Category: News

In last night’s State of the Union speech, President Obama put the spotlight on one of his invited guests, Army Ranger Sgt. 1st Class Cory Remsburg, a severely wounded veteran who was nearly killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. Here’s Reason‘s Nick Gillespie in Time on why using the wounded vet as a political tool is “morally dubious.”

The most emotionally powerful moment in Barack Obama’s State of the Union address was also its most morally dubious. The nation’s commander in chief drew attention to a wounded warrior while eliding any responsibility for placing the young man in harm’s way.

A record number of Americans – 60 percent – think the government is too powerful, says Gallup, which also finds a near record low percentage trusts the government “to do what is right.” Who can blame us? The government under Republican and Democratic presidents has spent virtually the entire 21st century sending young men and women to fight in ill-defined and unsuccessful elective wars. That’s bad enough, but then to use them as props in political speeches? That’s positively obscene.

Gillespie is exactly right. As I tweeted at the time, praising Corey for almost getting killed in a war zone that Barack Obama ordered him into is a bit off.

Praising wounded soldiers who fight in the country’s wars is an old pastime, stretching back to tribal warfare and the ancient Greeks. It is mostly an attempt to gin up support for state violence.

So when Obama paid tribute to our warriors “who risk and lay down their lives to keep us free,” he was not being genuine. Does having 50,000 U.S. troops in Germany really have anything to do with keeping us free? Or is it what policymakers, in their less public moments, have said NATO is all about, namely ensuring the U.S. maintains dominance over the European continent? Are the approximately 50,000 U.S. troops in Japan really there to keep Americans “free”? Or are they there, as in Europe, to maintain Washington’s dominance and, more lately, contain a rising China? Did troops really invade Iraq in 2003 to secure the freedom of Americans? Isn’t it true that the presence of U.S. troops in the Middle East motivated al-Qaeda to attack us on 9/11, and thus made us less secure and less free?

And if the troops in Afghanistan are there to protect freedom all the way back here in America, why does it look like we’ll be pulling out with none of our major objectives accomplished and the Taliban as strong as ever? Might Americans have been just as free if we pulled out in 2009, when Obama took office and when Corey was nearly killed? Wouldn’t Afghanistan be in approximately the same position it is now, with a weak government that survives on foreign aid and systemic corruption and a Taliban insurgency that, despite the vaunted surge, looks like it can break up the country?

By 1965, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had privately admitted the war in Vietnam was unwinnable, but necessary in order to maintain American credibility and prestige. The war in Afghanistan is very much the same. Soldiers sent to fight and die in Afghanistan are sent for the international reputations of politicians in Washington, to save face, to prove to the world that America will use force even in lost wars.

The greatest threat to Americans’ freedom doesn’t come from Germany or Japan or Iraq or Afghanistan. It comes from Washington. That’s why people in the Founding generation like James Madison said, “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” He also warned posterity that, “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Thomas Jefferson described “standing armies” as a “menace to the liberties of the people.”

If Obama said something like that, it would have been a hard truth put to the country. Hard, but at least it’d be true.

The Obama administration seems to have made a decision long ago on how to deal with Egypt’s rocky, post-Mubarak transition; namely to keep it subtle and in the background. Washington intends to remain a player in Egypt’s strategic position, but as far as the domestic stuff goes, Obama is tight-lipped.

That is actually representative of what the U.S. approach to Egypt has been for years prior to its 2011 revolution. Prop up the regime in exchange for favoring U.S. interests and pretend like the domestic repression is unknown to us. Why? Because Egypt is too important to U.S. strategy (they claim).

Doug Bandow sums up:

Egypt is racing toward dictatorship. Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sisi even arrested opponents of the proposed constitution in the January referendum. However, Washington always has been more interested in maintaining influence than encouraging democracy or promoting development in Egypt. Toward that end the U.S. provided more than $75 billion in “aid” over the years. In fact, the cash bought little leverage. Hosni Mubarak spent decades oppressing Egyptian citizens and persecuting Coptic Christians despite Washington’s advice to the contrary. Israel’s military superiority, not America’s money, bought peace. Cash for fancy weapons may have won privileged access to Egyptian airspace and the Suez Canal, but today the Egyptian military needs the U.S.—for maintenance on and spare parts for those same weapons—more than the U.S. needs the Egyptian military. [emphasis added]

I’ve made the recurring argument that whenever people in Washington speak of “U.S. interests” they are really talking about the interests of the state and the corporate entities closely tied to it, not, as it were, ordinary American people. But even if we buy into the notion of strategic interests that are to the benefit of the country, it appears the U.S. has none in Egypt. Washington continues to spend billions of dollars on a regime that is brutalizing its people and dismantling what little democratic structures have been built up since 2011. The only difference now is that it doesn’t benefit the U.S. at all.

