Vietnam is to the far left what Munich is to the neoconservatives: an important and illuminating historical event that has many lessons for us, that they blow up into a Universal Model That Explains Everything, in order to avoid the need to think about the specific circumstances of different situations, and to foster an facile satisfaction in their own alleged superior understanding of history.
My guess is that the Obama administration decided that reassuring the Israelis about the US missile shield via these joint military drills might have been misinterpreted in the region an implied threat of a joint US-Israeli military attack on, say, the Natanz nuclear facilities.
There's also the possibility that the Obama administration is doing to punish Israel for the assassination campaign of Iranian scientists, and to visibly distance itself from the Israelis.
My guess is that he is not at all pleased that the United States gets blowback for Israeli actions, and doesn't like it when Israel does something inflammatory.
I assume you're referring to the air strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban commanders.
As it turns out, there actually is a difference between military strikes against combatants fighting against you in a war, and assassinating the citizens of a country with whom no state of war exists.
The opportunity belonged to an Iranian who could move freely and had his papers in order.
Or someone who could pass himself off as such.
I don't know anything about the Saudi intelligence services.
I know that the post-Porter Goss CIA's human/clandestine operation is a shell of its former self. I know that the CIA has been killing al Qaeda terrorists, and that they haven't been using close-in, covert ops like this to do it. The damage the Bush administration did to the CIA is one of the reasons why the US is relying so much on drones and special forces teams. They couldn't have gotten somebody close to Awlaki if they tried.
I know that the Mossad carries out close-in assassinations of Palestinian and Hezbollah targets with some regularity, inserting their own people into Arab communities, or turning locals.
Let's just say that I know which square I'd put my chips on.
Wanting something and trying to make it happen are two different things. I wanted the Saddam government to go away, but that doesn't mean I supported the Iraq War.
Also, the regime-change claim doesn't fit in with the rest of what the source said, which was about creating public pressure for POLICY, not REGIME, change.
The "regime change" charge is based on a single retracted statement from the WaPo, and the additional quotes from that same source make it pretty clear that the Post got the statement wrong.
Your orientalist distortion above notwithstanding,
You're throwing out words that you think seem powerful, but they are utterly without meaning. It is "orientalist" for me to agree with the Egyptian, Libyan, and Tunisian people that their dictatorial governments should go? Whatever.
To suggest otherwise is down right racist in my view.
Good think nobody has suggested that, then. Not me, nor the Egyptian, Libyan, Syrian, and Tunisian people with whom I am agreeing, and who you seem to think engaged in racist orientalism for denouncing their country's dictators.
Majid exact phrase is that “Islam fosters tyranny”,
No, it is not. Good lord, we can all still read the post, you know!
His EXACT phrase is, "One problem in American-Muslim relations is the old American conviction that Islam fosters tyranny." and later, "Muslims need to face the facts and realize that old perception of their societies as despotic had some basis in truth."
You completely misrepresented his statement. What you just did is not different from what the Romney campaign did with Obama's quoting of the McCain campaign. You took a statement in which he described someone else's position, and pretended that he was stating it as his own.
I will generously attribute this misrepresentation to your reading disability, and not accuse you of deliberate dishonesty.
According to you and Majid, humanity should accommodate settler-colonialism and Apartheid — decency, morality and international law be damned.
Another misrepresentation. Neither of us has written a single word about colonialism, Apartheid, or any other Israeli policy. Here is the sum total of what Majid wrote about Israel: They also must accommodate themselves to the historical reality of Israel
And that's it. While my exact words were "the existence of Israel."
It's becoming more difficult to attribute your errors to good-faith misunderstanding.
Well joe, some people think that the struggle for justice is more important than the individual.
To be more precise, these "some people" think that their "struggle for justice" is more important that other individuals.
Which is both cowardly and morally abhorrent.
It seems that you are advocating that if an entity (such as Israel) can elude punishment for long enough, those crimes become irrelevant, perhaps even quaint.
Ever read about how the Persian nation was founded? How about Canada? How about, say, every single nation on the face of the earth?
You think you're going to "punish" Israel? Yeah, good luck with that. I just hope that there aren't too many more millions of people whose lives are ended or impoverished in this endless quest for punishment.
Let me get this straight: your argument is that the statements "There is tyranny in the Muslim world" and "Jews are evil" are equivalent?
Uh...ok.
Silly me, I thought settler-colonialism is now a crime and international law prohibits ethnic cleansing and the acquisition of territory by force. If you think this should be ignored/scrubbed, do come out and say it.
Those are what you consider to be the options? Either "ignore/scrub" the history of Israel's settlement, or maintain perpetual hostile relations while refusing to recognize Israel...for how long? No matter how much it harms your own people, just keep up the crusade against the existence of Israel, regardless of how many generations pass? This is the lack of imagination that comes from not having to incorporate the real world consequences of one's bromides into one's political stance.
Hey, Middle Eastern residents, keep up the fight against Israel! Tridant is behind you; several thousand miles behind you, but still, behind you!
If this is true, then why were the Libyan people waving American flags?
Don't overstate your case here. America is still quite effective. The Bush years certainly took some luster off our shine, but American soft power still seems to pretty compelling to an awful lot of people.
Lots of nations have possessed atomic weapons in the past sixty years. Not a one of them, except the US, has used those weapons. Even N. Korea, which is about as looney a nation as you can be, hasn’t.
So you're perfectly comfortable with nuclear proliferation?
You know, there are a lot of countries that would love to have nuclear weapons, and would be willing to pay good money. Meanwhile, the United States is suffering from elevated unemployment and has a large trade deficit. We could put many thousands of people to work if we established a nuclear arms export industry. Why not?
Also, you say that Not a one of them, except the US, has used those weapons. It's true that nobody has fired them off in the modern nuclear era (that is, since atomic weapons went from the small ones in 1945, which were only marginally worse than the other bombardment weapons of the day, to the world-destroying monsters we have today), but that's not the only use to which a weapon can be put. They can be used to make an aggressor invulnerable to counterattack. They can be used for extortion.
I am NOT OK with nuclear proliferation, even as I agree with you that Iran would almost certainly be a rational actor with its nukes. I think it's a big mistake to downplay the dangers of nuclear weapons and proliferation just because it's momentarily convenient for a specific political debate.
Professor Cole is writing for an American audience, to whom the name "Muslim Brotherhood" is indistinguishable from a terrorist organization (which, years ago, the MB was).
Why can’t people be allowed to build a society that does not include lewdness and vice?
Because human beings are human beings, and to create a society without lewdness and vice would require a police state, complete with informants, torture chambers, heavy-handed suppression of dissent, and all of the other accessories of those states that saw it as their right and duty to create utopia by force.
For that matter, how do we know this was Iraqis, as opposed to al Qaeda?
It was the international jihadists who started the terrorist provocations in 2004, and the provocation of a Shiite backlash against Iraq's Sunnis, while nonsensical for Iraqi Sunnis, makes sense for foreign jihadists.
Nixon was able to slip away to China, but does anyone think that’s even conceivable for Obama?
Why not? Like Nixon, he's "made his bones" and it would be tough for the hawks to peg him as "Soft on Terror." He's demonstrated a willingness to engage in peace talks with the Taliban, and has the New START accord to show that he's pretty good at it. The Clinton administration carried out covert talks with the Iranian regime for years, hoping to reach some kind of detente, and look who happens to be Secretary of State.
Another parallel to Nixon going to China: Iran is a competitor of significant power that is directly adjacent to a country where we have a major ongoing conflict (think Vietnam and the Soviet Union), and it is very much in America's interest to placate them.
I can definitely see a path to a negotiated resolution here. We'll just have to see how it plays out.
The second half of your post very effectively undermines the first half, as well as your final paragraph.
Those sanctions are as full of holes as Swiss cheese. Oil in fungible on the world market. The actual effects of the price of the oil the U.S. imports, you've convinced me, is likely to be minimal.
If so, how can the Arab Spring have come as a surprise to the US?
Organizations like the National Democratic Institute and private pro-democracy NGOs have operations all over the world. It's still a surprise when a democratic uprising breaks out. They're not a very powerful tool for making things happen on our schedule.
The US has no where near the massive numbers of B-2 bombers or whiz bang missiles necessary to pulverize Iranians into submission.
We would certainly have less capability, no question, compared to having naval aviation in close. I'm disagreeing with the overheated rhetoric about "the end of American power projection, any pretensions to global and possibly regional hegemony." Too far!
In addition to the expansion in the capabilities of the bomber fleet - which serves to greatly reduce the sheer numbers needed by greatly upping accuracy, and thus making each sortie count a great deal more - your statement is too absolute about the aircraft carriers themselves. They would be forced to stand farther off, thus reducing the number of sorties by making the planes fly further, but they wouldn't be out of the battle.
The Iranians will target the tankers, forcing US naval task forces and assets into harms way, in a littoral, war-fighting environment to protect those tankers.
...for as long as their minute Navy and shore batteries remained operational. Even a carrier-less Navy + air power could suppress Iranian fire.
