said there would be more wars, and that from McCain's point of view, "that is straight talk. ... You get John McCain in the White House, and I do believe we will be at war with Iran."
"That's one of the things that makes me very nervous about him," Buchanan went on.
"There's no doubt John McCain is going to be a war president. ... His whole career is wrapped up in the military, national security. He's in Putin's face, he's threatening the Iranians, we're going to be in Iraq a hundred years."
"So when he says more war," Scarborough commented, "he is promising you, if he gets in the White House, we'll not only be fighting this war but starting new wars. Is that what conservative Republicans want?
"I don't say he's starting them," Buchanan answered. "He expects more wars. ... I think he's talking straight, because if you take a look at the McCain foreign policy, he is in everybody's face. Did you see Thad Cochran's comment when he endorsed Romney? He said, look, John McCain is a bellicose, red-faced, angry guy, who constantly explodes."
"Not a happy message," commented Scarborough. "Not Reaganesque."
This video is from MSNBC News Live, broadcast January 28, 2008.
1.
Transcript via closed captions
:: all right. let me ask you, we're going to talk about the kennedy endorsement in a second, but we're down in florida at universal orlando resorts. it's florida, florida, florida. it's a little chilly, but john mccain, yesterday, said something very interesting. he talked about a promising that more wars were coming. he kept talking about more wars, we counted it three times in five seconds. is he so desperate to get off the economic issue --
:: yes.
:: -- that he will basically promise americas that they're facing grim times ahead and he's the only guy that can save america when we get in all these future wars?
:: he didn't say promise. what he said was, make no mistake, there are going to be more wars. that is straight talk, to be quite frank, joe. you get john mccain in the white house, and i do believe we'll be at war with iraq. that's one of the things that makes me very nervous about him. i think we need an eisenhower, who got us out of korea or a nixon who tried to get us out of vietnam with honor. i think that's the kind of president this country needs. there's no doubt john mccain is going to be a war president. can anybody see john mccain as sort of a peace-time calvin coolidge president? it's preposterous. his whole career is wrapped up in the military, national security. he's in putin's face, he's threatening the iranians. we're going to be in iraq 100 years. if we're in iraq 100 years, joe, we'll be fighting 100 years of war, just as the british, if they stayed in our country 100 years, would be fighting the americans for a century. i'm telling you, what john mccain's promising you.
:: so he's promising wow if he gets into the white house, we won't only be fighting this war but starting new wars.
:: i don't say he's starting them. he expects more wars and he anticipates them and he's predicting them. and i think he's talking straight because if you take a look at the mccain foreign policy, he is in everybody's face. did you see thad cochran's comment when he endorsed romney? he is john mccain is an angry guy who constantly explodes. his whole career is the military. his big issue, the one he's comfortable with is what? is national security, fachism, the long war, 100 years in iraq. that's where he's comfortable, that where he's at his best.
:: pat buchanan, as we say good-bye to you --
:: not a happy message.
:: not at all.
:: thank you, pat.
:: pat, the bar hasn't opened yet.
:: i'm not talking about you, i'm talking about john mccain. it was very, very bellicose.
:: i think mccain is straight talk.
:: yeah. that's what he said it was. i don't know. it struck me as a little bit -- i don't know. it struck me as a little bit contrived yesterday. i could be wrong. pat buchanan, thank you very much.
by David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Global Research, January 28, 2008
Raw Story
"More wars" could prove to be the oddest of all presidential campaign slogans. Especially if it works.
Presidential candidate John McCain shocked observers on Sunday when he told a crowd of supporters, "There's going to be other wars. ... I'm sorry to tell you, there's going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there will be other wars."
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asked old-line conservative Pat Buchanan about McCain's remarks, saying, "He talked about promising that more wars were coming. ... Is he so desperate to get off the economic issue?"
Pat Buchanan replied that McCain never used the word "promise" but simply said there would be more wars, and that from McCain's point of view, "that is straight talk. ... You get John McCain in the White House, and I do believe we will be at war with Iran."
"That's one of the things that makes me very nervous about him," Buchanan went on.
"There's no doubt John McCain is going to be a war president. ... His whole career is wrapped up in the military, national security. He's in Putin's face, he's threatening the Iranians, we're going to be in Iraq a hundred years."
"So when he says more war," Scarborough commented, "he is promising you, if he gets in the White House, we'll not only be fighting this war but starting new wars. Is that what conservative Republicans want?
"I don't say he's starting them," Buchanan answered. "He expects more wars. ... I think he's talking straight, because if you take a look at the McCain foreign policy, he is in everybody's face. Did you see Thad Cochran's comment when he endorsed Romney? He said, look, John McCain is a bellicose, red-faced, angry guy, who constantly explodes."
"Not a happy message," commented Scarborough. "Not Reaganesque."
This video is from MSNBC News Live, broadcast January 28, 2008.
1.
Transcript via closed captions
:: all right. let me ask you, we're going to talk about the kennedy endorsement in a second, but we're down in florida at universal orlando resorts. it's florida, florida, florida. it's a little chilly, but john mccain, yesterday, said something very interesting. he talked about a promising that more wars were coming. he kept talking about more wars, we counted it three times in five seconds. is he so desperate to get off the economic issue --
:: yes.
:: -- that he will basically promise americas that they're facing grim times ahead and he's the only guy that can save america when we get in all these future wars?
:: he didn't say promise. what he said was, make no mistake, there are going to be more wars. that is straight talk, to be quite frank, joe. you get john mccain in the white house, and i do believe we'll be at war with iraq. that's one of the things that makes me very nervous about him. i think we need an eisenhower, who got us out of korea or a nixon who tried to get us out of vietnam with honor. i think that's the kind of president this country needs. there's no doubt john mccain is going to be a war president. can anybody see john mccain as sort of a peace-time calvin coolidge president? it's preposterous. his whole career is wrapped up in the military, national security. he's in putin's face, he's threatening the iranians. we're going to be in iraq 100 years. if we're in iraq 100 years, joe, we'll be fighting 100 years of war, just as the british, if they stayed in our country 100 years, would be fighting the americans for a century. i'm telling you, what john mccain's promising you.
:: so he's promising wow if he gets into the white house, we won't only be fighting this war but starting new wars.
:: i don't say he's starting them. he expects more wars and he anticipates them and he's predicting them. and i think he's talking straight because if you take a look at the mccain foreign policy, he is in everybody's face. did you see thad cochran's comment when he endorsed romney? he is john mccain is an angry guy who constantly explodes. his whole career is the military. his big issue, the one he's comfortable with is what? is national security, fachism, the long war, 100 years in iraq. that's where he's comfortable, that where he's at his best.
:: pat buchanan, as we say good-bye to you --
:: not a happy message.
:: not at all.
:: thank you, pat.
:: pat, the bar hasn't opened yet.
:: i'm not talking about you, i'm talking about john mccain. it was very, very bellicose.
:: i think mccain is straight talk.
:: yeah. that's what he said it was. i don't know. it struck me as a little bit -- i don't know. it struck me as a little bit contrived yesterday. i could be wrong. pat buchanan, thank you very much.
The War on Immigrants Is a War on Freedom by Jacob Hornerberger
The War on Immigrants Is a War on Freedom
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Lost in the furor over the so-called immigration crisis is that the war on immigrants is a direct assault on both free enterprise and freedom of association, freedoms on which our nation was founded.
Despite the often-heard canard about immigrants going on welfare, the fact is that most immigrants come to the United States to better their lives by getting jobs. After all, how often do we ever hear about some illegal alien being caught filing false papers at the local welfare office? Answer: Hardly ever. Nor is this surprising, given the fact that most illegal aliens wish to stay as far away from government officials as possible, for fear of being detected, arrested, incarcerated, and deported.
The fact is that the vast majority of illegal aliens find their way into jobs in the private sector. To put it another way, American businessmen have voluntarily and willingly hired millions of illegal aliens to work in their businesses.
Why have they done that? Most likely it’s because immigrants work hard and are honest. If they didn’t have a strong work ethic and were not honest, American employers wouldn’t be hiring them.
When the employer and the immigrant enter into a working relationship, they both benefit, from their respective standpoints. Each one of them gives up something he values less for something he values more. Thus, while it’s tempting to conclude that employers “exploit” immigrants by paying them “low” wages, nothing could be further from the truth. By entering into the employment contract, the immigrant is essentially saying, “I’m better off with this job than without it.” By the same token, the employer is saying, “I’m better off with this immigrant than without him.” Both of them benefit from the relationship.
In fact, exploitation enters the picture as a result of immigration laws. Given that the illegal alien is subject to being reported, arrested, and deported, dishonest employers sometimes take advantage of that by refusing to pay illegal aliens the agreed-upon wage, knowing that it will be extremely difficult for the immigrant to do anything about it.
The working relationship between the American employer and Mexican (or other foreigner) employee goes to the heart of a free-enterprise system. Under principles of free enterprise, why shouldn’t an employer be free to hire anyone he wants? It’s his money, isn’t it? It’s his business, isn’t it? Why should the government have the right to interfere with what a person does with his own money?
The same principles apply to freedom of association. Doesn’t that right entail the right to associate with anyone a person pleases? If a businessman wishes to associate with a foreigner, either personally or in a business relationship, why shouldn’t he be free to do so? Under what moral authority does the government interfere with a person’s freedom to associate with another person?
Aren’t freedom of association, freedom of enterprise, and freedom of contract fundamental rights? Don’t such rights connote freedom from state interference? Under what moral authority does the state interfere with the exercise of fundamental rights?
Does this mean that people who don’t like associating with foreigners should be forced to do so? Of course not. If a businessman doesn’t want to hire foreigners, he shouldn’t be forced to do so. If a consumer doesn’t want to patronize a business that hires foreigners, his choice should be protected. No one should be forced to hire anyone or associate with anyone he doesn’t want to hire or associate with.
America was founded on the principles of individual freedom and limited government. Unfortunately, for the last several decades our nation has moved in the opposite direction, as manifested by such socialist and regulatory, big-government schemes as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the drug war, and protectionism. The war on immigrants, with its direct assault on free enterprise and freedom of association, is just one more example of this regrettable trend.
Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Permalink
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Lost in the furor over the so-called immigration crisis is that the war on immigrants is a direct assault on both free enterprise and freedom of association, freedoms on which our nation was founded.
Despite the often-heard canard about immigrants going on welfare, the fact is that most immigrants come to the United States to better their lives by getting jobs. After all, how often do we ever hear about some illegal alien being caught filing false papers at the local welfare office? Answer: Hardly ever. Nor is this surprising, given the fact that most illegal aliens wish to stay as far away from government officials as possible, for fear of being detected, arrested, incarcerated, and deported.
The fact is that the vast majority of illegal aliens find their way into jobs in the private sector. To put it another way, American businessmen have voluntarily and willingly hired millions of illegal aliens to work in their businesses.
Why have they done that? Most likely it’s because immigrants work hard and are honest. If they didn’t have a strong work ethic and were not honest, American employers wouldn’t be hiring them.
When the employer and the immigrant enter into a working relationship, they both benefit, from their respective standpoints. Each one of them gives up something he values less for something he values more. Thus, while it’s tempting to conclude that employers “exploit” immigrants by paying them “low” wages, nothing could be further from the truth. By entering into the employment contract, the immigrant is essentially saying, “I’m better off with this job than without it.” By the same token, the employer is saying, “I’m better off with this immigrant than without him.” Both of them benefit from the relationship.
In fact, exploitation enters the picture as a result of immigration laws. Given that the illegal alien is subject to being reported, arrested, and deported, dishonest employers sometimes take advantage of that by refusing to pay illegal aliens the agreed-upon wage, knowing that it will be extremely difficult for the immigrant to do anything about it.
The working relationship between the American employer and Mexican (or other foreigner) employee goes to the heart of a free-enterprise system. Under principles of free enterprise, why shouldn’t an employer be free to hire anyone he wants? It’s his money, isn’t it? It’s his business, isn’t it? Why should the government have the right to interfere with what a person does with his own money?
The same principles apply to freedom of association. Doesn’t that right entail the right to associate with anyone a person pleases? If a businessman wishes to associate with a foreigner, either personally or in a business relationship, why shouldn’t he be free to do so? Under what moral authority does the government interfere with a person’s freedom to associate with another person?
Aren’t freedom of association, freedom of enterprise, and freedom of contract fundamental rights? Don’t such rights connote freedom from state interference? Under what moral authority does the state interfere with the exercise of fundamental rights?
Does this mean that people who don’t like associating with foreigners should be forced to do so? Of course not. If a businessman doesn’t want to hire foreigners, he shouldn’t be forced to do so. If a consumer doesn’t want to patronize a business that hires foreigners, his choice should be protected. No one should be forced to hire anyone or associate with anyone he doesn’t want to hire or associate with.
America was founded on the principles of individual freedom and limited government. Unfortunately, for the last several decades our nation has moved in the opposite direction, as manifested by such socialist and regulatory, big-government schemes as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the drug war, and protectionism. The war on immigrants, with its direct assault on free enterprise and freedom of association, is just one more example of this regrettable trend.
Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Permalink
Are Americans Facing a Perfect Storm? by Jacob Hornberger
Hornberger’s Blog
Monday, January 28, 2008
Are Americans Facing a Perfect Storm?
by Jacob G. Hornberger
President Bush is advising the members of Congress not to load up his “economic-stimulus” package with a bunch of lard and pork. Unfortunately, he didn’t explain why. After all, if $800 in the hands of each taxpayer will “stimulate” the economy, why won’t a bunch of checks in the hands of favorite congressional supporters do the same?
In fact, why is President Bush being so miserly? If $800 per person will “stimulate” the economy, how about sending $10,0000 — no, $50,000—to every person, business, and organization. Heck, let’s make it an even $100,000. Think of the boost that “stimulus” will provide the economy!
Before everyone starts kneeling in gratitude to their federal daddy for sending them this allowance money, it’s important that people ask themselves an important question: Where is their daddy getting all this money to send them?
Given that the government is spending far is excess of what it brings in, there are only 3 possibilities.
First, taxes. With this approach, the government taxes each person $800 and then sends each person back $800. It should be obvious that under this method, a person gains nothing — unless the government taxes other people to get the money to send to him.
Second, borrowing. With this approach, the government must induce people to lend the $800 per person to the government, which it then sends back to the taxpayer. That means less money is available for private capital, e.g., home mortgages, which means more foreclosures. It also means that all that debt must ultimately be paid back, which means higher taxes down the line.
Third, printing the money through the Federal Reserve System. With this approach, the government simply prints the $800 and sends it out, causing the value of the dollar to continue plummeting. People pay the price in terms of higher prices for gas, groceries, cars, restaurants, movies, utilities, vacations, and the like. This is the most likely route that federal officials will take, given that most people won’t be able to figure out how their federal parent is sending them the free money.
The question is: Can this game, which has gone on for decades, go on indefinitely?
Consider, for example, the banking industry. Prior to the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, banks that could not honor their obligations to depositors would go under. Depositors would lose a part or all their money. That’s the nature of a free-market system—if you make the wrong investment, you bear the responsibility.
Then, along comes the federal daddy and announces that no longer will people lose their money from having chosen bad banks in which to deposit their money. Instead, the federal government would “insure” them against such occurrences. The government would be the people’s protector.
It’s not difficult to understand how such an “insurance” system works with respect to the fall of individual banks. When a bank goes down, the government simply taxes people to cover the losses of depositors in that bank.
But what happens if there is an industry-wide banking collapse? In that case, every depositor will be demanding that the government refund the money he has in the bank, up to $100,000, pursuant to his FDIC “insurance” policy.
But where will the government get the money to refund everybody’s money? You guessed it — in one of the three ways enumerated above — by taxing everyone, by borrowing from everyone, or by simply printing the money.
To discourage bank runs, over the years the government has steadily increased the amount of deposit insurance. But all it would take is one big panicky financial moment for depositors to appear at banks all across the land demanding their money for an industry-wide banking crisis to materialize. Then what?
Ever since the 1930s, people have put their faith in the paternalistic welfare state to take care of them, to watch over them, to guard them against the visisitudes of life. Today, every aspect of the welfare state is in crisis, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, home loans, the dollar, and more. For that matter, every aspect of the warfare state is also in crisis, including Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism, civil liberties, privacy, torture, and more.
Time will tell whether Americans are facing a perfect storm of crises, both foreign and domestic. If so, a bit of pork and lard in an economic “stimulus” bill will be the last thing on people’s mind.
Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Permalink
Monday, January 28, 2008
Are Americans Facing a Perfect Storm?
by Jacob G. Hornberger
President Bush is advising the members of Congress not to load up his “economic-stimulus” package with a bunch of lard and pork. Unfortunately, he didn’t explain why. After all, if $800 in the hands of each taxpayer will “stimulate” the economy, why won’t a bunch of checks in the hands of favorite congressional supporters do the same?
In fact, why is President Bush being so miserly? If $800 per person will “stimulate” the economy, how about sending $10,0000 — no, $50,000—to every person, business, and organization. Heck, let’s make it an even $100,000. Think of the boost that “stimulus” will provide the economy!
Before everyone starts kneeling in gratitude to their federal daddy for sending them this allowance money, it’s important that people ask themselves an important question: Where is their daddy getting all this money to send them?
Given that the government is spending far is excess of what it brings in, there are only 3 possibilities.
First, taxes. With this approach, the government taxes each person $800 and then sends each person back $800. It should be obvious that under this method, a person gains nothing — unless the government taxes other people to get the money to send to him.
Second, borrowing. With this approach, the government must induce people to lend the $800 per person to the government, which it then sends back to the taxpayer. That means less money is available for private capital, e.g., home mortgages, which means more foreclosures. It also means that all that debt must ultimately be paid back, which means higher taxes down the line.
Third, printing the money through the Federal Reserve System. With this approach, the government simply prints the $800 and sends it out, causing the value of the dollar to continue plummeting. People pay the price in terms of higher prices for gas, groceries, cars, restaurants, movies, utilities, vacations, and the like. This is the most likely route that federal officials will take, given that most people won’t be able to figure out how their federal parent is sending them the free money.
The question is: Can this game, which has gone on for decades, go on indefinitely?
Consider, for example, the banking industry. Prior to the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, banks that could not honor their obligations to depositors would go under. Depositors would lose a part or all their money. That’s the nature of a free-market system—if you make the wrong investment, you bear the responsibility.
Then, along comes the federal daddy and announces that no longer will people lose their money from having chosen bad banks in which to deposit their money. Instead, the federal government would “insure” them against such occurrences. The government would be the people’s protector.
It’s not difficult to understand how such an “insurance” system works with respect to the fall of individual banks. When a bank goes down, the government simply taxes people to cover the losses of depositors in that bank.
But what happens if there is an industry-wide banking collapse? In that case, every depositor will be demanding that the government refund the money he has in the bank, up to $100,000, pursuant to his FDIC “insurance” policy.
But where will the government get the money to refund everybody’s money? You guessed it — in one of the three ways enumerated above — by taxing everyone, by borrowing from everyone, or by simply printing the money.
To discourage bank runs, over the years the government has steadily increased the amount of deposit insurance. But all it would take is one big panicky financial moment for depositors to appear at banks all across the land demanding their money for an industry-wide banking crisis to materialize. Then what?
Ever since the 1930s, people have put their faith in the paternalistic welfare state to take care of them, to watch over them, to guard them against the visisitudes of life. Today, every aspect of the welfare state is in crisis, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, home loans, the dollar, and more. For that matter, every aspect of the warfare state is also in crisis, including Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism, civil liberties, privacy, torture, and more.
Time will tell whether Americans are facing a perfect storm of crises, both foreign and domestic. If so, a bit of pork and lard in an economic “stimulus” bill will be the last thing on people’s mind.
Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Permalink
Monday, January 28, 2008
Iran & Bush's Crisis of Truth
Iran & Bush's Crisis of Truth
By Peter Dyer
January 26, 2008
Editor’s Note: With less than a year left in his presidency, George W. Bush is still trying to stoke the fires of confrontation with Iran, relying on his signature mix of bellicose threats and insistence he is only trying to protect world peace.
In this guest essay, journalist Peter Dyer looks at Bush’s latest rhetorical appeals in the context of the President’s long history of falsehoods:
“Iran is a threat to world peace.” Iran is “the world’s leading sponsor of terror.” So declared President Bush in his recent trip to the Middle East. Iran, he said, is seeking to “intimidate its neighbors with ballistic missiles and bellicose rhetoric.”
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By now most of us are familiar with the President’s feelings and rhetoric concerning Iran. They have a familiar ring. They sound a lot like the buildup to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Recently the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit investigative reporting institution, published a report: “Iraq: the War Card.” The report documented 935 false statements made by President Bush and seven top administration officials in the two years following September 11, 2001 concerning the national security threat posed by Iraq to the U.S.
The top liar was the President. He made, according to the report, 232 false statements about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and 28 false statements about Iraq’s links with al-Qaeda.
In this light we should examine carefully any statement the President makes concerning Iranian threats to world peace.
A look at a map of the region helps put things in perspective. We see that Iran has 13 “next-door neighbors.” Seven share land borders with Iran while six countries lie directly across the Persian Gulf.
Of these 13 all but five (Oman, Saudi Arabia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan) contain U.S. military bases. Of these five, Oman and the U.S. negotiated a 10-year agreement in 2000 which gives the U.S. access to three Omani air fields.
The other four neighbors are all recipients of U.S. aid. Pending congressional approval, this will include President Bush’s recent offer to Saudi Arabia of a $20 billion arms package.
Two of Iran’s neighbors, Afghanistan and Iraq, have recently been invaded and occupied by the U.S. Another neighbor, Pakistan, is a nuclear power and a U.S. ally in the “Global War on Terror.” Another nuclear power and U.S. ally, Israel, lies within striking distance of Iran.
In the Persian Gulf, according to the U.S. Navy Times, the U.S. is currently deploying an aircraft carrier strike group and two expeditionary strike groups.
A partial list of this force includes an aircraft carrier; two amphibious assault ships; three guided-missile frigates; four guided-missile cruisers; six-guided missile destroyers; two dock landing ships; two amphibious transport dock ships; and two fast-attack submarines (one deployed independently of any strike group).
In sum, Iran is nearly encircled by the air, land and naval forces of the world’s most powerful military.
Iran may not be run by saints. No country is. But Iran has never threatened the U.S. Nor has Iran ever invaded another country. The Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has pledged there will be no Iranian nuclear weapons, nor will Iran start a war.
On the other hand, preemptive war is now openly acknowledged to be an “option” in U.S. political/military strategy. We demonstrated this convincingly when we invaded Iraq -- a country which had never harmed us, was not preparing to harm us and had never even threatened to harm us.
Nevertheless we initiated a conflict which has, to date, killed at least 150,000 and created 4,000,000 refugees.
Invading a country which has not threatened the invader is aggression: the “supreme international crime,” according to the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Whether Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who is not the ultimate decision maker in Iran, has threatened to “wipe Israel off the map” is open to debate. It is not open to debate, however, that both Israel and the U.S. have repeatedly threatened to attack Iran.
Despite all this President Bush continues to assert that Iran is a threat to world peace and the world's leading sponsor of terror.
The President appears to be using the same strategy which worked so well in 2002-2003: simply to repeat falsehoods until a majority of Americans believe them.
He appears to be gambling that we are either so apathetic or so foolish we will accept the lies and approve yet another war. Unfortunately, based on his past experience, it may not be a bad gamble.
Peter Dyer is a journalism student who moved with his wife from California to New Zealand in 2004. He can be reached at p.dyer@inspire.net.nz .
By Peter Dyer
January 26, 2008
Editor’s Note: With less than a year left in his presidency, George W. Bush is still trying to stoke the fires of confrontation with Iran, relying on his signature mix of bellicose threats and insistence he is only trying to protect world peace.
In this guest essay, journalist Peter Dyer looks at Bush’s latest rhetorical appeals in the context of the President’s long history of falsehoods:
“Iran is a threat to world peace.” Iran is “the world’s leading sponsor of terror.” So declared President Bush in his recent trip to the Middle East. Iran, he said, is seeking to “intimidate its neighbors with ballistic missiles and bellicose rhetoric.”
Share this article
Bookmark
Digg!Digg
emailEmail
printPrinter friendly
By now most of us are familiar with the President’s feelings and rhetoric concerning Iran. They have a familiar ring. They sound a lot like the buildup to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Recently the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit investigative reporting institution, published a report: “Iraq: the War Card.” The report documented 935 false statements made by President Bush and seven top administration officials in the two years following September 11, 2001 concerning the national security threat posed by Iraq to the U.S.
The top liar was the President. He made, according to the report, 232 false statements about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and 28 false statements about Iraq’s links with al-Qaeda.
In this light we should examine carefully any statement the President makes concerning Iranian threats to world peace.
A look at a map of the region helps put things in perspective. We see that Iran has 13 “next-door neighbors.” Seven share land borders with Iran while six countries lie directly across the Persian Gulf.
Of these 13 all but five (Oman, Saudi Arabia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan) contain U.S. military bases. Of these five, Oman and the U.S. negotiated a 10-year agreement in 2000 which gives the U.S. access to three Omani air fields.
The other four neighbors are all recipients of U.S. aid. Pending congressional approval, this will include President Bush’s recent offer to Saudi Arabia of a $20 billion arms package.
Two of Iran’s neighbors, Afghanistan and Iraq, have recently been invaded and occupied by the U.S. Another neighbor, Pakistan, is a nuclear power and a U.S. ally in the “Global War on Terror.” Another nuclear power and U.S. ally, Israel, lies within striking distance of Iran.
In the Persian Gulf, according to the U.S. Navy Times, the U.S. is currently deploying an aircraft carrier strike group and two expeditionary strike groups.
A partial list of this force includes an aircraft carrier; two amphibious assault ships; three guided-missile frigates; four guided-missile cruisers; six-guided missile destroyers; two dock landing ships; two amphibious transport dock ships; and two fast-attack submarines (one deployed independently of any strike group).
In sum, Iran is nearly encircled by the air, land and naval forces of the world’s most powerful military.
Iran may not be run by saints. No country is. But Iran has never threatened the U.S. Nor has Iran ever invaded another country. The Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has pledged there will be no Iranian nuclear weapons, nor will Iran start a war.
On the other hand, preemptive war is now openly acknowledged to be an “option” in U.S. political/military strategy. We demonstrated this convincingly when we invaded Iraq -- a country which had never harmed us, was not preparing to harm us and had never even threatened to harm us.
Nevertheless we initiated a conflict which has, to date, killed at least 150,000 and created 4,000,000 refugees.
Invading a country which has not threatened the invader is aggression: the “supreme international crime,” according to the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Whether Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who is not the ultimate decision maker in Iran, has threatened to “wipe Israel off the map” is open to debate. It is not open to debate, however, that both Israel and the U.S. have repeatedly threatened to attack Iran.
Despite all this President Bush continues to assert that Iran is a threat to world peace and the world's leading sponsor of terror.
The President appears to be using the same strategy which worked so well in 2002-2003: simply to repeat falsehoods until a majority of Americans believe them.
He appears to be gambling that we are either so apathetic or so foolish we will accept the lies and approve yet another war. Unfortunately, based on his past experience, it may not be a bad gamble.
Peter Dyer is a journalism student who moved with his wife from California to New Zealand in 2004. He can be reached at p.dyer@inspire.net.nz .
None Dare Call It Treason: Who is stealing our nuclear secrets and why are they being shielded by the authorities? by Justin Raimondo
None Dare Call It Treason
Who is stealing our nuclear secrets – and why are they being shielded by the authorities?
by Justin Raimondo
The Valerie Plame case is, by journalistic standards, ancient history, and naturally any follow-up on a once-important story is considered bad form. Yet there is an interesting – and rather scary – new twist to the narrative. It turns out that Scooter Libby and friends weren't the first to "out" CIA agent Plame, whose alleged employer, a company known as Brewster Jennings, was really a cover for a CIA unit investigating nuclear proliferation issues.
The London Times reveals that a former top U.S. State Department official tipped off Turkish agents about Brewster Jennings' CIA connection, according to Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator assigned to produce English-language transcripts of intercepted conversations of Turkish targets – in this case recordings of Turkish embassy officials and a top State Department official discussing, among other things, Brewster Jennings' relationship to the CIA.
As the Times reports, the recordings were made "between the summer and autumn of 2001. At that time, foreign agents were actively attempting to acquire the West's nuclear secrets and technology. Among the buyers were Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's intelligence agency, which was working with Abdul Qadeer Khan, the 'father of the Islamic bomb,' who in turn was selling nuclear technology to rogue states such as Libya."
Plame and her unit were onto a black market nuclear network, run as a cooperative effort by the intelligence agencies of Pakistan, Turkey, and Israel. Accordingly, the Turks were lured into hiring Brewster-Jennings as "consultants," but when the high U.S. official learned of this, says Edmonds, he "contacted one of the foreign targets and said … you need to stay away from Brewster Jennings because they are a cover for the government. The target … immediately followed up by calling several people to warn them about Brewster Jennings. At least one of them was at the ATC [American Turkish Council]. This person also called an ISI person to warn them."
The Israeli connection is what's interesting about this covert operation, because it involves U.S. citizens, high government officials who have been part of an ongoing investigation that dates back to at least 1999, the earliest year mentioned in the AIPAC indictment. As Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay of McClatchy News Service reported in 2004:
"Several U.S. officials and law-enforcement sources said yesterday that the scope of the FBI probe of Pentagon intelligence activities appeared to go well beyond the [Larry] Franklin matter.
"FBI agents have briefed top White House, Pentagon, and State Department officials on the probe. Based on those briefings, officials said, the bureau appears to be looking into other controversies that have roiled the Bush administration, some of which also touch [Douglas] Feith's office.
"They include how the Iraqi National Congress, a former exile group backed by the Pentagon, allegedly received highly classified U.S. intelligence on Iran; the leaking of the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame to reporters; and the production of bogus documents suggesting that Iraq tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons from the African country of Niger. Bush repeated the Niger claim in making the case for war against Iraq.
"'The whole ball of wax' was how one U.S. official privy to the briefings described the inquiry."
The whole ball of wax is a pretty tall order, but surely a major part of it is this nuclear black market business that Edmonds has clear evidence of. Edmonds has been subjected to an unprecedented gag order, imposed by a judge in the name of preserving "state secrets" – yet what is being preserved, apparently, aren't state secrets at all but the knowledge that our nuclear secrets are being stolen and sold to the highest bidder with the active collaboration of high U.S. government officials. A whole gallery of top figures has been fingered by Edmonds, who hasn't mentioned any names yet has managed to identify the guilty parties by posting their photos on a Web site associated with her case.
The lack of coverage of this amazing – and quite frightening – story in the U.S. media is easily explained: anything having to do with the activities of Israeli intelligence in this country is sure to sink beneath the radar, although the London Times and a good number of international news outlets have picked up the details. What isn't so easily explained is the cover-up of criminal activities, including treason, by our very own Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Times, seeking corroboration of Edmonds' story, filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI, asking for a particular document:
"One of the documents relating to the case was marked 203A-WF-210023. Last week, however, the FBI responded to a freedom of information request for a file of exactly the same number by claiming that it did not exist. But The Sunday Times has obtained a document signed by an FBI official showing the existence of the file."
Who is protecting what I called this treasonous camarilla from prosecution – and why have successive investigations into a number of activities by the same cabal of government officials been closed down, repeatedly, over the years?
As Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark point out in their new book, Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy, the network associated with Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan continues to operate in Europe, the Gulf, and Southeast Asia through a series of front companies. They cite a study produced by the BND, Germany's intelligence agency, that found Pakistan is procuring nuclear-related materials and technology far in excess of its needs, leading experts to suspect they're funneling their nuclear assets into a global black market operation. The chilling conclusion of the authors ought to send shivers down your spine:
"Most alarming was the finding that hundreds of thousands of components amassed by Khan had vanished since he had been put out of operation. In other words, Pakistan has continued to sell nuclear weapons technology (to clients known and unknown) even as Musharraf denies it – which means either that the sales are being carried out with his secret blessing or that he is no more in control of Pakistan's nuclear program than he is of the bands of jihadis in his country."
The Pakistanis think they are above reproach, at least publicly, by the U.S. authorities, and this strange immunity may have lethal consequences for us all:
"In 2001, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency, had proof that Osama bin Laden had received in person two retired Pakistani nuclear scientists at his secret HQ in Afghanistan. Both had become Islamist radicals in retirement.
"According to the son of one of them, bin Laden told them he had succeeded in acquiring highly enriched uranium from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and he wanted their help to turn it into a bomb. Amazed, they explained that while they could help with the science of fissile materials, they were not weapons designers.
"Soon afterwards, a secret army audit discovered evidence that 40 canisters of highly enriched uranium (HEU), the feedstuff for a nuclear bomb, were missing from the Kahuta enrichment labs outside Islamabad after A.Q. Khan retired. Dr. Muhammad Shafiq ur-Rehman, an insider who is the son of one of Khan's former key aides, revealed: 'They could only account for 80 out of a supposed 120 canisters.'"
