7 - 2011 - Antiwar.com Blog

Losing Interest and Muscle in Libya War

It’s now almost two months since the sternest congressional resolution against Obama’s war in Libya and against the pathetic legal argument employed to circumvent the War Powers Resolution failed, losing out to John Boehner’s resolution asking Obama to pretty please explain himself. No additional resolutions have been drafted and efforts to prohibit funds towards the war effort have fizzled down to nothingness. The contrast between the relative uproar in the weeks after the initiation of force and the quiet subordination of now is really something to behold. It’s as if high crimes and misdemeanors committed by our nation’s highest officials are statutorily promoted to “legally permissible” after a few months. Criminality of those in power have swift expiration dates. Wars, however, do not.

One effort is technically still pending. That is the lawsuit that ten Congress members filed against the Obama administration for taking the country to war illegally. But according to a just-released Congressional Research Service report, these efforts are historically not fruitful:

[O]n eight occasions [“which concerned U.S. military activities in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Grenada; military action taken during the Persian Gulf conflict between Iraq and Iran; U.S. activities in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait (prior to the congressional authorization); and U.S. participation in NATO’s action in Kosovo and Yugoslavia”] Members of Congress have filed suit to force various Presidents to comply with WPR requirements or otherwise to recognize Congress’s war powers under the Constitution…Although the courts have not ruled out the possibility that a conflict over the use of force between Congress and the President could require a judicial resolution, they have thus far deemed the matter to be one for the political branches to resolve.

So the only effort still ongoing to stop the Executive branch from acting outside the law is likely to be dismissed by the courts on jurisdictional or other grounds, if history is any guide. The entire political class and mainstream media have shifted the focus to the politics of recognizing the rebels as legitimate and rather chaotic, variously contradictory negotiations with them and the Gadhafi regime. Meanwhile, the American people have peaked in their boredom regarding Libya.

I wrote last week about how the national security state “absolutely relies upon the forgetfulness and apathy of the American people.” They certainly seem to be getting what they wished for.

Oh, About That Other Thing I Said Friday

Jesse Walker has some solid reading recommendations here.

Was I Unfair to The Atlantic?

On Friday, I included The Atlantic in a list of sources that “ran with the unsubstantiated Muslim-terrorist angle” immediately after the attacks in Norway. I was referring to a they-hate-us-for-our-freedoms piece about an alleged 2010 plot by three Muslims against Norwegian targets. In my haste, I overlooked the July 2010 dateline and wrote as if the article were newly issued background on a pattern of unprovoked Muslim hostility toward peaceful Norway. That was sloppy of me, and I corrected my post to note the error.

But it turns out that The Atlantic did re-post the year-old piece Friday as background on a pattern of unprovoked Muslim hostility toward peaceful Norway. The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg explains:

The question arises, then, why did Jennifer Rubin make this outrageous assertion about jihadism and Norway?

Well, perhaps it was because she was reading the Atlantic. Shortly after the bombing in Oslo, the Atlantic re-posted on its home page a very interesting piece from last year by Thomas Hegghammer and Dominic Tierney entitled “Why Does al Qaeda Have a Problem With Norway?” …

So it would have been possible, from reading The Atlantic alone, to suspect al Qaeda involvement in the Norway attacks. I myself suspected this, and wrote so.

Boy, did he. In a post subtly titled “Mumbai Comes to Norway” — we know what sort of people blow up buildings in Mumbai, right? — Goldberg let his extraordinarily active imagination loose on the situation, even working in a plug for his beloved Iraq War. Goldberg was sure to include an escape hatch, thus proving that he’s smarter than Will Saletan and Dave Weigel, but it’s a doozy:

Of course, this could [be] an act of right-wing extremism, perhaps in reaction to the rise of radical Islamism in Europe. I’m as confused as the rest of you are about the authorship of these attacks. There have been early claims of responsibility by jihadist groups, followed by denials, followed by reports that a blonde “Nordic-looking” man was the one who opened fire on the youth camp. Was this “Nordic-looking” man an Adam Gadahn-type, or someone not motivated by jihadist ideology? Stay tuned.

