When War Just Can’t Wait

Prominent in the international press this past month has been Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s latest push to have the nation’s constitution amended to support a more belligerent foreign policy. The Japanese people, to their credit, have organized massive protests in opposition to the government’s rising militarism.

While revision of the constitution has been and remains a top priority for Abe’s administration, former envoy Shunji Yanai feels that the matter is simply too pressing to be allowed to continue through the appropriate legal channels. Revising a constitution can take years, after all, and in the meantime, the prohibitions against starting wars or getting involved in other peoples’ wars would remain in place. That is why Mr. Yanai has been appointed as the head of a committee to seek legal loopholes that would allow the government to further erode the interpretation of this portion of the constitution.

The “growing threat” of North Korea may be the present justification for this policy, but getting Japan to ditch its pacifist constitution so that they can “do their part” in assisting in America’s various international adventures has been a goal of American foreign policy for many years. In 2000, a bipartisan study group featuring such well-placed neocons as Richard Armitage and Paul Wolfowitz issued a report that called the Japanese policy a ‘constraint’ on their alliance and urged a model similar to US-Britain alliance for broadening Japanese involvement in global military operations.

Yohei Kono, the Speaker of the Japanese Parliament says he takes pride in the fact that the Japanese troops haven’t killed a single person in the 60 years since this constitution has been in place. Between that and turning a country devastated by war into the second largest economy on the planet, one can’t help but wonder why there is such haste amongst policymakers, and indeed, why there would be any support at all from the population at large for such a major change. Hasn’t peace served Japan well enough since then? Hasn’t war after war proven enough of a disaster for the nations that have gone down that road since then?

A Preview of AFRICOM?

On Friday it was reported that Mohamed Dheere was appointed as the new mayor of Mogadishu by the US-backed Somali government. What’s interesting about this is that just last year, when the US decided to start funding warlords to pick fights with the Islamic Courts, Mr. Dheere was one of the warlords that was on the CIA’s payroll.

This is just the latest US link in a Somali government that is rapidly becoming an international embarrassment. I’m not going to rehash the backstory of the conflict: Scott’s recent Antiwar Radio interview with Chris Floyd does a far better job of that than I could in a single blog posting.

On the other hand, I was recently reading the transcript of the press conference in which Defense Department officials announced the creation of AFRICOM. The officials promise that America’s goals in Africa will be exclusively altruistic in nature, and I wonder if what’s occurred in Somalia, from American airstrikes on villages, to mass rendition of refugees to a nation with the dreadful human rights record of Ethiopia, and culminating with the installation of a CIA-funded warlord as the mayor of the capital city is an example of the sort of actions we can expect of AFRICOM in the coming years.

In 1983, the US founded CENTCOM to be the operational command for the Middle East and Central Asia. Since then, the US has fought three major wars and innumerable small skirmishes in that theater of operations. Can we expect more of the same from AFRICOM, and does its founding portend a massive increase in US military interventionism in Africa?

Only time will tell, but the Council on Foreign Relations recommended in a recent report that the US ramp up its involvement in Africa to secure its oil resources. Is it even possible that this agenda won’t lead to the same fiasco of a foreign policy that it has in the Middle East?

I guess that’s the risk you run

Maybe I should’ve held onto my Sunday blog posting about coalition forces killing Afghan civilians for a few days. If I had: I could’ve pointed this out as well.

So, fresh off a series of airstrikes that killed scores of civilians last week, fresh off promises of wholesale changes to policies to reduce civilian casualties in the future and, as the article points out: just one day after the US paid off the families of all those civilians that the Marines slaughtered in March… 21 more.

I hope whoever was responsible for paying them off didn’t put his checkbook away, because the indiscriminate killing of dozens of innocent villagers continues unabated.

Oh, and just in case you were keeping score: US military spokesman Major William Mitchell once again insisted that they didn’t know anything about having killed any civilians. I guess they’re always the last to know.

