Author: Daniel Larison

The Intercept reports that the Biden administration is seriously considering the request from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to re-designate Houthis as terrorists:

The White House appears to be seriously considering the change. In late January, Biden’s National Security Council circulated a memo exploring the possibility, according to a U.S. intelligence official and a think tank official familiar with the matter. The memo, a policy options paper produced by the NSC, considers labeling the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, Specially Designated Global Terrorists, or a combination of both, the two sources told The Intercept on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

High-level administration officials discussed the paper during a Friday, February 4 meeting of the National Security Council Deputies Committee, a senior interagency forum for the consideration of national security policy matters, the sources said. The officials who discussed the paper were split, with representatives from the State Department expressing strong opposition to the designations.

As I said a few weeks ago, a decision to re-designate the group would be an appalling error. The Biden administration reversed the designation put in place by Mike Pompeo in the final days of the Trump presidency because they understood the devastating effects that it was already having on the civilian population in Yemen. It was outrageous to apply the designation last year, and it would be doubly so to reapply it when it is clear what the consequences would be for millions of innocent people. Oxfam’s Scott Paul recently had this to say about a possible designation:

Unfortunately, we’ve seen how this plays out – and it’s deadly for Yemenis. When these designations went into effect last year, we saw exporters of vital commodities like food, medicine, and fuel all rush for the exits. It was clear to all that Yemen was heading toward economic freefall. The most important difference between then and now is that today, the Biden administration knows in graphic detail what this will mean for Yemenis who are already facing violence, hunger, and preventable disease. They would knowingly be condemning Yemenis to even more desperate suffering and death.

No one believes that this designation will serve any real purpose except to inflict more starvation on a country already wracked by acute malnutrition and famine. Its effects on the Houthis would be negligible, but it would be a death sentence for millions of innocent people. It is deeply troubling that a proposal this awful is even being entertained.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

The Biden administration doesn’t like being asked legitimate questions to provide evidence for their claims:

Top White House and State Department officials tried to shut down reporters’ questions on Thursday about the veracity of Biden administration claims on Russia and Syria.

The reporters were asking for some proof to back up the administration claim that the Russian government was preparing to stage a false flag incident to provide a pretext for military action and a separate claim that the ISIS leader killed in a U.S. special forces raid had blown himself up along with his wife and two children. The White House press secretary and State Department spokesman didn’t offer any evidence to corroborate the claims, and by the end of their exchanges with reporters each one had suggested that questioning these claims implied a preference for information provided by Russia and ISIS. Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, said, “If you doubt the credibility of the US government, of the British government, of other governments and want to find solace in information that the Russians are putting out, that is for you to do.” These exchanges came in the same week that Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, attacked Josh Hawley for “parroting Russian talking points” when he questioned the wisdom of continuing to support Ukrainian membership in NATO.

The dismissive and insulting responses to legitimate questions have been widely mocked and criticized, but they point to a troubling pattern in how the Biden administration is responding to criticism and basic journalistic inquiries. Even if we assume for the sake of argument that official claims about the false flag plan and the special forces raid are entirely accurate (quite an assumption given our government’s track record over the decades), the administration has not done its credibility any favors by blowing off requests for evidence and then accusing the journalists asking the questions of some sort of disloyalty. The Politicoreport summed it up this way:

When it comes to matters of war, the Biden administration’s current stance is “trust us” – and if you disagree, you’re Vladimir Putin’s or ISIS’ talking puppet.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Sen. Bob Menendez delivered a speech today attacking the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the negotiations in Vienna. It was a typically bad speech filled with false and misleading claims, but it is worth noting because it shows how unreasonable opposition to reviving the nuclear deal is and how pointless it was for Biden to try to placate Iran hawks like Menendez over the last year. Iran hawks will never accept any agreement that would be even minimally acceptable to Iran, because they do not want to see U.S.-Iranian tensions reduced.

Because of Menendez’s position as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, the administration thought it necessary to go slow and offer no sanctions relief, and it indulged in a lot of silly rhetoric about desiring a “longer and stronger agreement” to keep Iran hawks in their own party quiet. The problem is that Menendez’s opposition to any achievable agreement has been unwavering and there was never anything that the administration could have done that would win him over. Feigning interest in a “comprehensive” agreement that could never be successfully negotiated, Menendez has never supported a realistic diplomatic solution to the nuclear issue.

Menendez makes a number of misleading claims, including this one: “In February 2021, we saw the consequences of not insisting Iran permanently ratify the Additional Protocol. Iran simply decided they were done with the Additional Protocol and refused to allow the IAEA to fully investigate locations where it found traces of uranium enrichment.” It is disingenuous to blame this on Iran’s voluntary implementation of the Additional Protocol, since Iran took these steps in protest against the Israeli assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in late 2020. Iran was still choosing to implement the AP until Israel launched that attack, and if the JCPOA survives until 2023 they are expected to ratify it and adhere to it permanently. The development that Menendez wants to pin on the supposed “weakness” of the JCPOA was the fault of the Israeli government’s backfiring sabotage operations.

