Category: News

Despite Obama’s promise in last week’s State of the Union address that he will veto any bill that heaps additional sanctions on Iran while the interim agreement is still in place, hawks in the House of Representatives are still pushing for it.

Indeed, a mixture of hawkish Republicans and Democrats in Congress are aligned with AIPAC and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their belief that the interim deal reached with Iran in the P5+1 talks in Geneva is tantamount to appeasement and will inevitably lead to a nuclear-armed Iran.

The Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin is criticizing the Obama administration for not wanting to preventively bomb Iran. Richard Grenell at Fox News argues the interim agreement is too favorable to Iran, “allowing the Islamic Republic to forego full and verified suspension before negotiations even begin.”

President Obama and his team caved further to the Iranians by agreeing to a deal that rewarded sanctions relief and other benefits without getting any actions from Iran first.

In trusting the Iranians to stop their secret enrichment activities and come clean to the IAEA inspectors at a later date, Obama shows his naivety.

I suppose I was the naive one, considering I actually believed such obviously false statements couldn’t possibly be published at FoxNews.com.

The argument that Iran got sanctions relief without any curbs on its nuclear program is so baseless as to be laughable. Jessica Tuchman Matthews of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace explains:

Continue reading “The Mindlessness of Iran Hawks”

In the policy and think tank worlds, we’re told Obama’s “pivot” to Asia is essential for America’s national interests and that, indeed, continued U.S. military presence throughout the Asia Pacific region is vital for both the U.S. and its allies. U.S. allies need to be reassured of our protection racket and Washington must compete with a rising China for regional hegemony…or else!

Robert Kelly, Asia expert and professor of international relations at Pusan National University in Korea, disagrees. In a recent post over at the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter blog, Kelly reiterates a point he has been “banging away at for a while“…

that the pivot is an elite project that only activates the US foreign policy community and think tank set; that most Americans know little about Asia, perceive it mostly as an export platform for cheap stuff at Walmart, and do not really care that much; that the pivot is wildly over-rated in Asia as a some major strategic shift of the US against the Middle East; and that America hardly ‘needs’ Asia as Asian commentators love to intone.

…Always remember that Asian states need the US a lot more than the U.S. needs them. US regional allies need it to hold back China, and even China needs Americans to buy all their exports and provide a savings safe-haven. Sure, Americans benefit from cheap Asian exports and lending, but that is a lot less important. Almost all of Asia’s growing economies are so deeply based on exporting to the West that a cut-off would lead to economic chaos and political turbulence. This is one of the many reasons why Asian exporters should rebalance toward local consumer demand. But so long as Asia’s mega-exporter oligarchs persists with the ‘tiger’ model of export dependence, the U.S. has enormous leverage. Where would Sony, Samsung and so on be without the American consumer?

Hence in both security and economic affairs, the relationship is highly asymmetric, and those who tell you otherwiseare trying to cover the weaknesses of many Asian states and their desperation for U.S. attention with bravado that America ‘needs’ Asia. As I have been trying to argue on my blog for awhile, if Asians do not want the US in Asia, it is no big deal for US security, and it is an economic blow far worse for them than it is for America.

Elsewhere, Kelly writes that “U.S. alliances shouldn’t be charity.”

America is too broke for that; global hegemony and endless war are corroding American domestic liberalism far too much for freebies; and unburdened allies who don’t feel a sense of limits in dealing with the US can easily pull us into unwanted trouble (see: Israel or the endless infantile scrapping between Korea and Japan).

…If we have to have a $13 trillion dollar debt and the NSA listening to all our phone calls, then we can push allies to do a lot more. Hegemony is not healthy for the US at home, and I see no reason for America to become a prussianized semi-imperial state for foreigners’ defense…

More than anything else, America’s expansive foreign policy is to blame for systematic civil liberties abuses and bigger government here at home. Domestic encroachments on liberty are part and parcel of having a limitless national security state. So, no…we don’t need a surge in Asia.

