Just Foreign Policy News, January 15, 2013
Wyden demands drone info from Brennan; Hagel survives neocons; Iraq surge redux
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I) Actions and Featured Articles
**Action: Urge Senators to Challenge Brennan on Drone Strikes
President Obama has nominated John Brennan to lead the CIA. Human Rights Watch – and the Washington Post editorial board - have called for the CIA to stop conducting drone strikes, because
of the CIA’s lack of transparency and accountability to international
law. Urge your Senators to question Brennan on drone strike policy and
the demand that the CIA get out of drone strikes.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/cia-head-drones
**Action: Senators: Confirm Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense
President
Obama has nominated Chuck Hagel as the next Secretary of Defense. As
Secretary of Defense, Hagel will push to end the war in Afghanistan, cut
the Pentagon budget, and avoid war with Iran. Right-wing pro-war groups
are trying to obstruct Senate confirmation. 30,000 people have signed a
Just Foreign Policy petition at SignOn urging the Senate to confirm
Hagel.
http://signon.org/sign/senators-confirm-chuck-1?source=c.url&r_by=1135580
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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1)
Senator Wyden is asking John Brennan to provide Congress with the
secret legal opinions outlining the government’s ability to target and
kill Americans ahead of Brennan’s confirmation hearing to head the CIA,
his office reports. [Wyden's letter hints without saying that he might
consider release of the information a pre-condition of proceeding with
the nomination - JFP]
2) Critics from Elliott Abrams to The Wall
Street Journal have been attacking Obama’s defense secretary nominee as
‘anti-Jewish’ or ‘anti-Israel,’ but are sounding a retreat after being
hammered by the likes of Thomas Friedman and Richard Haass, writes Peter
Beinart in the Daily Beast. From the beginning, Chuck Hagel’s
nomination as secretary of defense has been about more than just the
policies he’d pursue at the Pentagon. It’s been about the terms of
legitimate discourse in Washington, D.C. And in this regard, even though
he’s yet to be confirmed, Hagel is already proving an agent of change,
Beinart writes.
He’s proving an agent of change because over the past week or so,
the Jewish right’s tactic of calling people they disagree with on Israel
policy anti-Semitic has begun to backfire, Beinart writes.
Why has the anti-Semitism attack stopped working? First, because
when the president of the United States isn’t cowed, others take heart,
Beinart writes. By actually nominating Hagel, and calling the bluff of
the Al Sharptons of the Jewish world, Obama revealed them to be less
powerful than many had feared. Second, because the Hagel nomination
isn’t really about Israel. It’s about the broader direction of American
foreign policy. For years, the anti-Semitism charge has been used to
marginalize not merely voices skeptical of Israeli policy toward the
Palestinians, but voices skeptical of American war with Iran. By
nominating Hagel, Obama is sending the message that the Iran debate is
too important to be circumscribed by these kinds of attacks.
3) The Libyan war is frequently touted as a success story for
liberal interventionism, writes Owen Jones in The Independent. But the
toppling of Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship had blowback for Mali.
Tuaregs – who traditionally hailed from northern Mali – made up a large
portion of his army. When Gaddafi was ejected from power, they returned
to their homeland: sometimes forcibly so as black Africans came under
attack in post-Gaddafi Libya, an uncomfortable fact largely ignored by
the Western media. Awash with weapons from Libya’s turmoil, armed
Tuaregs saw an opening for their long-standing dream for national
self-determination. Thus the Western military intervention in Libya
spawned the conditions that are now driving the Western military
intervention in Mali.
There can be no sympathy for the militia now fighting the Malian
government, Jones writes. But don’t fall for a narrative so often pushed
by the Western media: a perverse oversimplification of good fighting
evil, just as we have seen imposed on Syria’s brutal civil war. Amnesty
reports brutality on the part of Malian government forces, too. When the
conflict originally exploded, Tuaregs were arrested, tortured, bombed
and killed by the security forces, “apparently only on ethnic grounds”,
Amnesty says. Last July, 80 inmates arrested by the army were stripped
to their underwear, jammed into a 5sqm cell; cigarettes were burnt into
their bodies; and they were forced to sodomise each other. Back in
September 2012, 16 Muslim preachers belonging to the Dawa group were
rounded up at a checkpoint and summarily executed by the army. These are
acts committed by those who are now the West’s allies.
4) Criticism of former Senator Chuck Hagel for not backing the 2007
US “troop surge” in Iraq demands an explanation of why that relatively
small reinforcement was not the main driver for reversing Iraq’s descent
into violent chaos, writes Wayne White at LobeLog. [White was a member
of the Iraq Study Group.] When proposed in late 2006, there was
widespread doubt about its potential for success among experts. And that
skepticism was not, as detractors allege, off target.