BTW, the reference to "Missouri" is to one of the bases from which B-2s fly - and from which they have been used any number of times to hit targets in the region and return home. I could just as well have said Diego Garcia or Baghram.
The destruction of the battleship fleet at Pearl Harbor - the heart of American naval power at the time - certainly didn't prevent us from projecting power over the next few years.
The increased precision of the American land-based bomber fleet makes large numbers of sorties from carriers less important. When one B-2 can effectively, reliably hit a couple dozen different targets and then go home to Missouri, carrier aviation becomes less important.
It conceded its authority to the President by legislation, which is itself an unconstitutional act.
If this is true, then every single limitation the EPA has ever placed on the emission of air pollutants is unconstitutional as well. Congress didn't pass those regulations; it "ceded its authority to the" executive "by legislation," by passing the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, which authorize the executive to decide what substances will be regulated, and how.
But, of course, both the AUMF and the Clean Air Act regulations are perfectly Constitutional, as Congress using its powers to enable the executive to make decisions happens all the time, and has since the beginning of the Republic.
Pretty much the only people who claim otherwise - who claim that Congress cannot delegate its powers, under whatever conditions it decides, to the executive - are extremist libertarians seeking to overturn the modern regulatory/welfare state.
‘why do you assume it must be the U.S. Government behind it? That is, unless you harbor an irrational sense that only the U.S. Government is capable of such atrocities.’
one has to conclude that you never read any books about the cia involvement abroad. please do...the us government is capable of committing atrocities on a huge scale
What you just did is taught in freshmen year logic classes as the "All men are John" fallacy. It's a variety of fallacious reasoning that takes the proposition "John is a man" and draws the conclusion "All men are John." Sort of like you just did with "the CIA" as "John" and "atrocities" as "men."
what would be the mission of americans in iraq at this moment?
The same as any other foreign service mission in a friendly country: to keep up relations, engage in military and other forms of bilateral cooperation, and generally work to look after national interests in that country. In this case, they've got rather a lot of security guards, because there are rather a lot of security threats.
I get it, I get it: America bad, blah blah blah. Fine, whatever, but it's time to acknowledge that the war and the occupation are over, and we're now talking about a completely different kind of American badness.
I believe that our very secretive forces are very active in conducting violence against individuals and small groups.
The "people and small groups" who belong to al Qaeda on the receiving end of that violence aren't going to ruin my holiday. It is an abdication of moral, legal, and political responsibility to simply call them "people" and leave it at that.
And I think the violence is so secretive because much of it could not be justified in the light of day by a “rule of law” nation.
How very odd, then, that our government goes on TV and brags about successful strikes against al Qaeda targets, if it's so ashamed of them. Covert means are usually used in war in order to avoid tipping off the target.
I just don't buy this. The difference between Britain and France, Germany, or Japan in the inter-war years was much, much less significant than the difference between the US and our nearest competitors today. Any two other great powers, working together, could have certainly won a war against Britain alone in 1930. If Russia and China together went to war against the United States alone today, the outcome would be a certain American victory.
We might not be where we were in 1993, but we're a lot closer to that than to first-among-equals.
Barack Obama has explicitly, repeatedly renounced the formulation "War on Terror," clarifying that we are fighting a war against Al Qaeda.
And given the statements from people like David Patraeus and Leon Panetta, this administration clearly sees that war as one that can be won, and brought to a definite end. I expect we'll see Obama announce victory in that war sometime in his second term.
Once the bombings take place and the strait is closed...
That's quite an assumption there. People have been assuring me that a bombing campaign against Iran was imminent for the past seven years. Remember when Bush was going to make sure and do it before he left office? When Obama was going to make sure and do so before leaving Iraq, so he could give the Israelis over-flight authorization?
Not so much, as it turned out. But like fundamentalist preachers predicting the end of the world, or Austrian economists predicting runaway inflation, the failure of the predicted event to manifest itself never seems to dampen the certainty of the next fellow.
You do an excellent job, professor, of charting a middle course in your analysis of America's reaction to/involvement in the Arab Spring uprisings. The USA was neither the instigator of these movements, nor hostile to them. We were taken by surprise, took a while to get our bearings, and eventually ended up on the right side of history, of ousting the dictators - even our longtime allies.
I have one complaints, though: I think you vastly overestimate the popularity of Myth #1. You write, "Americans are so full of self-admiration that they cannot see Iraq as it is, and as it is perceived in the Arab world." I think most Americans understand quite well that Iraq was a fiasco and that Bush's "Model Democracy" strategy crashed and burned quite some time ago.
Also, let's not forget that there was a series of similar bombings, targeting Shiite mosques and other soft targets, in Afghanistan just three weeks ago:
Let's see here: terrorist bombings, multiple simultaneous attacks, targeting Shiites, in countries with ties the the United States. Hmmm...who does that sound like?
This actually more like the foreign-jihadi-led terror campaign against Shiites, culminating in the bombing of the Golden Mosque, in 2006, than like the native-Iraqi-Sunni-led insurgency that began in 2003. As you say, yesterday's attacks targeted soft targets associated with Shiite Iraqis, not government forces, which (along with American military forces) were the primary targets of the Sunni insurgency.
Remember, the al Qaedist terror campaign was designed to provoke revenge-killings against Iraqi Sunnis, thus leading to a civil war. It worked, resulting in the ethnic cleansing of many thousands of Sunnis. The Sunnis lost that civil war very, very badly. Why would Iraqi Sunnis, as opposed to foreign forces, want to replicate that episode?
Nobody, apparently, actually gives a damn about the truth when it comes to the MEK. Those people and their situation only exists as a launching pad to read off old note cards.
I like bashing Republicans for "supporting a terrorist group" as much as the next guy, but does the MEK really still belong on the State Department's list?
That video is sickening. What kind of a man does that to a woman?
Tough guys, six or eight on one, wearing helmets and carrying clubs, ganging up on a woman!
I couldn't do that. I couldn't do that Michelle Bachmann. I couldn't do it Liz Cheney. I couldn't do it to some Klan woman who'd been screaming slurs and throwing rocks at children a minute before. I don't have it in me.
They'd broken the line already, they'd sent the protesters running. They weren't fighting anyone; they were singling out a helpless person for a beating.
Mr. Evans has not heard the State Department make public statements about Egypt's internal political situation, so therefore, the only reasonable thing to conclude is that we're the puppet master.
Nothing you've written is evidence that the United States is pulling strings. You've written an explanation of what the United States' motive would be if it was pulling strings, but you skipped over the part of actually providing any reason to think they're doing so.
Basically, you're using reasoning remarkably like that of the Iraq War's supporters: you start out with your ideological vision of how things just gotta work, and then you assume that the facts just gotta support that vision.
The word "reality-based community" was created to describe people who take the opposite tack.
the US seems to be using its leverage not against the Muslim political parties, and not against the left-wing protesters, but against the people of Egypt
the ousting of Saddam showed the Arab peoples that their leaders are not invincible supermen and this led directly to the “Arab Spring” ousting of the dictators
I never knew that "directly" meant "eight years later,
or "after a period in which democratic agitation in the region was all but shut down," or "only after the mission and the people who who ordered it had been thoroughly repudiated both at home and around the globe."
Foud Ajami, like most people who were wrong about the Iraq War, is trying to cover his butt.
The difference isn't between the US and France, but between the crimes.
It is much, much easier to prosecute political figures for corruption or larceny or other ordinary crimes than for war crimes. This is not something unique to the US - look at how Israel prosecuted a president for rape, but nobody gets so much as a summons for the attack on Gaza.
This is because rape, bribery, or other ordinary crimes are not topics of disagreement. Everybody is against them.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees here, professor.
Ever since Obama came into office, he and Congress have been at loggerheads over how to handle terror detainees. Congress wants them to be put into military custody, while Obama, Holder, and the rest of the administration want them tried and held in the federal criminal justice system. Congress has been trying to make the administration cave, and they've refused. Not a single person has been put into military custody under Obama.
Obama tried to move Gitmo detainees into the federal prisons, and try them in federal court, and Congress passed legislation forbidding the administration from doing so. Obama and Holder fought the good fight in a very public manner (remember the effort to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York?), and they got their butts kicked.
Now, Congress tried to tie the administration's hands by including language that would have forced the administration to put terror suspects into military custody, and Obama refused, issuing a veto threat and making them back down. Going forward, he will be able to do what he has been doing all along - using the real courts and the real prison system to try and imprison terrorists.
Because of the stance Obama took, the next guy who tries to blow up a plane with his underpants will be handled just like the last guy - arrested by the FBI, tried in federal court, and sentenced to a term in the federal penitentiary. The reason this is so - the reason he won't be shipped off to a military brig - is because of the stance the administration took on this bill.
HRW gets an important point wrong. The section referred to here:
The bill also requires the US military take custody of certain terrorism suspects even inside the United States, cases that previously have been handled by federal, state and local law enforcement authorities.
was removed by the House-Senate conference committee today. This was the section over which Obama threatened his veto, and its removal is why he said he'll sign it.
