Month: December 2012

Last month the US issued an ultimatum to Iran, demanding it fully cooperate with the IAEA by March or else face further action and possible measures at the UN Security Council. Micah Zenko, fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, speculates that this “could indicate that the Obama administration is moving toward the zone of immunity logic.”

Zenko is referring to the Israeli standard for deciding to go to war with Iran. Up to now, the Israeli standard to attack Iran is not when it has nuclear weapons or presents an imminent threat to Israel, but rather when Iran’s nuclear program is sufficiently advanced and redundant across the country – although not being weaponized – that Israeli military action would be inadequate to significantly retard it.

The US standard, at least as commonly understood, has been a little stricter. Washington has implied it will resort to war only if Iran is demonstrably weaponizing its nuclear program and on the verge of having a nuclear bomb.

Despite the semantic differences, the two postures are essentially the same. Both the US and Israel have ignored the legal standard for resorting to war – to block an imminent attack, i.e. self-defense – and crafted their own standard, which says they can bomb Iran to smithereens if they judge that at some point in the future Iran might be able to deter US or Israeli aggression. Iran must be kept weak and defenseless, the thinking goes, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to obliterate them at will.

This speaks to Iran’s nuclear posture, which is aimed at what is sometimes called “a breakout capability.” In an environment of constant threats of war, economic sanctions, and being surrounded by the US military, Iran has tried to abstain from developing nuclear weapons while having the know-how needed to get there; this essentially is an attempt to have a deterrent without actually having a deterrent. They don’t get in trouble for having a weapon, but they are able to ward off attack or invasion.

US intelligence corroborates this analysis. As James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, has repeatedly said, “We don’t believe they’ve actually made the decision to go ahead with a nuclear weapon.”

So if the US’s announcement of a March deadline really does indicate a gradual shift toward the more trigger-happy Israeli standard for preemption, “how would this new intelligence be presented as a justification for war?” Zenko asks. After all, “it is tough to make the case for going to war with Iran because it refused to concentrate its nuclear sites (that are under IAEA safeguards) in above-ground facilities that can be easily bombed.”

Setting a March deadline provides some certainty and perhaps coercive leverage to compel Iran to cooperate with the IAEA. But declaring deadlines also places U.S. “credibility” on the line, generating momentum to use force even if there is no new actionable intelligence that Iran has decided to pursue a nuclear weapon. Based on what we know right now, that would be a strategic miscalculation.

A strategic miscalculation…and a savage war crime. Bombing Iran without the justification of self-defense against an imminent attack would be a war crime, a war of aggression. In the words of the Nuremberg Tribunal, “To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

And the effects of such a war of choice would certainly be evil. As a recent report by former government officials, national security experts and retired military officers concluded “achieving more than a temporary setback in Iran’s nuclear program would require a military operation – including a land occupation – more taxing than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.” More taxing, not just in dollar amounts and military resources, but in lives lost.

A recent study from the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics found, an attack that tried to take out more than four of Iran’s main enrichment facilities would cause immediate casualties of an estimated “10,000 people.” And according to a 2009 study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies “any strike on the Bushehr nuclear reactor will cause the immediate death of thousands of people living in or adjacent to the site, and thousands of subsequent cancer deaths or even up to hundreds of thousands depending on the population density along the contamination plume.” The fierce insurgency and counter-insurgency efforts that would inevitably take place, including a flood of jihadist fighters from around the world à la Iraq, would mean hundreds of thousands of lives lost.

More than that, an attack on Iran would motivate them to actually start building nuclear weapons in order to deter further aggression, bringing exactly the result the war-mongers claim they’re trying to prevent.

So why would the Obama administration ratchet up the stakes and impose an arbitrary March deadline? They claim there is a diplomatic window. As Clinton explained, “What was meant about the March reference was either about the IAEA and its continuing work or the fact that we finished our election and now would be a good time to test the proposition that there can be some good-faith serious negotiations before the Iranians get into their elections.” Elections make diplomacy harder, so yes, there is a diplomatic window. But the Obama administration may have locked themselves into a box by implicitly adopting the Israeli standard for preemptive war on Iran.

In October, the US launched an airstrike in Afghanistan that killed three children – ages 8, 10, and 12 -while they were gathering firewood (or by some accounts, dung to burn as fuel). NATO issued its usual dismissive statement, admitting it may have “accidentally killed three innocent Afghan civilians.”

But now, according to the Military Times, the US military includes children on their list of who they’re allowed to murder with impunity.

