Category: News

The announcement of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, set for October 11, is sure to make big news. The prize remains the most prestigious in the world. But the award has fallen into an evasive pattern, ignoring the USA’s continuous "war on terror" and even giving it tacit support.

In his 1895 will, the dynamite inventor and ammunition magnate Alfred Nobel specified that Norway’s parliament should elect a five-member committee for awarding the prize to "champions of peace." Yet the list of recent Nobel peace laureates is notably short on such champions. Instead, the erstwhile politicians on the Norwegian Nobel Committee have largely bypassed the original purpose of the prize.

Despite all its claims of independence, the Oslo-based Nobel Committee is enmeshed in Norwegian politics. The global prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize has obscured the reality that its selection committee is chosen by leaders of Norway’s main political parties – and, as a member of NATO, Norway is deeply entangled in the military alliance.

When the Nobel Peace Prize went to President Obama in 2009, he was in the midst of drastically escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, in tandem with the rest of NATO. The same prize went to the European Union in 2012, a year after many of its member states intervened with military force in Libya. On both occasions, in effect, the Nobel Committee bestowed a "good war-making seal of approval."

Since 2001, the Nobel Peace Prize has been on a prolonged detour around the US government’s far-flung warfare, declining to honor anyone who had challenged any of it anywhere in the world. But the Nobel Committee has done more than just ignore peace activism seeking to stop U.S.-led war efforts. By giving the Peace Prize to Obama and the E.U., the committee has implicitly endorsed those military efforts as part of a rhetorical process that conflates war-making with peace-making. Orwell’s 1984 specter of "War Is Peace" looms uncomfortably large.

Continue reading “Here Comes the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize, Dragging a Broken Moral Compass”

The New York Times is hosting a “Room for Debate” forum on the question of whether al Shabab poses a direct threat to the U.S.

Seth G. Jones of the RAND Corp is one of the commentators and employs some funny reasoning. Citing a University of Maryland database, Jones explained that, “Since 2007, 85 percent of Al Shabab’s attacks have taken place in Somalia, with another 12 percent in Kenya,” so “there is little evidence that Al Shabab is plotting attacks against the U.S. homeland.” But…they could or might…so we should still view them as a threat.

As I’ve written, the inflated threats experts continue to identify in Somalia are a real danger because they could serve to justify even more U.S. meddling in East Africa than has already been occurring. And that is one way to exponentially increase the prospects of al Shabab hitting the U.S.

Jones cites al Shabab’s formal alliance with al-Qaeda as one reason to fear it, but as Bronwyn Bruton, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, warned last month, “it was al-Qaeda’s goal in Somalia to attempt to draw the U.S. into yet another quagmire,” just as we saw in Afghanistan. And that could still be the goal.

Bruton is another commentator in the Times‘ “Room for Debate” and argues al Shabab is mainly a local problem. “The Somali clan factions in Al Shabab that are opposing the government in Mogadishu do not pose a threat to the U.S. homeland or to U.S. interests in East Africa.” She warns against conflating al-Qaeda and al Shabab factions.

Ken Menkhaus has an even firmer view, arguing that “the actual risk of a terrorist attack by Al Shabab on a soft target in the U.S. remains very low, and should not be a cause for alarm.”

Indeed. Harvard Professor Stephen Walt last week described the “breathless language” in the media that “exaggerates the actual danger” posed by al Shabab. Parodying what he saw in the press, he wrote, “For Americans to be 100 percent safe on American soil, the U.S. government has to get more deeply involved in the local politics and national security problems of this troubled East African region — using the FBI, CIA, special operations forces, drones, whatever — in order to root out bad guys wherever they might be.”

Even if al Shabab did pose a threat to the U.S., which it doesn’t, it seems pretty clear that getting more involved militarily wouldn’t be a way to resolve it. As Jeremy Scahill argues, “U.S. policy has strengthened the hand of the very groups it purports to oppose and inadvertently aided the rise of militant groups, including the Shabab.”

UPDATE: More grist: “law enforcement sources” now telling NBC News that Carey, “may have thought that President Barack Obama was stalking her.” Old boss tells NBC affiliate that she was fired from old job for being “too rough” with dental patients.

UPDATE 10/6: Little more is known about Carey or what happened on Thursday. Stories emerge that suggest she was taken in for a “mental health evaluation” last December. More troubling are reports that she was shot inside her car. Remember, initial news flashes said Carey had emerged from her vehicle after crashing it on the Capitol Grounds, suggesting she might have acted aggressively toward awaiting police. Thankfully, some Beltway writers are showing more skepticism toward the cops’ version of events today.

