Changing the subject in the middle of someone else's conversation to what YOU would rather have people talk about is called "hijacking the thread," and is considered rude.
First, that's a nice piece of question-begging, attributing the bombings to "the Syrian opposition," broadly. It's always super-awesome when a purported leftist starts lumping together widely divergent people into the same "they're all terrorists" category because they're Muslim.
Second, you do know that the United States has put one faction of the Syrian opposition on the State Department's list of international terrorist organizations, making it a federal felony to provide them with material or financial support, right? Most people you talk to would describe such an action as the opposite of an endorsement.
Wind turbines look cool. They don't blight the land; they decorate it. They give it character.
Off-shore wind energy projects are the next great era in maritime history, and the turbines are like monuments to that history. Complaining about off-short wind turbines blighting the landscape is like complaining about masts and sails ruining your view of the ocean.
Gadhaffi had been sending weapons to sub-Saharan Africa for decades. Charles Taylor's rebels fought with Libyan-supplied weapons. So did Foday Sankoh's.
Considering that "deal" to be just fine, but the proliferation of Libyan weapons not through the Gadhaffi state apparatus is not?
Some of those editorials are shockingly dishonest.
Obama is forging history and insulting the Palestinian people by stating during his visit to Israel that he stood alongside the Jews on their historic land, their Israeli homeland for thousands of years, and that they had plowed the land and established the state of Israel in a renaissance.
Yeah, no, that never happened.
When Obama said that Israel must recognize that settlements are the obstacle on the way to peace, this means he is giving the ‘Israeli’ Government the green light to continue settlement-building
Read that again. That doesn't even make sense.
This isn't even about different editorial lines or viewpoints. These writers are flat-out making stuff up.
Tell us, you subtle proponents, of “this time will be different:” did “air power” WIN anything in Iraq or Afghanistan?
The air support given to the Northern Alliance allowed it to rout the Taliban, capture the capital, and take over the country. I wouldn't characterize that as "air power" WINning that war, though, but as air power allowing a ground force to WIN.
I do love the way your sneering attitude is supposed to make us understand that there is no difference between a 1940s area bombing campaign and the a series of drone strikes against al Qaeda commanders. I imagine it's much easier than actually arguing the case.
The irritating thing, Bill, is that there good, realistic, insightful arguments to be made on the side of your positions - that the industrial bombing didn't do much to contribute to the allied victory, or that the apparent success of MAD was just a matter of luck, and it was only good fortune that the world didn't blow up during the Missiles of October or Operation Able Archer.
Yep, solid arguments there are...just not in this column.
It's true that the US and UK were not coordinating with the KLA on the ground. Nonetheless, the air campaign targeted those ground forces' opposition, drove them back, and allowed the KLA to advance.
Bill, you're leaving the KLA out of your analysis of Kosovo, in much the same way that some critics leave the Free Libya Forces out of their analysis of the Libyan Revolution. There were ground forces, and as always when air power is successful against a military fighting force, the air power served to support the ground forces and put them in a position where the opposing force was in trouble.
Using Tom Dispatch as a resource on questions of military operations is like using Jane's Defense Quarterly as a resource on questions of anthropology.
The pieces you run from them are always the same: a thesis about a topic that requires a solid knowledge base to draw a reliable conclusion, followed by a wikipedia-level overview of history, followed by some editorial commentary denouncing the military operation on political grounds.
I come away from this piece with a sense that the author doesn't even understand the difference between a strategic bombing campaign intended to suppress a country's industrial base, and a tactical strike intended remove specific targets from the fight, and wouldn't care very much if he did.
Which is fine, if you want to write an editorial piece about the politics of drone strikes, but apparently that's not good enough, and "Tom Dispatch" consistently adopts a wonkish pretense of addressing fact-based policy matters that it then proceeds to ignore, or fumble.
Really, there are better sources for drone-critical military analyses out there.
Some Congressional Republicans have insisted that such cases are better prosecuted in military commissions like the one at Guantanamo. Senator Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said of Harun: “the administration has once again decided to forgo an extensive intelligence interrogation and instead bring an enemy combatant immediately into the federal court system.”
This is ridiculous. The military justice system exists to keep order in the ranks. These sprawling international conspiracies are simply not what they do for a living. Meanwhile, the civilian law enforcement system has handled cases like that - terrorism cases like the first WTC bombing, drug-cartel cases with people in numerous countries, espionage cases involving covert operators and foreign intelligence systems - effectively year after year.
Whatever motivates people like Saxby Chambliss when they insist on military detention, investigations, and trials, it's not a desire to investigate, gain information, and prosecute in the most effective manner.
It is the nature of the fanatics who dominate both sides of the issue to refuse to acknowledge anything positive from the United States that comes up short of 100% agreement with the most hard-line position, and even then, to lash out with full-bore condemnation about the improper pronunciation of Shibboleth.
Predictably, Obama's words in Israel were an important subject, sufficient to condemn him, right up until you saw him saying good things, at which point they immediately became insignificant, and only a fool would find them meaningful.
I managed to find the text of Obama's well-attended, published speech in Jerusalem, to an Israeli audience. You don't think the Prime Minister of Israel could?
Had President Obama made it clear in Jerusalem that the Palestinians had a right to freedom in a state of their own, he would have accomplished something.
From Obama's speech in the Jerusalem Convention Center:
But the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized. Put yourself in their shoes – look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. It is not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It is not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; to restrict a student’s ability to move around the West Bank; or to displace Palestinian families from their home. Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.
It's always good when a President accomplishes something.
But the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized. Put yourself in their shoes – look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. It is not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It is not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; to restrict a student’s ability to move around the West Bank; or to displace Palestinian families from their home. Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.
For this reason alone the US and Iran should be friends and should be on the same side.
I believe that Iran is America's most natural ally in southwest Asia, and that within a few decades an American-Indian-Iranian alliance will be as important in world affairs as NATO was in the late 20th.
Manned spaceflight is a pointless waste of money, and exists mainly to make the sort of people who use terms like "namby-pamby" feel like big tough guys.
The problem isn't that Emmerson considered the public statements from the Pakistani foreign service. The problem is that that evidence is all he considered, when there is very obviously more going on.