He claims that Iran already possesses missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons: “The ballistic missiles to deliver them. That, they already had.” This, too, is false, as any serious study of Iran’s missile program will demonstrate. As Gawdat Bahgat and Anoushiravan Ehteshami conclude in their new book, Defending Iran, “the available evidence does not support the claims that Iran has developed an ICBM capability.” Iran’s missile program has been built up for conventional deterrence and not as a means of delivering nuclear weapons, which the Iranian government isn’t even trying to acquire.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Peter Beinart makes an interesting observation about the way most U.S. policymakers understand “great power competition” with China and Russia:

What prevails today in Washington’s halls of power is a defense of unipolarity dressed up as a recognition that unipolarity is dead. In both parties, top officials herald the return of great power competition but resist meaningful great power accommodation [bold mine-DL]. What they mean when they say the US must compete with Russia and China is that the US must prevent Russia and China from altering the frontiers of American dominance established in the 1990s, when China’s GDP was roughly one-third as large as America’s and Russia was flat on its back.

The resistance to accommodation is bound up with our political culture’s disrespect for diplomacy and compromise, but it is mostly a relic of the first decade and a half after the Cold War when US policymakers tricked themselves into thinking that they didn’t have to accommodate any other powers. This reached its peak during the early Bush years when Karl Rove was talking about “creating” our own reality. Back then, US policymakers grew used to thinking that US power was either effectively unlimited or so vast that it could overcome almost any obstacle, and they weren’t shy about using it. Now that the obstacles are bigger, major powers are more formidable than before, and the US has fewer advantages than it once did, the US hasn’t adapted to the new realities.

We see an inflexibility born of pride today in the insistence that the US and its allies should make no alterations to NATO’s “open door” and in arguments that the US must increase its commitments in East Asia to contain a much more powerful China. Right now, the US is still considering expanding its defense perimeter in the face of major powers that are stronger than they were twenty years ago. The US and its allies refuse to rule out further NATO expansion even when everyone can see that the alliance cannot defend the states in question. Something has to give somewhere.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

A Saudi coalition airstrike on a prison killed at least 60 people and wounded at least 100 more in northern Yemen as part of the coalition’s reprisal attacks after the Houthis claimed drone and missile attacks that hit targets in Abu Dhabi earlier this week:

At least three children are among the dozens of people killed Friday, the humanitarian organization Save the Children said in a statement on Twitter. It noted that “the true number is feared to be higher.”

This follows coalition airstrikes in Sanaa that killed at least 20 civilians. The coalition response to the Abu Dhabi attacks has been consistent with the way they have waged the war from the beginning: reckless and indiscriminate bombing that slaughters civilians. The AP reports on the aftermath of the bombing:

“The initial casualties report from Saada is horrifying,” said Gillian Moyes, Save the Children’s country director in Yemen. “Migrants seeking better lives for themselves and their families, Yemeni civilians injured by the dozens, is a picture we never hoped to wake up to in Yemen.”

Of course, this is a picture that we keep waking up to over and over because the coalition governments are never held accountable and pay no penalty for their outrages. They still receive U.S. support and weapons, and they evidently have no need to worry that relations with the US will worsen if they keep pummeling Yemen with U.S.-made weapons. Once again, the people of Yemen are made to suffer as the coalition lashes out blindly. There were also reports yesterday and today that a coalition airstrike in Hodeidah had knocked out Internet service throughout the country, which has cut off Yemenis outside the country from contact with their friends and relatives.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Walter Russell Mead does a good job of making Russia hawks look ridiculous:

As the Ukrainian crisis deepens, there is only one option that would stop a Russian invasion – and that is the one that all the serious players in Washington say is off the table: dispatching an American and coalition force to defend Ukraine. Vladimir Putin is not ready for war with the U.S.; informing his gamble is a well-grounded conviction that America is not committed enough to Ukraine to defend it by force.

History may look back on this as a failure of nerve equal to the appeasement of the 1930s.

There is good reason why America is “not committed enough to Ukraine” to go to war for it. The US has nothing at stake there that could possibly justify taking the enormous risks that a war with Russia involves. Even the most aggressive hawks tacitly admit as much when they claim that the current crisis is just a prelude to worse things later. Mead makes the usual references to the 1930s because he can’t make a straightforward argument that Ukraine is important enough on its own that the US has to defend it. Russia hawks know they can’t sell a war for Ukraine, so they have to make it into a war for NATO or world order or something big enough to make their insane proposal seem at least slightly defensible. Their own alarmism confirms that they know the US has no vital interests here.

Mead asserts that putting Western troops in Ukraine to defend it is the “only” option that can stop an invasion. This conveniently ignores the obvious compromise that is much more likely to achieve the goal, and it fails to anticipate how Russia would react to the insertion of more Western forces into Ukraine. The current crisis has been driven in large part by Russian opposition to any Western military presence in Ukraine. Sending a large deployment of troops would be extremely provocative. Something like that could be the match that sets off the explosion.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.