In reality, a different change in Bush Administration Iraq policy
was the primary game-changer. Unknown to the ISG (and evidently most of
everyone outside the executive branch), the Bush Administration had
quietly made another decision truly capable of sparking a major
improvement on the ground in Iraq. The White House agreed to a deal with
the bulk of the Sunni Arab insurgents fighting US forces. Insurgent
leaders began approaching US forces over two years earlier with the same
offer. But it was rebuffed by the Bush Administration. In late 2006,
however, the US accepted the deal. That triggered what was called Iraq’s
Sunni Arab “Awakening” (up to 100,000 Sunni Arab insurgents changing
sides). The modest US “troop surge” helped, but was not nearly as
critical as what some called the far more sweeping “deal with the
devil.”
6) The Sunni Arab “awakening” in Iraq had little to do with the
surge, writes James Russell at LobeLog, based on research he conducted
on local politics in Anbar province during the period of the awakening
in 2005-2007. The Awakening spread from western Anbar in 2005 and
culminated in Ramadi in the summer/fall of 2006 – before the surge had
even begun.
Contrary to popular myths now being offered up on the airwaves, the
White House and Gen. David Petraeus were not involved in decisions by
brigade and battalion commanders to start forming local alliances with
Sunni militia leaders, Russell writes. These commanders took these steps
out of desperation and because they couldn’t think of anything else to
do to reduce insurgent violence.
The net result of the surge was to help create circumstances to
cover the US retreat so the neoconservatives and others could assert we
had in fact achieved something worthwhile in Iraq, Russell says. The
problem with this is that there are still those out there that believe
the information operations campaign that was itself part of the surge.
We ended up believing our own invented press releases – a process now
repeating itself in Afghanistan.
This IO campaign regrettably succeeded, and there is today no
national-level debate over the disastrous US experience in Iraq, Russell
says. That absence means that columnists like Krauthammer and other
neocons can make unsupported and unchallenged assertions about the
“surge” and its circumstances.
Importantly, it means that the same neoconservative figures who
helped sell the Iraq war in the first place can also, with straight
faces, go after figures like Chuck Hagel, who, whatever his faults,
turned out to be right about Iraq, Russell writes. If Hagel was right
about Iraq, maybe it says something about other judgments he might have
to make as our next secretary of defense.
Israel/Palestine
6)
Israeli forces fatally shot a Palestinian teenager during a
confrontation along the West Bank barrier on Tuesday, underscoring the
potential for spiraling violence after weeks of simmering restiveness in
the area, the New York Times reports. The teenager killed was
identified as Samir Ahmad Awwad, 16, from the village of Budrus. Citing
witnesses, Palestinian activists said Samir was walking away from light
clashes that had erupted by the barrier when he was hit from behind by
three bullets in his leg, head and torso. Budrus became an early symbol
of Palestinian popular resistance against the barrier; Israeli
commentators are speculating about the prospect of a third Palestinian
intifada.
Afghanistan
7)
President Karzai said meetings in Washington had yielded nearly
everything his country hoped for, including the promised end to raids
conducted by foreign forces in Afghan homes and villages, the New York
Times reports. He and President Obama held a joint news conference on
Friday announcing an accelerated turnover of security responsibility to
Afghan forces next year, the end of foreign raids by spring and the
handover of detainees still under American control.
Bahrain
8)
While the U.S. has maintained it is selling Bahrain arms only for
external defense, human rights advocates say recently released documents
raise questions about items that could be used against civilian
protesters, ProPublica reports. There have been reports that Bahrain
used American-made helicopters to fire on protesters in the most intense
period of the crackdown. Time magazine reported in mid-March 2011 that
Cobra helicopters had conducted “live ammunition air strikes” on
protesters. The new Defense Department list of arms sales has two
entries related to “AH-1F Cobra Helicopters” in March and April 2011.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Wyden Letter to CIA Director-nominee Brennan Seeks Legal Opinions on Killing of Americans
Office of Sen. Ron Wyden, Monday, January 14, 2013
http://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-letter-to-cia-director-nominee-brennan-seeks-legal-opinions-on-killing-of-americans
http://www.wyden.senate.gov/download/letter-to-brennan
Washington, D.C. – With the confirmation process for Deputy National
Security Advisor John Brennan to be Director of the Central
Intelligence Agency set to be begin shortly, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden
(D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is
asking Brennan to provide Congress with the secret legal opinions
outlining the government’s ability to target and kill Americans believed
to be involved in terrorism.
In a letter to Brennan sent today, Wyden reiterated his concerns
that the intelligence community, Justice Department and the
Administration have not been adequately forthcoming to Congress on their
legal justifications for targeting and potentially killing U.S.
citizens believed to be involved in terrorism activities. He said that
it is important that the legal opinions guiding these activities be
released so that Congress and the American people can “have full
knowledge of how the executive branch understands the limits and
boundaries of this authority…”
“For the executive branch to claim that intelligence agencies have
the authority to knowingly kill American citizens but refuse to provide
Congress with any and all legal opinions that explain the executive
branch’s understanding of this authority represents an alarming and
indefensible assertion of executive prerogative,” Wyden wrote in the
letter.