If someone investigating the legality of drone strikes issued a statement about their legality based entirely on the public statements of the United States Department of State, would you be asking why people have a problem with his methods?
Is this guy the most naive investigator on the face of the earth, or is he just a hack?
Lessee, we have Pakistan continuing to host drone bases years after they first proclaimed themselves to be shocked, shocked to discover that the US was carrying out drone strikes, so what's the best way to get to the bottom of this mystery?
I know, let's the Pakistani government to make an official statement on the record. Case closed!
The Iraqi National Congress was born and the U.S. dealt with a number of sharp operator exiles who talked a big game but delivered little – despite hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
I still can't believe anyone was ever fooled by Ahmed Chalabi.
He was just such an obvious con man. Of course, the CIA caught on pretty quickly and cut off contact, but the fanatics in the PNAC and, later, the Rumsfeld Pentagon were just sure that they knew better.
Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed
A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed,
Then one day he was shootin at some food,
And up through the ground came a bubblin crude.
Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea.
Well the first thing you know ol Jed's a millionaire,
Kinfolk said "Jed move away from there"
Said "Californy is the place you ought to be"
So they loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly.
Hills, that is. Swimmin pools, movie stars.
Well now its time to say good by to Jed and all his kin.
And they would like to thank you folks fer kindly droppin in.
You're all invited back a gain to this locality
To have a heapin helpin of their hospitality
Hillybilly that is. Set a spell, Take your shoes off.
You still haven’t said where you are going to store all that nuclear waste for the next tens of thousands of years.
You store it on-site and recycle it, like the French do. Technology advances all the time; you understand this when it comes to solar voltaic efficiency, so why forget it when it comes to spent nuclear fuel handling?
You might not remember this but in the old days (1215-2002) such behavior was frowned upon and instead we insisted on a quaint mechanism called a “trial” to weigh the evidence and determine whether or not the claim had merit.
Between 1215 and 2002, people who were fighting for the other side in a war were given trials before being shot at?
Are you sure about that? Or is it "weak and servile" of me to ask?
Has this left open the possibility that an American who is deemed to be an enemy combatant (possibly because of an alleged “association”), is “engaged in combat” when on American soil?
I really don't see how it does. "Engaged in combat" is not a category or identity; it refers to current, ongoing action. An enemy combatant who is not, at that moment, fighting is not "engaged in combat."
An enemy combatant is something you are; engaged in combat is something you are doing.
Holder's follow-up, that the government cannot do so against someone who is "not engaged in combat," addresses the gap you bring up.
Also, Awlaki was not killed merely for speech. According to Abdulmuttallab, the would-be Christmas Day bomber, he was an operational commander.
The son was not targeted at all, and was killed in a strike aimed at an al Qaeda figure named Ibrahim al-Bana. He went to the wrong place at the wrong time.
These senators who were engaged in the filibuster correctly see a dangerous precedent in allowing targeted killings of individuals with vague evidentiary criteria and procedures devoid of due process.
Actually, Mark, these senators who were engaged in the filibuster have explicitly endorses the use of drone strikes overseas.
You are projecting your own beliefs onto them. You might as well write that the Tea Party people carrying "Keep the Government's Hands Off My Medicare" are raising an important point, because you're against cuts to Medicare benefits.
Nobody assumes that anyone has a "perfect" knowledge of anything, but that's not the biggest problem with your argument.
The biggest problem is that no one was actually looking for Atta and his party before 9/11, while the majority of the resources of the CIA and FBI have been committed for years to looking for al Qaeda. That's why we know a great deal more about al Qaeda operatives in Yemen in 2013 than we knew about al Qaeda operatives in Hamburg in 2001.
Conspiracy to commit murder is already a crime. Belonging to al Qaeda - the enemy against whom Congress declared war - is also a crime. If there is solid evidence that a man sitting at a cafe is engaged in such a conspiracy, he can be arrested.
Also, we aren't shooting at people in Yemen just for thinking about things, but for being commanders of an enemy force.
Nobody as asserted that any male of military age is a legitimate target in Afghanistan. What you are referring to is a description of the bomb damage assessments done after strikes, in which the government tries to figure out who it killed.
The extreme secrecy with which the war against al Qaeda has been fought has served to give the conspiracy theorists cover for their rantings, and undermine the democratic legitimacy of a perfectly appropriate, legal, necessary policy. Now we have cranks like Paul and Cruz tying their black helicopter theories in with the drones (and, unfortunately, some lefties gullibly going along with them).
The drone strikes should migrate over to the Pentagon, where they can be subject to the same level of Congressional oversight as ordinary military operations.
Syrian rebels have seized a convoy of U.N. peacekeepers near the Golan Heights and say they will hold them captive until President Bashar al-Assad's forces pull back from a rebel-held village which has seen heavy recent fighting.
They think Bashar al-Assad cares about UN Peacekeepers?
What a bone-headed move. Now Assad gets to play Mr. U.N.
The U.S. isn't "openly allied with them in this effort." The Gulf dictatorships and the US are competing, not cooperating, by backing different factions within the rebellion.
Why is it when the US facilitates arming the Syrian rebels that’s not helping them to “kill their own people”? Because the Assad dictatorship isn't "the people," and because the FSA factions the US is backing are not targeting the general populace (unlike the Assad government, which seems to be the only player in the drama you didn't think to criticize, despite being the worst human-rights violator by a mile, and the reason the peaceful protests turned into a civil war).
Everything, every action, is a compromise, JfrLowell.
It's amazing how the most doctrinaire, purist "idealists" are willing to toss everything they've ever claimed to believe in aside when it's "their guy" doing it.
Also, I love the way "everything is a compromise" doesn't apply to the U.S. We're just the Death Star, the inexplicable, Iago-like evildoer.
That’s was their rhetoric, however in reality they were just competing for resources.
I think you vastly underestimate the degree to which both ideology and military/security concerns drive foreign policy thinking. It's really not all about resources.
Cheney didn’t say America was weak and surrounded. He said that it was a superpower, that it was special, that it should not have to ask when it was born to demand.
I'm talking about the Cold War. Dick Cheney had a career in politics before 1991. He was a Nixon administration staffer and a Congressman from Wyoming. During that period, Cold Warriors like Cheney certainly did cite the threat to the United States from an expansionist global superpower as justifying some shady alliances.