As John Mearsheimer has explained, arguments that Egypt represents a vital U.S. interest are “unpersuasive.” Indeed, Philip E. Auerswald, assistant professor at George Mason University, and a research associate at Harvard University, has argued that the Middle East, far from being the vital strategic center of the world everyone chalks it up to be, is largely “irrelevant” to U.S. interests. “The Middle East just isn’t that important,” he wrote back in 2007.

Then again, as The New York Times reported in 2012, U.S. aid to Egypt helps keep the pockets of defense corporations nice and full.

Despite my harsh criticisms of the Obama administration’s policies towards the Asia-Pacific, I’m of the opinion that an actual shooting war between the U.S. and China is very unlikely for the foreseeable future. Like the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, real conflict was considered simply too costly to statesmen on both sides.

But John Mearsheimer, professor of Political Science at Chicago University, thinks “there is a greater possibility of the U.S. and China going to war in the future than there was of a Soviet-NATO general war during the Cold War,” Zachary Keck, writing at The Diplomat, sums up Mearsheimer’s recent comments at a DC gathering.

Specifically, the center of gravity of the U.S.-Soviet competition was the central European landmass. This created a rather stable situation as, according to Mearsheimer, anyone that war gamed a NATO-Warsaw conflict over Central Europe understood that it would quickly turn nuclear. This gave both sides a powerful incentive to avoid a general conflict in Central Europe as a nuclear war would make it very likely that both the U.S. and Soviet Union would be “vaporized.”

The U.S.-China strategic rivalry lacks this singular center of gravity. Instead, Mearsheimer identified four potential hotspots over which he believes the U.S. and China might find themselves at war: the Korean Peninsula, the Taiwan Strait and the South and East China Seas. Besides featuring more hotspots than the U.S.-Soviet conflict, Mearsheimer implied that he felt that decision-makers in Beijing and Washington might be more confident that they could engage in a shooting war over one of these areas without it escalating to the nuclear threshold.

For instance, he singled out the Sino-Japanese dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, of which he said there was a very real possibility that Japan and China could find themselves in a shooting war sometime in the next five years. Should a shooting war break out between China and Japan in the East China Sea, Mearsheimer said he believes the U.S. will have two options: first, to act  as an umpire in trying to separate the two sides and return to the status quo ante; second, to enter the conflict on the side of Japan.

Mearsheimer said that he thinks it’s more likely the U.S. would opt for the second option because a failure to do so would weaken U.S. credibility in the eyes of its Asian allies. In particular, he believes that America trying to act as a mediator would badly undermine Japanese and South Korean policymakers’ faith in America’s extended deterrence. Since the U.S. does not want Japan or South Korea to build their own nuclear weapons, Washington would be hesitant to not come out decisively on the side of the Japanese in any war between Tokyo and Beijing.

As I’ve argued, there is an alternative.

One of the hard truths about Washington is that Congress recklessly wastes billions of taxpayer dollars on weapons programs that the Pentagon says it doesn’t want or need. Congress does this to avoid the slight uptick in unemployment in their districts that might result from cutting portions of the defense budget.

In other words, defense corporations that get virtually all their revenue from government extort continued welfare payments because they employ people in states and districts across the country. Politicians put their own political careers ahead of doing what is right and sensible (i.e., cutting wasteful DoD programs).

Part of this is achieved through lobbying. These corrupt politicians get tens of thousands in campaign contributions to incentivize them against cutting off Lockheed Martin’s welfare benefits. But another part of their strategy goes beyond lobbying; they lie.

According to a new report by William Hartung of the Center for International Policy (via Veronique de Rugy), Lockheed Martin dramatically inflated the number of estimated jobs that would be lost due to cuts to the notoriously expensive and wasteful F-35 fighter jet program.

“Lockheed Martin claims that the 125,000 jobs created by the F-35” would be lost if the government cuts funding. But only 32,500 of those are directly related to the F-35 program. A more generous estimate from a University of Massachusetts study “would put total jobs generated by the F-35 program in the range of 50,000 to 60,000 jobs, or less than half the 125,000 jobs claimed by Lockheed Martin.”

So Lockheed Martin was warning elected officials of dire unemployment predictions if the F-35 was cut, but the estimates were exaggerated in a big way. And this isn’t a new tactic.

A study put together during the recent sequestration debate that was “commissioned by a top defense and aerospace trade association” – namely, the Aerospace Industries Association and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers – found that “a new batch of planned Pentagon spending cuts would cause 1 million jobs to be lost next year.”

The National Association of Manufacturers, another lobby group, repeated this finding, adding that proposed cuts would “increase unemployment by 0.7 percent, and decrease gross domestic product by almost 1 percent.”

But, as Lawrence Korb, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress wrote at the time, these lobby groups fibbed their numbers.

“To maximize their findings (and their political impact),” Korb writes, ”both studies assessed the effects of defense sequestration on every sector of the economy that could be hit by “induced effects,’ including secondary and tertiary effects like reduced consumer spending. As a result, the ’1 million jobs’ figure includes jobs in industries as distant from defense as ‘retail trade’ and ‘leisure and hospitality services.’”