Okay, so let's see where this brings us: an underground network of spies and corrupt public officials is selling nuclear secrets worldwide, and al-Qaeda may very well have gotten its hands on enough lethal materials to make roughly 1,000 "dirty" bombs. Not only that, but the public officials and Washington insiders connected to this network are being protected from prosecution. The case files that document their treason have been withheld, and possibly destroyed.
Our brain-dead media, our kept pundits, and the "mainstream" outlets that determine if and when a news story is "legitimate" have systematically ignored the allegations of Sibel Edmonds, in spite of numerous endorsements of her credibility from two respected U.S. senators, the FBI's Office of the Inspector General, and numerous current and former FBI agents who share her frustration with the shameless cover-up of this important case. It is absolutely outrageous that not a single major news organization in the U.S. has bothered to examine the charges made by Edmonds – especially when it is known that Islamist groups are still planning attacks on Western targets.
None Dare Call It Treason was the title of a ubiquitous right-wing screed of the 1960s, remembered more for its high camp value than for anything the author had to say, but I've always wanted to use it as the title of a column. Now that I've managed to do it, it doesn't seem half as funny anymore.
Is it really time to consider moving to, say, a Pacific atoll and waiting out the catastrophe looming just down the road a bit? I never thought I'd say that, being temperamentally and ideologically opposed to "dropping out," but one wonders, in the face of such a massive cover-up of this appalling danger to our immediate safety, if that isn't the only alternative.http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12276
Who is stealing our nuclear secrets – and why are they being shielded by the authorities?
by Justin Raimondo
The Valerie Plame case is, by journalistic standards, ancient history, and naturally any follow-up on a once-important story is considered bad form. Yet there is an interesting – and rather scary – new twist to the narrative. It turns out that Scooter Libby and friends weren't the first to "out" CIA agent Plame, whose alleged employer, a company known as Brewster Jennings, was really a cover for a CIA unit investigating nuclear proliferation issues.
The London Times reveals that a former top U.S. State Department official tipped off Turkish agents about Brewster Jennings' CIA connection, according to Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator assigned to produce English-language transcripts of intercepted conversations of Turkish targets – in this case recordings of Turkish embassy officials and a top State Department official discussing, among other things, Brewster Jennings' relationship to the CIA.
As the Times reports, the recordings were made "between the summer and autumn of 2001. At that time, foreign agents were actively attempting to acquire the West's nuclear secrets and technology. Among the buyers were Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's intelligence agency, which was working with Abdul Qadeer Khan, the 'father of the Islamic bomb,' who in turn was selling nuclear technology to rogue states such as Libya."
Plame and her unit were onto a black market nuclear network, run as a cooperative effort by the intelligence agencies of Pakistan, Turkey, and Israel. Accordingly, the Turks were lured into hiring Brewster-Jennings as "consultants," but when the high U.S. official learned of this, says Edmonds, he "contacted one of the foreign targets and said … you need to stay away from Brewster Jennings because they are a cover for the government. The target … immediately followed up by calling several people to warn them about Brewster Jennings. At least one of them was at the ATC [American Turkish Council]. This person also called an ISI person to warn them."
The Israeli connection is what's interesting about this covert operation, because it involves U.S. citizens, high government officials who have been part of an ongoing investigation that dates back to at least 1999, the earliest year mentioned in the AIPAC indictment. As Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay of McClatchy News Service reported in 2004:
"Several U.S. officials and law-enforcement sources said yesterday that the scope of the FBI probe of Pentagon intelligence activities appeared to go well beyond the [Larry] Franklin matter.
"FBI agents have briefed top White House, Pentagon, and State Department officials on the probe. Based on those briefings, officials said, the bureau appears to be looking into other controversies that have roiled the Bush administration, some of which also touch [Douglas] Feith's office.
"They include how the Iraqi National Congress, a former exile group backed by the Pentagon, allegedly received highly classified U.S. intelligence on Iran; the leaking of the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame to reporters; and the production of bogus documents suggesting that Iraq tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons from the African country of Niger. Bush repeated the Niger claim in making the case for war against Iraq.
"'The whole ball of wax' was how one U.S. official privy to the briefings described the inquiry."
The whole ball of wax is a pretty tall order, but surely a major part of it is this nuclear black market business that Edmonds has clear evidence of. Edmonds has been subjected to an unprecedented gag order, imposed by a judge in the name of preserving "state secrets" – yet what is being preserved, apparently, aren't state secrets at all but the knowledge that our nuclear secrets are being stolen and sold to the highest bidder with the active collaboration of high U.S. government officials. A whole gallery of top figures has been fingered by Edmonds, who hasn't mentioned any names yet has managed to identify the guilty parties by posting their photos on a Web site associated with her case.
The lack of coverage of this amazing – and quite frightening – story in the U.S. media is easily explained: anything having to do with the activities of Israeli intelligence in this country is sure to sink beneath the radar, although the London Times and a good number of international news outlets have picked up the details. What isn't so easily explained is the cover-up of criminal activities, including treason, by our very own Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Times, seeking corroboration of Edmonds' story, filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI, asking for a particular document:
"One of the documents relating to the case was marked 203A-WF-210023. Last week, however, the FBI responded to a freedom of information request for a file of exactly the same number by claiming that it did not exist. But The Sunday Times has obtained a document signed by an FBI official showing the existence of the file."
Who is protecting what I called this treasonous camarilla from prosecution – and why have successive investigations into a number of activities by the same cabal of government officials been closed down, repeatedly, over the years?
As Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark point out in their new book, Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy, the network associated with Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan continues to operate in Europe, the Gulf, and Southeast Asia through a series of front companies. They cite a study produced by the BND, Germany's intelligence agency, that found Pakistan is procuring nuclear-related materials and technology far in excess of its needs, leading experts to suspect they're funneling their nuclear assets into a global black market operation. The chilling conclusion of the authors ought to send shivers down your spine:
"Most alarming was the finding that hundreds of thousands of components amassed by Khan had vanished since he had been put out of operation. In other words, Pakistan has continued to sell nuclear weapons technology (to clients known and unknown) even as Musharraf denies it – which means either that the sales are being carried out with his secret blessing or that he is no more in control of Pakistan's nuclear program than he is of the bands of jihadis in his country."
The Pakistanis think they are above reproach, at least publicly, by the U.S. authorities, and this strange immunity may have lethal consequences for us all:
"In 2001, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency, had proof that Osama bin Laden had received in person two retired Pakistani nuclear scientists at his secret HQ in Afghanistan. Both had become Islamist radicals in retirement.
"According to the son of one of them, bin Laden told them he had succeeded in acquiring highly enriched uranium from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and he wanted their help to turn it into a bomb. Amazed, they explained that while they could help with the science of fissile materials, they were not weapons designers.
"Soon afterwards, a secret army audit discovered evidence that 40 canisters of highly enriched uranium (HEU), the feedstuff for a nuclear bomb, were missing from the Kahuta enrichment labs outside Islamabad after A.Q. Khan retired. Dr. Muhammad Shafiq ur-Rehman, an insider who is the son of one of Khan's former key aides, revealed: 'They could only account for 80 out of a supposed 120 canisters.'"
Okay, so let's see where this brings us: an underground network of spies and corrupt public officials is selling nuclear secrets worldwide, and al-Qaeda may very well have gotten its hands on enough lethal materials to make roughly 1,000 "dirty" bombs. Not only that, but the public officials and Washington insiders connected to this network are being protected from prosecution. The case files that document their treason have been withheld, and possibly destroyed.
Our brain-dead media, our kept pundits, and the "mainstream" outlets that determine if and when a news story is "legitimate" have systematically ignored the allegations of Sibel Edmonds, in spite of numerous endorsements of her credibility from two respected U.S. senators, the FBI's Office of the Inspector General, and numerous current and former FBI agents who share her frustration with the shameless cover-up of this important case. It is absolutely outrageous that not a single major news organization in the U.S. has bothered to examine the charges made by Edmonds – especially when it is known that Islamist groups are still planning attacks on Western targets.
None Dare Call It Treason was the title of a ubiquitous right-wing screed of the 1960s, remembered more for its high camp value than for anything the author had to say, but I've always wanted to use it as the title of a column. Now that I've managed to do it, it doesn't seem half as funny anymore.
Is it really time to consider moving to, say, a Pacific atoll and waiting out the catastrophe looming just down the road a bit? I never thought I'd say that, being temperamentally and ideologically opposed to "dropping out," but one wonders, in the face of such a massive cover-up of this appalling danger to our immediate safety, if that isn't the only alternative.http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12276
Ending the stranglehold on Gaza by Eyad al-Sarraj and Sara Roy
EYAD AL-SARRAJ AND SARA ROY
Ending the stranglehold on Gaza
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/01/26/ending_the_stranglehold_on_gaza/
By Eyad al-Sarraj and Sara Roy | January 26, 2008
AN ISRAELI convoy of goods and peace activists will go today to Erez,
Israel's border with Gaza, and many Palestinians will be on the other
side waiting. They will not see one another, but Palestinians will
know there are Jews who condemn the siege inflicted on the tiny
territory by Israel's military establishment and want to see an end to
the 40-year-old occupation.
Israel's minister of justice, Haim Ramon, had pushed for cutting off
Gaza's "infrastructural oxygen" - water, electricity, and fuel - as a
response to the firing of Qassam rockets into Israel. Last Sunday,
Ramon's wish came true: Israel's blockade forced Gaza's only power
plant to shut down, plunging 800,000 people into darkness. Food and
humanitarian aid were also denied entry. Although international
pressure forced Israel to let in some supplies two days later, and the
situation further eased when Palestinians breached the border wall
with Egypt, the worst may be yet to come.
The Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, agrees with Ramon's
strategy, saying that it is "inconceivable that life in Gaza continues
to be normal." The rapid and deepening desperation of Gaza's sick and
hungry is of no moral concern to her. For Livni, like Ramon, the siege
is a tactical measure, a human experiment to stop the rockets and
bring down a duly elected government.
The siege on Gaza and the West Bank began after Hamas's 2006 electoral
victory with an international diplomatic and financial boycott of the
new Hamas-led government. Development assistance was severely reduced
with the improbable aim of bringing about a popular uprising against
the very government just elected to power. Instead, this collective
punishment resulted in a steady deterioration of Palestinian life, in
growing lawlessness, and a violent confrontation between Fatah and
Hamas, which escalated into a Hamas military takeover of Gaza in June
2007.
Since then, the siege has been tightened to an unprecedented level.
Over 80 percent of the population of 1.5 million (compared to 63
percent in 2006) is dependent on international food assistance, which
itself has been dramatically reduced.
In 2007, 87 percent of Gazans lived below the poverty line, more than
a tripling of the percentage in 2000. In a November 2007 report, the
Red Cross stated about the food allowed into Gaza that people are
getting "enough to survive, not enough to live."
Why is this acceptable?
The reduction in fuel supplies that the Israeli government first
approved in October not only threatens the provision of health and
medical services but the stock of medicines, which is rapidly being
depleted. This has forced the critically ill to seek treatment outside
the Gaza Strip.
However, according to Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, many
patients are being denied permission to leave, because of new
bureaucratic restrictions imposed on top of an already inefficient and
arbitrary system. The organization has also accused the Israeli
intelligence service of forcing some patients to inform on others in
order to be granted passage.
Since June, Israel has limited its exports to Gaza to nine basic
materials. Out of 9,000 commodities (including foodstuffs) that were
entering Gaza before the siege began two years ago, only 20
commodities have been permitted entry since. Although Gaza daily
requires 680,000 tons of flour to feed its population, Israel had cut
this to 90 tons per day by November 2007, a reduction of 99 percent.
Not surprisingly, there has been a sharp increase in the prices of
foodstuffs.
Gaza also suffers from the ongoing destruction of its agriculture and
physical infrastructure. Between June and November 2006, $74.7 million
in damage was inflicted by the Israeli military on top of the nearly
$2 billion already incurred by Palestinians between 2002 and 2005.
Over half the damage was to agricultural land flattened by bulldozers,
with the remainder to homes, public buildings, roads, water and sewage
pipes, electricity infrastructure, and phone lines.
The psychological damage of living in a war zone may surpass the
physical. According to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem,
between Sept. 1, 2005, and July 25, 2007, 668 Palestinians were killed
in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli security forces. Over half were
noncombatants and 126 were children. During the same period, Qassam
rockets and mortar shells killed eight Israelis, half of them civilians.
Gaza is no longer approaching economic collapse. It has collapsed.
Given the intensity of repression Gaza is facing, can the collapse of
its society - family, neighborhood, and community structure - be far
behind? If that happens, we shall all suffer the consequences for
generations to come.
Eyad al-Sarraj is founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program.
Sara Roy is senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.
Ending the stranglehold on Gaza
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/01/26/ending_the_stranglehold_on_gaza/
By Eyad al-Sarraj and Sara Roy | January 26, 2008
AN ISRAELI convoy of goods and peace activists will go today to Erez,
Israel's border with Gaza, and many Palestinians will be on the other
side waiting. They will not see one another, but Palestinians will
know there are Jews who condemn the siege inflicted on the tiny
territory by Israel's military establishment and want to see an end to
the 40-year-old occupation.
Israel's minister of justice, Haim Ramon, had pushed for cutting off
Gaza's "infrastructural oxygen" - water, electricity, and fuel - as a
response to the firing of Qassam rockets into Israel. Last Sunday,
Ramon's wish came true: Israel's blockade forced Gaza's only power
plant to shut down, plunging 800,000 people into darkness. Food and
humanitarian aid were also denied entry. Although international
pressure forced Israel to let in some supplies two days later, and the
situation further eased when Palestinians breached the border wall
with Egypt, the worst may be yet to come.
The Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, agrees with Ramon's
strategy, saying that it is "inconceivable that life in Gaza continues
to be normal." The rapid and deepening desperation of Gaza's sick and
hungry is of no moral concern to her. For Livni, like Ramon, the siege
is a tactical measure, a human experiment to stop the rockets and
bring down a duly elected government.
The siege on Gaza and the West Bank began after Hamas's 2006 electoral
victory with an international diplomatic and financial boycott of the
new Hamas-led government. Development assistance was severely reduced
with the improbable aim of bringing about a popular uprising against
the very government just elected to power. Instead, this collective
punishment resulted in a steady deterioration of Palestinian life, in
growing lawlessness, and a violent confrontation between Fatah and
Hamas, which escalated into a Hamas military takeover of Gaza in June
2007.
Since then, the siege has been tightened to an unprecedented level.
Over 80 percent of the population of 1.5 million (compared to 63
percent in 2006) is dependent on international food assistance, which
itself has been dramatically reduced.
In 2007, 87 percent of Gazans lived below the poverty line, more than
a tripling of the percentage in 2000. In a November 2007 report, the
Red Cross stated about the food allowed into Gaza that people are
getting "enough to survive, not enough to live."
Why is this acceptable?
The reduction in fuel supplies that the Israeli government first
approved in October not only threatens the provision of health and
medical services but the stock of medicines, which is rapidly being
depleted. This has forced the critically ill to seek treatment outside
the Gaza Strip.
However, according to Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, many
patients are being denied permission to leave, because of new
bureaucratic restrictions imposed on top of an already inefficient and
arbitrary system. The organization has also accused the Israeli
intelligence service of forcing some patients to inform on others in
order to be granted passage.
Since June, Israel has limited its exports to Gaza to nine basic
materials. Out of 9,000 commodities (including foodstuffs) that were
entering Gaza before the siege began two years ago, only 20
commodities have been permitted entry since. Although Gaza daily
requires 680,000 tons of flour to feed its population, Israel had cut
this to 90 tons per day by November 2007, a reduction of 99 percent.
Not surprisingly, there has been a sharp increase in the prices of
foodstuffs.
Gaza also suffers from the ongoing destruction of its agriculture and
physical infrastructure. Between June and November 2006, $74.7 million
in damage was inflicted by the Israeli military on top of the nearly
$2 billion already incurred by Palestinians between 2002 and 2005.
Over half the damage was to agricultural land flattened by bulldozers,
with the remainder to homes, public buildings, roads, water and sewage
pipes, electricity infrastructure, and phone lines.
The psychological damage of living in a war zone may surpass the
physical. According to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem,
between Sept. 1, 2005, and July 25, 2007, 668 Palestinians were killed
in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli security forces. Over half were
noncombatants and 126 were children. During the same period, Qassam
rockets and mortar shells killed eight Israelis, half of them civilians.