It is, however, absurd to expect Chavez to have fought according to the Marquis of Queensberry rules when his opposition was apparently prepared to do worse than hit him below the belt with brass knuckles.
the enemy of my enemy
These are the two classic excuses of dictators and human-rights violators across the world. They define the foreign policy worldview of the Nixon/Dulles/Kissinger set, and such reasoning should be roundly denounced by anyone who purports to care about humanitarian values, political liberalism, or human rights. Even when it's "your guy."
It is not entirely clear to me why Assad smashing his opposition and committing a gigantic massacre worse than the one his father carried out - the faster end to the war that would have obtained in the absence of international support for the rebels - is supposed to be a more desirable outcome for someone who adheres to liberal and humanitarian values.
The jihadist presence has grown steadily over time; they were not a significant part of the fighters initially, and grew into one. If aid had ended the war quickly, there would be fewer of them.
Also, there would be Salafist elements in Syria even if we were backing the FSA, but they would not be the best-armed, most capable force in Syria, and the non-Salafist elements would have much less interest in cooperating.
The absence of American intervention and arms for the rebellion was supposed to prevent the rise of al Qaeda-linked extremists in Syria.
As it turns out, the decision not to arm them has brought about that very outcome. It allowed Salafist-friendly governments to step in to the void, and it allowed the war to go on long enough for the Salafists to grow and consolidate their power.
Dictators and oppressors spend millions of dollars and shed barrels of blood to stop their opponents from voting, and these people are proposing to volunteer to do so for them?
Why is Honsi New-Barak supposed to care if left-labor voters don't show up to the polls?
Because there are left-wing varieties of Christianity-influenced politics as well. Were Martin Luther King's politics less influenced by religion than Pat Robertson's? Were the Catholic Workers less Catholic in their political thinking than Opus Dei?
Atta is a good example of why "fundamentalism" is an unhelpful term.
What he was "fighting" for was not a religious vision, but a political vision in which religious authority was strongly established.
There were plenty of cursing, philandering crusaders that fought in the Holy Land. What they were fighting for wasn't Christianity, really, but Christendom.
The other problem with using "fundamentalism" as a term for a political movement is that it conflates a theological stance with a political one. It is entirely possible for someone who believes in throwback religion to be political quietist, or even moderate when it comes to public policy. Meanwhile, one can find one's way to religious-right politics from a mainstream, contemporary religious orientation that doesn't not call for a return to old-style religious practice.
That is the tragedy of the post WW!! era and the Cold War strategy. Instead of taking up the banner of national revolution and democracy in former colonies, the US handed them over to Soviet support, throwing away the good will it garnered among great and poor nations alike after WW11
So true. There was no good reason why the revolutionaries in El Salvador, for instance, couldn't have been American allies.
Why we blew this opportunity is an interesting question. I blame commercial relationships between American elites and the oligarchs.
This is really starting to look embarrassing for Massachusetts. Maybe the collapse of the fisheries will get us off our butts when it comes to developing our next great maritime industry.
Why don't you ever criticize, say, the drone war, or the war in Afghanistan? And just once, I'd like to see you tell us how you feel about the Iran sanctions.
...and since the Iranian oil is still being sold internationally, the claim that its restriction can generate major consequences for the global market is quite implausible.
This story is an example of working much to hard to fit the evidence around the case you want to make.
At the same time, the West is really using the excuse of Iran’s nuclear weapons to impose tougher and tougher sanctions on Iran, in order to bring about a regime change or at least to force it to give in to Western demands on other issues.
"The West" is a big place, but for the past several years, it has been the Iranians who have insisted upon linking nuclear talks to other issues, while the United States has insisted that talks be narrowly focused on the nuclear issue.
The drift of Latin America away from the American sphere of influence is perhaps the most underreported development in global politics in the last quarter century, probably because it's been largely peaceful.
I noticed there wasn't any back-up to the claim The Turkish government responded by sponsoring Islamist Arab militants that who engaged in heavy clashes with the PYD militia for the control of Ras al-Ayn (Sêrekaniyê) since November 2012.
The last piece of "evidence" I saw for this claim was a video of a tank that was misidentified as an M-60, when it was a Soviet model.
For instance, might not Assad be keeping his MiGs available to defend against a feared foreign incursion, since he's getting all the "bang" he needs from the Areos? Related - wouldn't sending the MiGs out on civilian-slaughtering missions, loaded up with ground-attack armaments, leave them vulnerable to an air incursion?
Also, wouldn't the Areos be cheaper to use, require less resources and maintenance time?
I can think of all sorts of reasons why the Assad government might choose not to use its most advanced weaponry against the insurgents.
Sure it tried. Sure it was "firm in its support." I'll tell ya, it was Alan Dulles all over again when the administration had military officers call their Egyptian counterparts and tell them to disobey any orders to open fire. The public insistence that the government reach an accord with the protesters was indistinguishable from El Salvador 1984.
Do you know why your story isn't understood? Because it isn't true.
There are about 10,000 contractors and staff total in Baghdad. That includes development workers, diplomats, plumbers, embassy staff, embassy marines, and diplomatic security. There are about 3000 trigger-pullers out of that number, in a country of 27 million.
By way of comparison, there are over 10,000 uniformed U.S. troops in Italy.
The number I've seen being thrown around for a residual force in Afghanistan is about 3000.
One of the core beliefs of neocon ideology is that competition between states over traditional national interests is what matters, and that sub-state groups just don't matter, except to the extent that they are cat's paws of state actors.
They had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do something about al Qaeda, and changed the subject to Iraq as soon as possible. They talked our ears off explaining that gaining control of that state was the key to ending Islamic extremism and terrorism, and otherwise advancing the American national interest.
What you're calling a "cleaner war" is dramatically opposed to their vision. You can't secure oil resources with drone strikes. You can't overthrow hostile governments with drone strikes. You can't install and maintain puppet governments with drone strikes. You can't even make a serious dent in a foreign military.
The idea of an American presidential administration leaving a country it occupies and allowing its mineral resources of to be developed by others is every bit as absurd as the idea of an American presidential administration allowing a core regional security ally like Hosni Mubarak to be overthrown without lifting a finger to save him, and actively supporting the opposition.