…a Marine official here raised questions about whether the children were “innocent.” Before calling for the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System mission in mid-October, Marines observed the children digging a hole in a dirt road in Nawa district, the official said, and the Taliban may have recruited the children to carry out the mission.

So digging holes in Afghanistan is now grounds for getting bombed? The children’s relatives and local tribal elders had confirmed at the time that they were not Taliban recruits and were not planting any roadside bombs.

That’s apparently not enough for the US military to simply admit that killing innocent children is wrong. Instead, they invent Orwellian rationales for why these poor children were worthy enemy combatants.

“It kind of opens our aperture,” said Army Lt. Col. Marion “Ced” Carrington, whose unit, 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, was assisting the Afghan police. “In addition to looking for military-age males, it’s looking for children with potential hostile intent.”

There you have it. The US military is now looking for “military-age males” and “children” to kill in Afghanistan.

A new report from Amnesty International investigates human rights abuses by the militant group Ansar al-Sharia and by the Yemeni government during the 2011-2012 conflict in the country. The report provides further documentation of US drone strikes that hit civilians and target rescuers in follow-up strikes. The latter has been described by UN legal experts as a war crime.

Ansar al-Sharia has committed severe abuses of the civilian population “including summary killings and amputations” for minor crimes or for challenging their rule, and “recklessly exposing civilians to harm by storing ammunition and explosives in crowded residential areas and initiating attacks from the immediate vicinity of inhabited houses…”

But the Yemeni government, a regime Washington has generously supported and the current leadership of which Washington helped install, has also committed serious abuses of the civilian population, including violations of international law.

Government forces used air strikes, tanks, artillery and mortars to drive Ansar al-Shari’a out of Abyan and surrounding areas. In at least some cases, these weapons were used against residential areas in an indiscriminate or disproportionate manner, resulting in the deaths of civilians. In some instances, air strikes hit civilian homes, needlessly killing and injuring civilians apparently because of a failure to take necessary precautions, such as verifying that the target was, in fact, a military objective. The authorities also obstructed access to medical care, and subjected suspected fighters to enforced disappearance.

Importantly, the report says “Amnesty International cannot exclude the possibility that some of the air strikes documented in this report may have been carried out by US drones, which appear to have been active during the conflict.” Cannot confirm, because even though the US constantly brags about bombing Yemen via drone, they get a little miffed when asked to confirm the existence of these drone strikes.

And many of the documented strikes were widely and almost uncontroversially reported as US drone strikes at the time they occurred. Like, for example the strikes on May 15 which killed more than a dozen civilians and included a follow-up strike.

In the morning of 15 May 2012, an air strike killed one civilian in his home in Ja’ar. This was followed by another strike that killed at least 13 civilians who had gathered in front of the destroyed house. Nuweir al-Arshani, aged 33, was killed in the initial air strike that levelled his house. Residents and relatives of his who spoke to Amnesty International were surprised that his house was targeted because they said he had nothing to do with Ansar al-Shari’a. While some residents said that a house behind his was rented to Ansar al-Shari’a and that possibly the aircraft missed its target, Nuweir’s brother Anwar insisted that the houses behind them were occupied by the usual neighbours and that the nearest houses rented by Ansar al-Shari’a were between 100 and 300 metres away next to al-Hamza Mosque. Witnesses who spoke to Amnesty International gave consistent testimonies about the air strike that destroyed his home and killed him.

…Some people were angered by the killing of the civilian and blamed Ansar al-Shari’a, and an argument developed. Meanwhile, more residents gathered to see the destroyed house and ask what had happened. The aircraft returned and bombed and fired into the crowd…At least 12 men and one woman were killed instantly or died from their injuries.

“Our lives are valueless in the eyes of our government,” said one resident of Jaar, following the strikes, “and that is why civilians are being killed without a crime.”

With regard to drone strikes in Yemen, the United Nations is in the process of setting up an investigations unit dedicated to examining the legality of drone attacks and uncovering cases in which civilians are killed in the Obama administration’s drone war. Ben Emmerson, a UN special rapporteur that is heading this effort, says follow-up strikes constitute war crimes.

“[It is] alleged that since President Obama took office at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims and more than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners,” Emmerson said. “[UN special rapporteur on summary executions] Christof Heyns…has described such attacks, if they prove to have happened, as war crimes. I would endorse that view.”

Citing reports that the US has conducted follow-up drone strikes, Heyns said in June that, if true, “those further attacks are a war crime.”

With regard to the Yemeni government, as I said, this is a regime that engages in military policy in its own territory largely at the behest of the US government. Washington, therefore, is implicated in the crimes Amnesty ascribes to Yemen, even those that are not in all likelihood US drones.