For more than two years, Wyden has been seeking these legal opinions
and others but has either received insufficient responses to his
inquiries or no response at all. He has asked that prior to the start of
Brennan’s confirmation hearing in the Intelligence committee that he
and other committee members and their cleared staffs are given these
opinions and that written assurance be given to the committee that
future legal opinions related to this topic will also be provided.
“I have an obligation from my oath of office to review any
classified legal opinions that lay out the federal government’s official
views on this issue, and I will not be satisfied until I have received
them,” Wyden continued in the letter.
Wyden also asked for a list of countries in which the intelligence community has used its lethal counterterrorism authorities.
[...]
2) Chuck Hagel Accusers Who Allege Anti-Semitism Getting Pushback
Peter Beinart, Daily Beast, Jan 14, 2013 4:45 AM EST
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/14/chuck-hagel-accusers-who-allege-anti-semitism-getting-pushback.html
Critics from Elliott Abrams to The Wall Street Journal have been
attacking Obama’s defense secretary nominee as ‘anti-Jewish’ or
‘anti-Israel,’ but are sounding a retreat after being hammered by the
likes of Thomas Friedman and Richard Haass.
From the beginning, Chuck Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense
has been about more than just the policies he’d pursue at the Pentagon.
It’s been about the terms of legitimate discourse in Washington, D.C.
And in this regard, even though he’s yet to be confirmed, Hagel is
already proving an agent of change.
He’s proving an agent of change because over the past week or so,
for the first time I can remember, the Jewish right’s tactic of calling
people they disagree with on Israel policy anti-Semitic has begun to
backfire.
In the beginning, the script seemed to be playing out in familiar
ways. On Dec. 13, after reports surfaced that President Obama might pick
Hagel, an anonymous Senate aide emailed the Weekly Standard to warn:
“Send us Hagel and we will make sure every American knows he is an
anti-Semite.” The aide added, “Hagel has made clear he believes in the
existence of a nefarious Jewish lobby that secretly controls U.S.
foreign policy. This is the worst kind of anti-Semitism there is.”
That’s how it started: an anonymous attack on Hagel for something he
never said. Hagel had never said the “Jewish lobby secretly controls
U.S. foreign policy.” He had said the “Jewish lobby” – an imprecise but
hardly offensive term given that American Jewish officials use it
themselves – “intimidates a lot of people up here.” That statement,
which was praised for its honesty by the man Hagel said it to, the
(Jewish) former Clinton administration peace processor Aaron Miller, is
anti-Semitic only if you believe it is anti-Semitic to suggest that
AIPAC – like every other major lobby group in Washington – cultivates
the impression that consistently disagreeing with them could cost
members of Congress their seats. If AIPAC doesn’t cultivate that
impression, it’s not doing its job.
Four days after that, in a column entitled “Chuck Hagel’s Jewish
Problem,” Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal wrote that when Hagel
“carries on about how ‘the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up
here,’ the odor [of prejudice] is especially ripe.” The next day, The
Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin accused Hagel of “rank prejudice
against American Jews.” She also quoted the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe
Foxman as stating that “the sentiments he’s [Hagel's] expressed about
the Jewish lobby border on anti-Semitism in the genre of professors John
Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt and former president Jimmy Carter.”
Foxman never bothered to explain why such comments border on
anti-Semitism, or what Mearsheimer, Walt, and Carter had said that
qualified them for the epithet too. In fact, Mearsheimer and Walt have
explicitly rejected the term “Jewish lobby.” As for Carter, it’s hard to
see why he’s relevant to the conversation at all, since his most
controversial Israel-related comments have nothing to do with the
“Jewish” or “pro-Israel” lobby. What’s gotten Carter in trouble is his
claim that Israel risks becoming an “apartheid state” if it makes
permanent its control of the West Bank (something Ehud Barak and Ehud
Olmert have warned of too). But while leveling his drive-by accusation
of anti-Semitism against Hagel, Foxman threw in Carter for good measure.
Then, on Jan. 7, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Elliott Abrams
told NPR that Hagel “appears to be … frankly an anti-Semite.” Abrams
based this conclusion not only on Hagel’s “Jewish lobby” quote, but on
what Abrams called “the statements by the Nebraska Jewish community –
about his unresponsiveness to them, his dismissal of them, his hostility
to them.” Abrams’s source appeared to be an article in the Jewish
newspaper Algemeiner, which quotes some Jewish Nebraskans grumbling
about Hagel’s unresponsiveness. The problem with that assertion, as The
Forward has since detailed, is that while people in Nebraska’s Jewish
community’s differ in their views on Hagel, “Jews in Nebraska on both
sides of Hagel’s confirmation fight emphatically refute the
[anti-Semitism] charge.”