When did you start taking Dick Cheney at his word?
If Cheney supports the war against al Qaeda so much, why was the Cheney administration so asleep at the switch? Why did they bury it, do almost nothing on that front, and starve the mission so they could focus on Iraq.
Disgraced former Vice President Dick Cheney tries to glom onto his successor's accomplishments, and take credit for the success of policies that are dramatically different from his own. Didn't we just see this movie with the bin Laden raid?
I know: let's believe what Dick Cheney says, because wouldn't be awesome if he wasn't lying this time?
Skirmishes and drone strikes, however, threaten to continue.
Most of the drone strikes in Pakistan, and virtually all of them in Afghanistan, have not been part of the anti-al Qaeda mission, but are close air support or tactical bombing conducted as part of the Af-Pak War. With that war winding down and ending, the number of drone strikes should be expected to plummet as well.
This President has made nuclear reduction and nonproliferation far too high a priority in his foreign policy to dismiss that motivation as a mere pretext.
In the aftermath of the Iraq withdrawal and the response to the Egyptian revolution, as well as the focus of military activity on lush, oil-rich treasure troves of Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia (all of which feature either no boots on the ground, or the withdrawal of them), reading this administration's foreign policy as a straightforward quest for oil and hegemony is not obvious.
At the same time, the NEW START accords with Russia (which they valued so highly that they were willing to abandon the Eastern European anti-missile bases) and the extensive efforts to secure loose nuclear material around the world suggest that this administration does, in fact, take nuclear non-proliferation seriously as a foreign policy goal.
Despite the apparent tough talk coming from Iran, what is really going on is a negotiation in which Tehran is raising the stakes. Obama still has the opportunity to open Iran as Nixon opened China. He should see their bid, and raise them a round table.
This is the strategy that Obama is frequently denounced for adopting by his domestic leftist critics - setting his opening bid at halfway, before the negotiations even begin.
Better: he should respond with a call for talks "without preconditions," while quietly reassuring the Iranians that "all options are on the table" is not a threat, but rather, the non-answer answer that most people understand it to be.
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which seems to be the go-to source for drone casualty figures, there have almost certainly been fewer people killed in over a decade of drone strikes than there were between 9AM and 11AM on September 11.
The people who cast themselves as the humanitarians in this argument never seem willing to own up to the humanitarian cost of a fully-capable al Qaeda.
Drones are not particularly high-tech weaponry. Fly-by-wire aircraft and video streaming are off-the-shelf technologies. This isn't like the hydrogen bomb, where the Soviets never would have been able to build one if he hadn't produced plans for them to copy.
The alleged growth of al Qaeda in Yemen and North Africa doesn't seem to have produced any noticeable harm to our security. Before the drone war, Yemeni al Qaeda operatives blasted a hole in a U.S. Navy destroyer, almost sending it to the bottom. Since the strikes... It's the same story in North Africa. Al Qaeda has been there a lot longer than the drone program (which isn't being conducted in North Africa, making claims about its consequences there a bit implausible).
As for leaders that the Pakistani government is at peace with, forgive me, but they were hiding bin Laden, and the ISI has long been supporting the Afghan Taliban. I'll acknowledge that the harm with our alliance with Pakistan is a legitimate cost, but what are we giving up there, really?
In order to keep the support our allies in the region, we’re increasingly involved in their counterinsurgecy campaigns. This is a legitimate point, and a real cost.
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It looks like answering a rhetorical question makes the rhetorical questioner grouchy.
Perhaps rhetorical questions are best avoided, if you don't actually want an answer.
Mike Munk,
I don't know. Maybe a Fox "journalist." That seems to be their sort of "journalism."
JT,
Changing the subject in the middle of someone else's conversation to what YOU would rather have people talk about is called "hijacking the thread," and is considered rude.
First, that's a nice piece of question-begging, attributing the bombings to "the Syrian opposition," broadly. It's always super-awesome when a purported leftist starts lumping together widely divergent people into the same "they're all terrorists" category because they're Muslim.
Second, you do know that the United States has put one faction of the Syrian opposition on the State Department's list of international terrorist organizations, making it a federal felony to provide them with material or financial support, right? Most people you talk to would describe such an action as the opposite of an endorsement.
Which means cutting their greenhouse gas emissions in half, a massive gain for the environment.
Wind turbines look cool. They don't blight the land; they decorate it. They give it character.
Off-shore wind energy projects are the next great era in maritime history, and the turbines are like monuments to that history. Complaining about off-short wind turbines blighting the landscape is like complaining about masts and sails ruining your view of the ocean.
Gadhaffi had been sending weapons to sub-Saharan Africa for decades. Charles Taylor's rebels fought with Libyan-supplied weapons. So did Foday Sankoh's.
Considering that "deal" to be just fine, but the proliferation of Libyan weapons not through the Gadhaffi state apparatus is not?
When your category "other" is over three times larger than all of your titled categories put together, you are pushing bad data.
Some of those editorials are shockingly dishonest.
Obama is forging history and insulting the Palestinian people by stating during his visit to Israel that he stood alongside the Jews on their historic land, their Israeli homeland for thousands of years, and that they had plowed the land and established the state of Israel in a renaissance.
Yeah, no, that never happened.
When Obama said that Israel must recognize that settlements are the obstacle on the way to peace, this means he is giving the ‘Israeli’ Government the green light to continue settlement-building
Read that again. That doesn't even make sense.
This isn't even about different editorial lines or viewpoints. These writers are flat-out making stuff up.
Tell us, you subtle proponents, of “this time will be different:” did “air power” WIN anything in Iraq or Afghanistan?
The air support given to the Northern Alliance allowed it to rout the Taliban, capture the capital, and take over the country. I wouldn't characterize that as "air power" WINning that war, though, but as air power allowing a ground force to WIN.
I do love the way your sneering attitude is supposed to make us understand that there is no difference between a 1940s area bombing campaign and the a series of drone strikes against al Qaeda commanders. I imagine it's much easier than actually arguing the case.