Doubly concerning is the fact that the Yemeni government isn’t even straight with their American enablers; they often collaborate with Islamic militant groups, in part because of deep ties going back years and in part because Islamic militancy keeps US money and weapons flowing.

And Islamic militancy has been on the rise in Yemen in recent years, but not even this is persuasive enough for Washington abandon its policy of persistent bombing and propping up dictatorship in favor of something else that doesn’t cause blowback.

Here’s a twisted-like-a-pretzel kind of sentiment:

[British] Home Secretary Theresa May has warned that those opposing plans to let police monitor all internet use are “putting politics before people’s lives.”

Ah yes, those unwilling to have government thugs snoop on literally everybody’s personal internet use – essentially to put the final nail in the coffin for the presumption of innocence instead of guilt – are being superficial. The truly civic minded readily surrender their rights to privacy for the sake of Big Brother.

The legislation in question is Britain’s Communications Data Bill, which would require internet providers to retain records of all their customers’ online activity for 12 months, so that the police can “tackle organized crime, paedophiles, and terrorists,” according to Theresa May.

These types of measures are relevant especially as the 193-country UN conference in Dubai meets this week to discuss potential internet regulations. The conference, according to Joshua Keating, is being organized “by the International Telecommunication Union – a UN agency – which is intended to update the 1988 International Telecommunication Regulations for the Internet era.”

Participants including the European Union and the United States are opposed to proposals by some countries — notably Russia — that countries should have power to manage their own Internet domain names, as well as any move to give the ITU greater regulatory power over the Internet. Companies like Google argue that the ITU — an organization founded in 1865 to manage telegraph communications — shouldn’t have jurisdiction over the Internet at all and that decisions regarding Internet architecture should not be made by government regulators.

There are also widespread concerns among internet content producers like Google and Facebook over a proposal by a coalition of European telecom network operators as well as some developing country governments that would require web companies to pay a fee to access local telecoms networks. And pretty much everyone is upset about the lack of transparency in the run-up to the conference.

While many civil liberties advocates and internet activists have criticized the conference for potentially regulating the internet, government hands may not be making huge strides on the internet just by virture of this conference.

…as several blogs have pointed out, the most radical proposals — such as Russia’s — are unlikely to be adopted, whatever treaty does come out of the meeting will have essentially no enforcement power, and it’s not as if authoritarian governments aren’t doing a perfectly good job censoring web content already.

That said, the internet is the singular force worldwide that is undermining government control of populations and of the information they access. States will increasingly recognize this as a threat, and attempts to stifle internet freedom will become more and more frequent.

Update: As mentioned above, one of the criticisms of the conference is the total lack of transparency. Here’s Peter Suderman way back in June:

Jerry Brito and Eli Dourado, both tech policy research fellows with the The Mercatus Center at George Mason University, hope they’ve found a way to solve this problem. They’ve created a website called WCITLeaks.org that allows officials with access to ITU proposals to anonymously upload drafts.

The Syrian rebellion has never been a popular revolution, but now even some who advocated the demise of the Assad regime have begun to doubt the value of the brutal civil war and what it has done for Syria.

McClatchy has a brilliant report on “Ebrahem,” a Syrian revolutionary who “openly wonders whether he and his fellow revolutionaries have done the right thing.”

“What will we tell our children? That we started this revolution and destroyed the country?”

…The first demonstrations, particularly in Damascus, were hopeful ones and deliberate in their displays of unity among the country’s sects and ethnicities. But as the violence grew, it was the Sunni Muslim Arab population that armed itself. Though the narrative that has persisted is that arming the rebellion was the only choice, many peaceful demonstrators like Ebrahem are tepid in their support of that decision, and some oppose it outright.

…Ebrahem, who openly questions the existence of God, did not help start the rebellion in Hasaka to see it empower conservative Islamist militias, though that is exactly what it has done across the country.

And this is coming from a self-described “revolutionary.” Imagine what the rest of Syria – the majority of the population by most accounts – thinks of the Free Syrian Army and the alleged humanitarian imperative to arm them to victory.

Update: See also this Bloomberg report from September:

Although foreigners can be outraged that people would get upset over small inconveniences, given the suffering and atrocities caused by government forces, it is striking that a “silent majority” in Damascus and Aleppo is blaming the rebels and the uprising.

At first, “Aleppo witnessed an amazing number of civil disobedience and popular movements that included unions, lawyers, doctors, engineers and university students,” said Fadi Salem, a Syrian academic based in the gulf region who visited Aleppo recently. But that support fell away when violence came with the flow of armed rebels to the city.