In other words, at the time Goldberg composed the post, before he added any updates, he already knew that the only reported suspect was not your stereotypical al-Qaeda operative. Yet Goldberg charged ahead anyway, asserting that the killer was probably inspired by radical Islam one way or the other. Look at that first line again: “Of course, this could [be] an act of right-wing extremism, perhaps in reaction to the rise of radical Islamism in Europe.” Not “perhaps in reaction to the very presence of Muslims in Norway” or “perhaps in reaction to the Jared-Loughner-esque voices in some loon’s head.” No, our misguided young Aryan must have been driven to madness by THE RADICAL ISLAMS!!!!!

I believe we’ve just witnessed the birth of a new Twinkie defense.

UPDATE: I expected some competition for stupidest response to this post, but I think I can go ahead and declare a victor. Goldberg had no evidence that the attacks were undertaken by Islamists of any race or ethnicity, there was nothing particularly Islamist about the choice of targets (no synagogue or church or even military base), and there were reports that a “Nordic” guy (who could have been Muslim, of course, but there was no evidence of that) was responsible — and Goldberg still decided to ride the Clash of Civilizations Express. Obvious conclusion: Goldberg is credible and I’m a racist. Well, I’ve learned my lesson: from now on, my default assumption whenever a mass murder takes place will be that the perpetrator is a Muslim (or suffering from Muslim panic).

NYT Iran Scare Piece Just Lies, Innuendo

David Sanger carries on Walter Duranty, Judith Miller and Michael Gordon’s lying legacy at the New York Times. In his new piece, co-written with William J. Broad, Sanger spends eleven-hundred words speculating and propagandizing about what it might meant that an Iranian scientist got a promotion.

Eat your heart out, George Jahn.

Sanger’s* entire argument – it ain’t reporting – is that the new enrichment facility at Qom exists. He repeats the tired, nonsensical lie, which first appeared in Sanger’s "journalism" at the time, that the Iranian government disclosed the existence of the new facility they were building there back in September 2009, as he now puts it, "only after learning that the United States and European powers were about to announce that they had discovered the complex, deep inside the Iranian base."

What a bunch of nonsense. How in the world could the Iranian government know that President Obama, French President Nicholas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown were "about to announce that they had discovered the complex"? Is it (Broad and) Sanger’s case that Iranian Intelligence infiltrated the American president’s speech writers’ offices? That they have a high-level mole inside the CIA? The MI-6?

Of course not. These are simply hollow lies fed to Sanger by his anonymous government sources, and uncritically passed by him to the rest of the mindless media.

The Iranians simply abided by their Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA and notified them that they would be introducing nuclear material into equipment to be installed at a new facility they were building long before the required 6 months out.

Under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran is required to maintain a "Safeguards Agreement," which allows IAEA inspectors access to Iran’s nuclear material to verify its non-diversion to military purposes, and requires notification in due time before the introduction of nuclear materials new locations so that the verification of non-diversion will not be interrupted. (The NPT also guarantees the "unalienable rights" of all signatories to the use of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.)

But, since hardly anyone else in the world was aware of the Qom disclosure to the IAEA, the Western politicians decided they would seize the opportunity – four days after the disclosure – to pretend they had caught Iran "red handed," making a "secret" uranium enrichment site.

Sanger bought it. Or at least sold it. "They only admitted it first because somehow they knew we were about to call them on it," unbelievably, became the linchpin of the entire government/media argument of Iran’s corrupt deception at Qom.

One may wonder why they even need arguments at this point.

But this one did serve the administration’s purpose of finding a way to refuse to accept Iran’s damn-near complete acceptance [.pdf] of the 20% enriched u-235 fuel swap deal that Obama had offered them in the first place, and complain that the end-of-2009 deadline for falling in line and avoiding more sanctions had been violated by the Iranians.

Once the IAEA was done looking around the facility that November, then-director Mohamed ElBaradei said it was "nothing to be worried about." It was just a hole in the ground then, and has taken all this time to be ready for use. Apparently Sanger has trouble remembering things from a year and a half ago, if they’re true.