Gaza is no longer approaching economic collapse. It has collapsed.
Given the intensity of repression Gaza is facing, can the collapse of
its society - family, neighborhood, and community structure - be far
behind? If that happens, we shall all suffer the consequences for
generations to come.
Eyad al-Sarraj is founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program.
Sara Roy is senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.
The Tragic Politics of Fleeing by Rami Khouri
The Tragic Politics of Fleeing
by Rami G. Khouri Released: 28 Jan 2008
BEIRUT -- It was not exactly the Red Sea parting to allow a persecuted, enslaved people to flee to safety, but it was pretty close as far as political symbolism goes: Palestinians this week blew holes through the wall on the Egyptian-Palestinian border that Israel built to pen in the Palestinians in Gaza, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians poured over the border into Egypt. They went mainly to purchase the simple everyday needs that had been denied them recently due to Israel's policy of total isolation and strangulation of Gaza and its people.
The scale and symbolism of events in Gaza clarify some simple truths about the Palestinian issue in its wider historical, political, and geographic context -- and perhaps also its moral context, thanks to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's insensitive and obtuse call to "think creatively" about how to deal with the Gaza situation.
It is ironic but not unexpected that 3500 years after the Hebrews fled their dismal life in Egypt and escaped eastwards to freedom across the miraculously stilled Red Sea, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians should be fleeing from the modern day descendants of the Hebrews -- the state of Israel -- who now play the role of the oppressive Pharaoh to the subjugated and dehumanized Palestinians in Gaza. The reversed political geography is politically stunning, and tragic for both sides.
The double irony, however, is that the indigenous Palestinians in both cases pay the heaviest price. In antiquity, the Hebrews who fled Egypt conquered and settled in Palestine, driving out the native Canaanites and others who can be seen as the ancestors of the Palestinians, just as the Hebrews can be seen as the ancestors of the Israelis and Jews today.
More significant are the continuing implications of Israel's repeated attempts to force neighboring Arab states to assume responsibility for policing the Palestinian refugees and subduing the Palestinian nationalist resistance movement that were both spawned by Israel's creation and the parallel exile and occupation of the Palestinians.
Two Arab leaders in particular suffer politically from this crisis -- Egyptian President Husni Mubarak and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Israel and the United States have tried unsuccessfully to use both of them to control Gaza, thwart the rise of Hamas, and protect Israel from Palestinian wrath, just as they used the Jordanian and Lebanese governments to achieve similar goals.
But Mubarak and Abbas cannot play the role of Israel's subcontracted jailer, strangler and starver of the Palestinians in Gaza, and expect to remain credible with their own people or other Arabs. When an Arab leader is caught between acting as an agent and surrogate for Israel and the United States in treating the Palestinians like animals, or showing support for the basic humanitarian needs of Palestinians, they will lean towards helping the Palestinians. They will also try desperately to cling to the material aid and increasingly vacuous political validation they get from the US and Israel. Mubarak and Abbas sway in the wind this week, buffeted by their own untenable confusion about whether their primary role is to implement Arab, Israeli or American priorities.
The equally bewildered American position was reflected in Rice's macabre call to deal "creatively" with the Gaza situation. Why "creatively"? Is this a kindergarten finger painting class? Why not deal with the Gaza situation on the basis of more compelling adult criteria, such as legality, legitimacy, and humanity?
The American call for "creativity" in dealing with Gaza is an ethical weapon of mass destruction. It will only aggravate the widespread disdain, fear and disgust that define much of the world's attitude toward American foreign policy. Rice's call for creativity is a cheap attempt to get around the moral, political and legal consequences of Israel's many decades of brutality in Gaza, and Washington's refusal to deal with the reality of Hamas' election victory last year.
Israel and the United States refuse to do the hard work of making reasonable compromises that all the Arabs, including Hamas, have already suggested: to engage with all the Palestinians and negotiate, first, a long-term truce and, consequently, a permanent peace that is fair to all, that gives Israelis and Palestinians alike a chance to live in peace and dignity.
Rice's quest for "creativity" is a desperate bid to evade law, morality, human decency and constructive political compromise. It is a moral abomination that demeans all Americans in whose name it is spoken.
It is also one reason why the flow of thousands of desperate, dehumanized people across the Sinai -- fleeing subjugation and brutality, and in search of their own humanity -- was reversed this week -- 3500 years after today's Israeli jailers were history's jailed Hebrews. No surprises, here. Just politics and humanity taking their normal course.
The answer is not "creativity". It is mutual respect, abiding by the law, and, above all, human decency.
Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.
Copyright © 2008 Rami G. Khouri
by Rami G. Khouri Released: 28 Jan 2008
BEIRUT -- It was not exactly the Red Sea parting to allow a persecuted, enslaved people to flee to safety, but it was pretty close as far as political symbolism goes: Palestinians this week blew holes through the wall on the Egyptian-Palestinian border that Israel built to pen in the Palestinians in Gaza, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians poured over the border into Egypt. They went mainly to purchase the simple everyday needs that had been denied them recently due to Israel's policy of total isolation and strangulation of Gaza and its people.
The scale and symbolism of events in Gaza clarify some simple truths about the Palestinian issue in its wider historical, political, and geographic context -- and perhaps also its moral context, thanks to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's insensitive and obtuse call to "think creatively" about how to deal with the Gaza situation.
It is ironic but not unexpected that 3500 years after the Hebrews fled their dismal life in Egypt and escaped eastwards to freedom across the miraculously stilled Red Sea, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians should be fleeing from the modern day descendants of the Hebrews -- the state of Israel -- who now play the role of the oppressive Pharaoh to the subjugated and dehumanized Palestinians in Gaza. The reversed political geography is politically stunning, and tragic for both sides.
The double irony, however, is that the indigenous Palestinians in both cases pay the heaviest price. In antiquity, the Hebrews who fled Egypt conquered and settled in Palestine, driving out the native Canaanites and others who can be seen as the ancestors of the Palestinians, just as the Hebrews can be seen as the ancestors of the Israelis and Jews today.
More significant are the continuing implications of Israel's repeated attempts to force neighboring Arab states to assume responsibility for policing the Palestinian refugees and subduing the Palestinian nationalist resistance movement that were both spawned by Israel's creation and the parallel exile and occupation of the Palestinians.
Two Arab leaders in particular suffer politically from this crisis -- Egyptian President Husni Mubarak and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Israel and the United States have tried unsuccessfully to use both of them to control Gaza, thwart the rise of Hamas, and protect Israel from Palestinian wrath, just as they used the Jordanian and Lebanese governments to achieve similar goals.
But Mubarak and Abbas cannot play the role of Israel's subcontracted jailer, strangler and starver of the Palestinians in Gaza, and expect to remain credible with their own people or other Arabs. When an Arab leader is caught between acting as an agent and surrogate for Israel and the United States in treating the Palestinians like animals, or showing support for the basic humanitarian needs of Palestinians, they will lean towards helping the Palestinians. They will also try desperately to cling to the material aid and increasingly vacuous political validation they get from the US and Israel. Mubarak and Abbas sway in the wind this week, buffeted by their own untenable confusion about whether their primary role is to implement Arab, Israeli or American priorities.
The equally bewildered American position was reflected in Rice's macabre call to deal "creatively" with the Gaza situation. Why "creatively"? Is this a kindergarten finger painting class? Why not deal with the Gaza situation on the basis of more compelling adult criteria, such as legality, legitimacy, and humanity?
The American call for "creativity" in dealing with Gaza is an ethical weapon of mass destruction. It will only aggravate the widespread disdain, fear and disgust that define much of the world's attitude toward American foreign policy. Rice's call for creativity is a cheap attempt to get around the moral, political and legal consequences of Israel's many decades of brutality in Gaza, and Washington's refusal to deal with the reality of Hamas' election victory last year.
Israel and the United States refuse to do the hard work of making reasonable compromises that all the Arabs, including Hamas, have already suggested: to engage with all the Palestinians and negotiate, first, a long-term truce and, consequently, a permanent peace that is fair to all, that gives Israelis and Palestinians alike a chance to live in peace and dignity.
Rice's quest for "creativity" is a desperate bid to evade law, morality, human decency and constructive political compromise. It is a moral abomination that demeans all Americans in whose name it is spoken.
It is also one reason why the flow of thousands of desperate, dehumanized people across the Sinai -- fleeing subjugation and brutality, and in search of their own humanity -- was reversed this week -- 3500 years after today's Israeli jailers were history's jailed Hebrews. No surprises, here. Just politics and humanity taking their normal course.
The answer is not "creativity". It is mutual respect, abiding by the law, and, above all, human decency.
Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.
Copyright © 2008 Rami G. Khouri
Sheikhs for Sale: US Cash Diplomacy in Iraq Will Fail in the End by Douglas Macgregor
Readers interested in assessing the effects of the "surge" will find the article below from this week's Defense News instructive. The author, retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor, has extensive experience of military operations in the Gulf.
Sheikhs for Sale
U.S. Cash Diplomacy in Iraq Will Fail in the End
By Douglas Macgregor
Of the many factors contributing to the reduction of U.S. casualties in Iraq, none has been more critical than the decision by the generals in Baghdad to pay more than 80,000 of Iraq's Sunni Arab insurgents a quarter of a billion dollars a year not to shoot at U.S. forces.
It's not the first time that a foreign army in the Middle East has bought off troublesome Arab sheikhs and their cohorts with cash. The British used gold to sedate tribal enemies from the Khyber Pass to the Nile delta while they extracted billions from their colonies. However, it is the first time in American history that buying off the enemy has been presented to the American people as evidence for progress in a war or good generalship.
It's hard to imagine U.S. generals paying the German or Japanese armies not to fight or the Chinese and Vietnamese communists to leave U.S. forces alone. But, then, American military commanders in Baghdad have much more in common with British colonial governors than with the American military leaders of World War II, the Korean War or even the Vietnam War.
Unfortunately, the expedient policy to reduce U.S. casualties in the ru-nup to the '08 presidential election is not only reinforcing the sectarian and ethnic division of Iraq. It's also breathing new life into the tribalism that plagues not only Iraq, but most of the Middle East and Africa.
Anbar's tribal leaders were the first to benefit. With millions of dollars in hand, the sheikhs could reward the loyalty of their armed supporters, determine who would hold office, staff the police, and reassert their control over Anbar's towns and villages with their own arbitrary justice system.
Today, tribal sheikhs across central Iraq are on the payroll. Even Baathist insurgent organizations dependent on tribal support for recruits are enmeshed in the Sunni Arab tribal network.
Moving Backward
But tribal identity is a dangerous step backward on the road to modernity, and cash payments now make crushing tribalism later impossible for whatever regime rules in Baghdad. In Western Europe, it took centuries to eradicate tribalism, whose last great European bastion did not capitulate to the forces of modernization until well into the 18th century.
In 1745, Scotland was a case of arrested development. Central authority was destroyed with the first English invasion in the late 13th century and never re-established. The Highland clans living in mountainous areas, rugged enough to resist Roman occupation, enjoyed complete autonomy.
The clan chiefs governed as kings, speaking their own language (Gaelic), collecting taxes, dispensing justice and sacking their neighbors at will. All the chiefs maintained private militias; some even fielded armies of 5,000 or more. And, for a price, the clan chiefs would fight anyone, selling out the nominal Scottish kings to their English enemies.
In the long run, the payoffs made matters worse because the chiefs viewed payoffs from the English and Scottish kings as evidence of the kings' weakness and their own strength.
When roughly half the clans rose in revolt against the government in London in 1745, the majority of Scots and Englishmen said enough. Paying off the chiefs was no longer an option if a modern state with a legitimate political order, an effective economy and the rule of law were ever to be firmly established in Britain.
After a few months' campaigning, the Highland clan army was cornered and destroyed not by a foreign army, but by a British Army composed of both Scots and Englishmen at Culloden in 1746.
Civil wars are always more unforgiving than others, and the war to forcibly integrate the Scottish Highlands into modern British society was no exception. Thousands of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders were killed and 270,000 men, women and children were deported from the Highlands to British North America, where many, like Gen. Hugh Mercer, ended up fighting London again, this time in George Washington's Continental Army.
In contrast to the British government of 1746, the U.S. government of 2008 has no compelling strategic interest that would justify the sacrifice in U.S. blood and treasure required to eradicate the corrupting influence of tribalism that obstructs Iraq's national political integration.
Come to think of it, no such U.S. strategic interest exists to justify the investment of nearly a trillion U.S. dollars or the loss of thousands of U.S. lives to control Iraq with U.S. military power and create a modern nation-state where none exists.
From the Washington Beltway, Iraq looks more "stable" because American generals are using cash to temporarily manipulate local tribal interests. But when the Sunni Arab tribes coalesce to fight for control of Iraq, the façade of progress will collapse and the violence will be worse than before. The next president, regardless of party affiliation, would be wise to begin troop withdrawals soon.
Douglas Macgregor is a former U.S. Army colonel, a decorated Persian Gulf War combat veteran, and the author, most recently, of "Transformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing the Way America Fights."
Sheikhs for Sale
U.S. Cash Diplomacy in Iraq Will Fail in the End
By Douglas Macgregor
Of the many factors contributing to the reduction of U.S. casualties in Iraq, none has been more critical than the decision by the generals in Baghdad to pay more than 80,000 of Iraq's Sunni Arab insurgents a quarter of a billion dollars a year not to shoot at U.S. forces.
It's not the first time that a foreign army in the Middle East has bought off troublesome Arab sheikhs and their cohorts with cash. The British used gold to sedate tribal enemies from the Khyber Pass to the Nile delta while they extracted billions from their colonies. However, it is the first time in American history that buying off the enemy has been presented to the American people as evidence for progress in a war or good generalship.
It's hard to imagine U.S. generals paying the German or Japanese armies not to fight or the Chinese and Vietnamese communists to leave U.S. forces alone. But, then, American military commanders in Baghdad have much more in common with British colonial governors than with the American military leaders of World War II, the Korean War or even the Vietnam War.
Unfortunately, the expedient policy to reduce U.S. casualties in the ru-nup to the '08 presidential election is not only reinforcing the sectarian and ethnic division of Iraq. It's also breathing new life into the tribalism that plagues not only Iraq, but most of the Middle East and Africa.
Anbar's tribal leaders were the first to benefit. With millions of dollars in hand, the sheikhs could reward the loyalty of their armed supporters, determine who would hold office, staff the police, and reassert their control over Anbar's towns and villages with their own arbitrary justice system.
Today, tribal sheikhs across central Iraq are on the payroll. Even Baathist insurgent organizations dependent on tribal support for recruits are enmeshed in the Sunni Arab tribal network.
Moving Backward
But tribal identity is a dangerous step backward on the road to modernity, and cash payments now make crushing tribalism later impossible for whatever regime rules in Baghdad. In Western Europe, it took centuries to eradicate tribalism, whose last great European bastion did not capitulate to the forces of modernization until well into the 18th century.
In 1745, Scotland was a case of arrested development. Central authority was destroyed with the first English invasion in the late 13th century and never re-established. The Highland clans living in mountainous areas, rugged enough to resist Roman occupation, enjoyed complete autonomy.
The clan chiefs governed as kings, speaking their own language (Gaelic), collecting taxes, dispensing justice and sacking their neighbors at will. All the chiefs maintained private militias; some even fielded armies of 5,000 or more. And, for a price, the clan chiefs would fight anyone, selling out the nominal Scottish kings to their English enemies.
In the long run, the payoffs made matters worse because the chiefs viewed payoffs from the English and Scottish kings as evidence of the kings' weakness and their own strength.
When roughly half the clans rose in revolt against the government in London in 1745, the majority of Scots and Englishmen said enough. Paying off the chiefs was no longer an option if a modern state with a legitimate political order, an effective economy and the rule of law were ever to be firmly established in Britain.
After a few months' campaigning, the Highland clan army was cornered and destroyed not by a foreign army, but by a British Army composed of both Scots and Englishmen at Culloden in 1746.
Civil wars are always more unforgiving than others, and the war to forcibly integrate the Scottish Highlands into modern British society was no exception. Thousands of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders were killed and 270,000 men, women and children were deported from the Highlands to British North America, where many, like Gen. Hugh Mercer, ended up fighting London again, this time in George Washington's Continental Army.
In contrast to the British government of 1746, the U.S. government of 2008 has no compelling strategic interest that would justify the sacrifice in U.S. blood and treasure required to eradicate the corrupting influence of tribalism that obstructs Iraq's national political integration.
Come to think of it, no such U.S. strategic interest exists to justify the investment of nearly a trillion U.S. dollars or the loss of thousands of U.S. lives to control Iraq with U.S. military power and create a modern nation-state where none exists.