“The population was not ready for this,” he said. “The armed rebels are mostly not from the city itself. They don’t have organic popular support.”

There was some bluster on Monday in response to reports that the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad made the first step in weaponizing chemical stockpiles and also has moved them around to different locations in the country.

In terms of US action, the conflict in Syria has long been defined by the high rate of Islamic jihadists in the ranks of the rebel forces and by the lack of feasible military options for regime change at the disposal of the Obama administration. So, the US has said that the “red line” which would precipitate an American military intervention is if Assad uses chemical warfare on his own population.

So, apparently eyes have been kept on Assad’s chemical stockpiles. Danger Room reported the following exclusive:

Engineers working for the Assad regime in Syria have begun combining the two chemical precursors needed to weaponize sarin gas, an American official with knowledge of the situation tells Danger Room. International observers are now more worried than they’ve even [sic] been that the Damascus government could use its nerve agent stockpile to slaughter its own people.

The U.S. doesn’t know why the Syrian military made the move, which began in the middle of last week and is taking place in central Syria. Nor are they sure why the Assad government is transferring some weapons to different locations within the country, as the New York Times reported on Monday.

Whenever journalists report anonymous officials making claims that bolster the case for war, heavy scrutiny is in order. This official told Danger Room that “isopropanol, popularly known as rubbing alcohol, and methylphosphonyl difluoride” had been combined by Syrian engineers, which is the first step to weaponizing sarin gas. “They didn’t do it on the whole arsenal, just a modest quantity,” the official said. “We’re not sure what’s the intent.”

Even if the information is true, which is by no means a given, it’s not reasonable to assume the Assad regime is preparing to unleash chemical warfare on his people. The Obama administration has made it clear such action is a “red line” and even if Assad recognizes this as rhetoric issued for the deterrence factor (which it transparently is) it’s probably enough to disincentivize him from taking such action, if he were ever so inclined in the first place. Assad has been employing incredible force to quell this rebellion because it aims to eliminate him and his regime. The only thing worrying the Assad regime more than the rebellion is the prospect of some kind of US-led bombing campaign or invasion, which could undoubtedly topple the regime but would then lead to such destruction and chaos that the country would be ruined and a lengthy occupation and counter-insurgency effort would inevitably follow, à la Iraq. So Assad isn’t about to attract that sort of attention.

Additionally, for what its worth, Russia has guaranteed Assad’s restraint on chemical weapons use. That’s not a pledge one of the the five most powerful nations in the world makes lightly.

If I were to speculate, again, assuming the reports are true, Assad could be making such moves in order to deter international action against his regime. One of the primary reasons cited in Washington officialdom against initiating a no-fly zone or a bombing campaign in Syria is the fact that Assad’s anti-aircraft capabilities and chemical stockpiles are located in residential areas. This means any attempt to destroy them would put vast numbers of civilian lives at risk, making the humanitarian situation in the country far worse than it is currently, and thus defeating the pretext for intervention. Assad knows this has been an argument against military action, and his alleged moderate moves to make his chemical stockpiles more dangerous and to transfer them to different locations in the country could be playing on this factor.

It’s also true that, as much as the US has been trying to undermine the Assad regime by supporting the jihadist rebels, Washington prefers the chemical stockpiles be under the control of the Assad regime  rather than the rag tag rebel opposition. Take Michael Eisenstadt at the perpetually pro-war Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who notes that given the lack of feasible military options, “the preferred means of dealing with the problem of Syrian CW [chemical weapons] are deterrence, assistance, containment, and elimination.” Here’s his explanation of “assistance”:

To deal with the threat of diversion, the United States should quietly work with Russia, building on their history of cooperation on a variety of threat-reduction initiatives in order to offer Syria various means of maintaining accountability and control over its CW stockpile. While the United States does not have an interest in strengthening Assad, it does have an interest in the regime retaining control over its CW for as long as it is around (just as the United States offered the Soviet Union technology to help secure its nuclear arsenal during the Cold War, to avoid accidental or unauthorized use).

US military officials have been quick to point out the costs of war in Syria and the White House has consistently said that direct military intervention “would lead to greater chaos, greater carnage.” I don’t see them changing their tune any time soon, nor do I see the Assad regime using chemical weapons. The real concern is the proxy war being waged by the Obama administration which continues to bolster a dangerous band of criminal religious extremists. Not only is this morally and legally problematic, but it is laying the groundwork for further blowback.