Two recent reports from Foreign Policy reveal that there is routine corruption at the Defense Department and that it even extends to covering up evidence of war crimes.

First, from Gordon Lubold, an article based on a July 2013 report compiled by the Defense Department’s General Counsel’s Standards of Conduct Office that catalogued ethical violations of employees. Here’s the lede:

Did you hear the one about the first lieutenant who had to pay $120,000 in fines for accepting bribes from contractors he’d awarded with lucrative Defense Department deals? Or the Navy civilian working who asked a fence contractor for a $5,000 payment so the contractor could be “recommended” for a $153,000 contract? What about the four senior officials, including two Air Force generals, a Marine general and a Navy admiral, who extended their stay in Tokyo to play golf at an illegal cost of $3,000 to the government?

The thing is, those aren’t jokes. They’re true stories. And they point to a growing problem within the military: a pattern of misconduct, misbehavior and outright thievery by senior generals, top Pentagon civilian officials and of course, the rank-and-file.

And then there’s Dan Lamothe’s exclusive on “an investigation into whether senior Marine Corps officers attempted to cover up their own misconduct while prosecuting war crimes in Afghanistan.” Remember the soldiers who were caught in a viral video peeing on dead Afghans? Well, apparently higher level officials tried to hide additional evidence in the case and, specifically, tried to classify evidence that would have incriminated them.

Three snipers who appeared in the video pleaded guilty to a variety of charges, including wrongful possession of unauthorized photos of casualties. At least five other Marines received non-judicial punishments.

While the criminal cases played out, top Marine officials abruptly classified the videos and other information collected despite protestations that it wasn’t legal to do so from classification experts in the military. Marine officials argued that releasing the videos and other information in the case could lead to new attacks American troops in Afghanistan.

That move outraged Maj. James Weirick, a Marine lawyer at Quantico, VA, who alleged that Gen. James Amos — the top officer in the Marine Corps and a member of the Joint Chiefs – or others acting on his behalf deliberately and unlawfully meddled in the prosecution of the Marines caught in the video to ensure that they received stiff punishments. Weirick also accused senior Marine Corps leadership of unlawfully classifying evidence in the case in an attempt to cover up their involvement in the case.

Not only does this raise questions about accountability mechanisms within the Pentagon and military systems, but it kind of flies in the face of our cultural and political obligation to exalt members of the military for “nobly protecting our freedoms” without any appraisal of their actual behavior. I’ve written about this before, noting that uncomfortable realities – like the rampant sexual assault and inordinate gang member representation in the military – are simply erased in order to maintain our automatic, society-wide praise for military service.

If you say it out loud, it seems too preposterous to be true. Four high-profile former government officials are getting paid by an Iranian dissident group that until 2012 was an officially designated terrorist organization to publicly oppose the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts with Iran.

BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray attended a briefing in the Dirksen Senate office building on Capitol Hill sponsored by “an Iranian exile group related to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK).” The former government officials speaking out on behalf of this group against diplomacy with Iran included “former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, former Ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg, General James L. Jones, and and former US Special Envoy for Nuclear Nonproliferation Robert Joseph.”

Robert Joseph described the diplomacy as “appeasement” and urged additional sanctions, which Obama has promised to veto, to stop “Iran’s nuclear quest.”

Howard Dean refused to answer questions as to whether he was still getting boatloads of money from MEK groups and even went so far as to say that U.S.-Iran negotiations should not go forward until the Obama administration agrees to grant some kind of asylum to the 3,000 MEK activists sheltered by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein that are now living in a U.S. military base called Camp Liberty.

“We ought to sign no agreement until those 3000 people are safe,” Dean said.

Rewind to 2003. George W. Bush included Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorists like MEK in his propaganda justifying the invasion of Iraq. “Iraq shelters terrorist groups including the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization,” reads a document in the archives of the White House’s website, “which has used terrorist violence against Iran and in the 1970s was responsible for killing several US military personnel and US civilians.”

As recently as 2007, a State Department report warned that the MEK, retains “the capacity and will” to attack “Europe, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, and beyond.”

