who am I to decide who should live and who should die?
Have you never heard of the concept of a sin of omission?
We would have been deciding about life and death - and deciding in favor of a great deal more death - by averting our eyes as Gadhaffi massacred his people.
It's worth noting here that the UN inspectors didn't just point to "gaps" when they accused the Saddam government of not cooperating, but to actions they took to stymie the activities of the inspectors.
What Serri fails to acknowledge is that Saddam and his government was, in fact, actively working to bluff the world about WMDs - to create enough doubt that there would still be a deterrent effect.
Ditto. This attack on Blix and the UN really lets the Bushies off the hook. The UN inspection teams were in the process of confirming that there were no active programs when Bush told them they had to get out because the war was about to start.
Uh, yeah, that's quite an empire. Egypt and Syria? Look out now!
What ever would poor little Israel do, if faced with such an overwhelming menace? Besides mop the floor with them both inside of a month and then annex some territory. You know, like last time. And the time before that.
I'm as concerned about the government's counter-terrorism powers leaking into domestic law enforcement, and even politics, as the next liberal, but the claim about the DHS is incredibly weak.
It comes from a single anonymous source quoted on a right-wing web site whose owner owns the Weekly Standard. Remember when these kooks went after the DHS because it released a report on right-wing domestic terrorism?
And as it turns out, the web site that originally published the (unsourced, anonymous) claim about DHS, the Examiner, is a right-wing site owned by Phillip Anschutz, the owner of the Weekly Standard, known as "the Christian billionaire."
These kooks have been pushing DHS conspiracy theories for years. Remember what they did Janet Napolitano when the report on right-wing domestic terrorism came out in 2009?
I think McCain's right. Obama made an offer he knew the Iraqis would never accept.
Just like during the debt ceiling negotiations. "Gee, I'd really love to sign onto a deal, but you Republicans need to agree to...let's see...a trillion dollars in tax increases."
Aw, the negotiations fell apart? Who could have known that the Iraqi Parliament wouldn't sign on to giving American troops immunity for combat operations?!?
This seems a bit more plausible than the official story, which is that the most powerful empire the world has ever seen really, really wanted to keep troops in a country it had taken over, but then Ooops! At the last minute, some legal wrinkle came up, and there was just nothing we could have done about it, and we had to remove the troops against our will. Because that's totally how it works.
The involvement of jihadists in the Arab Spring uprisings is not a bug, it's a feature. It's wonderful that jihadists have joined into a coalition with nationalists and secular liberals and moderate Islamists. It's wonderful that they are becoming involved in electoral politics.
Providing a peaceful, democratic path for the more militant Islamists to pursue their agenda - an alternative to the al Qaeda route - is an important reason for liberal democrats to support these uprisings.
"Hey, Zawahiri, how many corrupt governments have your bombs toppled? Because our crowds have taken down three."
3500 people have been killed by the regime in Syria. To compare the few dozen in Bahrain to this is a make mockery of humanitarian concern.
I'm no absolutist when it comes to sovereignty, but this type of international intervention, even political intervention, into the internal politics of a country should be reserved for only the most serious cases. The Arab League, the UN, NATO, France, the US, and other outside powers can't be sticking their noses in every time a government misbehaves; I suspect you can explain the downside to foreign intervention as well as I can. Only in the worst cases might these drawbacks be outweighed by potential benefits. So far, it is only in Libya and Syria that the humanitarian crises have risen to the point where the intervention cure might not be worse than the disease.
Do you actually need me to walk you through the report, or are you up to reading it yourself?
Because the use of centrifuges that need only be run for a longer period to produce bomb-grade material is not in dispute.
Nor is the presence of hardened facilities capable of withstanding an air strike (not typically used for commercial power generation, you might or might not know).
And I guess it was well within the realm of possibility that Saddam was going pell-mell for his own nukes and chemical and biological weapons, too.
No, it wasn't. Are you insane? The UN inspectors certainly never made any such claim. You know, it helps to actually familiarize yourself with the facts, rather than just checking your own ideological predilections. We're supposed to be the reality-based community, remember?
The Narrative is the only truthiness we need. Right, Joe? You're the only one in this discussion basing his understanding of the facts on a narrative, champ. You should really try to stop doing that.
It fits so neatly with that Manichaean/realpolitikal worldview, where countries are conveniently treated as individual players, and with the ebbs and flows of all that money’n'power…
Um, what on earth do you imagine this to have to do with the comments of someone who writes: I can live with an Iran nuclear weapons program. Iran hasn’t launched an aggressive war for hundreds of years. Its program is clearly designed as a deterrent, and driven by the acquisition of nuclear weapons by several other powers in its region, along with concern about being next up for an invasion. I find Pakistani nuclear weapons a great deal scarier than Iranian nukes. Those are some mighty impressive BIG WORDS you used, but I don't think they mean what you think they mean.
Seriously, you need to stop thinking backwards. You're supposed to let your political opinions flow from an understanding of the facts, not vice-versa, like you're doing here.
The concern about a nuclear attack (whether through traditional means, or nuclear terrorism) is what everyone talks about in public, but a deeper concern in about the regional balance of power. An Iran with a nuclear deterrent can act with a freer hand.
I'm not used to seeing you use this many rhetorical twists, Professor. Such as:
"The way you tell if a country like Iran is actively working on a nuclear bomb is that it diverts uranium to weapons purposes.":
Well, if they're far-enough along in their program, that is. A country actively seeking to build nuclear weapons wouldn't start diverting uranium to weapons purposes until it was ready, or almost ready, to build a weapon.
"Everything we know about Iran’s nuclear enrichment program points to it mainly being for civilian purposes."
Mainly?
"Whatever computer simulations or other measures Iran has taken would be consistent with seeking nuclear latency as a deterrent against an invasion."
And what else would they be "consistent with?"
"Iraq had no nuclear program at all in 2002, much less a weapons program. There was no real evidence for any such thing, just black propaganda such as the fraudulent document on alleged Niger uranium purchases."
So, as opposed to the current situation with Iran, then.
I can live with an Iran nuclear weapons program. Iran hasn't launched an aggressive war for hundreds of years. Its program is clearly designed as a deterrent, and driven by the acquisition of nuclear weapons by several other powers in its region, along with concern about being next up for an invasion. I find Pakistani nuclear weapons a great deal scarier than Iranian nukes.
But let's face the facts straight on here. It is well within the realm of possibility that Iran is seeking an existent nuclear deterrent, and just just breakout capability. The information in the IAEA report is perfectly consistent with either scenario.
He is ideological unreliable. He keeps changing his positions for obvious political benefits, whenever he finds it convenient, and they don't trust him to govern as a conservative.
For instance, he ran for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in 1994 as a pro-life Republican, who promised that he would be better on gay rights than Kennedy.
He presided over the passage of a health care reform bill as governor of Massachusetts that was very similar to the Affordable Care Act, which he now claims to oppose.
If “the left’s” critique of military intervention by our representatives is found wanting, then by all means let us work out better and sharper critiques (or look around for more interesting ones in the rather big tent that is the left).
I have a thought: if the best critique of a military intervention anyone can come up with is "found wanting," then perhaps it's worth considering that the case against that intervention is weak, and that the pro-intervention side won that argument because they have the better case.
Another thought: you talk about "military intervention" the way Republicans talk about regulation: as some undifferentiated mass, identical in root and branch, that needs only be discussed in the abstract and in reference to one's ideological constructs - as opposed to discussing specific regulations, which can often have quite different purposes and effects, and using factual evidence from the specific situation to guide your understanding of it.
Yes, indeed, I didn't mean to suggest that Libya's only economic ties were with China, just that they had such ties.
But, nonetheless, Libya was a country with considerable economic ties to China, and China has traditionally stood up in the UN on behalf of such countries when the West looked askance at them.