The New York Daily News should be ashamed, as well as any other news outfit that has jumped to conclusions in favor of the mentally-ill-woman-police-were-just-doing-their-jobs-and-by-the-way-they’re-heroes-we-live-in-a-scary-world storyline. But the New York City paper, known for dwarfing word space and actual copy with hyperbolic Citizen Kane headlines and even bigger paparazzi photography, takes the prize for reporting on yesterday’s shooting of an unarmed mother on Capitol Hill.

There was horror on the Hill when a crazed Connecticut woman who tried to ram her way into the White House was shot and killed Thursday after leading police on a high-speed chase through the heart of Washington.

Now we know someone is trying to earn their hard-boiled, wiseguy writing chops here, but step off Lee Tracy, this account is so far from reality that it goes beyond Big Apple embellishment. It’s just plain wrong. There is no evidence, yet, that 34-year-old Miriam Carey of Stamford, Connecticut, who has been identified as the dead woman, tried to “ram the gates of the White House,” which the Daily News and a host of irresponsible news reports charged willy-nilly on Thursday. As for being “crazed,” there is some thread of unknown origin that Carey had been suffering from “mental illness,” “mental issues,” “depression” and/or  “post-pardum depression” (the last two were from the Daily News gumshoes who stalked Carey’s family in New York Thursday night, snapping photos of their weary faces from across the street).

Simply put, from all the interviews I’ve scanned on the story — some of the most authoritative reporting I’ve seen so far has been from The Washington Post — the  best picture I can get is that Carey was a dutiful dental hygienist, who was generally liked, and for some unknown reason drove down to Washington with her one-year-old daughter in a luxury car, where she led police on a deadly high-speed chase.

Meanwhile, eye-witness accounts and raw video tell a different story about “crazed woman” in the Infiniti sedan. It looks like she might have made a wrong turn down a cordoned street (of which there are many) around the White House (though to be entirely fair, the DC police chief says it was no “accident,” but has offered no details to that end). She was yelled at, according to witnesses, by a plain-clothed guard and others who banged on the hood of her car. She freaked, hit the guard and a makeshift barricade that was put in her way, then tried to turn around and flee. Shots were fired at her car and the chase ensued. It ended in a hail of bullets when Carey emerged from the car (see UPDATE), outside the Hart Office Building on Capitol Hill (not far away), reportedly unarmed. From Time:

Meanwhile, beyond the garish headlines and the applause — yes, the police got a “standing ovation” from members of the House of Representatives afterwards, ostensibly for riddling a woman’s car and body with bullets  — we know nothing except a woman is dead and her child, motherless.

The police will no doubt be excused for engaging in a dangerous high speed chase through the streets of Washington, endangering pedestrians and the child inside (there are confusing reports about whether they saw the baby inside before she left the White House area or not) and then shooting Carey dead. This is a post-9/11 world, where she could have easily been careening toward the Capitol, armed with a trunk full of explosives, right? The truth is, more people are killed by cops each year than terrorists have attacked our cities. We need to get to the bottom of what happened to Miriam Carey, and keep the terror bugaboo out of it. And please, New York Daily News, stop acting like a law enforcement apparatchik, just do your job and report the facts. If they’re not readily available, don’t make them up.

The Russian Space Forces, an actual real branch of the Russian military (with on-again, off-again independence historically) is not in very good shape if war breaks out with some other planet.

“We are unfortunately not ready to fight extraterrestrial civilizations,” conceded Sergey Berezhnoy, the deputy chief of the Titov Main Test and Space Systems Control Centre, who was asked about the forces’ readiness for defending against extraterrestial incursions.

The Titov Centre has been around since 1957, and was eventually just part of the Soviet space program, before its attention turned primarily toward orbital defense, preparation that included not just the prospect of exchanges with other Earth factions in orbit (and missile exchanges), but also at least some preliminary examination of what will happen if and when things get real on a galactic scale.

Of course it’s hard to imagine how anyone could really prepare to fight a whole different species that hasn’t been discovered yet with entirely unknown capabilities, and agendas, but Russian officials don’t seem optimistic about their Space Forces getting “ready” any time soon, noting that there are an awful lot of problems on the planet that are actually taking precedent over the entirely theoretical one.

The U.S. has just announced a deal with Japan that will allow basing rights for surveillance drones. Oh and the Pentagon swears their purpose is to surveil North Korea. Really, they promise. China? What’s a China?

