Month: June 2011

The real concern coming out of today’s alleged events in Syria  – that protesters killed 120 Syrian troops in an ambush – is that the Assad regime uses them (true or not) as a justification to violently clamp down on civilians. Thoughts turn to Bashar’s father and the Hama Massacre of 1982 which was a response to Sunni anti-government uprisings and killed 10,000-20,000 people in one fell swoop.

I believe something like that is still a possibility, but its also possible that the pressure put on the regime thus far has been sufficient to persuade important factions of the military to defect or fully side with the protesters. That has been an essential step in successful revolutions in decades past, and certainly it was the case with Tunisia and Egypt. It presented something of a turning point in Yemen as well. What is needed to avoid a repeat of the mass murder that the Assad regime is certainly capable of, is more stories like this one from Amnesty International, in which Syrian soldiers defied orders to shoot peaceful protesters:

“The officer gave us the order to shoot when the protesters were around 15 or 20 meters away from us… but we – in all, five of us soldiers – immediately said we would not shoot and said to the other soldiers present: ‘How can you shoot at these people? We will not do that.’”

At this point, the soldier told me, the officer in charge of his unit ordered: “Shoot at them”, pointing to those who refused to fire at the protesters, leading to a stand off between the two groups of soldiers.

“They cocked their rifles and so did we… but neither of us pulled the trigger. We then started pushing each other and scuffled a bit… Then the officer fell on the ground. We immediately ran in the direction of the demonstration and held our rifles up in the air so that protesters would know that we weren’t going to shoot at them. When we were close enough so that they could hear us, we shouted to them saying ‘We are not going to shoot you. We are with you.’”

Minutes later, however, the shooting began as other government security forces opened fire on the demonstrators. The soldier said he witnessed several people fall as they were shot, who then were carried away from the scene by other protesters. As he continued marching with the protesters, he saw other soldiers leaving the ranks and joining in support of the demonstration, despite the risks that they could face for disobeying orders and deserting the ranks.

An unfortunate reality for someone like me who despises acquiescence in war crimes is that publicly guaranteeing immunity (at least initially) to the army may actually increase the chances that tyranny ends and peace comes to Syria. History tends to bear this out, as Larry Diamond explained:

Unless the military collapses in defeat, as it did in Greece in 1974 and in Argentina after the Falklands War, it must be persuaded to at least tolerate a new democratic order. In the short run, that means guaranteeing the military significant autonomy, as well as immunity from prosecution for its crimes. Over time, civilian democratic control of the military can be extended incrementally, as was done masterfully in Brazil in the 1980s and in Chile during the 1990s. But if the professional military feels threatened and demeaned from the start, the transition is in trouble.

The Independent Institute’s Anthony Gregory, a friend of Antiwar.com, has written a compelling new report tracking the foreign policy trends of the current administration and the last one. Comparing troop levels, U.S. fatality rates, and the financial burden of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars under Bush and Obama, Anthony makes the case that U.S. foreign policy has been roughly as aggressive and costly under both presidencies.

This is intuitive to many Antiwar.com readers, although the numbers he presents here are useful and informative.

The report also includes some discussion of Bush and Obama’s use of contractors, the Libya conflict, and miscellaneous aspects of U.S. war policies in the last decade. Well worth a look.

Rick Santorum has officially announced his candidacy for President. Santorum is about as hawkish as the Republican field is going to get for 2012. And that’s saying a lot. He is most well known for being a culture warrior, but according to him, his expertise lies elsewhere:

“I have one major piece of legislation I passed, on partial-birth abortion, but I had two on foreign policy — the Syria Accountability Act and the Iran Freedom and Support Act, both of which were opposed by Bush and took me a year or more,” he said. He added: “I spent the last four years at the Ethics and Public Policy Center giving lectures all over the country on radical jihadism and the ‘Gathering Storm of the 21st Century.’ I haven’t done squat on moral, cultural issues.”

The Syria Accountability Act was passed in December 2003 and was essentially a round of harsh sanctions on the Assad government “for its support for terrorism, its occupation of Lebanon, weapons of mass destruction programs, illegal imports of Iraqi oil, and its role in the ongoing security problems in the Middle East.” Fundamentally an affront to Syrian sovereignty for offenses that we engage in every single day, this bill also likely strengthened the Assad regime.

The Iran Freedom and Support Act of 2006 was similar to the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 in that it appropriated tens of millions of dollars to give to questionable dissident groups within the country in order to actuate regime change. In order to believe that the United States government has the responsibility or the authority to foment coups in any country it sees fit (an historical past time for us), and then brag about having drafted the bill to authorize such actions, you have to be a pretty radical interventionist for military empire. And that’s exactly what Santorum is.

[He has even more extreme positions, like mandating the National Language to be English. If he would want to force that kind of conformity, who knows what it’ll look like on issues of national security.]

And about these lectures he’s been giving on radical jihadism…The likelihood that Rick Santorum knows anything at all about Islamic jihad is about equivalent to the Earth crashing into the moon tomorrow. What he means to say there is that he has been going around the country stirring up fear and hysteria with pure paranoia about some three century old plot to install sharia law through an Islamic caliphate over America. This is based on nothing, of course. At the risk of suggesting that this fear is a notion worth pursuing, you can check out the ACLU’s report debunking the myth here.

Bottom line? Fear Santorum’s candidacy.

Update: One of Santorum’s primary talking points against the Obama administration is that he has “appeased” other countries and that our “enemies” don’t sufficiently fear President Obama. From this, we can get a pretty clear picture of how Santorum would run the world if given the chance.