What's left is language authorizing military detention (but not of United States persons in the US) but not requiring it, which is in accordance with current law. There's even a section that stipulates that the bill doesn't change current law in this area.
So, Obama continues to have the authority to hold terrorism suspects in military detention (although he's never used this power and doesn't support doing so). This could become a problem under a future president, however, who doesn't agree with Obama about how to handle such suspects.
All of this is contingent on the 2001 AUMF. What we need is for Obama to declare that war over before he leaves office, so that these powers aren't left lying around for the next president.
Both in word and deed she repeatedly showed she did consider that killing all those children was “worth it”
This is called "defining your conclusion" or "begging the question," and it's a logical fallacy.
You are taking the statement that is being questioned - that Albright believed that half a million children died from the sanctions - and assuming it to be true, in order to prove itself.
If Albright did not, as she has made clear she did not, believe that the "cost" of the policy was as high as Stahl claimed, then her support for the policy does not in any way demonstrate that she thought the policy was worth the cost.
I'm sure the oil angle played some role, but I really do think it was less important that security/geopolitical concerns. It has subsequently come out that the administration intended Iraq to be the first of three wars to topple the governments of the "Axis of Evil," the other two being Iran and North Korea. We certainly wouldn't invade North Korea for oil, but to eliminate a hostile country that was viewed as a threat.
And Bush really did pull the American troops off the bases in Saudi Arabia, at the request of the Bush family's very close friends in the House of Saud.
"she thought the sanctions were ‘worth it’ in the full knowledge that they had resulted in the death of half a million babies?!"
No, she DENIED that the policies had resulted in the death of a half million children. (Oh, and "babies?" Heck, even Stahls' "some have said" statement wasn't about "babies.")
The fact that you make an assertion does not mean that that assertion is true and in this case your assertion is demonstrably false. She condemned herself out of her own mouth
And then clarified out of her own mouth, yet you decide to completely ignore that. You won't even acknowledge the retraction she made in here book, you're so honest.
furthermore her actions as Secretary of State both before and after that interview prove that she supported the policies leading to those childrens’ deaths and that she did indeed consider their deaths worth it.,/i>
Her policies demonstrate that she supported the policies towards Iraq, yes, but that's not the matter that's under dispute. The point of disagreement was whether she agreed that the "cost" was as high as half a million deaths. She plainly did not.
Unlike Albright and her defenders... I'm actually not terribly fond of Albright. Too hawkish for me. I just have this, apparently unusual, habit of sticking to the facts, instead of believing and ignoring things based on how convenient they are for me.
I don’t have to resort either to deliberate falsehoods or to trying to conceal things
Clearly, you do, since you won't even acknowledge the existence of those statements she's made renouncing her misstatement.
No matter how passionately you insult me, one of us is willing to acknowledge the facts, and one of us is not.
So your argument is that the Iraqi government would never buy military equipment instead of spending the money on helping the populace, unless the United States is secretly controlling them?
This seems like a bit of a stretch. Middle Eastern governments - hell, all governments - have been putting guns ahead of butter for a lot longer than the American involvement in Iraq. That's not terribly strong evidence for you claim.
And what about Karzai’s miraculous election?
Karzai is a much better better example than Iraq. Iraq and Afghanistan aren't the same country, you know, and different things can happen in different places.
They would never allow someone who is not friendly to the US to get elected, otherwise, what was that huge waste of lives and money for?
As all of the examples I listed demonstrate, the Bush administration did indeed try quite hard to get its puppets into power. They also tried quite hard to establish a permanent American military presence in Iraq, but that didn't work, either. I agree wholeheartedly that the Bush administration had an imperialist policy towards Iraq...but they failed. They didn't get what they wanted.
She made it quite clear that she was responding to the question of whether the effects of the sanctions were "worth it," not the claim about the number, which she explicitly clarified she didn't agree with.
Of course, you know this. You're just deliberately trying to hide that fact.
I think you're just declaring that whatever outcome presented itself must have been the goal from the beginning.
It would be much more in keeping with the historical evidence, both from Iraq and from other American regime-change efforts, to conclude that the purpose was not a destabilized Iraq, but a stable client state in which to base the troops that we were moving out of Saudi Arabia.
Remember when our "hand-picked puppet" Malaki hosted Ahmedinejad in Baghdad, and embraced and kissed him in front of the cameras, after throngs turned out to throw flowers at his motorcade?
Our "hand-picked puppets" quite dramatically failed to come to to power in Iraq. Remember when Chalabi (Shiny Suits Be Upon Him) was going to roll into Baghdad like a latter-day DeGaulle?
Remember when the US wanted to delay elections, and Sistani brought the Shiites out into the streets and forced us to hold them with the threat of a mass uprising?
Remember Lashkar Brahimi? Remember the UN mission? Remember "brave man" Ayad Allawi?
It takes a certain historical revisionism to look at the Bush administration's utter failure to subdue Iraq and conclude that we're the puppet-masters pulling the strings. They may have thought that Iraq in the 21st century was just like Central America in the 1950s, but as it turned out, not so much.
Or do you agree with President Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who said that their deaths were “worth it”?
This is a misrepresentation of Albright's position. She said she thought the effects of the sanctions were "worth it," but she disputed that claim that there had been half a million deaths caused by them.
We should also ask what would have happened had Saddam remained in power. Of course this is conjecture, but had he continued as before then it would seem reasonable to suppose that the number of deaths would have run into the 100s of thousands, with corresponding numbers of widows, orphans and displaced people.
But, of course, as of 2002, he couldn't have "continued as before." All of the events you cite happened at least a decade before Operation Iraqi Freedom. The No-Fly Zone and No-Drive Zone and other containment efforts had long since rendered him incapable of carrying out such atrocities. Heck, he couldn't even stop the weakest group in the country, the Kurds, from setting up a quasi-independent state allied with the US inside Iraqi territory.
Much of the violence post 2003 has been inflicted by Al-Qaeda affiliated groups. It may be argued that Western intervention created the conditions in which these groups could conduct violent campaigns, but it is still not obvious why all the casualties they inflicted should be attributed to Western intervention.
Since the purpose of the war was to bring about political changes in Iraq, this argument that we should not judge it by the consequences of the political changes it brought about is a non-starter.
I also find it a bit disturbing that Juan simply lumps “Iraqis” into one big category, not differentiating from combatants and civilians, and who was responsible for them.
Well, yes and no. Point taken about the vast majority of these Iraqi casualties not being deliberately killed by Americans - and that, in fact, most of them were killed by other Iraqis in the ethnic cleansing, or by foreign jihadists in their terror campaign against Shiites, or by the Iraqi resistance fighting against the Iraq state.
HOWEVER, and there's a big HOWEVER, we set the stage for this with our invasion. Our invasion and occupation attracted the jihadists (remember "fly paper?" Remember "fight them in Baghdad so we don't have to fight them in Boston?") It was our occupation and attempt to govern the country that they set out to destroy by sparking a Shitte-Sunni civil war.
And keep in mind, we invaded Iraq for the purpose of bringing about political change there. The difference between Saddam's Iraq and post-Saddam Iraq was the purpose and justification for the war - so pointing out what a catastrophe Iraq is still an indictment of the operation, even if most of those deaths weren't directly caused by American fire.
In your opinion, Professor, is Assad a gangster who is only in it for himself, or someone who feels a genuine responsibility as a leader of the Alawites?
So, the bill would authorize indefinite military detentions of non-United States persons captured on American soil, and it would authorize indefinite military detention of US citizens captured outside of the US, but not the military detention of US persons arrested in the US.
the provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act that explicitly allow US military personnel to arrest Americans and others anywhere in the world and hold them in detention indefinitely without trial.
This isn't true anymore. The "Feinstein Amendment" forbids holding American captured on US soil. From Mother Jones: The bill no longer authorizes the indefinite military detention of Americans captured in the US. That authority was removed from the Senate bill by a compromise amendment that stated nothing in the bill was intended to change existing authority on detention. While Senators such as Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) argue that the president already has the authority to do so based on the 2004 Supreme Court decision Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, that case involved an American captured in Afghanistan. The Supreme Court has not yet weighed in on the constitutionality of indefinite military detention of Americans suspected of terrorism who are apprehended in the US.
The Feinstein Amendment inserted this language:
(e) Authorities- Nothing in this section (that is, Section 1031, which authorizes the military detention) shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities, relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.
The Marxist perspective is remarkably limited. It takes one useful insight, and tries to blow it up into an all-encompassing theory of everything. Everything must be explained by the class struggle, and anything that doesn't fit into that narrow formulation, you're just supposed to close your eyes and stick your fingers in your ears.
Note the definitions of "covered persons" under Sec 1031, (b) (1) and (2):
(b) Covered Persons- A covered person under this section is any person as follows:
(1) A person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks.
(2) A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.
Say what you will about the MEK, but they haven't been conducting or supporting hostilities against the US in aid of al Qaeda. The Wahabbist fundies in al Qaeda would no more work with these Marxists than they'd work with Saddam Hussein.