The irritating thing, Bill, is that there good, realistic, insightful arguments to be made on the side of your positions - that the industrial bombing didn't do much to contribute to the allied victory, or that the apparent success of MAD was just a matter of luck, and it was only good fortune that the world didn't blow up during the Missiles of October or Operation Able Archer.
Yep, solid arguments there are...just not in this column.
It's true that the US and UK were not coordinating with the KLA on the ground. Nonetheless, the air campaign targeted those ground forces' opposition, drove them back, and allowed the KLA to advance.
Bill, you're leaving the KLA out of your analysis of Kosovo, in much the same way that some critics leave the Free Libya Forces out of their analysis of the Libyan Revolution. There were ground forces, and as always when air power is successful against a military fighting force, the air power served to support the ground forces and put them in a position where the opposing force was in trouble.
Using Tom Dispatch as a resource on questions of military operations is like using Jane's Defense Quarterly as a resource on questions of anthropology.
The pieces you run from them are always the same: a thesis about a topic that requires a solid knowledge base to draw a reliable conclusion, followed by a wikipedia-level overview of history, followed by some editorial commentary denouncing the military operation on political grounds.
I come away from this piece with a sense that the author doesn't even understand the difference between a strategic bombing campaign intended to suppress a country's industrial base, and a tactical strike intended remove specific targets from the fight, and wouldn't care very much if he did.
Which is fine, if you want to write an editorial piece about the politics of drone strikes, but apparently that's not good enough, and "Tom Dispatch" consistently adopts a wonkish pretense of addressing fact-based policy matters that it then proceeds to ignore, or fumble.
Really, there are better sources for drone-critical military analyses out there.
Something I've never understood: why does Egypt, even the new Muslim Brotherhood-led Egypt, help enforce the blockade?
He's a tool of the Turks?
He thinks Turkish-Israeli relations require more help that American-Israeli relations?
I really don't see where you're going with this.
Some Congressional Republicans have insisted that such cases are better prosecuted in military commissions like the one at Guantanamo. Senator Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said of Harun: “the administration has once again decided to forgo an extensive intelligence interrogation and instead bring an enemy combatant immediately into the federal court system.”
This is ridiculous. The military justice system exists to keep order in the ranks. These sprawling international conspiracies are simply not what they do for a living. Meanwhile, the civilian law enforcement system has handled cases like that - terrorism cases like the first WTC bombing, drug-cartel cases with people in numerous countries, espionage cases involving covert operators and foreign intelligence systems - effectively year after year.
Whatever motivates people like Saxby Chambliss when they insist on military detention, investigations, and trials, it's not a desire to investigate, gain information, and prosecute in the most effective manner.
"Judea and Samarra"
Help me out with my geography: are they closer to Dacia, or to Medea?
Anyone who denies the Subarians' right to the lower Eurphrates is a vile Sumerian apologist!
It is the nature of the fanatics who dominate both sides of the issue to refuse to acknowledge anything positive from the United States that comes up short of 100% agreement with the most hard-line position, and even then, to lash out with full-bore condemnation about the improper pronunciation of Shibboleth.
Predictably, Obama's words in Israel were an important subject, sufficient to condemn him, right up until you saw him saying good things, at which point they immediately became insignificant, and only a fool would find them meaningful.
This isn't too transparent or anything.
What is this, Calvinball?
I managed to find the text of Obama's well-attended, published speech in Jerusalem, to an Israeli audience. You don't think the Prime Minister of Israel could?
Had President Obama made it clear in Jerusalem that the Palestinians had a right to freedom in a state of their own, he would have accomplished something.
From Obama's speech in the Jerusalem Convention Center:
But the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized. Put yourself in their shoes – look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. It is not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It is not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; to restrict a student’s ability to move around the West Bank; or to displace Palestinian families from their home. Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.
It's always good when a President accomplishes something.
What would have been remarkable is if he had said it in Jerusalem
The quote is from a speech he gave at the Jerusalem Convention Center.
Since this is "remarkable," will you be writing a post about Obama's remarkable statement to the Israelis about the Palestinians' right to a homeland?
Obama, in his remarks with Abbas:
We seek an independent, a viable and contiguous Palestinian state as the homeland of the Palestinian people
It doesn't appear that he used the word "homeland" to describe Israel in that particular speech.
I don't find this to be noteworthy at all, but it appears that there are some who do, so I thought I'd pass it on.
Obama on a Palestinian state:
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2013/3/21/115426/282
But the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized. Put yourself in their shoes – look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. It is not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It is not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; to restrict a student’s ability to move around the West Bank; or to displace Palestinian families from their home. Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.
A ginned-up nontroversy. From Obama's speech:
Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.
Did you read the remarks before you wrote this?
For this reason alone the US and Iran should be friends and should be on the same side.
I believe that Iran is America's most natural ally in southwest Asia, and that within a few decades an American-Indian-Iranian alliance will be as important in world affairs as NATO was in the late 20th.
Most Dems in Congress were afraid of looking “unpatriotic” when they voted for war in 2002.
Actually, 58% of the Democrats in Congress voted against the AUMF.
He also told a woman with a really ugly baby that it was cute.
The presence of empty flattery is hardly the most important thing to note about Obama's visit to Israel.
Reading this post after Obama's Jerusalem speech and his remarks with President Abbas is wryly ironic.
That Obama, undermining peace!
Manned spaceflight is a pointless waste of money, and exists mainly to make the sort of people who use terms like "namby-pamby" feel like big tough guys.
I see no reason why a post-Soviet Russian nuclear space program can't be every bit as successful as the post-Soviet Russian nuclear submarine program.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_submarine_K-141_Kursk
The Israelis don't seem to have been too terribly keen on that war. The head of Shin Bet was warning that it was a bad idea.
The boon that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein represented for Iran was utterly predictable.
We should take the Pakistani Foreign Ministry at face value, because you hate it when people reference the AUMF, despite nobody referencing the AUMF.
Have I got that about right?
Congressional authorizations for attack on Pakistan: 0
Congressional authorizations for attacks on al Qaeda and their allies: 1.
The problem isn't that Emmerson considered the public statements from the Pakistani foreign service. The problem is that that evidence is all he considered, when there is very obviously more going on.