So far, so familiar. Over roughly the last year, hawkish Jewish
officials and pundits have hurled the anti-Semitism charge at several
left-of-center institutions and columnists. Rubin and the
Anti-Defamation League have wielded it against the Center for American
Progress. Abrams has accused Thomas Friedman and Joe Klein of “spreading
the two major themes of contemporary American anti-Semitism.” The
Weekly Standard has denounced “the anti-Semitism – the pure,
unadulterated bigotry – witnessed at the Occupy Wall Street protests.”
What’s new about the Hagel case isn’t the promiscuous charge of
anti-Semitism. It’s the pushback against it. One New York Times
columnist, Thomas Friedman, has called the claim that Hagel is an
anti-Semite “disgusting.” Another, Nick Kristof, has called it
“shameful.” In The Washington Post, Richard Cohen has accused Stephens
of “character assassination.” Abrams’s boss at the Council on Foreign
Relations, Richard Haass, has forcefully rejected even the claim that
Hagel is anti-Israel, let alone anti-Semitic.
And in response, lo and behold, the accusers are starting to
retreat. In a statement last week, Foxman not only declined to repeat
the anti-Semitism charge but said the ADL would not oppose Hagel’s
nomination. In a new column about Hagel posted this weekend, Abrams,
while still critical of the former Nebraska senator, writes, “I will
avoid the term anti-Semitism, because it can mean too many different,
particular things, and does not help illuminate the nature of the issue I
discussed.” In an interview on Fareed Zakaria GPS yesterday, Stephens
suggested that while he had claimed Hagel’s statements emitted “an odor
of prejudice,” he had not called him an anti-Semite.
Why has the anti-Semitism attack stopped working? Two reasons.
First, because when the president of the United States isn’t cowed,
others take heart. By actually nominating Hagel, and calling the bluff
of the Al Sharptons of the Jewish world, Obama revealed them to be less
powerful than many had feared. Second, because the Hagel nomination
isn’t really about Israel. It’s about the broader direction of American
foreign policy. For years, the anti-Semitism charge has been used to
marginalize not merely voices skeptical of Israeli policy toward the
Palestinians, but voices skeptical of American war with Iran. By
nominating Hagel, Obama is sending the message that the Iran debate is
too important to be circumscribed by these kinds of attacks. Just as he
didn’t let Benjamin Netanyahu force him to set a date for military
action last fall, Obama is now rebuffing another effort to limit his
freedom of maneuver on questions of war and peace.
What role Hagel plays in Obama’s Iran policy remains anyone’s guess.
But simply by being nominated, Hagel has dealt a blow to the silly,
lazy charges of anti-Semitism that have grown commonplace in Washington
in recent years. And that alone is reason for enthusiasm.
3) The war in Libya was seen as a success, now here we are engaging with the blowback in Mali
Our Government and media may often ignore the price of Western
interventions, but in future conflicts and fuel for radical Islamist
groups, it is still paid nonetheless.
Owen Jones, The Independent, Sunday 13 January 2013
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-war-in-libya-was-seen-as-a-success-now-here-we-are-engaging-with-the-blowback-in-mali-8449588.html
No scrutiny, no build-up, no parliamentary vote, not even a
softening-up exercise. Britain is now involved in yet another military
conflict in a Muslim land, or so we have been informed. British aircraft
are flying to Mali while France bombs the country, arguing that
Islamist militia must be driven back to save Europe from the creation of
a “terrorist state”. Amnesty International and West Africa experts
warned of the potential disaster of foreign military intervention; the
bombs raining on the Malian towns of Konna, Léré and Douentza suggest
they have been definitively ignored.
Mali’s current agony has only just emerged in our headlines, but the
roots go back generations. Like the other Western colonial powers that
invaded and conquered Africa from the 19th century onwards, France used
tactics of divide-and-rule in Mali, leading to entrenched bitterness
between the nomadic Tuareg people – the base of the current revolt – and
other communities in Mali.
To some Westerners, this is a distant past to be ignored, moved on
from, and certainly not used to preclude noble interventions; but the
consequences are still being felt on a daily basis. Initially, the
French Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius, suggested its colonial legacy
ruled out a France-led intervention; its sudden involvement is far more
rapid than expected.
But this intervention is itself the consequence of another. The
Libyan war is frequently touted as a success story for liberal
interventionism. Yet the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship had
consequences that Western intelligence services probably never even
bothered to imagine. Tuaregs – who traditionally hailed from northern
Mali – made up a large portion of his army. When Gaddafi was ejected
from power, they returned to their homeland: sometimes forcibly so as
black Africans came under attack in post-Gaddafi Libya, an uncomfortable
fact largely ignored by the Western media.