Both the left and the right were divided over this operation. It's tough to remember now, but in the decade between the end of the Soviet Union and 9/11, military questions in America were not polarized between left and right. We seem to have gone back to that situation.
Kucinich is precisely right: the Libyan war precedent signals the death knell of the War Powers Clause along with the War Powers Resolution.
No, it doesn't. There is nothing the slightest bit novel about Obama's assertions. Other Presidents have gone much farther than this operation on their own authority.
I find Berube’s determination not to recognize the complexity of the issue dishonest in the extreme.
I don't understand how you can say this. Berube went out of his way throughout the piece to say that there were certainly legitimate grounds on which to criticize this war.
It's not the presence of a bias that's the problem, and that is the equivalent of the neocons' bias, but it's use. I prefer anti-war biases to pro-war biases, too, but that's not the point.
Everyone has their biases, their ideological constructs, their ways of viewing the world. The question is, do you treat your biases as sufficient for answering questions, or do you let the evidence to make up your mind?
Anybody who could be "led" to believe that a majority-Muslim state's invocation of Islam as the basis of law is an indication that al Qaeda is going to run the place is an idiot who knows absolutely nothing about the region.
As is anyone who thinks that "former jihadist figures" taking up electoral politics is a bad thing. That's sort of the POINT, you know.
So, why exactly is it unimportant that NATO/US/UN didn’t intervene in (list of catastrophes)?
Because the question of whether stopping Gadaffi's military from committing mass slaughter is a good idea has absolutely nothing to do with the moral standing of NATO, the US, or the UN.
To wit: "Help, officer, help! A gang of murderers is breaking into the orphanage!"
"Sorry, madam. I have three DUIs on my record, and I totally didn't break up a bar fight last night when I was walking by the pub. So, good luck kids. I'm sorry I don't have the moral standing to help you."
I think Libya was a black swan, and we're unlikely to see its like again.
We had the Libyan people themselves calling for foreign militaries to intervene in their country. We had the Arab League, the relevant regional body, calling for intervention. We had the UN Security Council authorizing action, with China and Russia doing nothing to stop western militaries from intervening into a former Soviet client state with close economic ties to China. We had NATO willing to commit to a non-defensive military action. And we had a military situation on the ground in which air power could actually play a meaningful role in protecting civilian populations.
I'm come to learn from this episode that a large segment of the anti-war left approaches questions of American military power using the same intellectual strategy as the neoconservative right. They don't need to know anything about the particular situation or circumstances; they just have to consult their pre-existing ideological script about American military action in the abstract. That the two groups' prejudices about American going to war are polar opposites, they are used in the same way.
If you read liberal or leftist commentary about issues like global warming, health care, public transit, income inequality, or the federal budget, you find an astounding level of knowledge and a deep commitment to the facts. It's clear why the phrase "Reality-based community" applies. The contrast to the commentary about Libya, or any other military-related subject, could not be more dramatic. It isn't just that they don't know anything about Libya and what was happening there, but that they so obviously didn't think that they need to in order to decide exactly what they think.
What’s an “official” enemy? The U.S. hasn’t declared war since World War II.
Under both American and international law, and AUMF has the same legal force as a war declaration.
Greenwald consistently embarrasses himself by failing to understand this rather elementary point, while holding forth on questions about warfare and the law in the tones of an expert.
Not according to the leaked Wikileaks cables. They show that Saudi Arabia was pushing us to strike Iran, but that the American government wasn't listening to them.
Note that he said "Assassination." Not "killing," not "military force," but "assassination."
This guy is literally complaining that the use of force under this President is TOO PRECISE (eg, an assassination, not a bombing campaign or ground invasion that kills a lot of other people besides the target).
The anti-Obama fanatics have now reached the point that they are attacking him for using force in a way that doesn't cause enough collateral damage.
By "starting to hear about it now," you mean that some Israeli right-wingers are talking about it. Why would Israeli right-wingers want to support the re-election of Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, or some even more hawkish, anti-Muslim, Likudnik Republican?
The funny part about Romney's comment is, as usual, its obvious lack of sincerity. Mitt "Double Gitmo" Romney would pressure our authoritarian allies about democratic reforms, and it bothers him how little Obama is doing so. Uh huh.
This outburst is, no doubt, coming from that burning core of passion for democracy that lies unyielding in Mitt's chest. Yeah, that's it.
Our military has been adapting, especially since the change in administrations.
But the fact is, they're up against a very capable, resourceful enemy that is, itself, able to adapt. We're not talking about Saddam's Uday-commanded conscript army.
Ah, "so" now "it's" not considered "acceptable" to consider "al" Qaeda to be "a" "problem." Gotcha.
I do love "Notagainistan," though. The name of the country is Afghanistan, thanks. It's a place with it's own history and politics, worthy of being looked and and considered in its own right, and not merely a screen for you to project your pre-existing, ahistorical, 40-years-stale notions about American politics.
For my part, I actually consider it a good thing that this administration is actually focusing our counter-terror efforts on the particular group that attacked us.
But, then, I believe that the people who carried out the 9/11 attacks are actual terrorists, not scare-quote "terrorists," and that they are our enemies, not merely "enemies," and that a group willing and capable of carrying out such an attack represent a threat, not merely a "threat."
Why, I even go so far as to believe that the United States - yes! Even the evil, terrible, awful United States! - has the right to defend itself against terrorism.
that would be better addressed by a squirt of more effective plain old local, as opposed to “world,” police work. And this is where your determination not to anything about Afghanistan, other than as an ink blot for your own feelings about the Vietnam War, leads you astray. It is precisely because this particular terrorist group had the resources of a sovereign nation at its disposal that it achieved the international scope and outsized capacities that, prior to the successes of the Obama administration, made it different from other terrorist groups, and required a different response.
Success in Afghanistan is the achievement of a situation in which the US can leave without the country returning to a situation in which the government once again allies with, and puts the resources of the state into the hands of, al Qaeda - that is, to the status quo in September 2001.
Prof. Cole's point about geography and tanks is key.
Air power can stop a column of tanks approaching enemy lines. With drones, air power can put a missile on a rocket launcher or artillery battery as it shells a city. But what is air power supposed to do when security officers with small arms are in and among the populace of a city?
Western companies were already drilling and buying Libya's oil before the war. In fact, it was their decision to back the protesters that led to the oil being cut off in the first place.
Humanitarian intervention poses some very difficult problems for people of a leftist bent. It arrays some of our most precious values against each other.
So difficult, apparently, that many leftists make up excuses to avoid having to think about the matter at all, and retreat to the comforting safety of much more easily denounced episodes, whether the facts of the matter support such a reading or not.
I don't think this is class or ideological issue as much as a generational one. We all remember Ted Stevens trying to explain the "series of tubes." We all remember John McCain explaining that he is "learning to get on myself." I once say Ted Kennedy hosting a local cable access show in which he referred to his guest's "er, ah, web numbah," meaning internet address.
The people governing this country are considerably older and less tech-savvy than the population as a whole. They are attempting to apply old principles to new technologies that they don't understand very well. This problem is only going to get worse as the median age and the rate of technological advancement increase over the next couple of decades.
It's a real problem, one predicted quite presciently in the book "Future Shock" by Alvin Toffler in 1972.
As a liberal and a small d democrat, nothing could make me happier than watching a Muslim fundamentalist party have to actually govern for a term, and then have to face the voters in the next election.
The US is hitting targets in Yemen and the tribal belt in Pakistan. When will the drone wars be over?
The "drone wars" are, in actuality, the single war against al Qaeda. When will that war be over? Leon Panetta had some interesting comments when he became Secretary of Defense:
5000 security contractors can't fight a war in a country the size and population of Iraq. They can provide security for a small number of locations, and escort motorcades, and that's about it.
Bush was backed into a corner when he signed the SOFA with that timetable. He and his administration had spent literally years arguing against it.