If someone investigating the legality of drone strikes issued a statement about their legality based entirely on the public statements of the United States Department of State, would you be asking why people have a problem with his methods?
Were you going to dispute Bill's summation of the facts, or...?
Is this guy the most naive investigator on the face of the earth, or is he just a hack?
Lessee, we have Pakistan continuing to host drone bases years after they first proclaimed themselves to be shocked, shocked to discover that the US was carrying out drone strikes, so what's the best way to get to the bottom of this mystery?
I know, let's the Pakistani government to make an official statement on the record. Case closed!
The Iraqi National Congress was born and the U.S. dealt with a number of sharp operator exiles who talked a big game but delivered little – despite hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
I still can't believe anyone was ever fooled by Ahmed Chalabi.
He was just such an obvious con man. Of course, the CIA caught on pretty quickly and cut off contact, but the fanatics in the PNAC and, later, the Rumsfeld Pentagon were just sure that they knew better.
I seem to recall that the U.S. Department of State's internal intelligence office similarly concluded that Iraq had no nuclear program.
Private contractors, being motivated largely be self-interest, are unlikely to jump aboard a sinking ship.
That you consider Bill and I to have comparable viewpoints only highlights how far off the map you are.
Hey, look, we finally found a circumstance in which the Perfessor supports the use of natural gas.
Dana Rohrbacher, aka "Taliban Dan," does not in any way representing the thinking of mainstream Washington, or even anyone other than Dana Rohrbacher.
You might as well quote Mike Gravel as proof of American intentions.
Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed
A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed,
Then one day he was shootin at some food,
And up through the ground came a bubblin crude.
Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea.
Well the first thing you know ol Jed's a millionaire,
Kinfolk said "Jed move away from there"
Said "Californy is the place you ought to be"
So they loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly.
Hills, that is. Swimmin pools, movie stars.
Well now its time to say good by to Jed and all his kin.
And they would like to thank you folks fer kindly droppin in.
You're all invited back a gain to this locality
To have a heapin helpin of their hospitality
Hillybilly that is. Set a spell, Take your shoes off.
Y'all come back now, y'hear?
You still haven’t said where you are going to store all that nuclear waste for the next tens of thousands of years.
You store it on-site and recycle it, like the French do. Technology advances all the time; you understand this when it comes to solar voltaic efficiency, so why forget it when it comes to spent nuclear fuel handling?
You might not remember this but in the old days (1215-2002) such behavior was frowned upon and instead we insisted on a quaint mechanism called a “trial” to weigh the evidence and determine whether or not the claim had merit.
Between 1215 and 2002, people who were fighting for the other side in a war were given trials before being shot at?
Are you sure about that? Or is it "weak and servile" of me to ask?
Has this left open the possibility that an American who is deemed to be an enemy combatant (possibly because of an alleged “association”), is “engaged in combat” when on American soil?
I really don't see how it does. "Engaged in combat" is not a category or identity; it refers to current, ongoing action. An enemy combatant who is not, at that moment, fighting is not "engaged in combat."
An enemy combatant is something you are; engaged in combat is something you are doing.
Holder's follow-up, that the government cannot do so against someone who is "not engaged in combat," addresses the gap you bring up.
Also, Awlaki was not killed merely for speech. According to Abdulmuttallab, the would-be Christmas Day bomber, he was an operational commander.
The son was not targeted at all, and was killed in a strike aimed at an al Qaeda figure named Ibrahim al-Bana. He went to the wrong place at the wrong time.
That is not what "engaged in combat" means.
Engaged in combat is a category based on current behavior, not past behavior or group membership. Compare to "enemy combatant."
These senators who were engaged in the filibuster correctly see a dangerous precedent in allowing targeted killings of individuals with vague evidentiary criteria and procedures devoid of due process.
Actually, Mark, these senators who were engaged in the filibuster have explicitly endorses the use of drone strikes overseas.
You are projecting your own beliefs onto them. You might as well write that the Tea Party people carrying "Keep the Government's Hands Off My Medicare" are raising an important point, because you're against cuts to Medicare benefits.
Nobody assumes that anyone has a "perfect" knowledge of anything, but that's not the biggest problem with your argument.
The biggest problem is that no one was actually looking for Atta and his party before 9/11, while the majority of the resources of the CIA and FBI have been committed for years to looking for al Qaeda. That's why we know a great deal more about al Qaeda operatives in Yemen in 2013 than we knew about al Qaeda operatives in Hamburg in 2001.
Conspiracy to commit murder is already a crime. Belonging to al Qaeda - the enemy against whom Congress declared war - is also a crime. If there is solid evidence that a man sitting at a cafe is engaged in such a conspiracy, he can be arrested.
Also, we aren't shooting at people in Yemen just for thinking about things, but for being commanders of an enemy force.
Is shooting at the enemy across a battlefield a crime?
How about bombing an airplane hanger full of pilots and mechanics?
This misstatement again.
Nobody as asserted that any male of military age is a legitimate target in Afghanistan. What you are referring to is a description of the bomb damage assessments done after strikes, in which the government tries to figure out who it killed.
The extreme secrecy with which the war against al Qaeda has been fought has served to give the conspiracy theorists cover for their rantings, and undermine the democratic legitimacy of a perfectly appropriate, legal, necessary policy. Now we have cranks like Paul and Cruz tying their black helicopter theories in with the drones (and, unfortunately, some lefties gullibly going along with them).
The drone strikes should migrate over to the Pentagon, where they can be subject to the same level of Congressional oversight as ordinary military operations.
Syrian rebels have seized a convoy of U.N. peacekeepers near the Golan Heights and say they will hold them captive until President Bashar al-Assad's forces pull back from a rebel-held village which has seen heavy recent fighting.
They think Bashar al-Assad cares about UN Peacekeepers?
What a bone-headed move. Now Assad gets to play Mr. U.N.
How is that different from this:
There is solid evidence that the weapons transfer in the NYT story actually happened.
The U.S. isn't "openly allied with them in this effort." The Gulf dictatorships and the US are competing, not cooperating, by backing different factions within the rebellion.