From the Washington Beltway, Iraq looks more "stable" because American generals are using cash to temporarily manipulate local tribal interests. But when the Sunni Arab tribes coalesce to fight for control of Iraq, the façade of progress will collapse and the violence will be worse than before. The next president, regardless of party affiliation, would be wise to begin troop withdrawals soon.
Douglas Macgregor is a former U.S. Army colonel, a decorated Persian Gulf War combat veteran, and the author, most recently, of "Transformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing the Way America Fights."
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Waving Good Bye to Hegemony
Today's New York Times magazine contains a thought-provoking forecast of the more complex world that may now be emerging in place of American dominance.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27world-t.html?ref=magazine
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27world-t.html?ref=magazine
Cover Story - State of Disorder by James Kitfield
Readers may be interested in this sober but nonetheless seriously disturbing critique of the Bush legacy. This comes to us thanks to Jim Campbell.
Cover Story - State of Disorder
James Kitfield
© National Journal Group, Inc.
Everything old is new again. In the final year of a two-term presidency, the commander-in-chief travels to the Middle East for a last, legacy-burnishing push to forge a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. He reaches out personally to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il to close an elusive deal on the dismantlement of the Hermit Kingdom's nuclear weapons program.
Archterrorist Osama bin Laden and his Qaeda henchmen continue, meanwhile, to plot attacks against the United States from sanctuaries along the Afghan-Pakistan border. At home, a familiar nemesis from a competing political dynasty is running for president, promising to seize the reins of American foreign policy and dramatically alter the country's post-Cold War course yet again.
The eerie parallels between 2008 and 2000 -- a host of major international problems that have defied solution, the potential for another whipsaw change in American foreign policy, and a deeply divided domestic political landscape -- are striking. But beyond that, many more signs hint that America is entering a new and different period. The country faces threats and challenges today that defy easy characterization or a glib narrative.
Old problems persist, but new crises erupt with frightening regularity: devastating attacks by Islamic terrorists; war and nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq; looming confrontation with Iran; an epidemic of political assassination in Lebanon; violence and threatened implosion in Pakistan; renewed tensions in the Balkans; a wave of leftist populism sweeping Latin America; slow-motion genocide and pandemic in Africa; a rapidly rising China; and an increasingly bellicose Russia. Anti-Americanism everywhere you look.
As his lodestar for navigating that perilous landscape, President Bush rallied the country and U.S. allies to an unprecedented "global war on terror" in his first State of the Union speech after the September 11 attacks. In his 2005 Inaugural Address he called for a generational struggle to spread democracy and end tyranny throughout the world. Neither vision has captured the support of the world, or the nation.
Despite Bush's frequent trumpeting of lofty goals, in fact, poll after poll shows the United States' standing and influence in the world sinking to unprecedented lows, with majorities in 10 of 15 countries polled in April 2007 by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and WorldPublicOpinion.org saying that they do not trust the United States to act responsibly. Even in the closely allied countries of Britain, Canada, and Mexico, a majority of people polled by newspapers in late 2006 viewed Bush as a threat to world peace on par with Iran's Holocaust-denying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and North Korea's enigmatic "Dear Leader," Kim Jong Il.
At home, only one in four Americans expresses a favorable view of Bush's foreign-policy leadership, and the president's overall approval rating remains at less than half his predecessor's standing at this point in his second term. There is a growing sense on both sides of the nation's "red-blue" divide that something has gone terribly wrong, although pundits manning the battlements on the left and right disagree vociferously on why. America's fundamental role in the world is being challenged abroad -- and questioned at home -- to a degree not witnessed since the Vietnam War.
"America's image and influence are in decline," concluded a recent report by the independent and bipartisan Commission on Smart Power, sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and co-chaired by Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of State, and Joseph Nye, former dean of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. As an example, the report notes that foreign leaders have often found that standing shoulder to shoulder with Bush and U.S. policy is the "kiss of death." If you doubt it, look at the lipstick marks on the cheeks of former leaders Jose Maria Aznar of Spain, Tony Blair of Britain, Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, and John Howard of Australia. "America may be less well regarded today than at any time in its history," declared the commission, which included military and foreign-policy experts from both political parties.
With his belated push for a Middle East peace deal and a pact ending North Korea's nuclear program, Bush is clearly trying to polish his legacy. He has begun the mandatory goodwill tour of lame-duck presidents, with six overseas trips already planned for 2008. He is also preparing his final State of the Union address, a last chance to articulate a strategic vision that makes sense of a world in turmoil for a nation in a state of great unease.
A Radioactive In-Box
Few Americans will be more directly affected by the Bush legacy than the presidential candidates now auditioning in earnest for the job of commander-in-chief. Whatever happens in the final year of the Bush presidency, the next White House occupant will confront a sobering list of challenges from the moment his or her shadow darkens the Oval Office door.
First on the agenda will likely be developing a strategy for maintaining U.S. interests in the "arc of instability" that stretches from the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip and crisis-paralyzed Lebanon in the west, all the way east to Pakistan, tottering on the brink of political implosion in the wake of the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. (See sidebar on the Mideast, p. 30.) Major elements of that strategy must include managing counterinsurgency wars and epic nation-building enterprises in Iraq and Afghanistan; containing Iran's regional and global ambitions; contesting Al Qaeda's and the Taliban's newfound sanctuaries in Pakistan's tribal regions; defusing conflict between Turkey and Iraqi Kurds; ending Syrian meddling and apparent assassinations in Lebanon; birthing a Palestinian state; and keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of Iranian mullahs and Pakistani Islamic extremists. And all of that comes before the next president even looks into the eyes of Vladimir Putin -- the likely Russian premier and power behind the Kremlin.
The new president will also find the tools of American power in considerable disrepair. The all-volunteer and overburdened military has developed significant stress fractures, from persistent problems in recruiting qualified personnel to a looming modernization crisis. (See sidebar on the military, p. 32.) The intelligence community, still recovering from the Iraq debacle, remains deeply distrustful of the executive branch it serves, as evidenced by the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program that dramatically repudiated earlier intelligence estimates as well as the White House itself. (See sidebar on intelligence, p. 34.)
The State Department and related foreign-aid agencies have proven themselves woefully inadequate and under-resourced for the nation-building tasks they are increasingly asked to perform. The National Security Council, responsible for coaxing coordinated policies out of the interagency process, has consistently underperformed. A major reorganization of homeland-security agencies is incomplete, and serious questions remain about the faltering U.S. economy's capacity to indefinitely sustain spending levels that in Iraq and Afghanistan alone could top $1 trillion sometime during the next president's first term.
"It's difficult to imagine a more daunting in-box than the Bush administration is now coping with and will pass along to its successor," said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. "Not only are the major issues we confront more numerous and demanding, but the United States is less well positioned to deal with them than it was seven years ago. We're far more stretched militarily and economically, and because we're more unpopular internationally, it's increasingly difficult to find partners around the world. Add in the fact that the 44th president is almost certainly going to face this terrible choice of what to do about an Iran on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons, and it's a pretty worrisome combination."
Fractured Consensus
Presidential election years and, especially, the close of two-term presidencies are natural times for reflection, in the Oval Office and Washington think tanks as well as in kitchens and coffee shops across America. Given the unpopularity of the Iraq war and the tumult of the Bush years, questions about how America will wield its still-unmatched power going forward and how it relates to other countries and international institutions loom very large. For good or ill, much of the world will perceive the election outcome as a mandate for the victor's worldview.
What already seems painfully clear is that the once-sturdy domestic consensus on what America stands for in the world, which was already beginning to fray in the post-Cold War 1990s, has shredded entirely in the post-9/11 millennium. The tatters are evident in the vastly different interpretations of the Bush foreign-policy legacy among Washington's camps of hard-line nationalists, liberal progressives, neoconservative idealists, and traditional realists. Moreover, uneasy voters have begun to question the basic tenets and burdens of global leadership, with poles in both political parties drawn increasingly toward protectionism and isolationism and away from free trade, international engagement, and liberal immigration policies.
A December 2006 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, for instance, found that isolationist sentiment among Americans had risen dramatically, with 42 percent of respondents agreeing that the United States "should mind its own business internationally, and let other countries get along the best they can on their own." Thirty-four percent of Americans supported this view in 2004, and only 30 percent did so in 2002. Between 2002 and 2007, the number of Americans who said they supported global trade dropped from 78 percent to 59 percent, the steepest decline in any of the 47 nations polled in the Pew Global Attitudes survey.
"The spike in the percentage of Americans saying we should mind our own business in world affairs mirrors a similar rise in the mid-1970s after the Vietnam War," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Global Attitudes Project. "That resistance is something the next president, whether Republican or Democrat, will likely struggle with in fashioning a foreign policy."
Charles Kupchan is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University, and the author of The End of the American Era. "I worry that the broad, bipartisan consensus on foreign policy that Franklin Roosevelt put together, which was already beginning to fracture when Bush took office, has now been split asunder and could be gone for good," he said in an interview. "Given that deep divide among the electorate, I really think the next president is going to have a devilish time managing the domestic aspects of foreign policy. The erosion of America's standing abroad is also high on the list of damages done in the Bush years, because that will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reclaim. So the next president, whoever he or she is, will take office under some of the most inauspicious strategic circumstances in American history."
Defending the "Revolution"
Any assessment of Bush's foreign-policy legacy and its impact on the next presidency has to begin with the tumultuous first term, when an administration already inclined toward big, "transformative" ideas decided after 9/11 to make the world unsafe for terrorism, rogue states, and tyranny writ large. In less than two years, those ambitions led to the invasion of two Muslim countries. In the case of Iraq, the United States went in without a U.N. mandate or broad international support. The foundations of the old world order shook, which was just what the Bush team had in mind.
For the hard-liners and neoconservatives within the Bush administration who forged an alliance in those critical months after the attacks, a dramatic reordering of international affairs was a rational response to an extraordinary threat that they believed challenged the American way of life. They made the war on terrorism global and all-encompassing out of a belief that unrivaled and unshackled American military power could defeat both Islamic extremist terrorism and rogue-state sponsors that were pursuing weapons of mass destruction.
That thinking shaped the key elements of the Bush Doctrine: a preference for coercion rather than direct engagement with adversaries (hence, the "axis of evil"); a focus on regime change and reliance on pre-emptive war; and unilateral action masked behind small, ad hoc "coalitions of the willing."
Even today, the neocons and hard-liners are unapologetic. "Our enemies were not engaged in terror as political theater: Their aim was our destruction, and if they acquired weapons of mass destruction the result could be the deaths of many times the number of people killed on 9/11," said Douglas Feith, a prominent neoconservative intellectual and the No. 3 official in the Pentagon at the time of the attacks, speaking recently at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "The leading state supporters of terrorism also had a history of seeking weapons of mass destruction, a point not negated by our failure to find stockpiles in Iraq. So we determined that a series of 9/11-like attacks could change the nature of our society, because our constitutional system, civil liberties, and prosperity are all rooted in the openness of our society."
If the United States had not gone on the offensive against terrorists and rogue states with ties to terrorists, Feith argues, the alternative would have been adopting a stringent defensive posture, even including police-state tactics. "So the stakes in this conflict couldn't have been greater," he said.
Civil libertarians -- pointing to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, warrantless wiretapping, torture memos, and unprecedented assertions of executive power -- cringe at such arguments. But in the worldview of the Bush neocons and hard-liners and their ardent supporters -- some of whom today are top foreign-affairs advisers to Republican presidential candidates -- the problem with the Bush "revolution" was not that it was perceived as overly militaristic and unilateral. The problem was, rather, that the administration executed the revolution poorly and then abandoned its core principles in the second term.
Indeed, few of those who forged the Bush Doctrine, formulated the strategy for the global war on terrorism, and won the president to their cause, survived the harsh blowback from the Iraq war. These days, outside of Vice President Cheney's office, there is little talk within the administration of "regime change," "pre-emptive war," the "shock and awe" of transformative military power, or the mission "defining the coalition."
"I think the Bush foreign policy is in free fall at the moment, because the president has abandoned the principles and gut instincts he began to form in 2001," said John Bolton, the administration's former ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton, who is closely associated with Cheney in the hard-line nationalist camp, recalls that Bush embraced a policy of close alignment with Israel, no bilateral negotiations or rewards for bad behavior for North Korea, and no nuclear weapons for Iran. Recently, Bolton said, the administration has done a policy U-turn on each of those critical issues.
"All three legacies are heading in the wrong direction," he said, "because [Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice is now advocating the same policies that the State Department bureaucracy has been promoting for the past seven years, and she is effectively the only voice in Bush's ear on these issues now. I'm also afraid this focus on legacy is leading to bad policy, because legacy is what you accomplish during your entire term, not what you can rush in the waning months in office."
Bolton cites what he sees as a prime example of Bush's betrayal of the revolution. As recently as a year ago, Bolton says, the president genuinely seemed intent on ordering a pre-emptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear infrastructure. "President Bush said it was unacceptable for that country to acquire nuclear weapons, and because he is a man of his word, I thought that meant 'unacceptable.' I'm not sure what 'unacceptable' means today. I still have a candle lit in my home to the prospect that Bush will eventually say all these issues are headed in the wrong direction, because I still think his instincts are in the right direction."
Competing Narratives
For many foreign-policy experts with less aggressive ideas about the use of U.S. military force and coercion, the Bush Doctrine was premised on a fundamental misjudgment about the true nature of American power. The Bush acolytes may have believed that their good intentions and U.S. military might would make right in world affairs, but, the critics say, the administration failed to see how the perception of a superpower run amok would diminish the greater source of American power: the principles, ideals, and good deeds that other nations and peoples freely acknowledge and embrace, and that long shaped the world's judgments of American intentions and leaders.
"The Bush administration tried to transpose a 19th-century belief that military power is the most important form of interaction in international affairs onto a 20th-century world, where the forces of globalization have made military power less dominant, and the result is that practically everything they touched they made worse," said Ivo Daalder, a former Clinton administration official who is now a senior foreign-affairs fellow at the Brookings Institution. "Now it appears that even Bush himself has started to realize his mistake, and is engaging in the Middle East peace process and with North Korea in an effort to essentially return those situations to where Bush found them in 2001. It's going to be difficult, however, to recapture what was lost in the last seven years."
Perhaps not surprisingly for an administration that at times has seemed almost bipolar in its foreign-policy strategies and philosophies -- and in which competing camps of neoconservatives, uncompromising nationalists, and such traditional Republican realists as former Secretary of State Colin Powell have constantly been at war -- some of the harshest criticisms come from former top Bush officials.
"When I think about the Bush legacy, the two words that come to mind first are 'squander' and 'overreach,' " said Haass, who was the No. 3 official in the State Department under Powell in the first Bush term. " 'Squander,' because I predict the common judgment will be that he inherited a country in a moment of rare advantage, and he squandered those possibilities by overreaching and trying to do too much. He tried to remake the world, to recast societies, and to do it acting alone and using primarily military force. And closely linked with those first two words that come to mind is a third -- 'Iraq,' " Haass continued. "More than any other single decision by this administration, Iraq illustrates the costs of the Bush foreign policy, both in terms of spent treasure and other potential achievements it made impossible."
That theme of overreaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks also runs deep in the conclusions from the bipartisan Smart Power Commission. Its report criticizes the Bush administration for, in particular, adopting methods and tactics that the United States had traditionally stood against when used by other governments: secret prisons; covert "renditions" of suspects to countries with poor human-rights records; unlimited detention of prisoners without judicial review; warrantless and unsupervised electronic surveillance of American citizens; and "enhanced interrogations" that looked to all the world, and even to some who conducted them, like torture.
"The good news is, President Bush shows signs that he has learned some of those lessons after stumbling badly, and that his worldview has evolved somewhat, but the country is going to pay a very high price for his initial on-the-job learning," Harvard's Nye said in an interview. "When Abu Ghraib replaces the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of what the world thinks America stands for, I think it's fair to say that we, as a country, lost our way after 9/11."
The Truman Clause
In the view of current top Bush administration officials (see excerpts from NJ's interview with John Negroponte, p. 28), today's focus on the president's legacy and the Iraq war captures only a snapshot of his time in office and risks missing the broader and brighter picture that will emerge in time. For an administration mired in an unpopular war and with historically low approval ratings, that's not a surprising take on things, but it comports with Bush's frequent contention that the fight against Islamic-extremist terrorism and its root causes will be a generations-long struggle.