Many experts, including current senior U.S. officials, believe that the MEK, backed by Israel, is the group responsible for assassinating Iran’s civilian nuclear scientists in what are clear-cut terrorist acts.

This is the group lobbying hard to get high-profile U.S. officials to come out publicly against the U.S.-Iran negotiations, which supporters say is the only thing with any chance of verifiably curtailing Iran’s nuclear program and keeping Washington off the inevitable war path to Tehran.

Like I said, reality seems stranger than fiction in this case.

Catherine Traywick at Foreign Policy explains how the U.S. government and the (U.S.-backed) Philippines government exploited the U.S. military’s disaster response to the recent typhoon in order to justify more U.S. troops to be stationed at more U.S. bases in the Philippines.

Officials from both nations quickly framed the catastrophe as a justification for a broader U.S. military presence in the Philippines. Two weeks after Haiyan made landfall, Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario said the disaster “demonstrated” the need for U.S. troops in the Philippines. Shortly after that, U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg argued that Haiyan underscored his top priority: to deepen the military relationship between countries. That argument riled some Filipino legislators. One leftist political advocacy group decried it “disaster opportunism at its finest.”

U.S. troops already have a small but significant footprint in the Philippines. U.S. special forces have spent the past 12 years in the southern part of the country to help Philippine troops carry out counterrorism missions against Abu Sayyaf and elements of Jemaah Islamiyah, two Islamic terrorist groups with links to al Qaeda. U.S. troops also participate in frequent military exercises with the Philippine military. Since President Barack Obama announced his so-called “pivot to Asia,” however, the United States has been pushing for greater access to Philippine bases and the right to build exclusive facilities on them — a politically contentious issue that caused negotiations to fall apart last October.

Traywick notes the issue of more U.S. troops is “a sensitive one”: “The Philippine legislature ousted U.S. forces from the country in 1991 over issues of national sovereignty and the public’s perception that American troops were above the law, after allegations of rape and the human rights abuses made national headlines.”

I wrote about this cynical effort to win more basing rights back in November, noting specifically why the history of U.S. interventionism in the Philippines makes many Filipinos justifiably wary of welcoming U.S. troops back:

The fact that Filipinos hesitate to welcome the U.S. back onto permanent bases, after kicking us out at the end of the Cold War, should not be belittled. The 1899-1902 U.S. war and occupation of the Philippines was a vicious colonial experiment waged for cynical geopolitical interests. Inclusive estimates that account for excess deaths related to the war say there were as many as 1 million casualties. Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were locked up in concentration camps, where poor conditions and disease killed thousands.

The account of U.S. Corporal Sam Gillis provides a vivid insight into what the occupation was like: “We make everyone get into his house by seven p.m., and we only tell a man once. If he refuses we shoot him. We killed over 300 natives the first night. They tried to set the town on fire. If they fire a shot from the house we burn the house down and every house near it, and shoot the natives, so they are pretty quiet in town now.”

Just as the U.S. is now trying to cloak their interventionism in the guise of humanitarian causes, the 1899 intervention was of course described in the loveliest of terms. The leader of the nationalist movement in the Philippines who declared independence from the Spanish, Emilio Aguinaldo, received a letter from U.S. General Thomas Anderson that read,” General Anderson wishes you to inform your people that we are here for their good…”

President William McKinley insisted the U.S. was just trying to liberate the Philippines: “No imperial designs lurk in the American mind,” he said, but it was “not a good time for the liberator to submit important questions concerning liberty and government to the liberated while they are engaged in shooting down their rescuers.”

The legacy of that imperial war persisted over the decades until the U.S. was finally kicked out of the Philippines in the early 1990?s. The only reason the U.S. is interested in increasing military presence in the Philippines is to threaten and thus contain China. Never mind the fact that China doesn’t actually pose a threat to Americans.

It should go without saying that it is unacceptable for the U.S. to cynically use the quick military relief operations response to “lubricate” a deal that benefits U.S. foreign policy interests.

Read the whole thing.