As opposed to Obama, who had been calling for a date-certain for the end of our presence in Iraq for years.
As for "he seems to have been trying to back away from it," he has hit every single milestone identified on that timeline, on time, since he came into office, and now he's hit this one, too. It's clear that there were a lot of people in the Pentagon who thought we should stay longer, but Obama himself certainly never gave any indication.
Bin Laden says a lot of things, but I can't help but notice that al Qaeda doesn't attack Israel. It attacks Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the U.S., Bali, Jordan, Tanzania, Spain...but not Israel. Don't you find that odd?
Politicians often try to gin up popular support for themselves and their movements by latching onto popular causes. Opposition to Israel and to America's support for Israel is a popular cause in the MENA region.
Looking at bin Laden's actions, and lack thereof, towards Israel, I'd say that his assertions about Israel-Palestine being an issue he and his movement care about should be taken with about as much credibility as George Bush's statement that he wanted a more humble foreign policy. It's just something he says to look good.
This weakness got worse as Obama withdraw tens of thousands of US troops from Iraq, losing virtually all leverage.
This is a very hard-power position to take, Perfesser. Surely, our years-long protection of the Kurds from Saddam, our arming of them, our NATO alliance with Turkey, and the aid we give to them, has left us with some influence over the two parties.
Well, actually, Wall Street has given $350,000 to Mitt Romney, compared with $45,000 to Barack Obama, in the last FCC filing. That's not exactly "both ways."
Nor is it a case of siding with the likely winner, since Obama consistently beats Romney in the polls.
It's pretty clear that Wall Street has a preference.
Obama isn't blamed for the economy. Every poll ever done on the question shows that Wall Street and the Republicans are blamed by much larger segments of the public for the state of the economy than Obama.
They use both. The Marines guard the physical location, while State Department security - some of it contractors, some of it State employees - provide security for the staff, including off-site.
Think of the difference between the Marines at the White House and the Secret Service.
You can't occupy a country the size of Iraq with 5000 security contractors.
All you can do is provide security for a few secure locations. That number of personnel isn't enough to have any noticeable influence over what happens in Iraq, or what the Iraqi government does.
Too far! The existence of terrorists isn't enough to make a country into a failed state. Certainly, nobody is going to cite the current Iraq government as a model of good governance, but the difference between Iraq in 2011 and Afghanistan in 1993 is pretty significant. I can't also help but notice two things:
1) Iraq has never, ever been a failed state, in which the central government was unable to enforce its will throughout the country, in its entire history, except when some foreign military (Hi, mom!) was deliberately causing that outcome. Quite the opposite, Iraq has always been a very strong state, in which the central government has been able to push the population around however and whenever it wanted.
2) The U.S. isn't out yet. Our withdrawal over the past three years has consistently been accompanied by political and security progress, as the provocative foreign military presence has diminished, and the government and political process became increasingly legitimate in the eyes of Iraqis. I suspect this is likely to continue as our withdrawal is completed.
"The US will receive no benefit from its illegal war of aggression, no permanent bases..." Even moreso, we gave up the bases we did have in Saudi Arabia, based on the assumption that we'd relocate our military presence to Iraq. Not only did we gain nothing strategically from this war, but we are actually left in a weaker military position as a consequence of it.
Why would Obama need a story like this to "wag the dog?" Look at all of the strikes against al Qaeda. He's got all the FP dog-wagging he needs already.
“Death from Above” is a bigger bang for the buck than nation building
I think this gets it wrong. "Death from Above" and nation building aren't meant to accomplish the same things. Al Qaeda isn't an expression of the concerns of ordinary Muslims, any more than the Weather Underground was an expression of the concerns of ordinary Americans.
It is certainly true that our engagement with the Muslim world cannot only or primarily be through the killing of al Qaeda terrorists, but that's not the same thing as saying that such "short term tactical victories" are harmful or unnecessary in and of themselves.
Take the example of reducing crime in urban neighborhoods. Yes, the police need to engage the community. Yes, they need to constantly work to develop relationships. Yes, they need to make sure they're seen as a positive element in the community's life, not as hostile outsiders.
But they still have to arrest violent gang members when they commit murder. The police have to do both.
The key is to recognize that, just as gang activity in a neighborhood is not actually the ordinary experience of people in that neighborhood - that it is, in fact, parasitic upon that community - so are the activities of the al Qaeda ideologues not representative of the experience of the vast majority of the Muslim world. They're two different fields entirely.
Phil D. and PRS point out that wages today are lower than they were in 1971, and that's true.
But that's not quite the same thing as saying that wages have been declining for 40 years. Wages for workers actually rose in the 1990s. We then gave those gains back in the succeeding years.
The application and dissemination of new technology are just as important as its invention, when it comes to affecting the lives of people.
An Egyptian invented a little device that used steam to make a toy spin around during the Pharonic era, but it didn't make the slightest difference to world history. It was only when James Watt figured out something you could do with a device that used steam power to spin around that the Industrial Revolution happened.
This power doesn't give the President the power to kill Americans at will, of course.
It only gives the President the power to order attacks against Americans who have joined our wartime enemies.
I would think that the civil libertarian concern here would be best served by highlighting the bright-line difference between what the executive can do in a wartime situation under Congressionally-authorized war powers and what he can do under general executive powers, as opposed to blurring it.
al-Qaeda is not like the German army that Patton fought.
They are different in a whole host of ways. You've yet to explain why any of those differences presents a legal barrier to a state of war existing between us and them. You've just noted that they're different.
I can think of a couple of ways that they are similar, on the other hand, that seem relevant to the question: they acted as an organization to launch a major attack on our country; they maintain combat forces; and the United States Congress authorized the use of force against them under its war powers. I'll note that authorization has never been held to be invalid by any court or any branch of government. Nor has there been any other case establishing a precedent that prevents Congress from declaring war on a non-state organization.
If people want the United States to be able to declare war on non-governmental organizations that maintain private armies and so are para-statal, we need new statutes or perhaps a constitutional amendment.
Says who? States have waged war on non-state actors throughout human history. The self-styled "Confederate States of America" wasn't a state - it was a secessionist rebel movement - but we were clearly at war with them. If FARC was raiding into Peru, could Peru not declare war against FARC? I don't see why not.
Congress passed an AUMF, the legal equivalent of a war declaration. That has legal standing, and as much more than a "rhetorical flourish," such as War on Drugs, or War on Poverty, or War on Terror. Certainly, it's never been held to be unconstitutional. I don't understand what is supposed to make this a non-starter.
And once you realize that, we get back to your fourth paragraph: al-`Awlaqi was an enemy combatant on the battlefield in a war on the US, in which case obviously the US government has a right of self-defense and can kill him with impunity
What is a non-starter, on the other hand, is the explanation about this being different from the bin Laden killing. The SEALs went there to kill Osama bin Laden. I'm sure they would have accepted his legal surrender if he'd offered it, in accordance with the law, but they weren't there to take a surrender. The "expeditionary force" was sent there for the purpose of killing him, just as sure as the missile. It was the desire to collect computers and other evidence, not a plan that didn't involve killing him, that explains the use of special operations instead of a missile.
There are certainly plenty of examples of this from past presidencies, but Congressional Republicans have been loathe to cooperate in any way with this President, in any arena.
More likely, this is Graham trying to score political points and actually being more hawkish than Obama.
Why does every country have to be, in the mind of someone like Graham, either an ally or a target?
Absolutely, we should move away from Pakistan, the worst ally in the history of geopolitics. They make the Saudis look like Churchill. They make the Israelis look like the Canadian staff at NORAD. I say it's time to give India a big, sloppy public kiss.
But to actually adopt a hostile posture towards Pakistan is nuts.
And there is also a difference between "sending signals it supports Mubarak" and working for a negotiated solution to avoid bloodshed.