A senior Bush official who asked not to be named said, "We are only in the opening rounds in this war against terror, which includes a Sunni version in the form of Al Qaeda and its networks that seek to find safe haven in weak countries, and a Shiite version with Iran as its state sponsor." In this construct, those early rounds have been about taking the fight to terrorists, and disrupting their capacity to attack the United States at home or to acquire weapons of mass destruction abroad.
The fight thus far has been violent and sometimes brutish. The fact that the United States has not been attacked again in the six-plus years since 9/11, this official argues, also suggests that the U.S. has won some of the early rounds.
While conceding setbacks and difficulties in their campaign to establish democracy in places with no democratic traditions, administration officials still argue that few alternatives exist for addressing the root causes of terrorism. The nation should take heart, they say, that Saddam Hussein is gone from Iraq, the Taliban no longer controls Afghanistan, and Syria is out of Lebanon.
"Has it been messy and is the world a volatile place today?" the senior official asked. "Sure, there is a lot of chaos out there. But democracy is a fairly messy business. It takes a long time to form, and elections open the door to some uncomfortable results. So the cake is not cooked yet. Part of it is still in the bowl being mixed. Part of it is in the oven. None of it is done yet. But I would argue that we will be leaving our successor some promising developments."
Call it the Truman Clause. On their bad days -- and there have been many -- Bush administration officials like to recall that during the Korean War, President Truman was excoriated in the press and pummeled by some of the worst public-approval ratings of any sitting chief executive in history. But long after Truman boarded the Ferdinand Magellan at Union Station for the long train ride home to Missouri, he would be remembered most as the president who implemented the international policies and constructed the national security architecture that eventually brought the United States victory in the Cold War. Legacy reformed.
"I actually think there's a pretty good probability that Bush will share the same fate as Truman," said Edward Luttwak, a longtime strategist and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Similar to Truman, in 50 years' time people are likely to only vaguely remember that Bush was president during an unpopular war. Instead, they'll remember him for establishing the architecture not of containment, but of disassociation of Al Qaeda and other jihadist terrorists from their support among Arab elites and states. In a half-century, I think he'll be given credit for marginalizing the enemy."
Hoover Could Work, Too
Of course, there is also the Hoover precedent to consider. From the evidence available, it seems just as likely that historians will one day place Bush alongside President Hoover as someone who responded to a crisis with instincts and a set of policies that made the original problem far worse. In Hoover's case, the government reacted to the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent recession with a tightening of monetary policy by the Federal Reserve Board, despite massive bank foreclosures; by Hoover's signing of the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that further strangled global trade; and by a hands-off approach to massive unemployment. The legacy: the Great Depression.
Many experts detect a similar serious misjudgment in Bush's post-9/11 decision to launch an all-encompassing "global war" on Islamic terrorism at a time when the United States needed to divide rather than unite its enemies. These critics question the administration's embrace of unilateralism and pre-emptive war at a moment when the nation could have benefited from collective action, and from the counsel and firm support of allies.
"For seven years we have seen a constant struggle within the Bush administration between ideologues and pragmatists, and for the first five or six years the ideologues who viewed military force as the prime instrument of change in the world prevailed," said Joseph Cirincione, senior vice president for national security at the Center for American Progress. "They argued that the military option would be quick, cheap, and easy. Instead as we've seen in Iraq, it's been a costly disaster. That put the final nail in the coffin. The Bush Doctrine is dead."
Even some of those who supported elements of the Bush Doctrine doubt that its core will survive the backlash against the Iraq war. That, too, is part of the Bush legacy. In too much of the world, America's promotion of democracy is now linked with violence and instability, and pre-emptive strikes against terrorists are equated with the unilateral invasion of nation-states.
"I fear that the biggest foreign-policy legacy of the Bush administration will be that it de-legitimized its own strategy, whether you're talking about the democratization agenda or the idea of preventive war and regime change as a response to terrorists and states that sponsor them" said Kori Shake, a professor of international security studies at West Point who served on the National Security Council in Bush's first term. "While I happen to think there is merit to those ideas in a world where terrorists cannot be deterred and can inflict truly strategic damage, I couldn't even convince my mother of that view after Iraq. And if I can't persuade her, I doubt the next president will be able to persuade a skeptical American public. Like so much else the Bush administration embraced in theory, those ideas were de-legitimized in practice."
* With six overseas trips already planned for 2008, a lame-duck Bush tries to clean up the puddle before the new president takes office.
* The old talk of "regime change," "pre-emptive war," the "shock and awe" of transformative military power is gone.
* As U.S. popularity hits new lows around the world, signs are surfacing that Americans, too, want to pull back from international engagements.
42% of Americans say that the U.S. "should mind its own
business internationally."
Cover Story - State of Disorder
James Kitfield
© National Journal Group, Inc.
Everything old is new again. In the final year of a two-term presidency, the commander-in-chief travels to the Middle East for a last, legacy-burnishing push to forge a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. He reaches out personally to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il to close an elusive deal on the dismantlement of the Hermit Kingdom's nuclear weapons program.
Archterrorist Osama bin Laden and his Qaeda henchmen continue, meanwhile, to plot attacks against the United States from sanctuaries along the Afghan-Pakistan border. At home, a familiar nemesis from a competing political dynasty is running for president, promising to seize the reins of American foreign policy and dramatically alter the country's post-Cold War course yet again.
The eerie parallels between 2008 and 2000 -- a host of major international problems that have defied solution, the potential for another whipsaw change in American foreign policy, and a deeply divided domestic political landscape -- are striking. But beyond that, many more signs hint that America is entering a new and different period. The country faces threats and challenges today that defy easy characterization or a glib narrative.
Old problems persist, but new crises erupt with frightening regularity: devastating attacks by Islamic terrorists; war and nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq; looming confrontation with Iran; an epidemic of political assassination in Lebanon; violence and threatened implosion in Pakistan; renewed tensions in the Balkans; a wave of leftist populism sweeping Latin America; slow-motion genocide and pandemic in Africa; a rapidly rising China; and an increasingly bellicose Russia. Anti-Americanism everywhere you look.
As his lodestar for navigating that perilous landscape, President Bush rallied the country and U.S. allies to an unprecedented "global war on terror" in his first State of the Union speech after the September 11 attacks. In his 2005 Inaugural Address he called for a generational struggle to spread democracy and end tyranny throughout the world. Neither vision has captured the support of the world, or the nation.
Despite Bush's frequent trumpeting of lofty goals, in fact, poll after poll shows the United States' standing and influence in the world sinking to unprecedented lows, with majorities in 10 of 15 countries polled in April 2007 by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and WorldPublicOpinion.org saying that they do not trust the United States to act responsibly. Even in the closely allied countries of Britain, Canada, and Mexico, a majority of people polled by newspapers in late 2006 viewed Bush as a threat to world peace on par with Iran's Holocaust-denying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and North Korea's enigmatic "Dear Leader," Kim Jong Il.
At home, only one in four Americans expresses a favorable view of Bush's foreign-policy leadership, and the president's overall approval rating remains at less than half his predecessor's standing at this point in his second term. There is a growing sense on both sides of the nation's "red-blue" divide that something has gone terribly wrong, although pundits manning the battlements on the left and right disagree vociferously on why. America's fundamental role in the world is being challenged abroad -- and questioned at home -- to a degree not witnessed since the Vietnam War.
"America's image and influence are in decline," concluded a recent report by the independent and bipartisan Commission on Smart Power, sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and co-chaired by Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of State, and Joseph Nye, former dean of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. As an example, the report notes that foreign leaders have often found that standing shoulder to shoulder with Bush and U.S. policy is the "kiss of death." If you doubt it, look at the lipstick marks on the cheeks of former leaders Jose Maria Aznar of Spain, Tony Blair of Britain, Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, and John Howard of Australia. "America may be less well regarded today than at any time in its history," declared the commission, which included military and foreign-policy experts from both political parties.
With his belated push for a Middle East peace deal and a pact ending North Korea's nuclear program, Bush is clearly trying to polish his legacy. He has begun the mandatory goodwill tour of lame-duck presidents, with six overseas trips already planned for 2008. He is also preparing his final State of the Union address, a last chance to articulate a strategic vision that makes sense of a world in turmoil for a nation in a state of great unease.
A Radioactive In-Box
Few Americans will be more directly affected by the Bush legacy than the presidential candidates now auditioning in earnest for the job of commander-in-chief. Whatever happens in the final year of the Bush presidency, the next White House occupant will confront a sobering list of challenges from the moment his or her shadow darkens the Oval Office door.
First on the agenda will likely be developing a strategy for maintaining U.S. interests in the "arc of instability" that stretches from the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip and crisis-paralyzed Lebanon in the west, all the way east to Pakistan, tottering on the brink of political implosion in the wake of the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. (See sidebar on the Mideast, p. 30.) Major elements of that strategy must include managing counterinsurgency wars and epic nation-building enterprises in Iraq and Afghanistan; containing Iran's regional and global ambitions; contesting Al Qaeda's and the Taliban's newfound sanctuaries in Pakistan's tribal regions; defusing conflict between Turkey and Iraqi Kurds; ending Syrian meddling and apparent assassinations in Lebanon; birthing a Palestinian state; and keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of Iranian mullahs and Pakistani Islamic extremists. And all of that comes before the next president even looks into the eyes of Vladimir Putin -- the likely Russian premier and power behind the Kremlin.
The new president will also find the tools of American power in considerable disrepair. The all-volunteer and overburdened military has developed significant stress fractures, from persistent problems in recruiting qualified personnel to a looming modernization crisis. (See sidebar on the military, p. 32.) The intelligence community, still recovering from the Iraq debacle, remains deeply distrustful of the executive branch it serves, as evidenced by the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program that dramatically repudiated earlier intelligence estimates as well as the White House itself. (See sidebar on intelligence, p. 34.)
The State Department and related foreign-aid agencies have proven themselves woefully inadequate and under-resourced for the nation-building tasks they are increasingly asked to perform. The National Security Council, responsible for coaxing coordinated policies out of the interagency process, has consistently underperformed. A major reorganization of homeland-security agencies is incomplete, and serious questions remain about the faltering U.S. economy's capacity to indefinitely sustain spending levels that in Iraq and Afghanistan alone could top $1 trillion sometime during the next president's first term.
"It's difficult to imagine a more daunting in-box than the Bush administration is now coping with and will pass along to its successor," said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. "Not only are the major issues we confront more numerous and demanding, but the United States is less well positioned to deal with them than it was seven years ago. We're far more stretched militarily and economically, and because we're more unpopular internationally, it's increasingly difficult to find partners around the world. Add in the fact that the 44th president is almost certainly going to face this terrible choice of what to do about an Iran on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons, and it's a pretty worrisome combination."
Fractured Consensus
Presidential election years and, especially, the close of two-term presidencies are natural times for reflection, in the Oval Office and Washington think tanks as well as in kitchens and coffee shops across America. Given the unpopularity of the Iraq war and the tumult of the Bush years, questions about how America will wield its still-unmatched power going forward and how it relates to other countries and international institutions loom very large. For good or ill, much of the world will perceive the election outcome as a mandate for the victor's worldview.
What already seems painfully clear is that the once-sturdy domestic consensus on what America stands for in the world, which was already beginning to fray in the post-Cold War 1990s, has shredded entirely in the post-9/11 millennium. The tatters are evident in the vastly different interpretations of the Bush foreign-policy legacy among Washington's camps of hard-line nationalists, liberal progressives, neoconservative idealists, and traditional realists. Moreover, uneasy voters have begun to question the basic tenets and burdens of global leadership, with poles in both political parties drawn increasingly toward protectionism and isolationism and away from free trade, international engagement, and liberal immigration policies.
A December 2006 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, for instance, found that isolationist sentiment among Americans had risen dramatically, with 42 percent of respondents agreeing that the United States "should mind its own business internationally, and let other countries get along the best they can on their own." Thirty-four percent of Americans supported this view in 2004, and only 30 percent did so in 2002. Between 2002 and 2007, the number of Americans who said they supported global trade dropped from 78 percent to 59 percent, the steepest decline in any of the 47 nations polled in the Pew Global Attitudes survey.
"The spike in the percentage of Americans saying we should mind our own business in world affairs mirrors a similar rise in the mid-1970s after the Vietnam War," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Global Attitudes Project. "That resistance is something the next president, whether Republican or Democrat, will likely struggle with in fashioning a foreign policy."
Charles Kupchan is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University, and the author of The End of the American Era. "I worry that the broad, bipartisan consensus on foreign policy that Franklin Roosevelt put together, which was already beginning to fracture when Bush took office, has now been split asunder and could be gone for good," he said in an interview. "Given that deep divide among the electorate, I really think the next president is going to have a devilish time managing the domestic aspects of foreign policy. The erosion of America's standing abroad is also high on the list of damages done in the Bush years, because that will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reclaim. So the next president, whoever he or she is, will take office under some of the most inauspicious strategic circumstances in American history."
Defending the "Revolution"
Any assessment of Bush's foreign-policy legacy and its impact on the next presidency has to begin with the tumultuous first term, when an administration already inclined toward big, "transformative" ideas decided after 9/11 to make the world unsafe for terrorism, rogue states, and tyranny writ large. In less than two years, those ambitions led to the invasion of two Muslim countries. In the case of Iraq, the United States went in without a U.N. mandate or broad international support. The foundations of the old world order shook, which was just what the Bush team had in mind.
For the hard-liners and neoconservatives within the Bush administration who forged an alliance in those critical months after the attacks, a dramatic reordering of international affairs was a rational response to an extraordinary threat that they believed challenged the American way of life. They made the war on terrorism global and all-encompassing out of a belief that unrivaled and unshackled American military power could defeat both Islamic extremist terrorism and rogue-state sponsors that were pursuing weapons of mass destruction.
That thinking shaped the key elements of the Bush Doctrine: a preference for coercion rather than direct engagement with adversaries (hence, the "axis of evil"); a focus on regime change and reliance on pre-emptive war; and unilateral action masked behind small, ad hoc "coalitions of the willing."
Even today, the neocons and hard-liners are unapologetic. "Our enemies were not engaged in terror as political theater: Their aim was our destruction, and if they acquired weapons of mass destruction the result could be the deaths of many times the number of people killed on 9/11," said Douglas Feith, a prominent neoconservative intellectual and the No. 3 official in the Pentagon at the time of the attacks, speaking recently at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "The leading state supporters of terrorism also had a history of seeking weapons of mass destruction, a point not negated by our failure to find stockpiles in Iraq. So we determined that a series of 9/11-like attacks could change the nature of our society, because our constitutional system, civil liberties, and prosperity are all rooted in the openness of our society."
If the United States had not gone on the offensive against terrorists and rogue states with ties to terrorists, Feith argues, the alternative would have been adopting a stringent defensive posture, even including police-state tactics. "So the stakes in this conflict couldn't have been greater," he said.
Civil libertarians -- pointing to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, warrantless wiretapping, torture memos, and unprecedented assertions of executive power -- cringe at such arguments. But in the worldview of the Bush neocons and hard-liners and their ardent supporters -- some of whom today are top foreign-affairs advisers to Republican presidential candidates -- the problem with the Bush "revolution" was not that it was perceived as overly militaristic and unilateral. The problem was, rather, that the administration executed the revolution poorly and then abandoned its core principles in the second term.
Indeed, few of those who forged the Bush Doctrine, formulated the strategy for the global war on terrorism, and won the president to their cause, survived the harsh blowback from the Iraq war. These days, outside of Vice President Cheney's office, there is little talk within the administration of "regime change," "pre-emptive war," the "shock and awe" of transformative military power, or the mission "defining the coalition."
"I think the Bush foreign policy is in free fall at the moment, because the president has abandoned the principles and gut instincts he began to form in 2001," said John Bolton, the administration's former ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton, who is closely associated with Cheney in the hard-line nationalist camp, recalls that Bush embraced a policy of close alignment with Israel, no bilateral negotiations or rewards for bad behavior for North Korea, and no nuclear weapons for Iran. Recently, Bolton said, the administration has done a policy U-turn on each of those critical issues.
"All three legacies are heading in the wrong direction," he said, "because [Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice is now advocating the same policies that the State Department bureaucracy has been promoting for the past seven years, and she is effectively the only voice in Bush's ear on these issues now. I'm also afraid this focus on legacy is leading to bad policy, because legacy is what you accomplish during your entire term, not what you can rush in the waning months in office."
Bolton cites what he sees as a prime example of Bush's betrayal of the revolution. As recently as a year ago, Bolton says, the president genuinely seemed intent on ordering a pre-emptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear infrastructure. "President Bush said it was unacceptable for that country to acquire nuclear weapons, and because he is a man of his word, I thought that meant 'unacceptable.' I'm not sure what 'unacceptable' means today. I still have a candle lit in my home to the prospect that Bush will eventually say all these issues are headed in the wrong direction, because I still think his instincts are in the right direction."