The rest of Sanger and Broad’s harangue is simply innuendo stemming from the obvious-to them premises that 1: the Qom facility must have been constructed for nuclear weapons development and 2: that if an Iranian nuclear scientist (that the U.S. and/or Israel has tried to murder**) who used to work with another man Sanger claims is "suspected" of unspecified nuclear weapons work inside the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has been made the new head of their Atomic Energy Agency, and he continues on the exact same path of enriching small amounts of uranium up to 20% for alleged medical uses that his predecessors were on, then that could only mean one thing: an atom bomb program.

Yet the American intelligence community is unanimous [.pdf] in this year’s National Intelligence Estimate that the Iranians have no nuclear weapons program, secret or declared, as they’ve said since 2007 [.pdf], long after, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, they claim to have discovered the existence of the Qom site.

As even Sanger admits in the article, the administration doesn’t see any cause for alarm here, other than the typical "they’re not supposed to be enriching at all" boilerplate – an answer given only when pressed by the Times. And we know Obama will use any excuse to start a war.

And why should weapons development be the most likely reason for 20% enrichment, Qom’s construction or this scientist’s promotion?

Yes, 20% enriched uranium is closer to the 90-plus percent required to make atom bombs than the rest of Iran’s stockpile of 3.6% enrichment for their electricity program, but it’s also needed for targets in their medical isotope reactor that the U.S.A. helped build for them back in the 1970s when their dictator was our loyal puppet.

During the so-called negotiations of 2009, Iran’s counter-offer to Obama that they swap their 3.6% LEU for finished 20% fuel rods, instead of their relying on the good faith of the French to honor the agreement was perfectly reasonable, as was the Turkish-Brazilian efforts to arrange the swaps on their territory. It was the U.S. government that was the intransigent party in all this, refusing to take Iran’s initial counter-offer as an opening to further talks, and even – shades of Dick Cheney – loudly criticizing the Brazilian and Turkish governments’ good faith efforts to bring a resolution to the dispute.

It is the president and secretary of state who deserve the blame from those worried about Iranian production of 20% enriched U-235, but they should also relax a bit because, after all, the Iranians have remained prepared to negotiate away production at those levels as recently as a few months ago – not the best way for them to stockpile eventual weapons material, right?

Why should the construction of a new uranium enrichment facility at Qom be an indication of a future weapons program? After all, the U.S. and Israel have threatened to bomb Iran for years under the pretext that their open, declared nuclear electricity facilities amount to a weapons program already. Why shouldn’t they diversify their supply and harden their defenses?

And why should the promotion of this one scientist be viewed as as some game-changing milestone on the road to the apocalypse in the context of the rest of these facts? Oh, right, these facts are here, not in the Times piece. So there you go.

*I pick on Sanger because Broad’s work is okay when he writes with Mark Mazzetti for example.

**Such attacks continue.

Update: That last link about an assassination today, turns out not to be right.

AP Iran Scare Piece Proves Itself Wrong

Where’s old Doc Prather when we need him? George Jahn, the David Sanger of the Associated Press, has a scary new piece out. And though the story seems to have gotten plenty of attention with it’s big headline “Iran Prez Said Pushing for Nukes,” on further inspection the “Said” amounts to, well, pretty much nothing:

“Iran’s president wants to shed the nation’s secrecy and forge ahead openly with developing nuclear weapons but is opposed by the clerical leadership, which is worried about international reaction to such a move, says an intelligence assessment shared with The Associated Press.

“That view, from a nation with traditionally reliable intelligence from the region, cannot be confirmed and contrasts with assessments by other countries that view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as relatively moderate on the nuclear issue compared to the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.”

So the vast majority of Western intelligence agencies agree that Ahmadinejad is “relatively moderate” on the issue, and one dissents. On what basis exists this discrepancy? Jahn never says.

If Ahmadinejad’s supposed ambitions are opposed by the religious leadership, who have the real say in the matter, then what’s so headliney about that anyway?

Are we to understand that Jahn’s source(s) swore him to secrecy regarding not just their names, but the name of the country which they presumably work for and produced this “intelligence”? Could it be that they anticipate readers may not agree with Jahn’s assessment their assertions about Iranian nuclear capabilities have been “traditionally reliable”?

The piece continues:

“Ahmadinejad is pushing ‘to shake free of the restraints Iran has imposed upon itself, and openly push forward to create a nuclear bomb,’ says the assessment. But Khamenei, whose word is final on nuclear and other issues, ‘wants to progress using secret channels, due to concern about a severe response from the West,’ says the report.”