“The Iranians, they are moving full-scale forward with their nuclear program and they know the president is not going to do anything to stop them,” Santorum said Monday. “He has been a paper tiger and they are an existential threat to the state of Israel, and the Israelis know it and the American’s know it. And this president has not stepped forward and done anything to stop that threat.”

This kind of psychotic babble is almost good enough to be satire, and it is based on pure fantasy. The Iranians are not moving full-scale forward with their nuclear program. As has been reported, there is not a shred of evidence for that contention. It is merely a fabrication, like his seething, frenzied fear of sharia law in America, that he stirs up in order to scare people into conformity with war policy. Furthermore, to say that Obama has done nothing, is simply untrue. Santorum is banking on the fact that most idiot voters will not check up on what he says, but Obama has either continued or intensified the neoconservative policies of Santorum’s friend George W. Bush. To stop that supposed threat, Obama has expanded covert operations on the ground, confronted Iran through cyber-attacks, and engaged in economic warfare and sabotage, among other things.

Our front page Highlights draws attention to Paul Pillar’s post over at the National Interest on war fatigue and how it can be a force for good in American foreign policy. I agree, but may go a bit further than him. So called war fatigue is essentially what people should feel at the onset of war, not after decades of it. The reason it’s called a fatigue is because it takes an exhausted military, budget, and population of both countries to get beyond what we’ve been taught by our government and media to do, which is support war. I’m reminded of what Noam Chomsky wrote in his book Media Control:

One aspect of the malady [“war fatigue”] actually got a technical name. It was called the “Vietnam Syndrome.” The Vietnam Syndrome, a term that began to come up around 1970, has actually been defined on occasion. The Reaganite intellectual Norman Podhoretz defined it as “the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force.” There were these sickly inhibitions against violence on the part of a large part of the public. People just didn’t understand why we should go around torturing people and killing people and carpet bombing them. It’s very dangerous for a population to be overcome by these sickly inhibitions, as Goebbels understood, because then there’s a limit on foreign adventures. It’s necessary, as the Washington Post put it rather proudly during the [first] Gulf War hysteria, to instill in people a respect for “martial value.” That’s important. If you want to have a violent society that uses force around the world to achieve the ends of its own domestic elite, it’s necessary to have a proper appreciation of the martial values and none of these sickly inhibitions about using violence.

It’s no secret the U.S. media is tilted far in favor of Israel. Just look at how two very similar events are treated in the NYTimes, one about a country deemed “bad guy” by U.S. policy, the other “our greatest friend and ally.”

Children Are Among Casualties of Syrian Military Raids After Demonstrations:

Syrian military forces killed 42 people Wednesday, including a 10-year-old boy and 4-year-old girl, in raids on a string of towns around the central city of Homs as the government continued trying to crush a three-month-old popular uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, human rights activists said.

Troops and tanks moved against the towns of Talbiseh, Teir Maaleh and Al-Rastan on Saturday after large antigovernment demonstrations on Friday, said Razan Zeitouneh, a rights activist whose organization, the Syrian Human Rights Information Link, collected the names of 42 people killed in Al-Rastan. Though figures for other towns were not available, Syrians reached by telephone described widespread arrests of men and neighborhoods besieged by tanks and snipers.

Now here’s how the same newspaper treats a comparable event:

Israeli forces fired at pro-Palestinian protesters on the Syrian frontier on Sunday as they tried to breach the border for the second time in three weeks, reflecting a new mode of popular struggle and deadly confrontation fueled by turmoil in the Arab world and the vacuum of stalled peace talks.

Wave after wave of protesters, mainly Palestinians from refugee camps in Syria, approached the frontier with the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. Israeli soldiers opened fire on those who crossed a new trench and tried to attack the border fence near the towns of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights and Quneitra in Syria.

By nightfall, the Syrian news agency SANA reported that 22 protesters had been killed and more than 350 had been wounded. Israeli officials said that they had no information on casualties but suggested that the Syrian figures were exaggerated.

…“What would any country do if people from an enemy country were marching on its borders?” asked Dan Gillerman, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. “We tried all other possible means to stop them.”

The Syrian military “killed 42 people” including children in “raids”  responding to “popular uprisings” for “human rights.” These Golan Heights protesters were “fueled by turmoil in the Arab world” and “tried to attack the border fence” with Israel, and the Syrians are likely to have “exaggerated” the death toll. No such statement was taken from Syrian officials, but I’m sure they would have said the same about the military justifications for the offensive: “What would any government do if ‘internal enemies’ were marching on its streets? We tried all other possible means to stop them.” We don’t get such a justification in the Syrian report, but there it is in the Israeli one. The events are similar: government military forces opening fire on unarmed, peaceful civilian protesters. But we wouldn’t necessarily know it from reading the NYTimes. They of course mentioned the children that the Syrian military attacked. But seemed to have forgotten to include that detail, reported here, from the Israeli offensive. The report even goes so far as to blame Syria for the protests:

Syria’s decision to allow the protest appeared to reflect a calculated strategy to divert attention from its own antigovernment uprising.

…anything to absolve Israel from too much blame. These differences can be subtle word changes and alterations in emphasis, but they help uphold a strong pro-Israeli mindset throughout the American electorate.

Update: It seems the Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz has been rather explicit about harsh military responses to Palestinian uprisings (via FPIF):

There is a focal player in the Middle East – the street – and it is clear to us that in the coming months we can find ourselves in broad popular demonstrations, which gain public resonance. The IDF is preparing for these demonstrations….we will act with great fire power and full force at the very beginning of the confrontation. Anything the camera can stand or could stand in the first three days of fighting – it will not be prepared to put up with thereafter.