I've seen what it looks like when the United States supports a dictator when the people of his country rise up against him. One need only think about Bush's response to the lawyers' protests in Pakistan, or Reagan's actions in Central America during the Cold War.
Publicly sympathizing with the uprising and saying it's time for a change isn't how that particular movie goes.
I think you get some of your history wrong, Professor.
American policy toward the Palestinians has been since the time of Harry Truman to sacrifice them at the altar of US domestic politics (Truman pointed out that he had Jewish constituents, but no Palestinian ones to speak of).
Truman made that remark not as an affirmative argument for recognizing Israel, but to refute an argument that doing so would be bad domestic politics.
Also, the U.S. was working to undermine Mubarak's control of his military - and thus, his ability to keep himself in power - long before Obama made his public statement that Mubarak had to go.
Anyway, I don't see the absence of early American intervention into Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya's internal politics - the decision to wait and see how things played out, rather than being the driving force behind events - as a bad thing. Quite the opposite, I see it as a welcome bit of humility.
Probably because he wasn't talking about all Sunnis, or even all Iraqi Sunnis, but about the armed Sunni groups (which consist of both Iraqi and foreign volunteers) who are fighting an insurgency.
What if America has more voters who want an Evangelical version of Iran than voters who think like Thomas Jefferson? For that matter, what if Egypt has more voters who want a Sunni version of Iran than voters who think like the majority of the people who occupied Tahrir Square (that is, people who do do not support theocracy)?
You're asking a question that goes to the heart of what liberal democracy is about, and casting one side of that debate as colonialist only hides the real point.
Americans and other Westerners are reflexively anti-democratic, reflexively colonialistic, when it comes to the Middle East.
We can see under Obama than we could under Bush that this tendency spans across very close to the entire US political spectrum.
Writing this in the aftermath of the Obama administration's actions regarding Tunisia, then Egypt, and then Libya is just bizarre.
In point of fact, Warren, the civil war dynamic in Iraq was exacerbated by our presence, and has been ameliorated by the withdrawal. The Sunni factions that were at war with the government and the Shiite militias have, over the course of this withdrawal, moved farther and farther from war, and more and more towards engagement in the political process. The level of violence dropped, and Sunni voting rates skyrocketed, over the course of our withdrawal.
The Iraqi Civil War was an artificial, foreign-imposed construct, resulting from foreign forces (American and then jihadist) in the country. Remember, the foreign jihadists had to conduct a months-long campaign of escalating atrocities against the Shiites in order to provoke that civil war.
Your treatment of it as something "natural," as what would inevitably happen if that country were to "find its own way," is deeply ahistorical, over both the sort- and long-term.
Both the far left and the neocon right have been insisting that Iraq will collapse into violence if we withdraw. In the real world, exactly the opposite has happened.
Your final three paragraphs have nothing to do with the dynamics of our exit from Iraq. They are simply a universal manifesto, a statement of principles detached from any objective facts about what is happening in Iraq, and I find the close observation of the particular facts of individual cases to be much more valuable in understanding those cases than the insistence - again, common to the neoconservatives and the far left - that only the proper ideological orientation towards military action in general is necessary to understand the world.
Let me leave you with this: I opposed the invasion of Iraq from the very beginning. Understanding the reasons why we should not have gone is does not mean that withdrawing faster is better than withdrawing gradually. Yes, someone with a knife sticking out of them needs to have it removed. No, that does not mean that the proper course of action is to grab the handle and yank the blade out as quickly as possible.
These are all very good reasons for the U.S. to withdraw from Afghanistan, but none of them demonstrate that it is better to withdraw faster.
I look at the example of Iraq, where the drawdown took place (is still taking place) over the course of four years. Just about all of the conditions Prof. Cole describes in Afghanistan were equally true in Iraq, and yet our slow withdrawal was accompanied by the progress - the political solutions, the insurgent groups turning from war to the political process - that we need to see in Afghanistan.
Our withdrawal in Iraq was gradual and staged, but it has two other important features: it was visible (the withdrawal back to bases, removing the experience of occupation), and it was definite (the AUMF specifying a timeline and an end date).
2. Malaki gives the Defense portfolio to the Sadrist party.
3. Let them decide - based on the reality of the Iraqi military's needs - whether a small number of U.S. troops engaged in training and liaison work is a good idea. I suspect that, after a couple of months of actually having to deal with the realities of running the military and military bureaucracy, the merits of inviting a few hundred specialized American troops back in would become apparent.
What will prevent Washington from betraying the new Libyan government?
The presence of an administration which has forsaken the relationship with Gadhafi, and the absence of the administration that forged that relationship.
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who am I to decide who should live and who should die?
Have you never heard of the concept of a sin of omission?
We would have been deciding about life and death - and deciding in favor of a great deal more death - by averting our eyes as Gadhaffi massacred his people.
It's worth noting here that the UN inspectors didn't just point to "gaps" when they accused the Saddam government of not cooperating, but to actions they took to stymie the activities of the inspectors.
What Serri fails to acknowledge is that Saddam and his government was, in fact, actively working to bluff the world about WMDs - to create enough doubt that there would still be a deterrent effect.
Ditto. This attack on Blix and the UN really lets the Bushies off the hook. The UN inspection teams were in the process of confirming that there were no active programs when Bush told them they had to get out because the war was about to start.
The United States is clearly working to force Assad out.
And what makes this so clear?
The Obama administration publicly said the opposition should not put down its arms.
Wait...what? Is that what the United States does when it is clearly working to force someone out?
Only in a war. Which brings us back to ZJB's question.
Uh, yeah, that's quite an empire. Egypt and Syria? Look out now!
What ever would poor little Israel do, if faced with such an overwhelming menace? Besides mop the floor with them both inside of a month and then annex some territory. You know, like last time. And the time before that.
They are all DEMOCRATS who are all attacking their respective Occupations in one form or another!
What does that tell us? That it’s being orchestrated from DC by the Justice Department, which is part of the Executive Branch of the US Government!
Um, no. That's an Evel Kneivel-sized leap.
I'm as concerned about the government's counter-terrorism powers leaking into domestic law enforcement, and even politics, as the next liberal, but the claim about the DHS is incredibly weak.
It comes from a single anonymous source quoted on a right-wing web site whose owner owns the Weekly Standard. Remember when these kooks went after the DHS because it released a report on right-wing domestic terrorism?
You say "Guantanamo," they say "FEMA camps."
And as it turns out, the web site that originally published the (unsourced, anonymous) claim about DHS, the Examiner, is a right-wing site owned by Phillip Anschutz, the owner of the Weekly Standard, known as "the Christian billionaire."
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/16/1037055/-Debunking-Right-Wing-Propaganda-DHS-vs-OWS?detail=hide
These kooks have been pushing DHS conspiracy theories for years. Remember what they did Janet Napolitano when the report on right-wing domestic terrorism came out in 2009?
One American official after another up to and including the Secretary of Defence has stated publicly....
Let me tell you something about American officials up to and including the Secretary of Defense...
Do (R) actually think that the US should benefit from staying in Iraq, if so in what way?
Remember, Bush gave up those big bases we had in Saudi Arabia at the beginning of this war. They were to be replaced by bases in Iraq.
Republicans want there to be American troops in Iraq to project power throughout the region.
I think McCain's right. Obama made an offer he knew the Iraqis would never accept.
Just like during the debt ceiling negotiations. "Gee, I'd really love to sign onto a deal, but you Republicans need to agree to...let's see...a trillion dollars in tax increases."
Aw, the negotiations fell apart? Who could have known that the Iraqi Parliament wouldn't sign on to giving American troops immunity for combat operations?!?
This seems a bit more plausible than the official story, which is that the most powerful empire the world has ever seen really, really wanted to keep troops in a country it had taken over, but then Ooops! At the last minute, some legal wrinkle came up, and there was just nothing we could have done about it, and we had to remove the troops against our will. Because that's totally how it works.