Awash with weapons from Libya’s own turmoil, armed Tuaregs saw an
opening for their long-standing dream for national self-determination.
As the rebellion spread, the democratically elected President Amadou
Toumani Touré was deposed in a military coup and – despite allowing a
transitional civilian-led government to take power – the army retains
its dominance.
There can certainly be no sympathy for the militia now fighting the
Malian government. Originally, it was the secular nationalists of the
National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad who led the uprising;
they have now been pushed aside by Islamist jihadists with a speed that
has shocked foreign analysts. Rather than achieving an independent
Tuareg state, they have far more sweeping ambitions, linking up with
similar groups based in northern Nigeria. Amnesty International reports
horrendous atrocities: amputations, sexual violence, the use of child
soldiers, and rampant extra-judicial executions.
But don’t fall for a narrative so often pushed by the Western media:
a perverse oversimplification of good fighting evil, just as we have
seen imposed on Syria’s brutal civil war. Amnesty reports brutality on
the part of Malian government forces, too. When the conflict originally
exploded, Tuaregs were arrested, tortured, bombed and killed by the
security forces, “apparently only on ethnic grounds”, Amnesty says. Last
July, 80 inmates arrested by the army were stripped to their underwear,
jammed into a 5sqm cell; cigarettes were burnt into their bodies; and
they were forced to sodomise each other. Back in September 2012, 16
Muslim preachers belonging to the Dawa group were rounded up at a
checkpoint and summarily executed by the army. These are acts committed
by those who are now our allies.
When the UN Security Council unanimously paved the way for military
force to be used at some point last month, experts made clear warnings
that must still be listened to. The International Crisis Group urged a
focus on a diplomatic solution to restore stability, arguing that
intervention could exacerbate a growing inter-ethnic conflict. Amnesty
warned that “an international armed intervention is likely to increase
the scale of human-rights violations we are already seeing in this
conflict”. Paul Rogers, professor of peace studies at Bradford
University, has argued that past wars show that “once started, they can
take alarming directions, have very destructive results, and often
enhance the very movements they are designed to counter”.
It is conceivable that this intervention could – for a time –
achieve its goals of pushing back the Islamist militias, and shore up
Mali’s government. But the Libyan war was seen as a success, too; and
here we are now engaging with its catastrophic blowback. In Afghanistan,
Western forces remain engaged in a never-ending war which has already
helped destabilised Pakistan, leading to drone attacks that have killed
hundreds of civilians and unleashed further chaos. The price of Western
interventions may often be ignored by our media, but it is still paid
nonetheless.
Western intervention led by France, supported by Britain and with
possible US drone attacks on the way will undoubtedly fuel the narrative
of radical Islamist groups. As Professor Rogers puts it to me, it will
be portrayed as “one more example of an assault on Islam”. With the
speed and reach of modern forms of communication, radical groups in
Western Africa and beyond will use this escalating war as evidence of
another front opened against Muslims.
[...]
4) Iraq: US “Troop Surge” Magic Bullet Myth Lives On
Wayne White, LobeLog, January 11th, 2013
http://www.lobelog.com/iraq-us-troop-surge-magic-bullet-myth-lives-on/
[Wayne White is a former Deputy Director of the State Department's Middle East/South Asia Intelligence Office (INR/NESA).]
Criticism of former Senator Chuck Hagel for not backing the 2007 US
“troop surge” in Iraq demands an explanation of why that relatively
small reinforcement was not the main driver for reversing Iraq’s descent
into violent chaos. In fact, when proposed in late 2006, there was
widespread doubt about its potential for success among experts. And that
skepticism was not, as detractors allege, off target. In reality, a
different change in Bush Administration Iraq policy was the primary
game-changer. Nonetheless, widespread belief still persists that the
troop surge alone reversed the downward spiral in Iraq during 2003-2006.
Some have tried to correct the record, but without much success.
When I served with the Iraq Study Group (ISG) led by former
Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton in
2006, many of its core Middle East experts felt the “troop surge” would
fail because it was far too small. It increased US troops in Iraq by
less than 20 percent. The situation, which included the robust Sunni
Arab insurgency, widespread al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) terrorism and rampant
sectarian cleansing, had gotten too far out of control for so few
troops to make a real difference. Some believed as many as five times
the 21,500 troops the Bush Administration sent in were needed. After
all, troop levels had risen and fallen modestly before with little
change in what had been a grindingly indecisive anti-insurgency war.