And besides, Korb points out, “defense spending is not a jobs program.” At least, it’s not supposed to be.

As far as the health of the economy is concerned, defense budgets are a net drain. The jobs that these rent-seeking defense corporations maintain only show what big business can do with taxed and diverted wealth.

In the early 1970s, I was chief of the CIA’s Soviet Foreign Policy Branch in which Robert M. Gates worked as a young CIA analyst. While it may be true that I was too inexperienced at the time to handle all the management challenges of such a high-powered office, one of the things I did get right was my assessment of Gates in his Efficiency Report.

I wrote that if his overweening ambition were not reined in, young Bobby was sure to become an even more dangerous problem. Who could have known, then, how huge a problem? As it turned out, I was not nearly as skilled as Gates at schmoozing senior managers who thus paid no heed to my warning. Gates was a master at ingratiating himself to his superiors.

The supreme irony came a short decade later when we – ALL of us, managers, analysts, senior and junior alike – ended up working under Gates. Ronald Reagan’s CIA Director William Casey had found in Gates just the person to do his bidding, someone who earned the title “windsock Bobby” because he was clever enough to position himself in whatever direction the powerful winds were blowing.

To justify the expensive military buildup of the 1980s and the proxy wars that Reagan wanted fought required judging the Soviet Union to be ascendant and marching toward world domination. In that cause, Gates was just the man to shatter the CIA’s commitment to providing presidents with objective analysis. He replaced that proud legacy with whatever “information” would serve the White House’s political needs.

As Casey’s choice to head the CIA analytical division and then serve as deputy CIA director, Gates showed himself to be super-successful at weeding out competent analysts, especially those – like Melvin A. Goodman – who knew the Soviet Union cold and recognized its new President Mikhail Gorbachev for the reformer he was.

Continue reading “No Tears for the Real Robert Gates”

Pro-Israel commentators have been known to downplay the importance of the Israel lobby here in the U.S. “The lobby” is not as influential, coordinated, sneaky, or nefarious as many of its critics maintain, they insist, while often making accusations of conspiratorial thinking.

In a strange, reverse-paranoia article at The Daily Beast, one of these pro-Israel commentators, Eli Lake, makes the argument that there is an “American Lobby in Israel” pressuring select Israeli leaders on a peace deal with the Palestinians. Oddly, he calls this a lobby even though he is referring to elected and appointed Washington diplomats out of the State Department and not private lobby groups or political action organizations.

Specifically, U.S. officials are talking with Israeli military officials about whether it is necessary for Israel to insist on maintaining an army occupation in the Jordan Valley (on Palestinian territory) as part of any final deal. Lake:

The Daily Beast has learned that Martin Indyk, the administration’s special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and his team have quietly been meeting with Israeli reservist generals and other leading national-security experts to discuss American ideas for securing the Jordan River Valley without a permanent Israeli troop presence. That’s an idea the current Israeli defense minister opposes, and strongly.

On the surface, these informal meetings may not sound like lobbying—at least, not the stuff-cash-in-congressmen’s-pockets style of lobbying we hear about in Washington. There’s no hard sales pitch, just a genteel discussion of issues. But the conversations are part of a larger effort to “prepare the Israeli public” to accept hard compromises for peace with the Palestinians, as one U.S. official working on the negotiations put it. And some senior members of the Israeli government, including Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, are not happy. Yaalon views the get-togethers with the Israeli reservist generals as a way to circumvent his own objections to any security plan that would require Israel not to have troops on the border with Jordan.

Oh, how wily and underhanded of Indyk! Far from a sneaky ploy to gin up support for a final deal without a continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands (which of course would never be accepted by the Palestinian side, as Yaalon and Netanyahu know full well), it seems entirely reasonable that the U.S. envoy would speak with Israeli generals about the need (or not) to have a presence in the Jordan Valley.

Lake seems to want to portray this as a quiet coup, since people like Yaalon and Netanyahu oppose IDF withdrawal from the West Bank. But many current and former officials don’t agree that an Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley is necessary as part of a final deal. Dov Weisglass, who was a top advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and by no means a dove, wrote earlier this month that there really is no security justification for such a presence. Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan also argued there is no military or security need.

In reality, the push to maintain an occupation in the Jordan Valley,  an area constituting some 20% of the West Bank, is a political one about denying Palestinian statehood and holding out hope for an eventual annexation of the coveted “Judea and Samaria.” The increasing sway of the settler movement in Israeli politics has caused some politicians to insist on this presence in the Jordan Valley, but it seems clear they only insist upon it because they know it will destroy any chance for a peace settlement.

The last thing Israel wants is a final agreement. As Yousef Munayyer has written at The Daily Beast, “Israel needs negotiations to provide cover for its continued colonization of Palestinian territory and create the impression that its presence in the West Bank is temporary and its withdrawal around the corner.”