Author: Daniel Larison

From The American Conservative:

Trump’s nominee for Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, former Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata, ran into an obstacle when the Senate Armed Services Committee abruptly canceled his confirmation hearing today. His past anti-Muslim and conspiratorial statements on Twitter and elsewhere have made him politically radioactive:

A U.S. Senate committee on Thursday canceled a confirmation hearing for the Pentagon’s top policy job of a former Army one-star general widely criticized for spouting conspiracy theories, making inflammatory statements about Muslims and suggesting that a former CIA director should suffer sexual humiliation in prison.

Retired Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata, 60 years old, nominated by President Trump to be undersecretary of defense, was to face the Senate Armed Services Committee following a wave of criticism from retired generals, civil rights groups and others.

But Gen. Tata’s nomination lacked the votes to advance, said a senior Republican Senate aide.

“The administration should consider nominating people who are qualified,” the aide said.

Tata’s past statements have been dogging his nomination for months since they were first reported on by CNN. Tata has since deleted the tweets in question, but some of them have been preserved here. After several high-profile retired generals withdrew their endorsement of his nomination because of Tata’s statements, he has tried to do damage control and apologize for what he said, but opposition to his nomination has only grown.

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From The American Conservative:

Ali Hashem describes how U.S. “maximum pressure” on Iran is wrecking Lebanon and simultaneously making Lebanon more dependent on Iran:

The more the United States ratchets up its pressure on Lebanon, the more opportunities will open up for Iran to exert power and influence in the disintegrating state. This will not necessarily come via the Iranian government; influence could flow directly through Hezbollah, which has vowed not to allow Shiites in Lebanon to die of hunger. The United States’ maximum pressure strategy could therefore easily play into the hands of its avowed enemy.

The administration’s cruel and destructive Iran policy has wreaked havoc on the civilian population in Iran for the last two years, but its harmful effects on other countries in the region tend to get overlooked. When the U.S. wages relentless economic war against an entire country, every other country that is connected to the targeted state economically suffers. Lebanon has been hit particularly hard because Hezbollah has also been targeted as part of the coercive campaign. The effect on the Lebanese economy has been devastating:

As part of the U.S. government’s campaign of maximum pressure on Iran, and because of Hezbollah’s footprint, maximum economic pressure is being brought to bear on Lebanon. To say this has sent Lebanon into free fall is an understatement: Banks are empty of dollars, power cuts in the capital are widespread, businesses are closing their doors for lack of customers, and the dollar value of the national minimum wage has fallen from around $450 per month to $80 as of this writing. A government minister whose monthly salary a few months ago was around $8,500 today earns roughly $1,500. Much the same can be said of the country’s president, speaker, and prime minister – and they are the fortunate ones.

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From The American Conservative:

Hal Brands urges us to look on the bright side of decades of destructive international rivalry:

But on balance, the Cold War was a force for equality because the reality of race relations in the US was incompatible with America’s efforts to win hearts and minds in the Third World.

It is true that there was significant progress on civil rights during the Cold War, but it is quite the illogical leap to conclude that this progress happened because of the rivalry with the Soviets. There is even less reason to think that a U.S.-Chinese rivalry would lead to something similar happening in the future. It would be much more accurate to say that the US made that progress in spite of the regimentation and militarism of that period. If we want to protect the civil rights and liberties of all Americans, we would do well to steer clear of anything resembling a new Cold War.

In just the last few months, we have seen how quickly hostility towards the Chinese government has encouraged a spike in attacks and derogatory language against Asian-Americans. It does not take clairvoyance to know that a sustained U.S.-Chinese rivalry will produce more of this ugliness, and it is likely to lead to many violations of civil liberties committed in the name of national security. We know very well from the last twenty years that the toxic mix of threat inflation and fear-mongering over terrorism have fueled anti-Muslim prejudice and led to discriminatory policies based solely on nationality and/or religion. Ginning up hostility towards another nation inevitably harms the minority and immigrant communities that have ties to that nation, and the hysterical nationalism that has accompanied our major international rivalries exposes diaspora communities to discrimination, surveillance, physical attacks, and arrest. In the most extreme case in WWII, it led to the mass internment of more than a hundred thousand American citizens because of their ethnicity.

