Category: News

This should be rather obvious, but a recent study shows that the less informed you are, the worse your policy recommendations are likely to be. Specifically, you are much more likely to advocate U.S. military intervention in Ukraine if you’re also someone who can’t find Ukraine on a map.

Washington Post:

On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans (fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI), what action they wanted the U.S. to take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine on a map as part of a larger, ongoing project to study foreign policy knowledge. We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views. We found that only one out of six Americans can find Ukraine on a map, and that this lack of knowledge is related to preferences: The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the U.S.  to intervene with military force.

Only about 16 percent of Americans can locate Ukraine on a map. Some respondents placed Ukraine “in Brazil or in the Indian Ocean.” Yeesh.

Anyone surprised by this should really pick up Bryan Caplan’s book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. “In theory, democracy is a bulwark against socially harmful policies,” Caplan writes. “In practice, however, democracies frequently adopt and maintain policies that are damaging.”

One thing I would add is that there is a reason uninformed opinions swing in the pro-war direction, rather than the non-intervention direction. It’s not as if a blank slate just magically tends toward greater U.S. military intervention. The uninformed get bits and pieces of information from a press corps that largely serves to amplify the hawkish rhetoric of politicians in Washington and from cable news anchors (who, I believe, are often as uninformed as their viewers). If you’re not going to start a university-level research project on some pressing issue of either foreign or domestic policy, you defer to these filtered sources. The fact that we end up with still very uninformed people whose lack of knowledge is highly correlated with a pro-war position should tell us something about the nature of the press and of cable news.

Business Insider:

In military slang, Predator drone operators often refer to kills as ‘bug splats’, since viewing the body through a grainy video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.

To challenge this insensitivity as well as raise awareness of civilian casualties, an artist collective installed a massive portrait facing up in the heavily bombed Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa region of Pakistan, where drone attacks regularly occur. Now, when viewed by a drone camera, what an operator sees on his screen is not an anonymous dot on the landscape, but an innocent child victim’s face.

After the U.S. and Israel delivered a one-sided, unacceptable interim agreement to the Palestinians last week, the PLO and Mahmoud Abbas decided to pursue further accession at the United Nations, building on its attainment of non-member observer status in 2012. In a press release yesterday, Human Rights Watch condemned the United States for opposing Palestinian efforts to adopt international treaties and urged Washington to “stop blocking Palestinian rights.”

On April 1, 2014, the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, signed accession instruments for 15 treaties, including the core treaties on human rights and the laws of war. On April 2, the US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, testified in front of Congress, that in response to the “new Palestinian actions” that the “solemn commitment” by the US to “stand with Israel,” “extends to our firm opposition to any and all unilateral [Palestinian] actions in the international arena.”

“It is disturbing that the Obama administration, which already has a record of resisting international accountability for Israeli rights abuses, would also oppose steps to adopt treaties requiring Palestinian authorities to uphold human rights,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The US should press both the Palestinians and the Israelis to better abide by international human rights standards.”

Obviously, the U.S. opposes Palestinian efforts to ingratiate itself further into the international community because Israel opposes them. Why does Israel oppose them? Two reasons: (1) it confers greater legitimacy on Palestine as a state, which conflicts with Israel’s plan to prevent that outcome, and (2) if the PLO seeks jurisdiction at the International Criminal Court, Israel may be subject to trial for its daily crimes against Palestinians.

HRW:

The US appears to oppose Palestine joining human rights treaties in part because it is afraid they will gain greater support for Palestinian statehood outside the framework of negotiations with Israel. According to Power’s testimony to a congressional subcommittee on April 2, the US has “a monthly meeting with the Israelis” to coordinate responses to possible Palestinian actions at the UN, which the US is concerned could upset peace negotiations. Power said that the US had been “fighting on every front” before peace negotiations restarted in 2013 to prevent such Palestinian actions. Discussing US legislation that bars US funding from UN agencies that accept Palestine as a member, Power noted, “The spirit behind the legislation is to deter Palestinian action [at the UN], that is what we do all the time and that is what we will continue to do.”

The US may also fear that the Palestinian moves are only a first step towards joining the International Criminal Court (ICC). But Abbas did not sign the Rome Statute of the ICC, which would allow the court to have jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed in Palestine or by Palestinians. Power, in her remarks, said that the US is “absolutely adamant” that Palestine should not join the ICC because it “really poses a profound threat to Israel” and would be “devastating to the peace process.”

It’s worth thinking about why the PLO didn’t pursue the ICC this time around. It may be because they want to keep that card for leverage in negotiations. But it’s also true that “Israel has threatened unspecified retaliation if [Palestine] seeks the court’s jurisdiction, and the U.S. has reinforced the threat,” according to Bill Van Esveld, a senior Middle East researcher at Human Rights Watch.

The official line from the Obama administration is that it opposes “unilateral actions” that might “upset peace negotiations.” Right, we must preserve the precious peace talks, which have gone on for decades and have served as a stalling tactic while Israel continues to occupy Palestine and steal more land. In reality, Israel opposes a Palestinian state. And the U.S. supports them in this.

Here’s a worthwhile interview with Brennan Center’s Mike German, a 16-year veteran of the FBI, on excessive secrecy, incompetence, and threat inflation in the FBI and the intelligence community.

Also from VICE and also on the FBI, Charles Davis wrote a great piece on the FBI’s pursuit of anti-war activists. Read it here.