The involvement of jihadists in the Arab Spring uprisings is not a bug, it's a feature. It's wonderful that jihadists have joined into a coalition with nationalists and secular liberals and moderate Islamists. It's wonderful that they are becoming involved in electoral politics.
Providing a peaceful, democratic path for the more militant Islamists to pursue their agenda - an alternative to the al Qaeda route - is an important reason for liberal democrats to support these uprisings.
"Hey, Zawahiri, how many corrupt governments have your bombs toppled? Because our crowds have taken down three."
"Boy is my face red."
Hear that, everyone? He's a commie.
Git him!
😉
Are you counting Syria as 1 of the 22?
Did they get a vote on this?
3500 people have been killed by the regime in Syria. To compare the few dozen in Bahrain to this is a make mockery of humanitarian concern.
I'm no absolutist when it comes to sovereignty, but this type of international intervention, even political intervention, into the internal politics of a country should be reserved for only the most serious cases. The Arab League, the UN, NATO, France, the US, and other outside powers can't be sticking their noses in every time a government misbehaves; I suspect you can explain the downside to foreign intervention as well as I can. Only in the worst cases might these drawbacks be outweighed by potential benefits. So far, it is only in Libya and Syria that the humanitarian crises have risen to the point where the intervention cure might not be worse than the disease.
LOL.
Yeah, “within the realm of possibility.” So is a K-T-level asteroid strike 71 minutes from now, and the Cubbies winning the World Series…
You seem to have missed the fact that is was Professor Cole who introduced this standard into the discussion.
Of course, you had absolutely no problem with that, when it led to your desired political outcome.
Intellectual honesty: UR NOT DOING IT RITE.
"Which facts are those again?"
Do you actually need me to walk you through the report, or are you up to reading it yourself?
Because the use of centrifuges that need only be run for a longer period to produce bomb-grade material is not in dispute.
Nor is the presence of hardened facilities capable of withstanding an air strike (not typically used for commercial power generation, you might or might not know).
And I guess it was well within the realm of possibility that Saddam was going pell-mell for his own nukes and chemical and biological weapons, too.
No, it wasn't. Are you insane? The UN inspectors certainly never made any such claim. You know, it helps to actually familiarize yourself with the facts, rather than just checking your own ideological predilections. We're supposed to be the reality-based community, remember?
The Narrative is the only truthiness we need. Right, Joe? You're the only one in this discussion basing his understanding of the facts on a narrative, champ. You should really try to stop doing that.
It fits so neatly with that Manichaean/realpolitikal worldview, where countries are conveniently treated as individual players, and with the ebbs and flows of all that money’n'power…
Um, what on earth do you imagine this to have to do with the comments of someone who writes: I can live with an Iran nuclear weapons program. Iran hasn’t launched an aggressive war for hundreds of years. Its program is clearly designed as a deterrent, and driven by the acquisition of nuclear weapons by several other powers in its region, along with concern about being next up for an invasion. I find Pakistani nuclear weapons a great deal scarier than Iranian nukes. Those are some mighty impressive BIG WORDS you used, but I don't think they mean what you think they mean.
Seriously, you need to stop thinking backwards. You're supposed to let your political opinions flow from an understanding of the facts, not vice-versa, like you're doing here.
The concern about a nuclear attack (whether through traditional means, or nuclear terrorism) is what everyone talks about in public, but a deeper concern in about the regional balance of power. An Iran with a nuclear deterrent can act with a freer hand.
I'm not used to seeing you use this many rhetorical twists, Professor. Such as:
"The way you tell if a country like Iran is actively working on a nuclear bomb is that it diverts uranium to weapons purposes.":
Well, if they're far-enough along in their program, that is. A country actively seeking to build nuclear weapons wouldn't start diverting uranium to weapons purposes until it was ready, or almost ready, to build a weapon.
"Everything we know about Iran’s nuclear enrichment program points to it mainly being for civilian purposes."
Mainly?
"Whatever computer simulations or other measures Iran has taken would be consistent with seeking nuclear latency as a deterrent against an invasion."
And what else would they be "consistent with?"
"Iraq had no nuclear program at all in 2002, much less a weapons program. There was no real evidence for any such thing, just black propaganda such as the fraudulent document on alleged Niger uranium purchases."
So, as opposed to the current situation with Iran, then.
I can live with an Iran nuclear weapons program. Iran hasn't launched an aggressive war for hundreds of years. Its program is clearly designed as a deterrent, and driven by the acquisition of nuclear weapons by several other powers in its region, along with concern about being next up for an invasion. I find Pakistani nuclear weapons a great deal scarier than Iranian nukes.
But let's face the facts straight on here. It is well within the realm of possibility that Iran is seeking an existent nuclear deterrent, and just just breakout capability. The information in the IAEA report is perfectly consistent with either scenario.
Fewer than 13 million? There are fewer than 8 million Jewish people in the region.
But they 1) control a country, and 2) aren't scattered across the region, existing as a small minority everywhere.
I do indeed.
He is ideological unreliable. He keeps changing his positions for obvious political benefits, whenever he finds it convenient, and they don't trust him to govern as a conservative.
For instance, he ran for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in 1994 as a pro-life Republican, who promised that he would be better on gay rights than Kennedy.
He presided over the passage of a health care reform bill as governor of Massachusetts that was very similar to the Affordable Care Act, which he now claims to oppose.
If “the left’s” critique of military intervention by our representatives is found wanting, then by all means let us work out better and sharper critiques (or look around for more interesting ones in the rather big tent that is the left).
I have a thought: if the best critique of a military intervention anyone can come up with is "found wanting," then perhaps it's worth considering that the case against that intervention is weak, and that the pro-intervention side won that argument because they have the better case.
Another thought: you talk about "military intervention" the way Republicans talk about regulation: as some undifferentiated mass, identical in root and branch, that needs only be discussed in the abstract and in reference to one's ideological constructs - as opposed to discussing specific regulations, which can often have quite different purposes and effects, and using factual evidence from the specific situation to guide your understanding of it.
Is this some kind of trick, Yusuf? Is a bucket of water about to fall on me?
😉
Yes, indeed, I didn't mean to suggest that Libya's only economic ties were with China, just that they had such ties.
But, nonetheless, Libya was a country with considerable economic ties to China, and China has traditionally stood up in the UN on behalf of such countries when the West looked askance at them.
Both the left and the right were divided over this operation. It's tough to remember now, but in the decade between the end of the Soviet Union and 9/11, military questions in America were not polarized between left and right. We seem to have gone back to that situation.
Kucinich is precisely right: the Libyan war precedent signals the death knell of the War Powers Clause along with the War Powers Resolution.
No, it doesn't. There is nothing the slightest bit novel about Obama's assertions. Other Presidents have gone much farther than this operation on their own authority.
I find Berube’s determination not to recognize the complexity of the issue dishonest in the extreme.
I don't understand how you can say this. Berube went out of his way throughout the piece to say that there were certainly legitimate grounds on which to criticize this war.
Ditto with knowing too much about the military's make-up and equipment.
It leaves the less-militaristic factions in our country at a real disadvantage in debates about the defense budget.
It's not the presence of a bias that's the problem, and that is the equivalent of the neocons' bias, but it's use. I prefer anti-war biases to pro-war biases, too, but that's not the point.
Everyone has their biases, their ideological constructs, their ways of viewing the world. The question is, do you treat your biases as sufficient for answering questions, or do you let the evidence to make up your mind?
Whoa. "Have led some," eh?
Anybody who could be "led" to believe that a majority-Muslim state's invocation of Islam as the basis of law is an indication that al Qaeda is going to run the place is an idiot who knows absolutely nothing about the region.
As is anyone who thinks that "former jihadist figures" taking up electoral politics is a bad thing. That's sort of the POINT, you know.
So, why exactly is it unimportant that NATO/US/UN didn’t intervene in (list of catastrophes)?