This would be an excellent time for Joe Biden to visit New Delhi, capital of the world's largest democracy. Maybe he can lay a wreath for the victims of the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament.
One good reason to end the Afghan War sooner rather than later: so we can stop pretending India and Pakistan are equivalent.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you read my comment denouncing the use of Bush-era detention practices, on a thread about holding people in indefinite military detention, and concluded that I was writing a comment in support of torture (a noted Bush-era detention practice).
"Can anyone doubt that if Egypt’s foreign affairs were not held under the control of a pro-US military, that a democratic Egypt that sets its own foreign policy would be treated no differently by the US than Iran is today?"
Pretty much anyone with any depth of knowledge at all about the region and American policy there can doubt that. There are all sorts of countries in the region that are "not held under the control of a pro-US military," but which aren't subject to economic sanctions like Iran. Algeria comes to mind. Tunisia. Oman. Lebanon.
There is quite a bit of room between the two poles you suggest.
One big question: If the regime was behind it, why have police teargas them and try to break the rally up?
They didn't try very hard.
My impression is that they were trying to make the attack on the embassy look sort of like an Arab Spring/OWS-type uprising, and the police were props to produce the correct effect for the cameras.
While 99% of the "freedom and democracy" happy talk from people in the Bush administration and its supporters was a transparent, cynical line of bull, there really does seem to be a 1% who actually believed it.
I will never understand the tendency to cast the United States, operating behind the scenes, as the prime motive force of political events in the Middle East.
The other day, someone described the House of Saud as "obedient" to the United States. Yeah, right - have you seen gas prices lately?
Dick Cheney's fantasies aside, the MENA region in the second decade of the 21st century is not Central America in the 1950s, and it's just misleading to describe the internal politics of a country like Egypt that way.
Between 1991 and 1998, the defense budget was cut by more than 20%, and under very similar circumstances - the disappearance of the primary security threat that had been driving military spending, during a period of great concern about the size of the national debt.
Unless you can give me some explanation for why we are in a different situation today, all you're doing is telling me that something is impossible, despite a recent example of that very thing happening.
Noting that America has engaged in acts of war does not, you might be surprised to learn, refute the observation that the American public is supportive of democracy, and feels more positively towards democratic countries.
My claim is that Obama supported Mubarak until there was no feasible way to maintain him in power.
And that simply isn't so. Obama actively worked to erode Mubarak's ability to maintain his power (the military peer-to-peer contacts aimed at denying him the strongest tool he had to remain in power). There's some discussion of this here:
"U.S. officials are using their contacts to do what they can to encourage a governmental transition and to promote restraint by the Egyptian Army."
You claim:
Obama came into office with an obedient dictatorship in Egypt. If he didn’t prefer it, he had no reason to wait for hundreds to die in protests to say he opposed it....There are obedient dictatorships in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and others right now.
First of all, "Obedient?" Did you just describe the Saudi government as "obedient" to the United States? That is a laughable misunderstanding.
Secondly, If Obama does not prefer them, he can say so at any time. How do you explain that he does not?
Because for the United States to dictate to other countries what to do with their governments, in the absence of large-scale popular movements aimed at ousting those governments, would be completely useless, as well as utterly imperialistic. Unless we're backing Arab-Spring type movements, our choices are either to support the government, to use American force to bring about regime change, or to make some useless statements. Why wait until there is actually a chance of the populace of Egypt overthrowing its government before backing them? The question answers itself - because having such a movement, such a revolutionary historical moment, is a necessary precondition for any action in favor of local democracy to have any meaning, or chance of success.
My claim is that Barack Obama would have the Middle East ruled by pliant dictators if possible.
And your claim in utterly belied by the administration's actions in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. I suggest you read up on America's behavior during the Cold War, to get a sense of how we behave when we want to support pliant dictators. Did we send in the CIA to assassinate the protest leaders? Did we send shipments of arms and money to the government to crush the protests? Did we go on TV and denounce the protesters as being in league with America's enemies? No, we did none of the things that the United States has done when it sought to back pliant dictators against popular uprisings.
To anyone familiar with that history, the claim that Obama's actions towards Egypt are even remotely similar is completely implausible.
Nethanyahu's comments are intended for an American audience.
Among American Zionists, the claim that Israel is "the only democracy in the Middle East," a country much more in line with our own democratic values than those nasty Arab countries, is a central plank in their argument for why the United States should support Israel.
The emergence of democratic states in the Arab world is an immediate threat to the Israel lobby's case to the American people.
If Obama would prefer an obedient dictatorship in Egypt, he certainly has a funny way of showing it.
Go back and look at how George Bush handled the street protests in Pakistan against Mushariff. He called the military dictatorship our great ally, and claimed that al Qaeda would get their hands on nukes if the popular movement succeeded in ousting him. He backed the military dictator to the hilt, and offered his support, and demonized the opposition.
As opposed to Obama, who ordered his military commanders with contacts in the region to get in touch with the officers they knew in the Egyptian army, and urge - urge, a much more accurate description than "order" - them to disobey orders to put down the uprising with violence. At the same time, he and Clinton were making numerous public statements supporting the protesters, calling for their rights to be respected, and urging reforms.
To anyone who has seen the United States back a pliant dictator over a democratic movement, your claim that Obama was supported the former last spring looks distinctly implausible.
First Clinton says delay in elections is ‘appropriate’, now scolding SCAF.
They original delay in the elections was done at the request of the protesters, to allow the liberals and unionists and other groups to organize, because the MB had such a head start as to make the playing field for elections unbalanced.
We need to remember the original protests, and the administration's response. It turned out that they were doing a lot more behind the scenes - such as the peer-to-peer communication from our military officers, urging their counterparts to disobey orders to shoot the protesters - than was apparent.
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Vietnam is to the far left what Munich is to the neoconservatives: an important and illuminating historical event that has many lessons for us, that they blow up into a Universal Model That Explains Everything, in order to avoid the need to think about the specific circumstances of different situations, and to foster an facile satisfaction in their own alleged superior understanding of history.
I think it is you, not Schmitt, who is straining to frame events as being in line with a pre-recorded political narrative.
As for the Shia, Sunnis and Kurds, the neocons did not want even to hear about them until they made themselves heard during the civil war in Iraq.
Wow. It's like you don't even know that the United States spent a decade propping up a Kurdish quasi-state in northern Iraq before the war.
Oh, Turkey. Did you mess with Texas? Heh.
And you go to zero with foreign aid for all of those countries. And it doesn’t make any difference who they are
...countries like Iran, and Syria and Turkey
I think I just got a little bit stupider. Like one little corner of my brain couldn't take it anymore and gave up the ghost.
Good point.
Seen this?
http://www.dailykos.com/tv/w/002917/
This is not a president worried about the Republicans calling him soft. It's the economy that's his soft spot right now.
My guess is that the Obama administration decided that reassuring the Israelis about the US missile shield via these joint military drills might have been misinterpreted in the region an implied threat of a joint US-Israeli military attack on, say, the Natanz nuclear facilities.
There's also the possibility that the Obama administration is doing to punish Israel for the assassination campaign of Iranian scientists, and to visibly distance itself from the Israelis.
My guess is that he is not at all pleased that the United States gets blowback for Israeli actions, and doesn't like it when Israel does something inflammatory.
Is this coming out now because the US is unhappy with Israel over the Iranian assassination, and is tired to getting blowback for Israeli actions?
Looks like Israel is determined to regain the "Worst Ally" crown from Pakistan.
They've definitely put some distance between themselves and third-place Saudi Arabia with this little stunt.
Maybe, but if the MEK were launching an offensive on their own, why would they target Iran's nuclear program?
I assume you're referring to the air strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban commanders.
As it turns out, there actually is a difference between military strikes against combatants fighting against you in a war, and assassinating the citizens of a country with whom no state of war exists.
The opportunity belonged to an Iranian who could move freely and had his papers in order.
Or someone who could pass himself off as such.
I don't know anything about the Saudi intelligence services.
I know that the post-Porter Goss CIA's human/clandestine operation is a shell of its former self. I know that the CIA has been killing al Qaeda terrorists, and that they haven't been using close-in, covert ops like this to do it. The damage the Bush administration did to the CIA is one of the reasons why the US is relying so much on drones and special forces teams. They couldn't have gotten somebody close to Awlaki if they tried.
I know that the Mossad carries out close-in assassinations of Palestinian and Hezbollah targets with some regularity, inserting their own people into Arab communities, or turning locals.
Let's just say that I know which square I'd put my chips on.
Wanting something and trying to make it happen are two different things. I wanted the Saddam government to go away, but that doesn't mean I supported the Iraq War.
Also, the regime-change claim doesn't fit in with the rest of what the source said, which was about creating public pressure for POLICY, not REGIME, change.
The "regime change" charge is based on a single retracted statement from the WaPo, and the additional quotes from that same source make it pretty clear that the Post got the statement wrong.
You really shouldn't include it.
