News and Views
Hundreds of folks turned out today in DC to protest NSA surveillance. The sign makers outdid themselves for this worthy cause —
[[ on Twitter – @jimbovard ]]
Marching from Union Station to the base of Capitol Hill…
Plenty of “Thank You Snowden” signs in today’s crowd…
Kelley Vlahos, the only journalist adept enough to write for both Fox News & Antiwar.com –
K
Let’s face it, with rising public criticism of the Obama administration’s drone war, embarrassing political posturing and shutdown politics on the domestic side, and unprecedented worldwide outrage over NSA spying, the U.S. government has seen better days (something worthy of celebration, in my opinion).
Jon Stewart sums it up well:
In a commentary that appeared in USA Today, RAND Corporation senior adviser Brian Michael Jenkins praises President Obama’s increased reliance on Joint Special Operations Command raids in place of drone strikes.
“The two U.S. commando raids in Libya and Somalia this month,” Jenkins argues, represent “a significant shift” that “has the potential to both reduce public hostility to the drones…and to improve intelligence by capturing rather than killing terrorist leaders.”
Mind you, Jenkins doesn’t express concern over the unlawfulness of the U.S. drone war or that it consistently kills civilians, as the two recent reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch document. Rather, raids are better because they reduce public anger and provide the opportunity to obtain intelligence by putting detainees in a legal limbo on a ship somewhere in the ocean.
There is a lot of “psychological utility” in the use of raids over drones, Jenkins explains. “Now, America can turn things around,” he writes. “Terrorists want us to live in fear. We will make them live in fear.”
I know what you’re thinking: with a comment like that, this Jenkins guy belongs in a Hollywood movie!
Interesting you should say that, because Jenkins cites another advantage to special operations raids over drone strikes: it feeds Americans’ appetite for warrior praise. If Americans can glorify and exalt the bravery and sacrifice of U.S. Marines, it will go a long way towards regaining the public support for U.S. militarism that drone warfare has diminished.
War is not to be celebrated or romanticized, but movies such as Zero Dark Thirty and Captain Phillips provide images and narratives that sustain morale in a protracted conflict. These special operations raids contrast the courage and prowess of American warriors with the calculated savagery displayed by murderers of unarmed civilians, so dramatically demonstrated in the terrorist attack on the Westgate mall in Nairobi.
Among the many honors these two Hollywood jingo flicks have received, I’m sure it warms the hearts of the actors, producers, and directors that there is profound propaganda value in their work.
See here for some history on how Hollywood served a similar role for war propaganda back in WWII.
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This well-reported article by Will Crisp at the Christian Science Monitor has two important findings. First, disparate armed militias are really who rules Libya, not the government. Second, these militias are motivated to wrest even more control over the government by a fear of Western interference.
Abdelmonem al-Said is the head of the militia that kidnapped Libya’s prime minister last month. He proudly stands by his role in the abduction and defiantly announces in press conferences how not scared he is of retribution or punishment, because the government is too weak, Crisp reports.
Here’s a key section of Crisp’s report, sub-titled “Suspicion of intervention.”
In the weeks ahead of Zeidan’s abduction, the Justice and Construction party, linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, repeatedly called for the prime minister’s removal, but couldn’t drum up the 120 votes in parliament needed for a no-confidence vote. The new lawmakers behind the push for a no-confidence vote insist they were not behind the kidnapping, and only seek to bring down the government by legitimate means.
“This could well have been an attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood to achieve something illegally that they failed to achieve through the legitimate means of a no-confidence vote,” says Jason Pack, a research at Cambridge University and president of Libya-Analysis.com.
“The Brotherhood doesn’t necessarily want to replace him with one of their own ranks, but it does want to block his plans to build a strong army. It’s seen what happened in Egypt and sees plans to cooperate with the US and Europe over training troops as a threat.”
Continue reading “Armed Militias Rule Libya, Primed For ‘Backlash’ At Sign of Western Meddling”
Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. The incursion into Lebanon was one of the biggest debacles of the Reagan administration. Unfortunately, though Reagan eventually recognized his folly and pulled troops out, other presidents did not recognize the tragic lessons of the pointless loss of American troops.
Here’s a piece I wrote ten years ago on the Lebanon debacle for Counterpunch (excerpted from my 2003 book, Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (St. Martin’s/Palgrave).
Counterpunch, October 8, 2003
The Reagan Roadmap for an Antiterrorism Disaster
by James Bovard
In his televised speech to the nation on September 7 [2003], President Bush declared, “In the past, the terrorists have cited the examples of Beirut and Somalia, claiming that if you inflict harm on Americans, we will run from a challenge. In this, they are mistaken.” There are many parallels between the 1982-84 U.S. deployment and decimation of U.S. troops in Beirut and the current Iraqi situation. None of them bode well for the success of Operation Iraqi Freedom or the life expectancy of American troops.
Few Americans remember the bitter details of one of Reagan’s biggest foreign debacles. Lebanon had been wracked by a brutal civil war for seven years when, in June 1982, Israel invaded in order to crush the Palestinian Liberation Organization. U.S. troops were briefly deployed in August in Beirut to help secure a ceasefire to facilitate the withdrawal of the PLO forces to Tunisia.
Continue reading “30th Anniverary of Beirut Marine Corps Bombing Debacle”
The list of former U.S. officials who believe drone strikes create more enemies than they eliminate juts got a little bit longer.
“Drone strikes take out a few bad guys to be sure, but they also kill a large number of innocent civilians,” writes Nabeel Khoury, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Yemen from 2004 to 2007. “Given Yemen’s tribal structure, the U.S. generates roughly forty to sixty new enemies for every AQAP operative killed by drones.”
This is an old trope for those of us who have been criticizing the drone war for years. But the notion that it creates blowback is gaining in popularity of late. CNN, for example, just ran this segment, entitled “In Swat Valley, U.S. drone strikes radicalizing a new generation.”
Another recent headline-grabber on this issue happened just last week when Malala Yousafzai said she told Obama, “that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people.”
And, as I said, Khoury joins a long list of U.S. officials who hold this point of view. “Drones are a weapon of terror in many ways, and the kind of hostility this is going to breed may not be worth the counter-terrorism gains,” says Barbara Bodine, who was U.S. ambassador to Yemen from 1997 to 2001.
Robert Grenier, who headed the CIA’s counter-terrorism center from 2004 to 2006 and was previously a CIA station chief in Pakistan, said last year that, “We have been seduced by [drones] and the unintended consequences of our actions are going to outweigh the intended consequences.”
“We have gone a long way down the road of creating a situation where we are creating more enemies than we are removing from the battlefield,” Grenier added. “We are already there with regards to Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
“U.S. involvement is far more than ever in Yemen. We have no evidence that all those being killed are terrorists,” Abdul Salam Mohammed, director of Abaad Strategic Center, told CNN last year. “With every U.S. attack that is conducted in Yemen al Qaeda is only growing in power and we have to ask ourselves why that is happening.”
Add to all this the devastating reports from both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch this week detailing the human and civilian costs of the drone war and questioning its legality, and it’s clear there is an emerging opposition to the gratuitous use of drones that has prevailed in Obama’s tenure thus far.