Because the question of whether stopping Gadaffi's military from committing mass slaughter is a good idea has absolutely nothing to do with the moral standing of NATO, the US, or the UN.
To wit: "Help, officer, help! A gang of murderers is breaking into the orphanage!"
"Sorry, madam. I have three DUIs on my record, and I totally didn't break up a bar fight last night when I was walking by the pub. So, good luck kids. I'm sorry I don't have the moral standing to help you."
I think Libya was a black swan, and we're unlikely to see its like again.
We had the Libyan people themselves calling for foreign militaries to intervene in their country. We had the Arab League, the relevant regional body, calling for intervention. We had the UN Security Council authorizing action, with China and Russia doing nothing to stop western militaries from intervening into a former Soviet client state with close economic ties to China. We had NATO willing to commit to a non-defensive military action. And we had a military situation on the ground in which air power could actually play a meaningful role in protecting civilian populations.
Those things don't happen all together every day.
I'm come to learn from this episode that a large segment of the anti-war left approaches questions of American military power using the same intellectual strategy as the neoconservative right. They don't need to know anything about the particular situation or circumstances; they just have to consult their pre-existing ideological script about American military action in the abstract. That the two groups' prejudices about American going to war are polar opposites, they are used in the same way.
If you read liberal or leftist commentary about issues like global warming, health care, public transit, income inequality, or the federal budget, you find an astounding level of knowledge and a deep commitment to the facts. It's clear why the phrase "Reality-based community" applies. The contrast to the commentary about Libya, or any other military-related subject, could not be more dramatic. It isn't just that they don't know anything about Libya and what was happening there, but that they so obviously didn't think that they need to in order to decide exactly what they think.
What’s an “official” enemy? The U.S. hasn’t declared war since World War II.
Under both American and international law, and AUMF has the same legal force as a war declaration.
Greenwald consistently embarrasses himself by failing to understand this rather elementary point, while holding forth on questions about warfare and the law in the tones of an expert.
USA and Arab countries want this war also.
Not according to the leaked Wikileaks cables. They show that Saudi Arabia was pushing us to strike Iran, but that the American government wasn't listening to them.
Gocart Mozart,
Note that he said "Assassination." Not "killing," not "military force," but "assassination."
This guy is literally complaining that the use of force under this President is TOO PRECISE (eg, an assassination, not a bombing campaign or ground invasion that kills a lot of other people besides the target).
The anti-Obama fanatics have now reached the point that they are attacking him for using force in a way that doesn't cause enough collateral damage.
We're now pretending that carrying out strikes against al Qaeda doesn't have Congressional approval?
David, meeting the September 19, 2001 AUMF. AUMF, meet David. I'll give you two a little time to get to know each other.
I agree.
It seems like I've been hearing about an imminent attack on Iran for years.
By "starting to hear about it now," you mean that some Israeli right-wingers are talking about it. Why would Israeli right-wingers want to support the re-election of Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, or some even more hawkish, anti-Muslim, Likudnik Republican?
This is a very insightful piece, Professor. You make a very good case.
The funny part about Romney's comment is, as usual, its obvious lack of sincerity. Mitt "Double Gitmo" Romney would pressure our authoritarian allies about democratic reforms, and it bothers him how little Obama is doing so. Uh huh.
This outburst is, no doubt, coming from that burning core of passion for democracy that lies unyielding in Mitt's chest. Yeah, that's it.
while the conflict in Bahrain is ignored
The conflict in Syria has killed thousands just in the past couple of months.
The "conflict" in Bahrain has killed dozens in about 3/4 of a year.
I don't think we have to scout about for dark conspiracies to explain why the Syrian crisis is getting more press.
Out of curiosity, do you write the opposite comment whenever there is a NATO victory?
Our military has been adapting, especially since the change in administrations.
But the fact is, they're up against a very capable, resourceful enemy that is, itself, able to adapt. We're not talking about Saddam's Uday-commanded conscript army.
They're going to score some victories.
Ah, "so" now "it's" not considered "acceptable" to consider "al" Qaeda to be "a" "problem." Gotcha.
I do love "Notagainistan," though. The name of the country is Afghanistan, thanks. It's a place with it's own history and politics, worthy of being looked and and considered in its own right, and not merely a screen for you to project your pre-existing, ahistorical, 40-years-stale notions about American politics.
For my part, I actually consider it a good thing that this administration is actually focusing our counter-terror efforts on the particular group that attacked us.
But, then, I believe that the people who carried out the 9/11 attacks are actual terrorists, not scare-quote "terrorists," and that they are our enemies, not merely "enemies," and that a group willing and capable of carrying out such an attack represent a threat, not merely a "threat."
Why, I even go so far as to believe that the United States - yes! Even the evil, terrible, awful United States! - has the right to defend itself against terrorism.
that would be better addressed by a squirt of more effective plain old local, as opposed to “world,” police work. And this is where your determination not to anything about Afghanistan, other than as an ink blot for your own feelings about the Vietnam War, leads you astray. It is precisely because this particular terrorist group had the resources of a sovereign nation at its disposal that it achieved the international scope and outsized capacities that, prior to the successes of the Obama administration, made it different from other terrorist groups, and required a different response.
Success in Afghanistan is the achievement of a situation in which the US can leave without the country returning to a situation in which the government once again allies with, and puts the resources of the state into the hands of, al Qaeda - that is, to the status quo in September 2001.
Prof. Cole's point about geography and tanks is key.
Air power can stop a column of tanks approaching enemy lines. With drones, air power can put a missile on a rocket launcher or artillery battery as it shells a city. But what is air power supposed to do when security officers with small arms are in and among the populace of a city?
Western companies were already drilling and buying Libya's oil before the war. In fact, it was their decision to back the protesters that led to the oil being cut off in the first place.
Humanitarian intervention poses some very difficult problems for people of a leftist bent. It arrays some of our most precious values against each other.
So difficult, apparently, that many leftists make up excuses to avoid having to think about the matter at all, and retreat to the comforting safety of much more easily denounced episodes, whether the facts of the matter support such a reading or not.
I don't think this is class or ideological issue as much as a generational one. We all remember Ted Stevens trying to explain the "series of tubes." We all remember John McCain explaining that he is "learning to get on myself." I once say Ted Kennedy hosting a local cable access show in which he referred to his guest's "er, ah, web numbah," meaning internet address.
The people governing this country are considerably older and less tech-savvy than the population as a whole. They are attempting to apply old principles to new technologies that they don't understand very well. This problem is only going to get worse as the median age and the rate of technological advancement increase over the next couple of decades.
It's a real problem, one predicted quite presciently in the book "Future Shock" by Alvin Toffler in 1972.
As a liberal and a small d democrat, nothing could make me happier than watching a Muslim fundamentalist party have to actually govern for a term, and then have to face the voters in the next election.
Red. Red banners.
I don't think American viewers would think "Stop signs" if they saw lots of people in red marching against "corporate greed" and "Wall Street."
There are quite a few countries in Europe that still have state churches and official religions.
The statements from all three countries - and Egypt, too - about sharia could haven a whole range of meanings, including purely symbolic ones.
Actually, your criticism of Obama and denunciation of popular protest movements is most reminiscent of Fox News.
I've thought the same thing.
We're still running Democracy 1.1 or 1.2, while the new machines are coming with version 4.0 loaded.
How can he?
Look at the situation he's in. Saying one thing to one audience and another to a different audience seems like the only option he has.
The US is hitting targets in Yemen and the tribal belt in Pakistan. When will the drone wars be over?
The "drone wars" are, in actuality, the single war against al Qaeda. When will that war be over? Leon Panetta had some interesting comments when he became Secretary of Defense:
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jul/09/world/la-fgw-panetta-kabul-20110710
We seem to have whittled that 10-20 number down a bit over the past few months.