Your orientalist distortion above notwithstanding,
You're throwing out words that you think seem powerful, but they are utterly without meaning. It is "orientalist" for me to agree with the Egyptian, Libyan, and Tunisian people that their dictatorial governments should go? Whatever.
To suggest otherwise is down right racist in my view.
Good think nobody has suggested that, then. Not me, nor the Egyptian, Libyan, Syrian, and Tunisian people with whom I am agreeing, and who you seem to think engaged in racist orientalism for denouncing their country's dictators.
Majid exact phrase is that “Islam fosters tyranny”,
No, it is not. Good lord, we can all still read the post, you know!
His EXACT phrase is, "One problem in American-Muslim relations is the old American conviction that Islam fosters tyranny." and later, "Muslims need to face the facts and realize that old perception of their societies as despotic had some basis in truth."
You completely misrepresented his statement. What you just did is not different from what the Romney campaign did with Obama's quoting of the McCain campaign. You took a statement in which he described someone else's position, and pretended that he was stating it as his own.
I will generously attribute this misrepresentation to your reading disability, and not accuse you of deliberate dishonesty.
According to you and Majid, humanity should accommodate settler-colonialism and Apartheid — decency, morality and international law be damned.
Another misrepresentation. Neither of us has written a single word about colonialism, Apartheid, or any other Israeli policy. Here is the sum total of what Majid wrote about Israel: They also must accommodate themselves to the historical reality of Israel
And that's it. While my exact words were "the existence of Israel."
It's becoming more difficult to attribute your errors to good-faith misunderstanding.
Well joe, some people think that the struggle for justice is more important than the individual.
To be more precise, these "some people" think that their "struggle for justice" is more important that other individuals.
Which is both cowardly and morally abhorrent.
It seems that you are advocating that if an entity (such as Israel) can elude punishment for long enough, those crimes become irrelevant, perhaps even quaint.
Ever read about how the Persian nation was founded? How about Canada? How about, say, every single nation on the face of the earth?
You think you're going to "punish" Israel? Yeah, good luck with that. I just hope that there aren't too many more millions of people whose lives are ended or impoverished in this endless quest for punishment.
You know, the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria had no trouble acknowledging that there was too much tyranny in their society.
Perhaps you can explain where they went wrong.
Let me get this straight: your argument is that the statements "There is tyranny in the Muslim world" and "Jews are evil" are equivalent?
Uh...ok.
Silly me, I thought settler-colonialism is now a crime and international law prohibits ethnic cleansing and the acquisition of territory by force. If you think this should be ignored/scrubbed, do come out and say it.
Those are what you consider to be the options? Either "ignore/scrub" the history of Israel's settlement, or maintain perpetual hostile relations while refusing to recognize Israel...for how long? No matter how much it harms your own people, just keep up the crusade against the existence of Israel, regardless of how many generations pass? This is the lack of imagination that comes from not having to incorporate the real world consequences of one's bromides into one's political stance.
Hey, Middle Eastern residents, keep up the fight against Israel! Tridant is behind you; several thousand miles behind you, but still, behind you!
If this is true, then why were the Libyan people waving American flags?
Don't overstate your case here. America is still quite effective. The Bush years certainly took some luster off our shine, but American soft power still seems to pretty compelling to an awful lot of people.
Lots of nations have possessed atomic weapons in the past sixty years. Not a one of them, except the US, has used those weapons. Even N. Korea, which is about as looney a nation as you can be, hasn’t.
So you're perfectly comfortable with nuclear proliferation?
You know, there are a lot of countries that would love to have nuclear weapons, and would be willing to pay good money. Meanwhile, the United States is suffering from elevated unemployment and has a large trade deficit. We could put many thousands of people to work if we established a nuclear arms export industry. Why not?
Also, you say that Not a one of them, except the US, has used those weapons. It's true that nobody has fired them off in the modern nuclear era (that is, since atomic weapons went from the small ones in 1945, which were only marginally worse than the other bombardment weapons of the day, to the world-destroying monsters we have today), but that's not the only use to which a weapon can be put. They can be used to make an aggressor invulnerable to counterattack. They can be used for extortion.
I am NOT OK with nuclear proliferation, even as I agree with you that Iran would almost certainly be a rational actor with its nukes. I think it's a big mistake to downplay the dangers of nuclear weapons and proliferation just because it's momentarily convenient for a specific political debate.
Clear to whom?
Professor Cole is writing for an American audience, to whom the name "Muslim Brotherhood" is indistinguishable from a terrorist organization (which, years ago, the MB was).
Whatever Egypt’s voters come up with is guaranteed to be better than the Mubarak dictatorship the US supported for 30 years.
It is guaranteed to be better than the Saudi dictatorship that the US supports right now, with no criticism from mainstream Western commentators.
This comment sounds identical to the Iraq hawks circa 2002. "It can't be worse than Saddam!"
Wanna bet? "It can't get worse" is always wrong. It certainly can get worse. Read some history.
Yusef,
Why can’t people be allowed to build a society that does not include lewdness and vice?
Because human beings are human beings, and to create a society without lewdness and vice would require a police state, complete with informants, torture chambers, heavy-handed suppression of dissent, and all of the other accessories of those states that saw it as their right and duty to create utopia by force.
For that matter, how do we know this was Iraqis, as opposed to al Qaeda?
It was the international jihadists who started the terrorist provocations in 2004, and the provocation of a Shiite backlash against Iraq's Sunnis, while nonsensical for Iraqi Sunnis, makes sense for foreign jihadists.
Why does your Shiite Crescent go through the northern, Kurdish/Sunni section of Iraq, and avoid the south-eastern area around Basra?
Nixon was able to slip away to China, but does anyone think that’s even conceivable for Obama?
Why not? Like Nixon, he's "made his bones" and it would be tough for the hawks to peg him as "Soft on Terror." He's demonstrated a willingness to engage in peace talks with the Taliban, and has the New START accord to show that he's pretty good at it. The Clinton administration carried out covert talks with the Iranian regime for years, hoping to reach some kind of detente, and look who happens to be Secretary of State.
Another parallel to Nixon going to China: Iran is a competitor of significant power that is directly adjacent to a country where we have a major ongoing conflict (think Vietnam and the Soviet Union), and it is very much in America's interest to placate them.
I can definitely see a path to a negotiated resolution here. We'll just have to see how it plays out.
The second half of your post very effectively undermines the first half, as well as your final paragraph.
Those sanctions are as full of holes as Swiss cheese. Oil in fungible on the world market. The actual effects of the price of the oil the U.S. imports, you've convinced me, is likely to be minimal.
Iowa doesn't have a primary, professor.
That's why it's called the "Iowa Caucasians." Duh.
If so, how can the Arab Spring have come as a surprise to the US?
Organizations like the National Democratic Institute and private pro-democracy NGOs have operations all over the world. It's still a surprise when a democratic uprising breaks out. They're not a very powerful tool for making things happen on our schedule.
The US has no where near the massive numbers of B-2 bombers or whiz bang missiles necessary to pulverize Iranians into submission.
We would certainly have less capability, no question, compared to having naval aviation in close. I'm disagreeing with the overheated rhetoric about "the end of American power projection, any pretensions to global and possibly regional hegemony." Too far!
In addition to the expansion in the capabilities of the bomber fleet - which serves to greatly reduce the sheer numbers needed by greatly upping accuracy, and thus making each sortie count a great deal more - your statement is too absolute about the aircraft carriers themselves. They would be forced to stand farther off, thus reducing the number of sorties by making the planes fly further, but they wouldn't be out of the battle.
The Iranians will target the tankers, forcing US naval task forces and assets into harms way, in a littoral, war-fighting environment to protect those tankers.
...for as long as their minute Navy and shore batteries remained operational. Even a carrier-less Navy + air power could suppress Iranian fire.
BTW, the reference to "Missouri" is to one of the bases from which B-2s fly - and from which they have been used any number of times to hit targets in the region and return home. I could just as well have said Diego Garcia or Baghram.
The destruction of the battleship fleet at Pearl Harbor - the heart of American naval power at the time - certainly didn't prevent us from projecting power over the next few years.
The increased precision of the American land-based bomber fleet makes large numbers of sorties from carriers less important. When one B-2 can effectively, reliably hit a couple dozen different targets and then go home to Missouri, carrier aviation becomes less important.
It conceded its authority to the President by legislation, which is itself an unconstitutional act.
If this is true, then every single limitation the EPA has ever placed on the emission of air pollutants is unconstitutional as well. Congress didn't pass those regulations; it "ceded its authority to the" executive "by legislation," by passing the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, which authorize the executive to decide what substances will be regulated, and how.
But, of course, both the AUMF and the Clean Air Act regulations are perfectly Constitutional, as Congress using its powers to enable the executive to make decisions happens all the time, and has since the beginning of the Republic.
Pretty much the only people who claim otherwise - who claim that Congress cannot delegate its powers, under whatever conditions it decides, to the executive - are extremist libertarians seeking to overturn the modern regulatory/welfare state.