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From The American Conservative:

The U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions has said in a new report that the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani earlier this year was in violation of international law, and noted that the US had provided no evidence that it had acted in self-defense:

The attack violated the UN Charter, Callamard wrote in a report calling for accountability for targeted killings by armed drones and for greater regulation of the weapons.

Callamard’s judgment is correct, but then we didn’t need a UN official to tell us what was right in front of us six months ago. The UN Charter prohibits the use of force except for the purpose of self-defense. The US was clearly not engaged in self-defense when it launched an attack to kill a senior member of a foreign government’s military on the territory of a third country. The US not only committed an act of aggression against Iran, but it trampled on Iraq’s sovereignty as well. Everything that the Trump administration told the public about this attack back in January was untrue or misleading, and its claim that the president had authority to launch this attack because of the 2002 Iraq war AUMF was spurious nonsense.

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From The American Conservative:

Barbara Boland reported on the House Armed Services Committee’s vote to impede withdrawal of US from Afghanistan:

The House Armed Services Committee voted Wednesday night to put roadblocks on President Donald Trump’s vow to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, apparently in response to bombshell report published by The New York Times Friday that alleges Russia paid dollar bounties to the Taliban in Afghanistan to kill US troops.

It speaks volumes about Congress’ abdication of its responsibilities that one of the few times that most members want to challenge the president over a war is when they think he might bring it to an end. Many of the members that want to block withdrawals from other countries have no problem when the president wants to use US forces illegally and to keep them in other countries without authorization for years at a time. The role of hard-liner Liz Cheney in pushing the measure passed yesterday is a good example of what I mean. The hawkish outrage in Congress is only triggered when the president entertains the possibility of taking troops out of harm’s way. When he takes reckless and illegal action that puts them at risk, as he did when he ordered the illegal assassination of Soleimani, the same members that are crying foul today applauded the action. As Boland explains, the amendment passed by the committee yesterday sets so many conditions on withdrawal that it makes it all but impossible to satisfy them:

Crow’s amendment adds several layers of policy goals to the US mission in Afghanistan, which has already stretched on for 19 years and cost over a trillion dollars. As made clear in the Afghanistan Papers, most of these policy goals were never the original intention of the mission in Afghanistan, and were haphazardly added after the defeat of al Qaeda. With no clear vision for what achieving these fuzzy goals would look like, the mission stretches on indefinitely, an unarticulated victory unachievable.

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From The American Conservative:

Mike Pompeo delivered an embarrassing, clownish performance at the UN on Tuesday, and his attempt to gain support for an open-ended conventional arms embargo on Iran was rejected the rest of the old P5+1:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on Tuesday for an arms embargo on Iran to be extended indefinitely, but his appeal fell flat at the United Nations Security Council, where Russia and China rejected it outright and close allies of the United States were ambivalent.

The Trump administration is more isolated than ever in its Iran obsession. The ridiculous effort to invoke the so-called “snapback” provision of the JCPOA more than two years after reneging on the agreement met with failure, just as most observers predicted months ago when it was first floated as a possibility. As I said at the time, “The administration’s latest destructive ploy won’t find any support on the Security Council. There is nothing “intricate” about this idea. It is a crude, heavy-handed attempt to employ the JCPOA’s own provisions to destroy it.” It was never going to work because all of the other parties to the agreement want nothing to do with the administration’s punitive approach, and U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA meant that it forfeited any rights it had when it was still part of the deal.

Opposition from Russia and China was a given, but the striking thing about the scene at the UN this week was that major US allies joined them in rebuking the administration’s obvious bad faith maneuver:

The pointedly critical tone of the debate saw Germany accusing Washington of violating international law by withdrawing from the nuclear pact, while Berlin aligned itself with China’s claim that the United States has no right to reimpose UN sanctions on Iran.

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