5000 security contractors can't fight a war in a country the size and population of Iraq. They can provide security for a small number of locations, and escort motorcades, and that's about it.
Well, on the other hand, we also gave up our military presence in Saudi Arabia and then failed to replace it with one in Iraq.
So...there's that.
Bush was backed into a corner when he signed the SOFA with that timetable. He and his administration had spent literally years arguing against it.
As opposed to Obama, who had been calling for a date-certain for the end of our presence in Iraq for years.
As for "he seems to have been trying to back away from it," he has hit every single milestone identified on that timeline, on time, since he came into office, and now he's hit this one, too. It's clear that there were a lot of people in the Pentagon who thought we should stay longer, but Obama himself certainly never gave any indication.
Bin Laden says a lot of things, but I can't help but notice that al Qaeda doesn't attack Israel. It attacks Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the U.S., Bali, Jordan, Tanzania, Spain...but not Israel. Don't you find that odd?
Politicians often try to gin up popular support for themselves and their movements by latching onto popular causes. Opposition to Israel and to America's support for Israel is a popular cause in the MENA region.
Looking at bin Laden's actions, and lack thereof, towards Israel, I'd say that his assertions about Israel-Palestine being an issue he and his movement care about should be taken with about as much credibility as George Bush's statement that he wanted a more humble foreign policy. It's just something he says to look good.
This weakness got worse as Obama withdraw tens of thousands of US troops from Iraq, losing virtually all leverage.
This is a very hard-power position to take, Perfesser. Surely, our years-long protection of the Kurds from Saddam, our arming of them, our NATO alliance with Turkey, and the aid we give to them, has left us with some influence over the two parties.
Summary: Wall Street goes both ways.
Well, actually, Wall Street has given $350,000 to Mitt Romney, compared with $45,000 to Barack Obama, in the last FCC filing. That's not exactly "both ways."
Nor is it a case of siding with the likely winner, since Obama consistently beats Romney in the polls.
It's pretty clear that Wall Street has a preference.
The reason Obama gets blamed for the economy...
Obama isn't blamed for the economy. Every poll ever done on the question shows that Wall Street and the Republicans are blamed by much larger segments of the public for the state of the economy than Obama.
They use both. The Marines guard the physical location, while State Department security - some of it contractors, some of it State employees - provide security for the staff, including off-site.
Think of the difference between the Marines at the White House and the Secret Service.
You can't occupy a country the size of Iraq with 5000 security contractors.
All you can do is provide security for a few secure locations. That number of personnel isn't enough to have any noticeable influence over what happens in Iraq, or what the Iraqi government does.
The statement from the White House includes an exception for about 150 Marine embassy guards.
The US will leave behind a failed state.
Too far! The existence of terrorists isn't enough to make a country into a failed state. Certainly, nobody is going to cite the current Iraq government as a model of good governance, but the difference between Iraq in 2011 and Afghanistan in 1993 is pretty significant. I can't also help but notice two things:
1) Iraq has never, ever been a failed state, in which the central government was unable to enforce its will throughout the country, in its entire history, except when some foreign military (Hi, mom!) was deliberately causing that outcome. Quite the opposite, Iraq has always been a very strong state, in which the central government has been able to push the population around however and whenever it wanted.
2) The U.S. isn't out yet. Our withdrawal over the past three years has consistently been accompanied by political and security progress, as the provocative foreign military presence has diminished, and the government and political process became increasingly legitimate in the eyes of Iraqis. I suspect this is likely to continue as our withdrawal is completed.
"The US will receive no benefit from its illegal war of aggression, no permanent bases..." Even moreso, we gave up the bases we did have in Saudi Arabia, based on the assumption that we'd relocate our military presence to Iraq. Not only did we gain nothing strategically from this war, but we are actually left in a weaker military position as a consequence of it.
The objective political situation would seem to argue against this theory.
Nobody cares about foreign policy - "It's the economy, stupid."
Obama already has a "nice little war" going - the one against al Qaeda.
I’ve thought for a long time he’s going to start a war with Iran in March or April of next year.
People have been assuring me that an attack on Iran in right around the corner for years now, and they've been wrong every single time.
Internet leftists : attack on Iran :: Austrian-school economists : runaway inflation.
Why would Obama need a story like this to "wag the dog?" Look at all of the strikes against al Qaeda. He's got all the FP dog-wagging he needs already.
This guy sounds like a Farsi George W. Bush.
“Death from Above” is a bigger bang for the buck than nation building
I think this gets it wrong. "Death from Above" and nation building aren't meant to accomplish the same things. Al Qaeda isn't an expression of the concerns of ordinary Muslims, any more than the Weather Underground was an expression of the concerns of ordinary Americans.
Good comment.
It is certainly true that our engagement with the Muslim world cannot only or primarily be through the killing of al Qaeda terrorists, but that's not the same thing as saying that such "short term tactical victories" are harmful or unnecessary in and of themselves.
Take the example of reducing crime in urban neighborhoods. Yes, the police need to engage the community. Yes, they need to constantly work to develop relationships. Yes, they need to make sure they're seen as a positive element in the community's life, not as hostile outsiders.
But they still have to arrest violent gang members when they commit murder. The police have to do both.
The key is to recognize that, just as gang activity in a neighborhood is not actually the ordinary experience of people in that neighborhood - that it is, in fact, parasitic upon that community - so are the activities of the al Qaeda ideologues not representative of the experience of the vast majority of the Muslim world. They're two different fields entirely.
If there's one thing the members of the Saudi elite hate, it's a dictatorial style.
Phil D. and PRS point out that wages today are lower than they were in 1971, and that's true.
But that's not quite the same thing as saying that wages have been declining for 40 years. Wages for workers actually rose in the 1990s. We then gave those gains back in the succeeding years.
The application and dissemination of new technology are just as important as its invention, when it comes to affecting the lives of people.
An Egyptian invented a little device that used steam to make a toy spin around during the Pharonic era, but it didn't make the slightest difference to world history. It was only when James Watt figured out something you could do with a device that used steam power to spin around that the Industrial Revolution happened.
This power doesn't give the President the power to kill Americans at will, of course.
It only gives the President the power to order attacks against Americans who have joined our wartime enemies.
I would think that the civil libertarian concern here would be best served by highlighting the bright-line difference between what the executive can do in a wartime situation under Congressionally-authorized war powers and what he can do under general executive powers, as opposed to blurring it.
al-Qaeda is not like the German army that Patton fought.
They are different in a whole host of ways. You've yet to explain why any of those differences presents a legal barrier to a state of war existing between us and them. You've just noted that they're different.
I can think of a couple of ways that they are similar, on the other hand, that seem relevant to the question: they acted as an organization to launch a major attack on our country; they maintain combat forces; and the United States Congress authorized the use of force against them under its war powers. I'll note that authorization has never been held to be invalid by any court or any branch of government. Nor has there been any other case establishing a precedent that prevents Congress from declaring war on a non-state organization.
The term “enemy combatant” is a creation of the same Bush legal team that said torture was OK
No, not really. The concept is articulated in the Geneva Conventions, referred to there as an "unlawful combatant."
The Bush administration's novelty wasn't creating the category, but inventing a passel of rules that allowed people in that category to be mistreated.
And yes, the government is allowed to kill people that private citizens are not. This is also not a novel legal theory of the Bush administration.
If people want the United States to be able to declare war on non-governmental organizations that maintain private armies and so are para-statal, we need new statutes or perhaps a constitutional amendment.
Says who? States have waged war on non-state actors throughout human history. The self-styled "Confederate States of America" wasn't a state - it was a secessionist rebel movement - but we were clearly at war with them. If FARC was raiding into Peru, could Peru not declare war against FARC? I don't see why not.
Congress passed an AUMF, the legal equivalent of a war declaration. That has legal standing, and as much more than a "rhetorical flourish," such as War on Drugs, or War on Poverty, or War on Terror. Certainly, it's never been held to be unconstitutional. I don't understand what is supposed to make this a non-starter.