Unknown to the ISG (and evidently most of everyone outside the
executive branch) the Bush Administration had quietly made another
decision truly capable of sparking a major improvement on the ground in
Iraq. The White House agreed to a deal with the bulk of the Sunni Arab
insurgents fighting US forces. The insurgents not only wanted to stop
fighting US/UK forces, but also to partner with Coalition forces against
al-Qaida in Iraq. Although holding their own and inflicting heavy
casualties, the insurgents had tired of suffering heavy losses
themselves, were appalled by damage to their own communities from the
fighting, and had been angered by extremist AQI abuses in their home
towns and villages.
In fact, insurgent leaders began approaching US forces over two
years earlier with the same offer. But it was rebuffed by the Bush
Administration (despite the support of many US military officers in
Iraq) because the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government bitterly opposed such
a deal. In late 2006, however, in the face of a severe spike in
violence – and despite more objections from the Iraqi government – the
US accepted the deal. That triggered what was called Iraq’s Sunni Arab
“Awakening” (up to 100,000 Sunni Arab insurgents changing sides).
It took nearly two more years of hard fighting to bring most all
Sunni Arab insurgents into the arrangement, weaken the power of AQI, and
curb sectarian cleansing. The modest US “troop surge” improved tactics
set in motion by General David Petraeus, and gains in Iraqi Army
professionalism helped too, but these were not nearly as critical as
what some called the far more sweeping “deal with the devil.”
Sadly, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who objected to the
deal well into 2008, continues to exclude the Sunni Arab community from
the Iraqi political mainstream. Despite assurances to the contrary, he
has hounded many Sunni Arab fighters who took part in the “Awakening”,
arresting and even taking out a good number of them. This has soured
Sunni Arabs on Maliki and his Shi’a allies, causing enough Sunni Arabs
to resume assisting AQI to make it difficult to stop the lethal
bombings.
Why the decision to make this deal with the vast majority of the
insurgents was withheld from the Iraq Study Group (and others) is
unknown to me. It almost surely would have changed our recommendations,
and likewise might well have made lawmakers like Chuck Hagel less
skeptical of what otherwise appeared to be an inadequate fix in the face
of a far greater challenge.
Equally bizarre has been the sloppy use of the US “troop surge” by
most American media outlets as misleading shorthand for everything that
altered the Iraqi playing field back in 2007-2008. As a result, critics
continue to hound opponents (like Hagel) about a troop surge that could
well have been a military failure if not for the stunning, belated, and
initially secretive deal that transformed most of our Sunni Arab foes in
Iraq into American allies.
5) The Surge and Other Popular Neocon Myths
James A. Russell, LobeLog, January 15th, 2013
http://www.lobelog.com/the-surge-and-other-popular-neocon-myths/
[James Russell serves as an associate professor in the Department of
National Security Affairs at the Naval Post-Graduate School in
Monterey, Ca.]
As the Senate prepares for what will be contentious confirmation
hearings for Chuck Hagel to be the next Secretary of Defense, it is
important to debunk some of the popularized narratives that are being
offered by neoconservative commentators as they attempt to seize control
of important issues that will likely come up during the confirmation
process.
Hagel was one of the few who had the guts to question the Iraq
invasion when it was politically unpopular to do so, was right about the
disastrous consequences of the invasion for US power and prestige, and
rightly raised questions about the increase in troop levels committed as
part of the so-called “surge” in 2007. As noted by Wayne White in this
blog, there are many misconceptions and myths perpetrated about the
surge and its relationship to America’s experience in the war.
Neoconservative commentators have successfully shaped a popular
narrative suggesting that the surge helped spur the famous Anbar
Awakening that turned the tide in Iraq and somehow helped “win” the war.
There are grains of truth in these assertions, but these half-truths
have been used to support wholly unfounded and full-blown myths that are
still spouted in print by columnists like Charles Krauthammer, Elliott
Abrams and others.
My book on ground operations in Iraq from 2005-07 in Anbar and Mosul
deals extensively with local politics in Anbar during the period and
provides an entirely different picture of the awakening and its
circumstances that had little to do with the surge. Like all complex
phenomena, the awakening occurred in a particular context and with a
history that has been largely omitted from popular narratives about the
war.
The first of the so-called tribal “flips” started in 2005 in Al Qaim
due in part to a dispute involving the Albu Mahal tribe and its
interest in controlling border and smuggling operations. The Albu Mahals
subsequently became the “desert protector” force in 2005; Marines
issued them uniforms and installed them in local police stations to
start directing traffic and performing other constabulary duties. In a
pattern that would be repeated elsewhere around the province, the
Marines turned a blind eye to the Albu Mahal’s smuggling operations in
exchange for this support – so long as the smuggling did not support
insurgent activities. The Marines initially tried to set up local
militias in 2004 in the city of Hit in Anbar – efforts that failed
miserably as the units disintegrated when insurgents attacked them.
The Awakening spread from western Anbar in 2005 and culminated in
Ramadi in the summer/fall of 2006 – before the surge had even begun. By
the time the surge happened in the spring of 2007, there were already
over 1,000 former Sunni tribal and nationalist insurgents manning police
checkpoints in and around Ramadi.