Competing Narratives
For many foreign-policy experts with less aggressive ideas about the use of U.S. military force and coercion, the Bush Doctrine was premised on a fundamental misjudgment about the true nature of American power. The Bush acolytes may have believed that their good intentions and U.S. military might would make right in world affairs, but, the critics say, the administration failed to see how the perception of a superpower run amok would diminish the greater source of American power: the principles, ideals, and good deeds that other nations and peoples freely acknowledge and embrace, and that long shaped the world's judgments of American intentions and leaders.
"The Bush administration tried to transpose a 19th-century belief that military power is the most important form of interaction in international affairs onto a 20th-century world, where the forces of globalization have made military power less dominant, and the result is that practically everything they touched they made worse," said Ivo Daalder, a former Clinton administration official who is now a senior foreign-affairs fellow at the Brookings Institution. "Now it appears that even Bush himself has started to realize his mistake, and is engaging in the Middle East peace process and with North Korea in an effort to essentially return those situations to where Bush found them in 2001. It's going to be difficult, however, to recapture what was lost in the last seven years."
Perhaps not surprisingly for an administration that at times has seemed almost bipolar in its foreign-policy strategies and philosophies -- and in which competing camps of neoconservatives, uncompromising nationalists, and such traditional Republican realists as former Secretary of State Colin Powell have constantly been at war -- some of the harshest criticisms come from former top Bush officials.
"When I think about the Bush legacy, the two words that come to mind first are 'squander' and 'overreach,' " said Haass, who was the No. 3 official in the State Department under Powell in the first Bush term. " 'Squander,' because I predict the common judgment will be that he inherited a country in a moment of rare advantage, and he squandered those possibilities by overreaching and trying to do too much. He tried to remake the world, to recast societies, and to do it acting alone and using primarily military force. And closely linked with those first two words that come to mind is a third -- 'Iraq,' " Haass continued. "More than any other single decision by this administration, Iraq illustrates the costs of the Bush foreign policy, both in terms of spent treasure and other potential achievements it made impossible."
That theme of overreaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks also runs deep in the conclusions from the bipartisan Smart Power Commission. Its report criticizes the Bush administration for, in particular, adopting methods and tactics that the United States had traditionally stood against when used by other governments: secret prisons; covert "renditions" of suspects to countries with poor human-rights records; unlimited detention of prisoners without judicial review; warrantless and unsupervised electronic surveillance of American citizens; and "enhanced interrogations" that looked to all the world, and even to some who conducted them, like torture.
"The good news is, President Bush shows signs that he has learned some of those lessons after stumbling badly, and that his worldview has evolved somewhat, but the country is going to pay a very high price for his initial on-the-job learning," Harvard's Nye said in an interview. "When Abu Ghraib replaces the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of what the world thinks America stands for, I think it's fair to say that we, as a country, lost our way after 9/11."
The Truman Clause
In the view of current top Bush administration officials (see excerpts from NJ's interview with John Negroponte, p. 28), today's focus on the president's legacy and the Iraq war captures only a snapshot of his time in office and risks missing the broader and brighter picture that will emerge in time. For an administration mired in an unpopular war and with historically low approval ratings, that's not a surprising take on things, but it comports with Bush's frequent contention that the fight against Islamic-extremist terrorism and its root causes will be a generations-long struggle.
A senior Bush official who asked not to be named said, "We are only in the opening rounds in this war against terror, which includes a Sunni version in the form of Al Qaeda and its networks that seek to find safe haven in weak countries, and a Shiite version with Iran as its state sponsor." In this construct, those early rounds have been about taking the fight to terrorists, and disrupting their capacity to attack the United States at home or to acquire weapons of mass destruction abroad.
The fight thus far has been violent and sometimes brutish. The fact that the United States has not been attacked again in the six-plus years since 9/11, this official argues, also suggests that the U.S. has won some of the early rounds.
While conceding setbacks and difficulties in their campaign to establish democracy in places with no democratic traditions, administration officials still argue that few alternatives exist for addressing the root causes of terrorism. The nation should take heart, they say, that Saddam Hussein is gone from Iraq, the Taliban no longer controls Afghanistan, and Syria is out of Lebanon.
"Has it been messy and is the world a volatile place today?" the senior official asked. "Sure, there is a lot of chaos out there. But democracy is a fairly messy business. It takes a long time to form, and elections open the door to some uncomfortable results. So the cake is not cooked yet. Part of it is still in the bowl being mixed. Part of it is in the oven. None of it is done yet. But I would argue that we will be leaving our successor some promising developments."
Call it the Truman Clause. On their bad days -- and there have been many -- Bush administration officials like to recall that during the Korean War, President Truman was excoriated in the press and pummeled by some of the worst public-approval ratings of any sitting chief executive in history. But long after Truman boarded the Ferdinand Magellan at Union Station for the long train ride home to Missouri, he would be remembered most as the president who implemented the international policies and constructed the national security architecture that eventually brought the United States victory in the Cold War. Legacy reformed.
"I actually think there's a pretty good probability that Bush will share the same fate as Truman," said Edward Luttwak, a longtime strategist and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Similar to Truman, in 50 years' time people are likely to only vaguely remember that Bush was president during an unpopular war. Instead, they'll remember him for establishing the architecture not of containment, but of disassociation of Al Qaeda and other jihadist terrorists from their support among Arab elites and states. In a half-century, I think he'll be given credit for marginalizing the enemy."
Hoover Could Work, Too
Of course, there is also the Hoover precedent to consider. From the evidence available, it seems just as likely that historians will one day place Bush alongside President Hoover as someone who responded to a crisis with instincts and a set of policies that made the original problem far worse. In Hoover's case, the government reacted to the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent recession with a tightening of monetary policy by the Federal Reserve Board, despite massive bank foreclosures; by Hoover's signing of the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that further strangled global trade; and by a hands-off approach to massive unemployment. The legacy: the Great Depression.
Many experts detect a similar serious misjudgment in Bush's post-9/11 decision to launch an all-encompassing "global war" on Islamic terrorism at a time when the United States needed to divide rather than unite its enemies. These critics question the administration's embrace of unilateralism and pre-emptive war at a moment when the nation could have benefited from collective action, and from the counsel and firm support of allies.
"For seven years we have seen a constant struggle within the Bush administration between ideologues and pragmatists, and for the first five or six years the ideologues who viewed military force as the prime instrument of change in the world prevailed," said Joseph Cirincione, senior vice president for national security at the Center for American Progress. "They argued that the military option would be quick, cheap, and easy. Instead as we've seen in Iraq, it's been a costly disaster. That put the final nail in the coffin. The Bush Doctrine is dead."
Even some of those who supported elements of the Bush Doctrine doubt that its core will survive the backlash against the Iraq war. That, too, is part of the Bush legacy. In too much of the world, America's promotion of democracy is now linked with violence and instability, and pre-emptive strikes against terrorists are equated with the unilateral invasion of nation-states.
"I fear that the biggest foreign-policy legacy of the Bush administration will be that it de-legitimized its own strategy, whether you're talking about the democratization agenda or the idea of preventive war and regime change as a response to terrorists and states that sponsor them" said Kori Shake, a professor of international security studies at West Point who served on the National Security Council in Bush's first term. "While I happen to think there is merit to those ideas in a world where terrorists cannot be deterred and can inflict truly strategic damage, I couldn't even convince my mother of that view after Iraq. And if I can't persuade her, I doubt the next president will be able to persuade a skeptical American public. Like so much else the Bush administration embraced in theory, those ideas were de-legitimized in practice."
* With six overseas trips already planned for 2008, a lame-duck Bush tries to clean up the puddle before the new president takes office.
* The old talk of "regime change," "pre-emptive war," the "shock and awe" of transformative military power is gone.
* As U.S. popularity hits new lows around the world, signs are surfacing that Americans, too, want to pull back from international engagements.
42% of Americans say that the U.S. "should mind its own
business internationally."
Saturday, January 26, 2008
All About Hamas
Those concerned to understand Hamas, its history, and its point of view on the struggle in the Holy Land may find the article at this link a succinctly written antidote to the stereotypes usually applied to the movement:
http://www.ameu.org/uploads/vol41_issue1_2008.pdf
http://www.ameu.org/uploads/vol41_issue1_2008.pdf
Why Bush Wants to Legalize the Nuke Trade with Turkey by Joshua Frank
Why Bush Wants to Legalize the Nuke Trade with Turkey
Exonerating Neocon Criminals
by Joshua Frank / January 25th, 2008
According to FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds there is a vast black market for nukes, and certain U.S. officials have been supplying sensitive nuclear technology information to Turkish and Israeli interests through its conduits. It’s a scathing allegation which was first published by the London Times two weeks ago, and Edmonds’ charge seems to be on the verge of vindication.
In likely reaction to the London Times report, the Bush Administration quietly announced on January 22 that the president would like Congress to approve the sale of nuclear secrets to Turkey. As with most stories of this magnitude, the U.S. media has put on blinders, opting to not report either Edmonds’ story or Bush’s recent announcement.
The White House Press Release claims that President Clinton signed off on the Turkey deal way back in 2000:
However, immediately after signature, U.S. agencies received information that called into question the conclusions that had been drawn in the required NPAS (Nuclear Proliferation Assessment Statement) and the original classified annex, specifically, information implicating Turkish private entities in certain activities directly relating to nuclear proliferation. Consequently, the Agreement was not submitted to the Congress and the executive branch undertook a review of the NPAS evaluation … My Administration has completed the NPAS review as well as an evaluation of actions taken by the Turkish government to address the proliferation activities of certain Turkish entities (once officials of the U.S. Government brought them to the Turkish government’s attention).
What “private entities” the Press Release refers to is not clear, but it could well include the American Turkish Council, the “entity” revealed in the Times article. The Bushites seem to be covering their own exposed backsides, for the timing of Bush’s call to sell nuke secrets to Turkey is certainly suspicious, if not overtly conspicuous.
It appears the White House has been spooked by Edmonds and hopes to absolve the U.S. officials allegedly involved in the illegal sale of nuclear technology to private Turkish “entities”. One of those officials is likely Marc Grossman, the former ambassador to Turkey during the Clinton Administration who also served in the State Department from 2001-2005. Grossman has been named by Edmonds who claims he was directly involved in the nuclear smuggling ring that she says has allowed the intelligence agencies of Pakistan, Israel and Turkey to operate in the U.S. with impunity. Totally complicit in the nuke trade, the U.S. government, according to Edmonds, has known of the expansive criminal activities of these foreign nations’ presence in the States, which has included all sorts of illegal activities like drug trafficking, espionage and money laundering.
Edmonds says “several arms of the government were shielding what was going on” which included an entire national security apparatus associated with the neoconservaties who have profited by representing Turkish interests in Washington. As Justin Raimondo recently reported in Antiwar.com:
…this group includes not only Grossman, but also Paul Wolfowitz, chief intellectual architect of the Iraq war and ex-World Bank president; former deputy defense secretary for policy Douglas J. Feith; Feith’s successor, Eric Edelman; and Richard Perle, the notorious uber-neocon whose unique ability to mix profiteering and warmongering forced him to resign his official capacity as a key administration adviser … Edmonds draws a picture of a three-sided alliance consisting of Turkish, Pakistani, and Israeli agents who coordinated efforts to milk U.S. nuclear secrets and technology, funneling the intelligence stream to the black market nuclear network set up by the Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. The multi-millionaire Pakistani nuclear scientist then turned around and sold his nuclear assets to North Korea, Libya, and Iran.
Is the Bush Administration seeking to exonerate these “officials” with its plea to allow Turkey to obtain U.S. nuclear secrets? Besides Grossman, who else was involved in Edmonds’ grim tale of the nuke-for-profit underground? As the news that U.S. officials have allegedly been supplying Turkey with nuclear technology begins to creep in to the mainstream media, the Bush team appears to be moving to legalize the whole shady operation.
If Congress does not block or amend Bush’s legislation to sell nukes to Turkey within 90 days, it will become law automatically, likely acting retroactively to clear the alleged crimes of Marc Grossman and his neocon, nuke-trading friends.
Joshua Frank is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the forthcoming Red State Rebels, to be published by AK Press in March 2008
Exonerating Neocon Criminals
by Joshua Frank / January 25th, 2008
According to FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds there is a vast black market for nukes, and certain U.S. officials have been supplying sensitive nuclear technology information to Turkish and Israeli interests through its conduits. It’s a scathing allegation which was first published by the London Times two weeks ago, and Edmonds’ charge seems to be on the verge of vindication.
In likely reaction to the London Times report, the Bush Administration quietly announced on January 22 that the president would like Congress to approve the sale of nuclear secrets to Turkey. As with most stories of this magnitude, the U.S. media has put on blinders, opting to not report either Edmonds’ story or Bush’s recent announcement.
The White House Press Release claims that President Clinton signed off on the Turkey deal way back in 2000:
However, immediately after signature, U.S. agencies received information that called into question the conclusions that had been drawn in the required NPAS (Nuclear Proliferation Assessment Statement) and the original classified annex, specifically, information implicating Turkish private entities in certain activities directly relating to nuclear proliferation. Consequently, the Agreement was not submitted to the Congress and the executive branch undertook a review of the NPAS evaluation … My Administration has completed the NPAS review as well as an evaluation of actions taken by the Turkish government to address the proliferation activities of certain Turkish entities (once officials of the U.S. Government brought them to the Turkish government’s attention).
What “private entities” the Press Release refers to is not clear, but it could well include the American Turkish Council, the “entity” revealed in the Times article. The Bushites seem to be covering their own exposed backsides, for the timing of Bush’s call to sell nuke secrets to Turkey is certainly suspicious, if not overtly conspicuous.
It appears the White House has been spooked by Edmonds and hopes to absolve the U.S. officials allegedly involved in the illegal sale of nuclear technology to private Turkish “entities”. One of those officials is likely Marc Grossman, the former ambassador to Turkey during the Clinton Administration who also served in the State Department from 2001-2005. Grossman has been named by Edmonds who claims he was directly involved in the nuclear smuggling ring that she says has allowed the intelligence agencies of Pakistan, Israel and Turkey to operate in the U.S. with impunity. Totally complicit in the nuke trade, the U.S. government, according to Edmonds, has known of the expansive criminal activities of these foreign nations’ presence in the States, which has included all sorts of illegal activities like drug trafficking, espionage and money laundering.
Edmonds says “several arms of the government were shielding what was going on” which included an entire national security apparatus associated with the neoconservaties who have profited by representing Turkish interests in Washington. As Justin Raimondo recently reported in Antiwar.com:
…this group includes not only Grossman, but also Paul Wolfowitz, chief intellectual architect of the Iraq war and ex-World Bank president; former deputy defense secretary for policy Douglas J. Feith; Feith’s successor, Eric Edelman; and Richard Perle, the notorious uber-neocon whose unique ability to mix profiteering and warmongering forced him to resign his official capacity as a key administration adviser … Edmonds draws a picture of a three-sided alliance consisting of Turkish, Pakistani, and Israeli agents who coordinated efforts to milk U.S. nuclear secrets and technology, funneling the intelligence stream to the black market nuclear network set up by the Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. The multi-millionaire Pakistani nuclear scientist then turned around and sold his nuclear assets to North Korea, Libya, and Iran.
Is the Bush Administration seeking to exonerate these “officials” with its plea to allow Turkey to obtain U.S. nuclear secrets? Besides Grossman, who else was involved in Edmonds’ grim tale of the nuke-for-profit underground? As the news that U.S. officials have allegedly been supplying Turkey with nuclear technology begins to creep in to the mainstream media, the Bush team appears to be moving to legalize the whole shady operation.
If Congress does not block or amend Bush’s legislation to sell nukes to Turkey within 90 days, it will become law automatically, likely acting retroactively to clear the alleged crimes of Marc Grossman and his neocon, nuke-trading friends.