And once you realize that, we get back to your fourth paragraph: al-`Awlaqi was an enemy combatant on the battlefield in a war on the US, in which case obviously the US government has a right of self-defense and can kill him with impunity
What is a non-starter, on the other hand, is the explanation about this being different from the bin Laden killing. The SEALs went there to kill Osama bin Laden. I'm sure they would have accepted his legal surrender if he'd offered it, in accordance with the law, but they weren't there to take a surrender. The "expeditionary force" was sent there for the purpose of killing him, just as sure as the missile. It was the desire to collect computers and other evidence, not a plan that didn't involve killing him, that explains the use of special operations instead of a missile.
He wasn't a known terrorist when he was invited to the Pentagon.
Which raises an interesting question: was he not a terrorist back then, or was he just not a known terrorist? Known, by whom?
Either way, it's not exactly soothing that they singled out Awlaki as their go-to moderate Muslim imam.
Ah, the Pentagon. Donald Rumsfeld, ladies and gentlemen! Let's give him a big round of applause. Awesome, Donald! You rock!
I find it pretty unlikely that Mullen was off the reservation when he made those remarks.
There are certainly plenty of examples of this from past presidencies, but Congressional Republicans have been loathe to cooperate in any way with this President, in any arena.
More likely, this is Graham trying to score political points and actually being more hawkish than Obama.
Why does every country have to be, in the mind of someone like Graham, either an ally or a target?
Absolutely, we should move away from Pakistan, the worst ally in the history of geopolitics. They make the Saudis look like Churchill. They make the Israelis look like the Canadian staff at NORAD. I say it's time to give India a big, sloppy public kiss.
But to actually adopt a hostile posture towards Pakistan is nuts.
And there is also a difference between "sending signals it supports Mubarak" and working for a negotiated solution to avoid bloodshed.
I've seen what it looks like when the United States supports a dictator when the people of his country rise up against him. One need only think about Bush's response to the lawyers' protests in Pakistan, or Reagan's actions in Central America during the Cold War.
Publicly sympathizing with the uprising and saying it's time for a change isn't how that particular movie goes.
I think you get some of your history wrong, Professor.
American policy toward the Palestinians has been since the time of Harry Truman to sacrifice them at the altar of US domestic politics (Truman pointed out that he had Jewish constituents, but no Palestinian ones to speak of).
Truman made that remark not as an affirmative argument for recognizing Israel, but to refute an argument that doing so would be bad domestic politics.
Also, the U.S. was working to undermine Mubarak's control of his military - and thus, his ability to keep himself in power - long before Obama made his public statement that Mubarak had to go.
Anyway, I don't see the absence of early American intervention into Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya's internal politics - the decision to wait and see how things played out, rather than being the driving force behind events - as a bad thing. Quite the opposite, I see it as a welcome bit of humility.
Probably because he wasn't talking about all Sunnis, or even all Iraqi Sunnis, but about the armed Sunni groups (which consist of both Iraqi and foreign volunteers) who are fighting an insurgency.
Good question.
I wonder how the Kuwaitis would feel about Iraqi troops being brought into their country.
What if America has more voters who want an Evangelical version of Iran than voters who think like Thomas Jefferson? For that matter, what if Egypt has more voters who want a Sunni version of Iran than voters who think like the majority of the people who occupied Tahrir Square (that is, people who do do not support theocracy)?
You're asking a question that goes to the heart of what liberal democracy is about, and casting one side of that debate as colonialist only hides the real point.
Americans and other Westerners are reflexively anti-democratic, reflexively colonialistic, when it comes to the Middle East.
We can see under Obama than we could under Bush that this tendency spans across very close to the entire US political spectrum.
Writing this in the aftermath of the Obama administration's actions regarding Tunisia, then Egypt, and then Libya is just bizarre.
The Muslim Brotherhood was a late, insignificant portion of the Egyptian protest movement.
Just as the handful of former al Qaeda affiliates are a late, insignificant portion of the Libyan resistance movement.
In point of fact, Warren, the civil war dynamic in Iraq was exacerbated by our presence, and has been ameliorated by the withdrawal. The Sunni factions that were at war with the government and the Shiite militias have, over the course of this withdrawal, moved farther and farther from war, and more and more towards engagement in the political process. The level of violence dropped, and Sunni voting rates skyrocketed, over the course of our withdrawal.
The Iraqi Civil War was an artificial, foreign-imposed construct, resulting from foreign forces (American and then jihadist) in the country. Remember, the foreign jihadists had to conduct a months-long campaign of escalating atrocities against the Shiites in order to provoke that civil war.
Your treatment of it as something "natural," as what would inevitably happen if that country were to "find its own way," is deeply ahistorical, over both the sort- and long-term.
Both the far left and the neocon right have been insisting that Iraq will collapse into violence if we withdraw. In the real world, exactly the opposite has happened.
Your final three paragraphs have nothing to do with the dynamics of our exit from Iraq. They are simply a universal manifesto, a statement of principles detached from any objective facts about what is happening in Iraq, and I find the close observation of the particular facts of individual cases to be much more valuable in understanding those cases than the insistence - again, common to the neoconservatives and the far left - that only the proper ideological orientation towards military action in general is necessary to understand the world.
Let me leave you with this: I opposed the invasion of Iraq from the very beginning. Understanding the reasons why we should not have gone is does not mean that withdrawing faster is better than withdrawing gradually. Yes, someone with a knife sticking out of them needs to have it removed. No, that does not mean that the proper course of action is to grab the handle and yank the blade out as quickly as possible.
These are all very good reasons for the U.S. to withdraw from Afghanistan, but none of them demonstrate that it is better to withdraw faster.
I look at the example of Iraq, where the drawdown took place (is still taking place) over the course of four years. Just about all of the conditions Prof. Cole describes in Afghanistan were equally true in Iraq, and yet our slow withdrawal was accompanied by the progress - the political solutions, the insurgent groups turning from war to the political process - that we need to see in Afghanistan.
Our withdrawal in Iraq was gradual and staged, but it has two other important features: it was visible (the withdrawal back to bases, removing the experience of occupation), and it was definite (the AUMF specifying a timeline and an end date).
"The main problem" is Barack Obama memorializing the people killed on 9/11?
That's "the main problem?"
From you link: in the past six months.
The spate of downed aircraft began months before the Free Libya Forces started capturing arms warehouses.
And why would a rebel force that was desperately short of arms ship those it captured out the country?
Indeed, Warren.
The difference between Bush's handling of Afghanistan and Obama's handling of Libya cannot be more dramatic.
If I had a nickel for every time I've read the words "We don't even know who TNC leaders are!" I'd be a rich man.
I still don't understand why people who consider themselves anti-imperialist would consider that to be a compelling argument.
How about this:
1. Remove all U.S. troops from Iraq.
2. Malaki gives the Defense portfolio to the Sadrist party.
3. Let them decide - based on the reality of the Iraqi military's needs - whether a small number of U.S. troops engaged in training and liaison work is a good idea. I suspect that, after a couple of months of actually having to deal with the realities of running the military and military bureaucracy, the merits of inviting a few hundred specialized American troops back in would become apparent.
Seconded.
I'm an American. There have been any number of wars in which in which Turkish troops have fought side by side with our own.
What has the US ever gotten out of its relationship with Israel?
Is the description of the forces escorting the convoy as "Nigerian" a typo, or are the Nigerians actually involved?
Personally, I blame spellcheck. Damn thing keeps wanting to change "Nigerien" on my computer, too.
What will prevent Washington from betraying the new Libyan government?
The presence of an administration which has forsaken the relationship with Gadhafi, and the absence of the administration that forged that relationship.
Actually, the UN Charter specifically empowers the UNSC to authorize interventions.
LIke it did in Libya.