In a post titled “US Warns China: Don’t Pull a Crimea,” The American Interest notes the Obama administration’s efforts to maintain a credible military threat as a bulwark against China’s disputed maritime and territorial claims in the South China Sea:

The U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia issued a stern warning to Beijing yesterday: Don’t even think about using force to annex islands in the South China Sea, as Russia did in Crimea.

“The prospect of the kind of incremental retaliatory steps that are gradually being imposed on Russia in terms of its banks, in terms of cronies and other areas should have a chilling effect on anyone in China who might contemplate the Crimea annexation as a model,” Daniel Russel said. ”The net effect is to put more pressure on China to demonstrate that it remains committed to the peaceful resolution of the problems.”

“The president of the United States and the Obama administration is firmly committed to honoring our defense commitments to our allies,” he continued.

China has been paying attention to the West’s response Russia, which has so far included nothing more than anemic sanctions and the categorical ruling-out of the military option.

It is very unlikely that China is drawing actionable lessons from Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Just as Washington’s failure to bomb Syria did not influence Putin to take action in Crimea, Washington’s failure to respond militarily in Crimea is not going to convince Beijing that it can annex Taiwan or the Spratly islands. For one thing, the U.S. probably would intervene militarily in the East or South China Seas because Washington has formal defense treaties with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines and remains the guarantor of the status quo in Taiwan. Washington had no such arrangements with Ukraine. Beijing knows this.

That said, China’s long-term strategy has indeed been to gradually gain more economic, military, and political power while refraining from outright aggressive provocations that upset the status quo. Beijing intends to acquire its expanded claims in a de facto way as its own sphere of influence in East Asia expands and Washington’s contracts. As University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer noted: “The Chinese are going to imitate the United States. They’re going to try to dominate Asia the way we dominated the Western hemisphere, and they’re going to try to push us out.”

So a war over the Diayou/Senkaku islands is unlikely to happen in the near term. But as U.S. power declines due to imperial overstretch, the influence over questions like Taiwan or these disputed island chains will gradually be ceded to China. That can either happen peacefully, with the U.S. willingly withdrawing from its claims of global hegemony, or violently, with a clash between two nuclear-armed giants.

In other words, the U.S. could easily keep out of costly war (whether hot or cold) with China over hegemony in East Asia. As Jan Hornát wrote recently at The National Interest, “a balance of power system can accentuate mutual differences, intensify rivalries and legitimize expansionist policies and preemptive war in name of the equilibrium.” Ceasing to impose on a region half a world away, on the other hand, can keep these dangerous contingencies remote. Seems like an easy choice to me. But the Obama administration is instead reinforcing its claims of dominance in East Asia and is issuing reassurances that we will continue to surround China militarily and respond with violence to any perceived expansions.

 

According to the Associated Press, the U.S. government is still engaged in efforts to overthrow the Cuban government. Starting in 2010, a group of U.S. officials working for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) hired high-tech contractors to stir up revolution in Cuba via social media.

According to documents obtained by The Associated Press and multiple interviews with people involved in the project, the plan was to develop a bare-bones “Cuban Twitter,” using cellphone text messaging to evade Cuba’s strict control of information and its stranglehold restrictions over the Internet. In a play on Twitter, it was called ZunZuneo — slang for a Cuban hummingbird’s tweet.

Documents show the U.S. government planned to build a subscriber base through “non-controversial content”: news messages on soccer, music and hurricane updates. Later when the network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize “smart mobs” — mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice that might trigger a Cuban Spring, or, as one USAID document put it, “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.”

The plan was to disseminate propaganda that would generate “mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice that might trigger a Cuban Spring, or, as one USAID document put it, ‘renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.'”

“There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement,” one memo from the project said. “This is absolutely crucial for the long-term success of the service and to ensure the success of the Mission.”

AP:

The program’s legality is unclear: U.S. law requires that any covert action by a federal agency must have a presidential authorization and that Congress should be notified.

The Obama administration on Thursday said the program was not covert and that it served an important purpose by helping information flow more freely to Cubans. Parts of the program “were done discreetly,” Rajiv Shah, USAID’s top official, said on MSNBC, in order to protect the people involved.

The administration also initially said Thursday that it had disclosed the program to Congress — White House spokesman Jay Carney said it had been “debated in Congress” — but hours later shifted that to say it had offered to discuss funding for the program with several congressional committees. “We also offered to brief our appropriators and our authorizers,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said.

…”If you’re going to do a covert operation like this for a regime change, assuming it ever makes any sense, it’s not something that should be done through USAID,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees USAID’s budget.

The administration can obfuscate all it wants about how transparent the effort was. What seems clear is that neither Congress or the American people knew about this effort. That means several things. First, it’s very likely illegal. Second, it represents an attempt to depose a foreign government that does not threaten the U.S. And third, it is anti-democratic to its very core since it was done without approval from the American people or their elected representatives. Taken together, it is ironic to say the least that this program was justified with claims of bringing democracy and the rule of law to Cuba.

The U.S. has a long and sordid history of committing serious crimes in Cuba. In modern history, this includes hiring organized crime syndicates to assassinate Cuba’s sitting president and training a counter-revolutionary militia to invade and overthrow the government. Both efforts failed. This is not to mention the decades of economic embargo which has contributed to mass suffering in Cuba.

When will this stop?

At the ceremony for the death of Nelson Mandela, Obama made headlines when he walked up to Raul Castro and shook his hand. The historic gesture seemed to say, “we don’t have to be enemies anymore.” If only Castro knew a program started by that same U.S. president sought to topple his government.