Jahn provides no evidence that Ahmadinejad is pushing for anything, and nothing in the article even acknowledges the fact that the unanimous opinion of all 17 American intelligence agencies [.pdf] is that the Iranians are not pursuing nuclear weapons openly or in secret. Renowned investigative reporter Seymour Hersh tells this writer that the rest of the West agrees. But in AP Land, inconvenient facts are omitted rather than confronted head on.

The new head of the IAEA is quoted complaining that Iran has made it “difficult for us to draw a conclusion [Iran’s nuclear program] is exclusively for peaceful purposes.” But that, as our dear retired Dr. Prather would put it, is “none of the IAEA’s beeswax.” Their mandate under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and Safeguards Agreement with Iran is the monitoring of Iran’s nuclear material, accounting for its quantity and quality on a regular basis and verifying its non-diversion to military purposes. Their further mandates from the UN Security Council to completely prove a negative, ask endless questions based on forgeries and inspect non-nuclear facilities are rightly considered illegitimate by the Iranians.

The rest of the article elaborates on the theme that that the “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei, is the one with the power to decide and that he is the more “cautious” and “circumspect” about the prospect of starting a nuclear weapons program and perhaps stoking a regional arms race than his already-willing-to-deal presidential frontman.

George Jahn’s new Iran piece in the Associated Press, despite its emotional headline and anonymous scare quotes, actually makes a strong case that neither Iran’s president, nor its head-Ayatollah are interested in obtaining nuclear weapons.

Norwegian Wood

Before Norwegian authorities arrested a sole, Norwegian suspect in today’s murders, America’s professional bullshitters stroked themselves into quite the, er, terrection, if you will. A sampling:

Jennifer Rubin:

This is a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too expensive to wage a war against jihadists. …

Some irresponsible lawmakers on both sides of the aisle — I will point the finger at Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee and yet backed the Gang of Six scheme to cut $800 billion from defense — would have us believe that enormous defense cuts would not affect our national security.

Will Saletan:

Oslo Peace Process. Nobel Peace Prize. Today’s attacks show how little terrorists respect countries that pursue peace.

This was, of course, seconded by Saletan’s colleague Dave Weigel.

The Atlantic ~~ran with the unsubstantiated Muslim-terrorist angle and~~ [edit: this article was from July 13, 2010; see Update 2 below] scoffed at any suggestion that the Norwegian government’s ongoing involvement in two wars in Muslim countries might have anything to do with an attack by Muslims:

It may be pointless to search for a single grievance to explain the recent plot. Most likely, a combination of factors placed Norway on the jihadists’ radar. In al-Qaeda’s binary worldview, Norway is part of the “Jewish-Crusader alliance.” Not a platinum member, perhaps, but a member nonetheless. If you’re not with al-Qaeda, you’re with the United States.

(Perplexed hat tip to Jesse Walker, whose reading recommendations will be taken less seriously in the future.)

There are plenty of other examples of this war-on-terror-justifying gun-jumping; feel free to post the most egregious in comments. And who knows? Maybe blondie really will turn out to be a Muslim, as The Daily Mail hopefully suggested*. But even if that’s so, as Glenn Greenwald put it:

[T]hese kinds of civilian-targeting attacks are, as I said, inherently unjustifiable (though if NATO declares the leader of Libya a “legitimate military target” and air bombs his residence, what’s the argument as to why the office of the Prime Minister whose country is at war with Libya is not a legitimate target?). The point is that it’s completely unsurprising that a nation at war — whether Norway or the U.S. — is going to be targeted with violent attacks. That’s what “being at war” means, and it’s usually what it provokes. And the way this fact is suppressed (“a coordinated assault on the ordinarily peaceful Scandinavian nation” = the post-9/11 why do they hate us?) highlights how we view violence as something only those Others commit, but not we.

*UPDATE: The Daily Mail, with characteristic integrity, has revised the linked story without notice to remove the original suggestion that the suspect might be — cross your fingers! — Muslim.

UPDATE 2: In haste, I jumped the gun on dissing The Atlantic. I missed the date and read it as background on today’s attacks.