‘why do you assume it must be the U.S. Government behind it? That is, unless you harbor an irrational sense that only the U.S. Government is capable of such atrocities.’
one has to conclude that you never read any books about the cia involvement abroad. please do...the us government is capable of committing atrocities on a huge scale
What you just did is taught in freshmen year logic classes as the "All men are John" fallacy. It's a variety of fallacious reasoning that takes the proposition "John is a man" and draws the conclusion "All men are John." Sort of like you just did with "the CIA" as "John" and "atrocities" as "men."
Oh, and of course the American mission in Iraq contains intelligence personnel. Everyone's embassies contain intelligence personnel.
what would be the mission of americans in iraq at this moment?
The same as any other foreign service mission in a friendly country: to keep up relations, engage in military and other forms of bilateral cooperation, and generally work to look after national interests in that country. In this case, they've got rather a lot of security guards, because there are rather a lot of security threats.
I get it, I get it: America bad, blah blah blah. Fine, whatever, but it's time to acknowledge that the war and the occupation are over, and we're now talking about a completely different kind of American badness.
I believe that our very secretive forces are very active in conducting violence against individuals and small groups.
The "people and small groups" who belong to al Qaeda on the receiving end of that violence aren't going to ruin my holiday. It is an abdication of moral, legal, and political responsibility to simply call them "people" and leave it at that.
And I think the violence is so secretive because much of it could not be justified in the light of day by a “rule of law” nation.
How very odd, then, that our government goes on TV and brags about successful strikes against al Qaeda targets, if it's so ashamed of them. Covert means are usually used in war in order to avoid tipping off the target.
(what else would you call them, since they act on the orders of the President alone, no approval by congress requested, encouraged, or respected?).
We call that a "military." Tell me, in what part of the world does the legislature, having declared a war, dictate what the targets will be?
I just don't buy this. The difference between Britain and France, Germany, or Japan in the inter-war years was much, much less significant than the difference between the US and our nearest competitors today. Any two other great powers, working together, could have certainly won a war against Britain alone in 1930. If Russia and China together went to war against the United States alone today, the outcome would be a certain American victory.
We might not be where we were in 1993, but we're a lot closer to that than to first-among-equals.
So we're retrenching all the way from hyperpower to sole-superpower status.
OK. That's progress.
Barack Obama has explicitly, repeatedly renounced the formulation "War on Terror," clarifying that we are fighting a war against Al Qaeda.
And given the statements from people like David Patraeus and Leon Panetta, this administration clearly sees that war as one that can be won, and brought to a definite end. I expect we'll see Obama announce victory in that war sometime in his second term.
Once the bombings take place and the strait is closed...
That's quite an assumption there. People have been assuring me that a bombing campaign against Iran was imminent for the past seven years. Remember when Bush was going to make sure and do it before he left office? When Obama was going to make sure and do so before leaving Iraq, so he could give the Israelis over-flight authorization?
Not so much, as it turned out. But like fundamentalist preachers predicting the end of the world, or Austrian economists predicting runaway inflation, the failure of the predicted event to manifest itself never seems to dampen the certainty of the next fellow.
You do an excellent job, professor, of charting a middle course in your analysis of America's reaction to/involvement in the Arab Spring uprisings. The USA was neither the instigator of these movements, nor hostile to them. We were taken by surprise, took a while to get our bearings, and eventually ended up on the right side of history, of ousting the dictators - even our longtime allies.
I have one complaints, though: I think you vastly overestimate the popularity of Myth #1. You write, "Americans are so full of self-admiration that they cannot see Iraq as it is, and as it is perceived in the Arab world." I think most Americans understand quite well that Iraq was a fiasco and that Bush's "Model Democracy" strategy crashed and burned quite some time ago.
Also, let's not forget that there was a series of similar bombings, targeting Shiite mosques and other soft targets, in Afghanistan just three weeks ago:
http://www.google.com/url?q=http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/afghan-president-toll-shiite-attack-now-80-15132115&sa=U&ei=Mvr0TsvhK-Tl0QGt1ai4Ag&ved=0CBcQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNFQ9S_5nsUZgnqluSqkFsTJMA--jA
Let's see here: terrorist bombings, multiple simultaneous attacks, targeting Shiites, in countries with ties the the United States. Hmmm...who does that sound like?
This actually more like the foreign-jihadi-led terror campaign against Shiites, culminating in the bombing of the Golden Mosque, in 2006, than like the native-Iraqi-Sunni-led insurgency that began in 2003. As you say, yesterday's attacks targeted soft targets associated with Shiite Iraqis, not government forces, which (along with American military forces) were the primary targets of the Sunni insurgency.
Remember, the al Qaedist terror campaign was designed to provoke revenge-killings against Iraqi Sunnis, thus leading to a civil war. It worked, resulting in the ethnic cleansing of many thousands of Sunnis. The Sunnis lost that civil war very, very badly. Why would Iraqi Sunnis, as opposed to foreign forces, want to replicate that episode?
Today, several great Irans have emerged in the region; and Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain are other Irans.
This reminds me of nothing so much as the neoconservatives' gloating in 2004 that Iraq was now a little America.
Sigh. And this is what I get.
Nobody, apparently, actually gives a damn about the truth when it comes to the MEK. Those people and their situation only exists as a launching pad to read off old note cards.
I like bashing Republicans for "supporting a terrorist group" as much as the next guy, but does the MEK really still belong on the State Department's list?
When was their last terror attack?
A play in one act. The part of the Son will be played by Hillary Clinton. The part of the Mother by DSmith.
Mother: Hello?
Son: Hi, Mom, how are you doing? Just thought I'd give you a ring.
Mother: HOW COME YOU NEVER CALL ME?!?
That video is sickening. What kind of a man does that to a woman?
Tough guys, six or eight on one, wearing helmets and carrying clubs, ganging up on a woman!
I couldn't do that. I couldn't do that Michelle Bachmann. I couldn't do it Liz Cheney. I couldn't do it to some Klan woman who'd been screaming slurs and throwing rocks at children a minute before. I don't have it in me.
They'd broken the line already, they'd sent the protesters running. They weren't fighting anyone; they were singling out a helpless person for a beating.
A woman.
What kind of a man does that?
John Caddidy,
Mr. Evans has not heard the State Department make public statements about Egypt's internal political situation, so therefore, the only reasonable thing to conclude is that we're the puppet master.
Nothing you've written is evidence that the United States is pulling strings. You've written an explanation of what the United States' motive would be if it was pulling strings, but you skipped over the part of actually providing any reason to think they're doing so.
Basically, you're using reasoning remarkably like that of the Iraq War's supporters: you start out with your ideological vision of how things just gotta work, and then you assume that the facts just gotta support that vision.
The word "reality-based community" was created to describe people who take the opposite tack.
...keeping in mind that "the US is pulling strings behind the scenes" is not a wholly-absurd thesis. Maybe we are.
But nor is it a charge that we should just accept on faith, because it would fit in nicely with what some might want to believe.
the US seems to be using its leverage not against the Muslim political parties, and not against the left-wing protesters, but against the people of Egypt
And you base this on...what?
I consider the quarter-million dead because of our invasion or Iraq to be objects of pity.
the ousting of Saddam showed the Arab peoples that their leaders are not invincible supermen and this led directly to the “Arab Spring” ousting of the dictators
I never knew that "directly" meant "eight years later,
or "after a period in which democratic agitation in the region was all but shut down," or "only after the mission and the people who who ordered it had been thoroughly repudiated both at home and around the globe."
Foud Ajami, like most people who were wrong about the Iraq War, is trying to cover his butt.
The difference isn't between the US and France, but between the crimes.
It is much, much easier to prosecute political figures for corruption or larceny or other ordinary crimes than for war crimes. This is not something unique to the US - look at how Israel prosecuted a president for rape, but nobody gets so much as a summons for the attack on Gaza.
This is because rape, bribery, or other ordinary crimes are not topics of disagreement. Everybody is against them.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees here, professor.
Ever since Obama came into office, he and Congress have been at loggerheads over how to handle terror detainees. Congress wants them to be put into military custody, while Obama, Holder, and the rest of the administration want them tried and held in the federal criminal justice system. Congress has been trying to make the administration cave, and they've refused. Not a single person has been put into military custody under Obama.
Obama tried to move Gitmo detainees into the federal prisons, and try them in federal court, and Congress passed legislation forbidding the administration from doing so. Obama and Holder fought the good fight in a very public manner (remember the effort to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York?), and they got their butts kicked.
Now, Congress tried to tie the administration's hands by including language that would have forced the administration to put terror suspects into military custody, and Obama refused, issuing a veto threat and making them back down. Going forward, he will be able to do what he has been doing all along - using the real courts and the real prison system to try and imprison terrorists.
Because of the stance Obama took, the next guy who tries to blow up a plane with his underpants will be handled just like the last guy - arrested by the FBI, tried in federal court, and sentenced to a term in the federal penitentiary. The reason this is so - the reason he won't be shipped off to a military brig - is because of the stance the administration took on this bill.
Correction: the entire section wasn't removed, just portions, and some changes made.