“The primary mission for the Global Hawks will be to fly near North Korea, where U.S. officials hope they will greatly enhance the current spying capabilities,” reports the Washington Post. Maybe – perhaps – an unintended side benefit to the drone missions will be to coordinate with Japan on ” the movements of Chinese ships in the vicinity.”

You can bet Beijing won’t see North Korea as the primary target for the U.S. spy drones. In recent weeks, the Japanese Defense Ministry has indicated a strong interest in obtaining drones for themselves in order to spy on and respond to Chinese military movements in and around the disputed maritime territory of the Senkaku/Diayou islands, currently the most intense point of tension between Japan and China.

Immediately following these indications, Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel visit with their Japanese counterparts and secure a deal to allow the U.S. to base its own drones on Japanese territory and take care Japanese defense for them. It’s a win for the U.S. in that it mitigates the Japanese desire to obtain its own drones, a privileged capability that gives the U.S. an edge, and it maintains U.S. military autonomy in Japan at a time when tensions with China have influenced Tokyo towards beefing up its long-dormant national security state.

But it’s not exactly a win for regional security. The U.S. has been antagonizing China by militarily encircling the rising Asian power and reaffirming defense agreements with all of China’s neighboring rivals, Japan foremost among them. A new scheme to increase spying on Chinese military movements in its own backyard is not going to go over well with Beijing.

“The presence of Global Hawks in East Asia is sure to irritate China, which has become increasingly vocal in pushing back against the U.S. military presence in the region,” the  Washington Post reports. “Officials in Beijing had criticized Tokyo in recent days for reports that the Japanese military was considering acquiring its own Global Hawks, saying the introduction of the drones could escalate tensions.”

U.S. policy could easily exacerbate Sino-Japanese tensions and prompt a very dangerous escalation. “My biggest fear is that a small mishap is going to blow up into something much bigger,” says Elizabeth C. Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations.

“If there is a use of force between Japan and China,” warns Sheila A. Smith, also of CFR, “this could be all-out conflict between these two Asian giants. And as a treaty ally of Japan, it will automatically involve the United States.”

And for what? To contain China’s increasing global power? The U.S. can’t stop that train, which is fueled by their growing economy and increased defense budgets, short of all-out war.

Really, the U.S. should just mind its own business instead of trying to dictate China’s behavior in a desperate attempt to hold on to world hegemony.

Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, provides the following anecdote to sum up the hypcritical U.S. position on China:

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel declared at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore earlier this year, “The United States stands firmly against any coercive attempts to alter the status quo.” Similarly, Hagel’s deputy, Ashton Carter, noted in reference to the Asia-Pacific, “We oppose provocation. We oppose coercion. We oppose the use of force,” adding a U.S. preference for “peaceful resolution of disputes in a manner consistent with international law.” Of course, resorting to coercion and the use of force to change the status quo are defining characteristics of U.S. foreign policy, and — as the reactions to Syria demonstrate — they are widely embraced among pundits and officials. The defining questions of East Asian relations in the coming decades is whether China emulates the U.S. military by embracing coercion, or follows U.S. guidelines as to how local disputes should be resolved.

Do as we say, not as we do. Follow our orders, or prepare for aggression.

Not exactly a constructive approach.

Update: In a piece entitled “New U.S. Drone Base is America’s Latest Move to Contain China,” John Reed at Foreign Policy says “the bottom line is that the U.S. is prepositioning forces around China.” He also details some of the other military assets, in addition to the drones, that America is encircling China with:

The Global Hawks will be joined in Japan by two squadrons of U.S. Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey tiltrotors. An MV-22 can haul a couple dozen Marines over long distances at airplane speeds with the ability to take off and land vertically like a helicopter. Needless to say, these craft could be very useful in responding to emergencies in the Pacific, where American defense officials often lament “the tyranny of distance.”

The Marines will also station F-35B Joint Strike Fighters in Japan starting in 2017, officials announced. The Marines are following the U.S. Air Force’s lead by positioning the stealth fighters in Japan. The air service announced last year that the first overseas bases for its fleet of F-35As will be in Japan. In addition to the American F-35 squadrons, the Japanese, Australian and possibly Singaporean air forces will all fly the Joint Strike Fighter, ringing China’s southeast flank with the stealth jets.

It’s worth pointing out that the U.S. Navy will base some of its brand new P-8 Poseidon submarine and ship hunting jets in Japan starting in December. The P-8 is navalized version of Boeing’s 737 airliner equipped with sonar gear, powerful radars, torpedos and even Harpoon anti-ship missiles.

There is plenty more here. Reed also offers this map of “the sites the U.S. is considering rotating its forces in-and-out of in the Pacific.”