Joshua Frank is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the forthcoming Red State Rebels, to be published by AK Press in March 2008
Friday, January 25, 2008
Using Air Power Kills Insurgents, But Can Also Create New Ones
Straus Military Reform Project adviser Charles Pena addresses this almost universally ignored question in a commentary in the January 23 edition of Philadelphia's "The Bulletin." This commentary is below and can also be found at The Bulletin's website at http://www.thebulletin.us/site/news.cfm?newsid=19224493&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=623508&rfi=6
01/23/2008
Using Air Power Kills Insurgents, But Can Also Create New Ones
By: Charles V. Pena , For The Bulletin
Operation Iraqi Freedom has rung in the new year with a bang - literally. On Jan. 10, U.S. warplanes dropped 40,000 pounds of bombs on the southern outskirts of Baghdad, one of the largest air strikes of the Iraq war. This attack reflects the increased use of air power as a component of Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy (Gen. Petraeus is the commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq and the primary author of FM 3-24, the Army's counterinsurgency manual). In 2007, the U.S. conducted more than 1,100 air strikes, a more than fivefold increase over the previous year.
The U.S. military's fascination with bombing is rooted in our competitive advantage in advanced technology.
The 1991 Gulf War saw the first widespread use of precision-guided munitions to destroy high-value targets (often deeply buried and hardened). Now ubiquitous in everyone's cars, the global positioning system was mated to dumb bombs to make them "smart" in Afghanistan, resulting in the venerable B-52 bomber (which has been in service in the U.S. Air Force since 1955) flying close air support missions at tens of thousands of feet altitude (usually directed by soldiers on the ground or the pre-set target coordinates). In Iraq, as guidance technology makes bombs more accurate, they are getting smaller - instead of 1,000-pound or 2,000-pound bombs, 500-pound (or even smaller) bombs can be used to destroy targets with less likelihood of collateral damage. According to Air Force Brig. Gen. Stephen Mueller, director of the Combined Air Operations Center in Iraq, the benefit of being able to use smaller bombs is that they can "take one building and not the whole block."
But the FM 3-24 counterinsurgency manual recognizes that "bombing, even with the most precise weapons, can cause unintended civilian casualties." Consequently, "an air strike can cause collateral damage that turns people against the host-nation government and provides insurgents with a major propaganda victory." In other words, bombing is a proverbial Catch-22. Insurgents or terrorists may be killed, but no matter how much care is taken to avoid non-combatant casualties, innocent civilians may also be killed.
According to Wing Commander Andrew Brookes of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, "Even a 400-pound bomb has a wide area of blast and you are quite likely to kill some civilians. Kill a wife, children, mother or uncle and people become so angry the terrorist cycle starts all over again."
Such phenomenon was evident in Iraq very early on. In November 2003, after U.S. F-16 fighter jets dropped several 500-pound bombs in Fallujah, one resident remarked, "We used to have hopes of the Americans after they removed Saddam. We had liked them until this weekend. Why did they drop bombs near us and hurt and terrify my children like this?"
Albert Einstein once said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Yet this may be the case of increasing the use of air power in Iraq.
Even if civilians are not killed (the military claims that 35 al-Qaida militants were killed in the attack that dropped 40,000 pounds of bombs and that there were no civilian casualties), bombing results in destruction and devastation (the attack destroyed 25 homes and 13 vehicles). And the reality is that a bombed-out house is a bombed-out house - while the returning occupants may be happy to have al-Qaida out of the neighborhood, they may not be too happy about their house. The wake of such wreckage runs contrary to FM 3-24 and another important tenant of counterinsurgency: "Successful counterinsurgents support or develop local institutions with legitimacy and the ability to provide basic services, economic opportunity, public order, and security." So while bombing may be one solution to achieving security, it may also create setbacks to providing basic services and economic opportunity - and ultimately counterproductive to counterinsurgency.
Charles V. Pena is an adviser on the Straus Military Reform Project, senior fellow at the Independent Institute, and author of Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism (Potomac Books).
©The Evening Bulletin 2008
Winslow T. Wheeler
Director
Straus Military Reform Project
Center for Defense Information
301 791-2397
winslowwheeler@msn.com
01/23/2008
Using Air Power Kills Insurgents, But Can Also Create New Ones
By: Charles V. Pena , For The Bulletin
Operation Iraqi Freedom has rung in the new year with a bang - literally. On Jan. 10, U.S. warplanes dropped 40,000 pounds of bombs on the southern outskirts of Baghdad, one of the largest air strikes of the Iraq war. This attack reflects the increased use of air power as a component of Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy (Gen. Petraeus is the commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq and the primary author of FM 3-24, the Army's counterinsurgency manual). In 2007, the U.S. conducted more than 1,100 air strikes, a more than fivefold increase over the previous year.
The U.S. military's fascination with bombing is rooted in our competitive advantage in advanced technology.
The 1991 Gulf War saw the first widespread use of precision-guided munitions to destroy high-value targets (often deeply buried and hardened). Now ubiquitous in everyone's cars, the global positioning system was mated to dumb bombs to make them "smart" in Afghanistan, resulting in the venerable B-52 bomber (which has been in service in the U.S. Air Force since 1955) flying close air support missions at tens of thousands of feet altitude (usually directed by soldiers on the ground or the pre-set target coordinates). In Iraq, as guidance technology makes bombs more accurate, they are getting smaller - instead of 1,000-pound or 2,000-pound bombs, 500-pound (or even smaller) bombs can be used to destroy targets with less likelihood of collateral damage. According to Air Force Brig. Gen. Stephen Mueller, director of the Combined Air Operations Center in Iraq, the benefit of being able to use smaller bombs is that they can "take one building and not the whole block."
But the FM 3-24 counterinsurgency manual recognizes that "bombing, even with the most precise weapons, can cause unintended civilian casualties." Consequently, "an air strike can cause collateral damage that turns people against the host-nation government and provides insurgents with a major propaganda victory." In other words, bombing is a proverbial Catch-22. Insurgents or terrorists may be killed, but no matter how much care is taken to avoid non-combatant casualties, innocent civilians may also be killed.
According to Wing Commander Andrew Brookes of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, "Even a 400-pound bomb has a wide area of blast and you are quite likely to kill some civilians. Kill a wife, children, mother or uncle and people become so angry the terrorist cycle starts all over again."
Such phenomenon was evident in Iraq very early on. In November 2003, after U.S. F-16 fighter jets dropped several 500-pound bombs in Fallujah, one resident remarked, "We used to have hopes of the Americans after they removed Saddam. We had liked them until this weekend. Why did they drop bombs near us and hurt and terrify my children like this?"
Albert Einstein once said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Yet this may be the case of increasing the use of air power in Iraq.
Even if civilians are not killed (the military claims that 35 al-Qaida militants were killed in the attack that dropped 40,000 pounds of bombs and that there were no civilian casualties), bombing results in destruction and devastation (the attack destroyed 25 homes and 13 vehicles). And the reality is that a bombed-out house is a bombed-out house - while the returning occupants may be happy to have al-Qaida out of the neighborhood, they may not be too happy about their house. The wake of such wreckage runs contrary to FM 3-24 and another important tenant of counterinsurgency: "Successful counterinsurgents support or develop local institutions with legitimacy and the ability to provide basic services, economic opportunity, public order, and security." So while bombing may be one solution to achieving security, it may also create setbacks to providing basic services and economic opportunity - and ultimately counterproductive to counterinsurgency.
Charles V. Pena is an adviser on the Straus Military Reform Project, senior fellow at the Independent Institute, and author of Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism (Potomac Books).
©The Evening Bulletin 2008
Winslow T. Wheeler
Director
Straus Military Reform Project
Center for Defense Information
301 791-2397
winslowwheeler@msn.com
America - A Bankrupt Empire: Financial instability rooted in economic 'blowback' from our disastrous foreign policy
America – A Bankrupt Empire
Financial instability rooted in economic 'blowback' from our disastrous foreign policy
by Justin Raimondo
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12259
As the stock market gyrates, and Federal Reserve Board meets by videoconference to inject emergency funds into the system, Chalmers Johnson's warning that the US empire is not sustainable – that "this is the way empires end" – resonates rather ominously.
Johnson, whose most recent book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, the third volume in his "Blowback" trilogy, argues that military expenditures are a drain on the productive capacity of the economy, and that the mistaken idea of what he calls "military Keynesianism" will eventually be our economic undoing. The US economy, he avers, has become increasingly dominated by what President Dwight Eisenhower dubbed the "military-industrial complex." Rampant militarism has diverted vital resources away from productive use and lines of research, and given other countries – Japan and the EU – the technological edge. This trend has also hollowed out our economic base, caused a debilitating decay in the physical infrastructure, and led to a growing debt – that is an economic time-bomb that seems to be exploding … now.
How many Americans realize the US military budget is greater than that of the rest of the world combined? This doesn't include our "off-budget" expenditures in the Iraqi and Afghan theaters, which surpass the combined military budgets of Russia and China. For the first time, the bill for the "defense" of the United States – a task left to the Department of Homeland Security [.pdf], not the Defense Department – exceeds $1 trillion. And that's just what's public: the secret "black budget" costs are unknown, and on this score Johnson advises us to heed economist Robert Higgs, who advises us to take any official Pentagon figures and simply double them.
Empires are expensive, and the American version has a peculiarly altruistic twist to it, in that, as Garet Garrett remarked, "everything goes out, and nothing comes in." We've financed it all with deficit spending, and rather than impose direct taxation – always a risky proposition – the powers that be have simply set the printing presses of the Federal Reserve on overdrive, creating a huge bubble that's about to pop. As Johnson points out, the whole system is financed by massive borrowing:
"On November 7, 2007, the U.S. Treasury announced that the national debt had breached $9 trillion for the first time ever. This was just five weeks after Congress raised the so-called debt ceiling to $9.815 trillion. If you begin in 1789, at the moment the Constitution became the supreme law of the land, the debt accumulated by the federal government did not top $1 trillion until 1981. When George Bush became president in January 2001, it stood at approximately $5.7 trillion. Since then, it has increased by 45%. This huge debt can be largely explained by our defense expenditures in comparison with the rest of the world."
Just as the worldwide Islamist insurgency sparked by Al Qaeda is blowback visited on us by the exigencies of the cold war era, so what we are experiencing, today, is economic blowback from our reigning ideology of military Keynesianism, which has built an economy embedded with a fatal flaw.
In the wake of World War II, the fear of another great depression was rife, and this was a motivating factor in the growth of the "defense" sector – neatly rationalized, as Johnson points out, by the Pentagon's NSC-68, a document outlining US strategic doctrine authored by Paul Nitze, which proclaimed the cold war dogma of "guns and butter":
"One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living."
Except it wasn't, and isn't, so.
Public works, in the form of ever-higher military spending, created an ever-expanding war-industry that sucked vital resources into avenues that led to a cul de sac, i.e. that had no productive use, such as nuclear bombs. Our mighty nuclear arsenal, which continues to expand even after the Soviet meltdown, represents trillions of dollars in frozen resources which go nowhere – that is, which produce no goods, and yield no continuing economic benefits. This has led to the fatal distortion of the American economy, and the massive misallocation of scarce resources: it is the root cause of the collapse of the US manufacturing sector. As Johnson puts it:
"Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable configuration. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses. Devotion to military Keynesianism is, in fact, a form of slow economic suicide."
Not only has America fallen behind by failing to modernize its capital assets and losing its technological edge, it has also corrupted its own currency. By exponentially expanding credit, the Federal Reserve is weighing down future generations with an unprecedented albatross of debt. The sheer weight is crushing the vitality out of the American economy, as military development crowds other investments out of the market. The dollar is no longer the currency of choice: the Euro has taken its place. All that has to happen, as Johnson points out in the video above, is for the Saudis and other oil-producers to demand Euros instead of dollars, and we're sunk.
What is likely to stop the rise of the American empire dead in its tracks isn't a sudden upsurge in the antiwar movement, the election of a rational President, and/or a sudden radical reversal by the policymaking elite after more than half a century of folly – it's bankruptcy that will do it, long before any of these possibilities have a chance to take shape.
Not that this is anything to anticipate with glee: it means social and political disruption on a scale we have scarcely experienced before in this country, perhaps even a revolution. It surely means the end of our republican form of government, and the institution of something less free, less secure, less faithful to the teachings and traditions of the Founders. It almost certainly means the end of constitutional government in America, and the beginning of our long, slow decline – or, perhaps, a more dramatic, meteoric descent than anyone now imagines.
Financial instability rooted in economic 'blowback' from our disastrous foreign policy
by Justin Raimondo
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12259
As the stock market gyrates, and Federal Reserve Board meets by videoconference to inject emergency funds into the system, Chalmers Johnson's warning that the US empire is not sustainable – that "this is the way empires end" – resonates rather ominously.
Johnson, whose most recent book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, the third volume in his "Blowback" trilogy, argues that military expenditures are a drain on the productive capacity of the economy, and that the mistaken idea of what he calls "military Keynesianism" will eventually be our economic undoing. The US economy, he avers, has become increasingly dominated by what President Dwight Eisenhower dubbed the "military-industrial complex." Rampant militarism has diverted vital resources away from productive use and lines of research, and given other countries – Japan and the EU – the technological edge. This trend has also hollowed out our economic base, caused a debilitating decay in the physical infrastructure, and led to a growing debt – that is an economic time-bomb that seems to be exploding … now.
How many Americans realize the US military budget is greater than that of the rest of the world combined? This doesn't include our "off-budget" expenditures in the Iraqi and Afghan theaters, which surpass the combined military budgets of Russia and China. For the first time, the bill for the "defense" of the United States – a task left to the Department of Homeland Security [.pdf], not the Defense Department – exceeds $1 trillion. And that's just what's public: the secret "black budget" costs are unknown, and on this score Johnson advises us to heed economist Robert Higgs, who advises us to take any official Pentagon figures and simply double them.
Empires are expensive, and the American version has a peculiarly altruistic twist to it, in that, as Garet Garrett remarked, "everything goes out, and nothing comes in." We've financed it all with deficit spending, and rather than impose direct taxation – always a risky proposition – the powers that be have simply set the printing presses of the Federal Reserve on overdrive, creating a huge bubble that's about to pop. As Johnson points out, the whole system is financed by massive borrowing:
"On November 7, 2007, the U.S. Treasury announced that the national debt had breached $9 trillion for the first time ever. This was just five weeks after Congress raised the so-called debt ceiling to $9.815 trillion. If you begin in 1789, at the moment the Constitution became the supreme law of the land, the debt accumulated by the federal government did not top $1 trillion until 1981. When George Bush became president in January 2001, it stood at approximately $5.7 trillion. Since then, it has increased by 45%. This huge debt can be largely explained by our defense expenditures in comparison with the rest of the world."
Just as the worldwide Islamist insurgency sparked by Al Qaeda is blowback visited on us by the exigencies of the cold war era, so what we are experiencing, today, is economic blowback from our reigning ideology of military Keynesianism, which has built an economy embedded with a fatal flaw.
In the wake of World War II, the fear of another great depression was rife, and this was a motivating factor in the growth of the "defense" sector – neatly rationalized, as Johnson points out, by the Pentagon's NSC-68, a document outlining US strategic doctrine authored by Paul Nitze, which proclaimed the cold war dogma of "guns and butter":
"One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living."
Except it wasn't, and isn't, so.
Public works, in the form of ever-higher military spending, created an ever-expanding war-industry that sucked vital resources into avenues that led to a cul de sac, i.e. that had no productive use, such as nuclear bombs. Our mighty nuclear arsenal, which continues to expand even after the Soviet meltdown, represents trillions of dollars in frozen resources which go nowhere – that is, which produce no goods, and yield no continuing economic benefits. This has led to the fatal distortion of the American economy, and the massive misallocation of scarce resources: it is the root cause of the collapse of the US manufacturing sector. As Johnson puts it:
"Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable configuration. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses. Devotion to military Keynesianism is, in fact, a form of slow economic suicide."
Not only has America fallen behind by failing to modernize its capital assets and losing its technological edge, it has also corrupted its own currency. By exponentially expanding credit, the Federal Reserve is weighing down future generations with an unprecedented albatross of debt. The sheer weight is crushing the vitality out of the American economy, as military development crowds other investments out of the market. The dollar is no longer the currency of choice: the Euro has taken its place. All that has to happen, as Johnson points out in the video above, is for the Saudis and other oil-producers to demand Euros instead of dollars, and we're sunk.
What is likely to stop the rise of the American empire dead in its tracks isn't a sudden upsurge in the antiwar movement, the election of a rational President, and/or a sudden radical reversal by the policymaking elite after more than half a century of folly – it's bankruptcy that will do it, long before any of these possibilities have a chance to take shape.
Not that this is anything to anticipate with glee: it means social and political disruption on a scale we have scarcely experienced before in this country, perhaps even a revolution. It surely means the end of our republican form of government, and the institution of something less free, less secure, less faithful to the teachings and traditions of the Founders. It almost certainly means the end of constitutional government in America, and the beginning of our long, slow decline – or, perhaps, a more dramatic, meteoric descent than anyone now imagines.
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