Description of the changes here: http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/12/white-house-statement-no-veto-on-ndaa/
HRW gets an important point wrong. The section referred to here:
The bill also requires the US military take custody of certain terrorism suspects even inside the United States, cases that previously have been handled by federal, state and local law enforcement authorities.
was removed by the House-Senate conference committee today. This was the section over which Obama threatened his veto, and its removal is why he said he'll sign it.
What's left is language authorizing military detention (but not of United States persons in the US) but not requiring it, which is in accordance with current law. There's even a section that stipulates that the bill doesn't change current law in this area.
So, Obama continues to have the authority to hold terrorism suspects in military detention (although he's never used this power and doesn't support doing so). This could become a problem under a future president, however, who doesn't agree with Obama about how to handle such suspects.
All of this is contingent on the 2001 AUMF. What we need is for Obama to declare that war over before he leaves office, so that these powers aren't left lying around for the next president.
Both in word and deed she repeatedly showed she did consider that killing all those children was “worth it”
This is called "defining your conclusion" or "begging the question," and it's a logical fallacy.
You are taking the statement that is being questioned - that Albright believed that half a million children died from the sanctions - and assuming it to be true, in order to prove itself.
If Albright did not, as she has made clear she did not, believe that the "cost" of the policy was as high as Stahl claimed, then her support for the policy does not in any way demonstrate that she thought the policy was worth the cost.
I'm sure the oil angle played some role, but I really do think it was less important that security/geopolitical concerns. It has subsequently come out that the administration intended Iraq to be the first of three wars to topple the governments of the "Axis of Evil," the other two being Iran and North Korea. We certainly wouldn't invade North Korea for oil, but to eliminate a hostile country that was viewed as a threat.
And Bush really did pull the American troops off the bases in Saudi Arabia, at the request of the Bush family's very close friends in the House of Saud.
"she thought the sanctions were ‘worth it’ in the full knowledge that they had resulted in the death of half a million babies?!"
No, she DENIED that the policies had resulted in the death of a half million children. (Oh, and "babies?" Heck, even Stahls' "some have said" statement wasn't about "babies.")
The fact that you make an assertion does not mean that that assertion is true and in this case your assertion is demonstrably false. She condemned herself out of her own mouth
And then clarified out of her own mouth, yet you decide to completely ignore that. You won't even acknowledge the retraction she made in here book, you're so honest.
furthermore her actions as Secretary of State both before and after that interview prove that she supported the policies leading to those childrens’ deaths and that she did indeed consider their deaths worth it.,/i>
Her policies demonstrate that she supported the policies towards Iraq, yes, but that's not the matter that's under dispute. The point of disagreement was whether she agreed that the "cost" was as high as half a million deaths. She plainly did not.
Unlike Albright and her defenders... I'm actually not terribly fond of Albright. Too hawkish for me. I just have this, apparently unusual, habit of sticking to the facts, instead of believing and ignoring things based on how convenient they are for me.
I don’t have to resort either to deliberate falsehoods or to trying to conceal things
Clearly, you do, since you won't even acknowledge the existence of those statements she's made renouncing her misstatement.
No matter how passionately you insult me, one of us is willing to acknowledge the facts, and one of us is not.
So your argument is that the Iraqi government would never buy military equipment instead of spending the money on helping the populace, unless the United States is secretly controlling them?
This seems like a bit of a stretch. Middle Eastern governments - hell, all governments - have been putting guns ahead of butter for a lot longer than the American involvement in Iraq. That's not terribly strong evidence for you claim.
And what about Karzai’s miraculous election?
Karzai is a much better better example than Iraq. Iraq and Afghanistan aren't the same country, you know, and different things can happen in different places.
They would never allow someone who is not friendly to the US to get elected, otherwise, what was that huge waste of lives and money for?
As all of the examples I listed demonstrate, the Bush administration did indeed try quite hard to get its puppets into power. They also tried quite hard to establish a permanent American military presence in Iraq, but that didn't work, either. I agree wholeheartedly that the Bush administration had an imperialist policy towards Iraq...but they failed. They didn't get what they wanted.
No it is not a misrepresentation of her position.
It is, indeed.
She made it quite clear that she was responding to the question of whether the effects of the sanctions were "worth it," not the claim about the number, which she explicitly clarified she didn't agree with.
Of course, you know this. You're just deliberately trying to hide that fact.
I think you're just declaring that whatever outcome presented itself must have been the goal from the beginning.
It would be much more in keeping with the historical evidence, both from Iraq and from other American regime-change efforts, to conclude that the purpose was not a destabilized Iraq, but a stable client state in which to base the troops that we were moving out of Saudi Arabia.
Remember when our "hand-picked puppet" Malaki hosted Ahmedinejad in Baghdad, and embraced and kissed him in front of the cameras, after throngs turned out to throw flowers at his motorcade?
Umwut?
Our "hand-picked puppets" quite dramatically failed to come to to power in Iraq. Remember when Chalabi (Shiny Suits Be Upon Him) was going to roll into Baghdad like a latter-day DeGaulle?
Remember when the US wanted to delay elections, and Sistani brought the Shiites out into the streets and forced us to hold them with the threat of a mass uprising?
Remember Lashkar Brahimi? Remember the UN mission? Remember "brave man" Ayad Allawi?
It takes a certain historical revisionism to look at the Bush administration's utter failure to subdue Iraq and conclude that we're the puppet-masters pulling the strings. They may have thought that Iraq in the 21st century was just like Central America in the 1950s, but as it turned out, not so much.
Or do you agree with President Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who said that their deaths were “worth it”?
This is a misrepresentation of Albright's position. She said she thought the effects of the sanctions were "worth it," but she disputed that claim that there had been half a million deaths caused by them.
We should also ask what would have happened had Saddam remained in power. Of course this is conjecture, but had he continued as before then it would seem reasonable to suppose that the number of deaths would have run into the 100s of thousands, with corresponding numbers of widows, orphans and displaced people.
But, of course, as of 2002, he couldn't have "continued as before." All of the events you cite happened at least a decade before Operation Iraqi Freedom. The No-Fly Zone and No-Drive Zone and other containment efforts had long since rendered him incapable of carrying out such atrocities. Heck, he couldn't even stop the weakest group in the country, the Kurds, from setting up a quasi-independent state allied with the US inside Iraqi territory.
Much of the violence post 2003 has been inflicted by Al-Qaeda affiliated groups. It may be argued that Western intervention created the conditions in which these groups could conduct violent campaigns, but it is still not obvious why all the casualties they inflicted should be attributed to Western intervention.
Since the purpose of the war was to bring about political changes in Iraq, this argument that we should not judge it by the consequences of the political changes it brought about is a non-starter.
I also find it a bit disturbing that Juan simply lumps “Iraqis” into one big category, not differentiating from combatants and civilians, and who was responsible for them.
Well, yes and no. Point taken about the vast majority of these Iraqi casualties not being deliberately killed by Americans - and that, in fact, most of them were killed by other Iraqis in the ethnic cleansing, or by foreign jihadists in their terror campaign against Shiites, or by the Iraqi resistance fighting against the Iraq state.
HOWEVER, and there's a big HOWEVER, we set the stage for this with our invasion. Our invasion and occupation attracted the jihadists (remember "fly paper?" Remember "fight them in Baghdad so we don't have to fight them in Boston?") It was our occupation and attempt to govern the country that they set out to destroy by sparking a Shitte-Sunni civil war.
And keep in mind, we invaded Iraq for the purpose of bringing about political change there. The difference between Saddam's Iraq and post-Saddam Iraq was the purpose and justification for the war - so pointing out what a catastrophe Iraq is still an indictment of the operation, even if most of those deaths weren't directly caused by American fire.
In your opinion, Professor, is Assad a gangster who is only in it for himself, or someone who feels a genuine responsibility as a leader of the Alawites?
Turkey unenthusiastically followed NATO into Libya, because they saw it as their duty to be loyal to their allies.
If they call on their allies this time, I don't see how the western powers can say no.
So, the bill would authorize indefinite military detentions of non-United States persons captured on American soil, and it would authorize indefinite military detention of US citizens captured outside of the US, but not the military detention of US persons arrested in the US.
the provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act that explicitly allow US military personnel to arrest Americans and others anywhere in the world and hold them in detention indefinitely without trial.
This isn't true anymore. The "Feinstein Amendment" forbids holding American captured on US soil. From Mother Jones: The bill no longer authorizes the indefinite military detention of Americans captured in the US. That authority was removed from the Senate bill by a compromise amendment that stated nothing in the bill was intended to change existing authority on detention. While Senators such as Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) argue that the president already has the authority to do so based on the 2004 Supreme Court decision Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, that case involved an American captured in Afghanistan. The Supreme Court has not yet weighed in on the constitutionality of indefinite military detention of Americans suspected of terrorism who are apprehended in the US.
The Feinstein Amendment inserted this language:
(e) Authorities- Nothing in this section (that is, Section 1031, which authorizes the military detention) shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities, relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.