Why is it when the US facilitates arming the Syrian rebels that’s not helping them to “kill their own people”? Because the Assad dictatorship isn't "the people," and because the FSA factions the US is backing are not targeting the general populace (unlike the Assad government, which seems to be the only player in the drama you didn't think to criticize, despite being the worst human-rights violator by a mile, and the reason the peaceful protests turned into a civil war).
You fail to see how Americans who had nothing to do with torture in Iraq, and who actively opposed it, can criticize Chavez?
Why is that? Because we all look alike, or something?
Why are we not allowed to discuss topics other than the depredations of the US?
Everything, every action, is a compromise, JfrLowell.
It's amazing how the most doctrinaire, purist "idealists" are willing to toss everything they've ever claimed to believe in aside when it's "their guy" doing it.
Also, I love the way "everything is a compromise" doesn't apply to the U.S. We're just the Death Star, the inexplicable, Iago-like evildoer.
That’s was their rhetoric, however in reality they were just competing for resources.
I think you vastly underestimate the degree to which both ideology and military/security concerns drive foreign policy thinking. It's really not all about resources.
Cheney didn’t say America was weak and surrounded. He said that it was a superpower, that it was special, that it should not have to ask when it was born to demand.
I'm talking about the Cold War. Dick Cheney had a career in politics before 1991. He was a Nixon administration staffer and a Congressman from Wyoming. During that period, Cold Warriors like Cheney certainly did cite the threat to the United States from an expansionist global superpower as justifying some shady alliances.
It is, however, absurd to expect Chavez to have fought according to the Marquis of Queensberry rules when his opposition was apparently prepared to do worse than hit him below the belt with brass knuckles.
the enemy of my enemy
These are the two classic excuses of dictators and human-rights violators across the world. They define the foreign policy worldview of the Nixon/Dulles/Kissinger set, and such reasoning should be roundly denounced by anyone who purports to care about humanitarian values, political liberalism, or human rights. Even when it's "your guy."
he believed that stopping US imperialism was the most important world goal
Alan Dulles and Henry Kissinger believed that stopping Soviet imperialism was the most important world goal.
You can't advance or defend humane and liberationist principles by abandoning them.
Isn't that exactly the excuse offered by the Kissingers and Cheneys during the Cold War?
Out of curiosity, Frank, is the Assad regime still just about to crush the rebellion?
Bill,
"Quick" is a relative term, I admit. Perhaps "quicker" would have been better.
It's been two years and even the most optimistic timelines have this war going on for more months.
You first, RBTL: "But Al Queda types would be in Syria with or without American arms."
If this is what we're going to do, you'll have to start.
It is not entirely clear to me why Assad smashing his opposition and committing a gigantic massacre worse than the one his father carried out - the faster end to the war that would have obtained in the absence of international support for the rebels - is supposed to be a more desirable outcome for someone who adheres to liberal and humanitarian values.
The jihadist presence has grown steadily over time; they were not a significant part of the fighters initially, and grew into one. If aid had ended the war quickly, there would be fewer of them.
Also, there would be Salafist elements in Syria even if we were backing the FSA, but they would not be the best-armed, most capable force in Syria, and the non-Salafist elements would have much less interest in cooperating.
The absence of American intervention and arms for the rebellion was supposed to prevent the rise of al Qaeda-linked extremists in Syria.
As it turns out, the decision not to arm them has brought about that very outcome. It allowed Salafist-friendly governments to step in to the void, and it allowed the war to go on long enough for the Salafists to grow and consolidate their power.
Worst political strategy ever.
Dictators and oppressors spend millions of dollars and shed barrels of blood to stop their opponents from voting, and these people are proposing to volunteer to do so for them?
Why is Honsi New-Barak supposed to care if left-labor voters don't show up to the polls?
The failures of secular socialists like Nasser.
Or secular nationalists like Mubarak.
Because there are left-wing varieties of Christianity-influenced politics as well. Were Martin Luther King's politics less influenced by religion than Pat Robertson's? Were the Catholic Workers less Catholic in their political thinking than Opus Dei?
Atta is a good example of why "fundamentalism" is an unhelpful term.
What he was "fighting" for was not a religious vision, but a political vision in which religious authority was strongly established.
There were plenty of cursing, philandering crusaders that fought in the Holy Land. What they were fighting for wasn't Christianity, really, but Christendom.
The other problem with using "fundamentalism" as a term for a political movement is that it conflates a theological stance with a political one. It is entirely possible for someone who believes in throwback religion to be political quietist, or even moderate when it comes to public policy. Meanwhile, one can find one's way to religious-right politics from a mainstream, contemporary religious orientation that doesn't not call for a return to old-style religious practice.
That is the tragedy of the post WW!! era and the Cold War strategy. Instead of taking up the banner of national revolution and democracy in former colonies, the US handed them over to Soviet support, throwing away the good will it garnered among great and poor nations alike after WW11
So true. There was no good reason why the revolutionaries in El Salvador, for instance, couldn't have been American allies.
Why we blew this opportunity is an interesting question. I blame commercial relationships between American elites and the oligarchs.
The 60 gigawatt figure is for the entire US, not Texas.
Texas' doubling of its wind power output will mean going from 11 GW to 22 GW.
Cool map here: http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/wind_installed_capacity.asp
This is really starting to look embarrassing for Massachusetts. Maybe the collapse of the fisheries will get us off our butts when it comes to developing our next great maritime industry.
He's really got you there, Perfesser.
Why don't you ever criticize, say, the drone war, or the war in Afghanistan? And just once, I'd like to see you tell us how you feel about the Iran sanctions.
Maybe they can show us muscular JefferHamilDullestonians the next steps that really ought to be taken…
Or not. Or exactly the opposite: http://www.ndi.org/tunisia
...and since the Iranian oil is still being sold internationally, the claim that its restriction can generate major consequences for the global market is quite implausible.
This story is an example of working much to hard to fit the evidence around the case you want to make.
At the same time, the West is really using the excuse of Iran’s nuclear weapons to impose tougher and tougher sanctions on Iran, in order to bring about a regime change or at least to force it to give in to Western demands on other issues.
"The West" is a big place, but for the past several years, it has been the Iranians who have insisted upon linking nuclear talks to other issues, while the United States has insisted that talks be narrowly focused on the nuclear issue.