All Because of a Statue…

The year is 1939, and the Soviet Union has just signed a non-aggression pact called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. While the effects of this pact were myriad and far-reaching, what interests us here is the secret portion of the document dividing up the land in between the two rapidly growing empires. The tiny nation of Estonia, which only 20 years prior had successfully fought a war of independence against the Soviet Union, was handed back to the Soviets, and the Red Army marched in two months later to formally occupy and eventually annex it.

The Soviet military police were quick to root out (read: execute) opposition to their occupation, and a few months later, when the German-Soviet pact fell apart, the Red Army forced thousands of young Estonians into conscription. Estonia was the battleground of many violent German-Soviet clashes over the next few years.

Having twice fought Soviet invasions, and considering tens of thousands of Estonians were deported to Siberia in the post-war period, it is unsurprising that many people in Estonia don’t look back terribly fondly on their half century of Soviet occupation. It should not have come as a surprise then, either, when in April the Estonian government decided to move a large Soviet monument to the glories of the Red Army from the center of their capital city.

Perhaps more surprising is what happened next. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov condemned the move as ‘blasphemy’, and a resolution of the Russian Senate condemned Estonian officials as ‘neo-nazis’. All over a statue.

And that’s not all: the Russian Duma called for harsh economic sanctions and a few days later, as Moscow protesters hurled rocks at the Estonian embassy, the Russian government cut off oil and coal exports to the tiny Baltic republic. All over a statue.

And even that’s not the end of it. While Estonia and Russia continue to bicker over what ought to be a relatively minor matter, it spirals into an enormous international incident. The European Union has criticized Russia for its reaction, and NATO has warned Russia to crack down on the protesters. Russia, for its part, has lashed out at Western ‘connivance’ with Estonia.

Did I mention this whole thing is about a statue?

Speaking of the upcoming quarter

As Antiwar.com holds our quarterly fundraising drive, the US military announces its plans for the upcoming quarter as well.

Major General Rick Lynch promises us an increase in US soldiers being killed in Iraq, primarily a result of the latest troop surge. Major General William Caldwell reminds us that things will also likely get even worse for the Iraqi people.

Is this the same surge that was supposedly going to be a major turning point in the American occupation of Iraq? Because it seems to me that a rising body count and an ever worsening situation for the Iraqi populace is essentially the same thing they’ve been giving us for the last four years.

So much for effort…

Last week, it was announced that NATO’s anti-Taliban raids in Kandahar province had killed approximately 50 civilians. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, for his part, let it be known that he is ‘losing patience’ with all the civilians NATO has been killing. As the US simultaneously denied that any such thing had happened and promised to look into it and insisted that it was entirely the Taliban’s fault, NATO officials insisted that in the future they would try to keep the civilian massacres to a minimum.

Needless to say, this is quite a messy situation. Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema warned that the civilian death toll could cost the US the support of Afghanistan’s civilian population (to the extent they ever had it). This is one of those situations that needs to be treated with kid gloves.

Fast forward to Friday, and Afghan officials say that days after the initial killings: the very day NATO promised to be more careful in the future in fact, a US bombing attack killed 13 more civilians. Needless to say, the Pentagon once again had no information that such an incident had ever taken place, but they promised to look into it… again.

Right about now, a lot of you are probably thinking this story sounds kind of familiar. In fact, it happens with surprising regularity, the civilian body counts, the initial denial, the eventually admissions, Karzai’s mock outrage, even the part where NATO promises to make wholesale changes so it doesn’t happen again.

What efforts NATO has actually undertaken in the past (or will undertake in the present incident) I’m not sure, but one thing is painfully obviously to the civilian population living under their occupation, it’s not good enough. NATO troops have killed civilians in at least 12 separate reported incidents in 2007 alone: their bodycount since this ill-conceived war began must simply be astronomical. Most of us manage to get through our entire lives without slaughtering dozens of innocent villagers: is it to much to ask that NATO manage to go more than a few weeks in-between atrocities?