The tribal flip had to do with many factors – national-level
political developments and the rising power of the Shi’ites and the
realization by Sunni tribal leaders that only the US could protect them
from the ascendant Shi’ites. They grasped the obvious in late 2006:
their continued alliance with the jihadists would lead to their
destruction. They had also become disaffected with the non-Iraqi
jihadists and their brutal methods of intimidation. They also resented
the way these jihadists had seized control over the smuggling routes in
Anbar that had supported Sunni tribes for decades.
In the fall of 2006, US commanders in Ramadi stood by as the 1920s
Brigade and other Sunni nationalist insurgents dragged the jihadists out
of the mosques on Fridays and blew their brains out. Importantly, the
improved tactical proficiency of US units – a proficiency driven by
desperation and willingness to learn and adapt – played a role in
supporting the awakening process. US brigade and battalion commanders
deserve great credit for forming personal relationships with tribal
leaders like Abdul Sittar Abdu Risha that helped immeasurably as the
awakening process gathered momentum in the fall of 2006.
Contrary to popular myths now being offered up on the airwaves, the
White House and Gen. David Petraeus were not involved in decisions by
brigade and battalion commanders to start forming these local alliances.
My research on this period of the war shows that these commanders took
these steps out of desperation and because they couldn’t think of
anything else to do to reduce insurgent violence.
Many myths surround the Awakening and the surge – myths popularized
by the neocons and the mainstream media, as well as by fawning
narratives in books by Paula Broadwell and others about how brilliant
senior leaders engineered this change in the landscape of Iraq. Like all
narratives, however, their stories contain only grains of truth.
The increase in US troop numbers were important in tamping down
violence in Iraq, and the bloody and brutal campaign undertaken by the
Joint Special Operations Command in 2007 in Baghdad eviscerated the
insurgent networks in and around the capital. But, the surge was not
responsible for the Awakening and it did not “win” the war, as asserted
by the neoconservatives.
The net result of the surge was to help create circumstances to
cover the US retreat so the neoconservatives and others could assert we
had in fact achieved something worthwhile in Iraq. The problem with this
is that there are still those out there that believe the information
operations (IO) campaign that was itself part of the surge. We ended up
believing our own invented press releases – a process now repeating
itself in Afghanistan.
This IO campaign regrettably succeeded, and there is today no
national-level debate over the disastrous US experience in Iraq. That
absence means that columnists like Krauthammer and other neocons can
make unsupported and unchallenged assertions about the “surge” and its
circumstances.
Importantly, it means that the same neoconservative figures who
helped sell the Iraq war in the first place can also, with straight
faces, go after figures like Chuck Hagel, who, whatever his faults,
turned out to be right about Iraq. If Hagel was right about Iraq, maybe
it says something about other judgments he might have to make as our
next secretary of defense.
Maybe this country would be better off with senior leaders willing
to take politically unpopular positions on important questions and have
the strength of their convictions to carry those arguments into the
senior reaches of government.
Israel/Palestine
6) Israeli Forces Kill Palestinian in West Bank Confrontation
Isabel Kershner, New York Times, January 15, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/world/middleeast/israeli-forces-kill-palestinian-in-west-bank-confrontation.html
Jerusalem – Israeli forces fatally shot a Palestinian teenager
during a confrontation along the West Bank barrier on Tuesday,
underscoring the potential for spiraling violence after weeks of
simmering restiveness in the area.
Two more Palestinians, both men in their early 20s, were fatally
shot in recent days along Gaza’s border with Israel, one of them in
disputed circumstances. The use of live ammunition against unarmed
protesters in the West Bank has become less common after years of
relative stability.
But disturbances have increased across the West Bank since
mid-November, when Israel embarked on a fierce eight-day military
campaign against the rocket-launching infrastructure in the Gaza Strip,
controlled by the militant group Hamas. The rising tensions also come
after years of stagnation in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and
against the background of a dire financial crisis that has prevented the
Palestinian Authority, the interim self-rule body in the
Israeli-occupied West Bank, from paying tens of thousands of government
workers their full salaries on time.
With Israeli commentators speculating about the prospect of a third
Palestinian intifada, or uprising, the military says it has been acting
with restraint in order to avoid escalating tensions further.
The teenager killed on Tuesday was identified as Samir Ahmad Awwad,
16, from the village of Budrus, in the Ramallah district of the West
Bank. Muhammad Marar, the head of the village council, told the
Palestinian independent news agency Maan that a group of students
leaving the village high school after an examination threw stones at
Israeli soldiers gathered nearby and that the soldiers responded with
live fire.
A spokesman for the Israeli military said that several Palestinians
had approached the security fence and damaged it in an attempt to cross.