Jeffrey,
The Marxist perspective is remarkably limited. It takes one useful insight, and tries to blow it up into an all-encompassing theory of everything. Everything must be explained by the class struggle, and anything that doesn't fit into that narrow formulation, you're just supposed to close your eyes and stick your fingers in your ears.
Well, no, not really. The Defense Authorization Act language refers to members and affiliates of al Qaeda, not just to "terrorists" generally.
The MEK is not known to have any ties to al Qaeda.
The text of the relevant sections can be found at this link: http://www.dailykos.com/comments/1042849/44178549#c4
Note the definitions of "covered persons" under Sec 1031, (b) (1) and (2):
(b) Covered Persons- A covered person under this section is any person as follows:
(1) A person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks.
(2) A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.
Say what you will about the MEK, but they haven't been conducting or supporting hostilities against the US in aid of al Qaeda. The Wahabbist fundies in al Qaeda would no more work with these Marxists than they'd work with Saddam Hussein.
China is not in any way "Marxist," and hasn't been since shortly after Mao died. They're state-capitalist, or corporatist.
The Lebanese Shiite leader accused Ghalioun of saying these things in order to gain support from the United States and Israel.
I haven’t seen any “Strident” support for Assad’s regime. Just a careful neutrality.
Because nothing says "careful neutrality" in Middle Eastern politics like accusing one side of pandering to Israel and the United States.
Puck Fakistan.
This would be an excellent time for Joe Biden to visit New Delhi, capital of the world's largest democracy. Maybe he can lay a wreath for the victims of the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament.
One good reason to end the Afghan War sooner rather than later: so we can stop pretending India and Pakistan are equivalent.
I read Baredei's comments as an effort to get those "non-partisan" liberal youth to get their act together and actually organize for elections.
JTMcPhee,
If I'm understanding you correctly, you read my comment denouncing the use of Bush-era detention practices, on a thread about holding people in indefinite military detention, and concluded that I was writing a comment in support of torture (a noted Bush-era detention practice).
That's very odd.
Obama named al-Qaeda ‘affiliates’ so as to invade everywhere else.
Um, refresh my memory: who has Obama invaded?
Joe, meet Bill (above.) Looks like you have stuff to talk about… Maybe you could conference in Jack Bauer.
What on earth are you talking about, and what does it have to do with what I wrote? Or with the subject of the post?
This is just bizarre.
I can't help but notice that America's counter-terrorism efforts have been a whole heck of a lot more successful since we stopped this sort of thing.
These people want to go back to Bush-era tactics? Absurd.
In the CIA's wildest dreams, it doesn't have that kind of influence Iran.
Especially these days, after the big roll-up.
"Can anyone doubt that if Egypt’s foreign affairs were not held under the control of a pro-US military, that a democratic Egypt that sets its own foreign policy would be treated no differently by the US than Iran is today?"
Pretty much anyone with any depth of knowledge at all about the region and American policy there can doubt that. There are all sorts of countries in the region that are "not held under the control of a pro-US military," but which aren't subject to economic sanctions like Iran. Algeria comes to mind. Tunisia. Oman. Lebanon.
There is quite a bit of room between the two poles you suggest.
One big question: If the regime was behind it, why have police teargas them and try to break the rally up?
They didn't try very hard.
My impression is that they were trying to make the attack on the embassy look sort of like an Arab Spring/OWS-type uprising, and the police were props to produce the correct effect for the cameras.
Elliot Abrams? I did not see that coming.
While 99% of the "freedom and democracy" happy talk from people in the Bush administration and its supporters was a transparent, cynical line of bull, there really does seem to be a 1% who actually believed it.
1. Then were are Iran and Saudi Arabia?
2. I don't recall ever hearing Hosni Mubarak or ben Ali described as "uncooperative or hostile towards US interests in the region."
If this had been an Iranian-Sudanese-Syrian Spring, that would be different.
I will never understand the tendency to cast the United States, operating behind the scenes, as the prime motive force of political events in the Middle East.
The other day, someone described the House of Saud as "obedient" to the United States. Yeah, right - have you seen gas prices lately?
Dick Cheney's fantasies aside, the MENA region in the second decade of the 21st century is not Central America in the 1950s, and it's just misleading to describe the internal politics of a country like Egypt that way.
I fear you are correct.
Gadhaffi would have survived, too, without the intervention.
I hope we're wrong.
Not going to happen. It’s an addiction, worse than crack.
But, in fact, it did happen, less than 20 years ago.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1990_2015USk_11s1li1181020_550cs_30t_30_Defense_Spending_Chart
Between 1991 and 1998, the defense budget was cut by more than 20%, and under very similar circumstances - the disappearance of the primary security threat that had been driving military spending, during a period of great concern about the size of the national debt.
Unless you can give me some explanation for why we are in a different situation today, all you're doing is telling me that something is impossible, despite a recent example of that very thing happening.
A 20% Pentagon budget cut would be perfectly consistent with what the US did at the end of the Cold War. We cut the Pentagon budget by more than 20% between 1990 and 1998: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1990_2015USk_11s1li1181020_550cs_30t_30_Defense_Spending_Chart
It was actually a great deal more than 20% if you adjust for inflation: http://www.davemanuel.com/2010/06/14/us-military-spending-over-the-years/
Noting that America has engaged in acts of war does not, you might be surprised to learn, refute the observation that the American public is supportive of democracy, and feels more positively towards democratic countries.
My claim is that Obama supported Mubarak until there was no feasible way to maintain him in power.
And that simply isn't so. Obama actively worked to erode Mubarak's ability to maintain his power (the military peer-to-peer contacts aimed at denying him the strongest tool he had to remain in power). There's some discussion of this here:
http://www.voanews.com/english/news/middle-east/US-Watches-Egypts-Army-as-Protests-Continue-115224879.html
"U.S. officials are using their contacts to do what they can to encourage a governmental transition and to promote restraint by the Egyptian Army."
You claim:
Obama came into office with an obedient dictatorship in Egypt. If he didn’t prefer it, he had no reason to wait for hundreds to die in protests to say he opposed it....There are obedient dictatorships in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and others right now.
First of all, "Obedient?" Did you just describe the Saudi government as "obedient" to the United States? That is a laughable misunderstanding.
Secondly, If Obama does not prefer them, he can say so at any time. How do you explain that he does not?
Because for the United States to dictate to other countries what to do with their governments, in the absence of large-scale popular movements aimed at ousting those governments, would be completely useless, as well as utterly imperialistic. Unless we're backing Arab-Spring type movements, our choices are either to support the government, to use American force to bring about regime change, or to make some useless statements. Why wait until there is actually a chance of the populace of Egypt overthrowing its government before backing them? The question answers itself - because having such a movement, such a revolutionary historical moment, is a necessary precondition for any action in favor of local democracy to have any meaning, or chance of success.
My claim is that Barack Obama would have the Middle East ruled by pliant dictators if possible.
And your claim in utterly belied by the administration's actions in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. I suggest you read up on America's behavior during the Cold War, to get a sense of how we behave when we want to support pliant dictators. Did we send in the CIA to assassinate the protest leaders? Did we send shipments of arms and money to the government to crush the protests? Did we go on TV and denounce the protesters as being in league with America's enemies? No, we did none of the things that the United States has done when it sought to back pliant dictators against popular uprisings.
To anyone familiar with that history, the claim that Obama's actions towards Egypt are even remotely similar is completely implausible.
Nethanyahu's comments are intended for an American audience.
Among American Zionists, the claim that Israel is "the only democracy in the Middle East," a country much more in line with our own democratic values than those nasty Arab countries, is a central plank in their argument for why the United States should support Israel.
The emergence of democratic states in the Arab world is an immediate threat to the Israel lobby's case to the American people.
If Obama would prefer an obedient dictatorship in Egypt, he certainly has a funny way of showing it.
Go back and look at how George Bush handled the street protests in Pakistan against Mushariff. He called the military dictatorship our great ally, and claimed that al Qaeda would get their hands on nukes if the popular movement succeeded in ousting him. He backed the military dictator to the hilt, and offered his support, and demonized the opposition.
As opposed to Obama, who ordered his military commanders with contacts in the region to get in touch with the officers they knew in the Egyptian army, and urge - urge, a much more accurate description than "order" - them to disobey orders to put down the uprising with violence. At the same time, he and Clinton were making numerous public statements supporting the protesters, calling for their rights to be respected, and urging reforms.
To anyone who has seen the United States back a pliant dictator over a democratic movement, your claim that Obama was supported the former last spring looks distinctly implausible.
We won World War Two by exporting oil to Europe?
What is that supposed to mean?
First Clinton says delay in elections is ‘appropriate’, now scolding SCAF.
They original delay in the elections was done at the request of the protesters, to allow the liberals and unionists and other groups to organize, because the MB had such a head start as to make the playing field for elections unbalanced.
We need to remember the original protests, and the administration's response. It turned out that they were doing a lot more behind the scenes - such as the peer-to-peer communication from our military officers, urging their counterparts to disobey orders to shoot the protesters - than was apparent.
What do you suppose the Libyan youth think about NATO and spot changing?