The drift of Latin America away from the American sphere of influence is perhaps the most underreported development in global politics in the last quarter century, probably because it's been largely peaceful.
I noticed there wasn't any back-up to the claim The Turkish government responded by sponsoring Islamist Arab militants that who engaged in heavy clashes with the PYD militia for the control of Ras al-Ayn (Sêrekaniyê) since November 2012.
The last piece of "evidence" I saw for this claim was a video of a tank that was misidentified as an M-60, when it was a Soviet model.
Anyone?
Is that really the only explanation, though?
For instance, might not Assad be keeping his MiGs available to defend against a feared foreign incursion, since he's getting all the "bang" he needs from the Areos? Related - wouldn't sending the MiGs out on civilian-slaughtering missions, loaded up with ground-attack armaments, leave them vulnerable to an air incursion?
Also, wouldn't the Areos be cheaper to use, require less resources and maintenance time?
I can think of all sorts of reasons why the Assad government might choose not to use its most advanced weaponry against the insurgents.
Sure it tried. Sure it was "firm in its support." I'll tell ya, it was Alan Dulles all over again when the administration had military officers call their Egyptian counterparts and tell them to disobey any orders to open fire. The public insistence that the government reach an accord with the protesters was indistinguishable from El Salvador 1984.
Do you know why your story isn't understood? Because it isn't true.
There are about 10,000 contractors and staff total in Baghdad. That includes development workers, diplomats, plumbers, embassy staff, embassy marines, and diplomatic security. There are about 3000 trigger-pullers out of that number, in a country of 27 million.
By way of comparison, there are over 10,000 uniformed U.S. troops in Italy.
The number I've seen being thrown around for a residual force in Afghanistan is about 3000.
One of the core beliefs of neocon ideology is that competition between states over traditional national interests is what matters, and that sub-state groups just don't matter, except to the extent that they are cat's paws of state actors.
They had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do something about al Qaeda, and changed the subject to Iraq as soon as possible. They talked our ears off explaining that gaining control of that state was the key to ending Islamic extremism and terrorism, and otherwise advancing the American national interest.
What you're calling a "cleaner war" is dramatically opposed to their vision. You can't secure oil resources with drone strikes. You can't overthrow hostile governments with drone strikes. You can't install and maintain puppet governments with drone strikes. You can't even make a serious dent in a foreign military.
The idea of an American presidential administration leaving a country it occupies and allowing its mineral resources of to be developed by others is every bit as absurd as the idea of an American presidential administration allowing a core regional security ally like Hosni Mubarak to be overthrown without lifting a finger to save him, and actively supporting the opposition.
Barack Obama is not George Bush.
When did you start taking Dick Cheney at his word?
If Cheney supports the war against al Qaeda so much, why was the Cheney administration so asleep at the switch? Why did they bury it, do almost nothing on that front, and starve the mission so they could focus on Iraq.
Disgraced former Vice President Dick Cheney tries to glom onto his successor's accomplishments, and take credit for the success of policies that are dramatically different from his own. Didn't we just see this movie with the bin Laden raid?
I know: let's believe what Dick Cheney says, because wouldn't be awesome if he wasn't lying this time?
Skirmishes and drone strikes, however, threaten to continue.
Most of the drone strikes in Pakistan, and virtually all of them in Afghanistan, have not been part of the anti-al Qaeda mission, but are close air support or tactical bombing conducted as part of the Af-Pak War. With that war winding down and ending, the number of drone strikes should be expected to plummet as well.
This President has made nuclear reduction and nonproliferation far too high a priority in his foreign policy to dismiss that motivation as a mere pretext.
I'm sure that domestic Iranian politics require some chest-thumping about the Great Satan before one can plausibly suggest negotiations.
Only one of their Nixons can go to China, too.
In the aftermath of the Iraq withdrawal and the response to the Egyptian revolution, as well as the focus of military activity on lush, oil-rich treasure troves of Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia (all of which feature either no boots on the ground, or the withdrawal of them), reading this administration's foreign policy as a straightforward quest for oil and hegemony is not obvious.
At the same time, the NEW START accords with Russia (which they valued so highly that they were willing to abandon the Eastern European anti-missile bases) and the extensive efforts to secure loose nuclear material around the world suggest that this administration does, in fact, take nuclear non-proliferation seriously as a foreign policy goal.
Despite the apparent tough talk coming from Iran, what is really going on is a negotiation in which Tehran is raising the stakes. Obama still has the opportunity to open Iran as Nixon opened China. He should see their bid, and raise them a round table.
This is the strategy that Obama is frequently denounced for adopting by his domestic leftist critics - setting his opening bid at halfway, before the negotiations even begin.
Better: he should respond with a call for talks "without preconditions," while quietly reassuring the Iranians that "all options are on the table" is not a threat, but rather, the non-answer answer that most people understand it to be.
"We're willing to enter negotiations, but only if you meet our primary demands first."
When the Israelis do this, it's assumed to be a dodge.
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which seems to be the go-to source for drone casualty figures, there have almost certainly been fewer people killed in over a decade of drone strikes than there were between 9AM and 11AM on September 11.
The people who cast themselves as the humanitarians in this argument never seem willing to own up to the humanitarian cost of a fully-capable al Qaeda.
Drones are not particularly high-tech weaponry. Fly-by-wire aircraft and video streaming are off-the-shelf technologies. This isn't like the hydrogen bomb, where the Soviets never would have been able to build one if he hadn't produced plans for them to copy.
The alleged growth of al Qaeda in Yemen and North Africa doesn't seem to have produced any noticeable harm to our security. Before the drone war, Yemeni al Qaeda operatives blasted a hole in a U.S. Navy destroyer, almost sending it to the bottom. Since the strikes... It's the same story in North Africa. Al Qaeda has been there a lot longer than the drone program (which isn't being conducted in North Africa, making claims about its consequences there a bit implausible).
As for leaders that the Pakistani government is at peace with, forgive me, but they were hiding bin Laden, and the ISI has long been supporting the Afghan Taliban. I'll acknowledge that the harm with our alliance with Pakistan is a legitimate cost, but what are we giving up there, really?
In order to keep the support our allies in the region, we’re increasingly involved in their counterinsurgecy campaigns. This is a legitimate point, and a real cost.