He added that soldiers at the scene “responded in order to prevent an
infiltration” and that live fire was used.
Citing witnesses, Palestinian activists said that Mr. Awwad was
walking away from light clashes that had erupted by the barrier when he
was hit from behind by three bullets in his leg, head and torso. The
activists distributed photographs of the boy’s corpse.
Budrus lies adjacent to the barrier, a system of fences, walls,
razor wire and patrol roads that Israel has built over the last decade
with the stated purpose of keeping Palestinian suicide bombers out of
Israeli cities. However much of it cuts through West Bank territory and
Budrus became an early symbol of Palestinian popular resistance against
the barrier. Activists held regular protests as it was being built and
caused the Israeli planners to reroute it so as to take in less of the
village land.
[...]
Afghanistan
7) U.S. to Give Spy Drones to Afghans, Karzai Says
Azam Ahmed, New York Times, January 14, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/world/asia/us-to-give-spy-drones-to-afghans-karzai-says.html
Kabul, Afghanistan – President Hamid Karzai announced Monday that
the United States would give Afghanistan its own fleet of aerial
surveillance drones and would speed up the handover of detainees held by
American forces. It was his first public comments since returning from a
visit to Washington.
Mr. Karzai said repeatedly that the meetings in Washington had
yielded nearly everything his country hoped for, including the promised
end to raids conducted by foreign forces in Afghan homes and villages.
He and President Obama held a joint news conference on Friday announcing
an accelerated turnover of security responsibility to Afghan forces
next year, the end of foreign raids by spring and the handover of
detainees still under American control.
That last issue in particular has been a sore point after the
continued American detention of some suspected insurgents despite an
agreement that the Afghan authorities would take full control of
detention.
[...]
Though Mr. Karzai took pains to note that the
drones would be unarmed, such aircraft could significantly help the
Afghan forces’ reconnaissance and surveillance abilities. Spy drones
have been a crucial part of efforts to track down Taliban insurgents in
the country and watch over coalition forces in the field. But the
aircraft have been operated strictly by Western forces.
[...]
Bahrain
8) Revealed: America’s Arms Sales To Bahrain Amid Bloody Crackdown
Justin Elliott, ProPublica, Jan. 15, 2013, 6:59 a.m.
http://www.propublica.org/article/americas-arms-sales-bahrain-crackdown
Despite Bahrain’s bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, the
U.S. has continued to provide weapons and maintenance to the small
Mideast nation.
Defense Department documents released to ProPublica give the fullest
picture yet of the arms sales: The list includes ammunition, combat
vehicle parts, communications equipment, Blackhawk helicopters, and an
unidentified missile system.
The documents, which were provided in response to a Freedom of
Information Act request and cover a yearlong period ending in February
2012, still leave many questions unanswered. It’s not clear whether in
each case the arms listed have been delivered. And some entries that
only cite the names of weapons may in fact refer to maintenance or spare
parts.
[...]
While the U.S. has maintained it is selling
Bahrain arms only for external defense, human rights advocates say the
documents raise questions about items that could be used against
civilian protesters.
“The U.S. government should not be providing additional military
equipment that could make matters worse,” said Sunjeev Bery, Middle East
advocacy director for Amnesty International USA.
There have been reports that Bahrain used American-made helicopters
to fire on protesters in the most intense period of the crackdown. Time
magazine reported in mid-March 2011 that Cobra helicopters had conducted
“live ammunition air strikes” on protesters.
The new Defense Department list of arms sales has two entries
related to “AH-1F Cobra Helicopters” in March and April 2011. Neither
the exact equipment or services being sold nor the delivery timetable
are specified.
The U.S. is also playing a training role: In April 2012, for
example, the Army News Service reported that an American team
specializing in training foreign militaries to use equipment purchased
from the U.S. was in Bahrain to help with Blackhawk helicopters.
[...]
The administration put a hold on one proposed sale of Humvees and
missiles in Fall 2011 following congressional criticism. But Foreign
Policy reported that other unspecified equipment was still being sold
without any public notification.
The new documents offer more details on what was sold during that
period – including entries related to a “Blackhawk helicopter armament”
in November 2011 and a missile system in January 2012.
In May 2012, the administration announced it was releasing some
unspecified items to Bahrain’s military that “are not used for crowd
control” while maintaining a hold on the Humvees and TOW missiles.
State Department spokesman Noel Clay told ProPublica, “We continue
to withhold the export of lethal and crowd-control items intended
predominately for internal security purposes, and have resumed on a
case-by-case basis items related exclusively to external defense,
counter-terrorism, and the protection of U.S. forces.”
[...]
—
Just Foreign Policy
is a membership organization devoted to reforming US foreign policy so
it reflects the values and interests of the majority of Americans. The
archive of the Just ‘Foreign Policy News is here:
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/blog/dailynews
Wednesday, 16 January 2013
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