Antiwar.com Blog

Military.com has done a story on Sibel Edmonds’s allegations of widespread espionage in the U.S. by the Israeli and Turkish governments and their allies in the U.S. government. For the first time, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith have gone on record to deny her allegations.

BradBlog.com has more coverage here.

Seems like President Barack Obama — Nobel Peace Laureate Obama — has taken his predecessor’s predator drone program and jacked it up with steroids. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reports this week that the number of Obama-authorized strikes in Pakistan equals the sum launched by the Bush Administration — in the last three years of his tenure. Wow. And the Republicans were worried that he wouldn’t be man enough. Mayer’s article goes on to detail two predator drone programs — one publicly acknowledged by the U.S Military, the other directed by the C.I.A:

From Mayer: The U.S. government runs two drone programs. The military’s version, which is publicly acknowledged, operates in the recognized war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and targets combatants in support of U.S. troops stationed there. The C.I.A.’s program is aimed at terror suspects around the world, including in places where U.S. troops are not based. The program is classified as covert, and the C.I.A. declines to provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed. Nevertheless, reports of fatal air strikes in Pakistan emerge every few days. According to a new study by the New America Foundation, the number of drone strikes has gone up dramatically since Obama became President. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, the defense contractor that manufactures the Predator and its more heavily armed sibling, the Reaper, can barely keep up with the government’s demand. With public disenchantment mounting over the U.S. troop deployment in Afghanistan, many in Washington support an even greater reliance on Predator strikes. And because of the program’s secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place. Peter W. Singer, the author of “Wired for War,” a recent book about the robotics revolution in modern combat, argues that the drone program is worryingly “seductive,” because it creates the perception that war can be “costless.” Cut off from the realities of the bombings in Pakistan, Americans have been insulated from the human toll, as well as the political and moral consequences.

When I was researching my recent piece on Taliban extortion rackets in Afghanistan, it was easy to find examples of the Taliban extorting private contractors hired by western governments and companies engaged in humanitarian and reconstruction projects. What was tricky was connecting payoffs to the Taliban by contractors who were moving supplies and food to U.S/NATO troops in the field. But the evidence is out there if you look hard enough — it’s just no one wants to talk about the possibility that we are paying off the enemy in order to maintain the occupation. It’s madness.

That’s what the French are saying today, just after the The Times (UK) broke a story charging that the Italian secret service had been systematically paying off the Taliban in exchange for protection in the Italian army’s area of operation — a charge that has since been denied — adamantly — by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. But the French say when they took over that territory in July they were never told about the bribes and therefore made a “catastrophically incorrect threat assessment.” They blame the brutal killing and mutilation of 10 French soldiers in an ambush August 18 in the Uzbin Valley on the Italian secret service. The Italians had left just a month before,and had all but declared the area benign — they had only lost one combat soldier in the previous year. Now we may be getting some insight as to why.

Western officials say that because the French knew nothing of the payments they made a catastrophically incorrect threat assessment…

“One cannot be too doctrinaire about these things,” a senior Nato officer in Kabul said. “It might well make sense to buy off local groups and use non-violence to keep violence down. But it is madness to do so and not inform your allies.”

One wonders how widespread the protection rackets are, and how far up the food chain they operate. Private contractors paying  bribes trying to get their convoys through insurgent-riddled communication lines to military installations are bad enough –  but governments paying the Taliban directly? And not doing it to eventually end the war, but to merely get through the next rotation? Catastrophically incorrect is a good way of putting it.

One of the most notable developments surrounding the debate about the Nobel Committee’s decision to award Obama its peace prize has been the apparently spontaneous agreement by both Tom Friedman and Liz Cheney that the president should make the occasion a celebration of the U.S. military. It speaks volumes about the ideological anchorlessness of Friedman, who, according to a recent National Journal survey of Democratic and Republican insiders, is the media personality with the single greatest influence among party elites.

Here’s Cheney on “Fox News Sunday” after denouncing the Committee’s decision as a “farce.”

“But I do think he [Obama] could send a real signal here. I think what he ought to do frankly is send a mother of a fallen American soldier to accept the prize on behalf of the U.S. military and frankly to send the message to remind the Nobel committee that each one of them sleeps soundly at night because the U.S. military is the greatest peacekeeping force in the world today.”

And here’s Friedman after expressing dismay “that the most important prize in the world has been devalued in this way” in his column published Saturday, entitled “The Peace (Keepers) Prize.” Most of the column consists of “the speech I hope he will give” when he accepts the prize in Oslo Dec 10:

“Let me begin by thanking the Nobel committee for awarding me this prize, the highest award to which any statesman can aspire. As I said on the day it was announced, ‘I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize.’ Therefore, upon reflection, I cannot accept this award on my behalf at all.

“But I will accept it on behalf of the most important peacekeepers in the world for the last century — the men and women of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.”

There follows a series of inspirational paragraphs about the U.S. military’s heroism and sacrifice from World War II through its rescue operations “from the mountains of Pakistan to the coasts of Indonesia” (with no mention of Vietnam whatsoever) before he concludes in a long coda:

“Members of the Nobel committee, I accept this award on behalf of all these American men and women soldiers, past and present, because I know — and I want you to know — that there is no peace without peacekeepers.

“Until the words of Isaiah are made true and lasting — and nations never again lift up swords against nations and never learn war anymore — we will need peacekeepers. Lord knows, ours are not perfect, and I have already moved to remedy inexcusable excesses we’ve perpetrated in the war on terrorism.

“But have no doubt, those are the exception. If you want to see the true essence of America, visit any U.S. military outpost in Iraq or Afghanistan. You will meet young men and women of every race and religion who work together as one, far from their families, motivated chiefly by their mission to keep the peace and expand the borders of freedom.

“So for all these reasons — and so you understand that I will never hesitate to call on American soldiers where necessary to take the field against the enemies of peace, tolerance and liberty — I accept this peace prize on behalf of the men and women of the U.S. military: the world’s most important peacekeepers.”

Note that there’s nothing in Friedman’s talk about “soft” or “smart power,” of which he is supposed to be a strong exponent. Nor even about the country’s voters who voted Obama into office. It’s all about the military, its goodness, and even its altruism.

To my mind, the agreement between Cheney and Friedman makes for a great illustration of the the similarity in worldview between the hard right — I think Liz is actually more of a neo-con in her strong feelings about Israel than her dad ever was) and liberal interventionists like Friedman. And that worldview, of course, not only implicitly extols American exceptionalism, but also — to put it bluntly — American militarism, a phenomenon to which Andrew Bacevich devoted an entire book after the Iraq invasion.

Here’s some of what Bacevich, a retired army colonel who teaches at Boston University, wrote as excerpted on Tomdispatch.com in 2005:

“[M]ainstream politicians today take as a given that American military supremacy is an unqualified good, evidence of a larger American superiority. They see this armed might as the key to creating an international order that accommodates American values. One result of that consensus over the past quarter century has been to militarize U.S. policy and to encourage tendencies suggesting that American society itself is increasingly enamored with its self-image as the military power nonpareil.

“…Since the end of the Cold War, opinion polls surveying public attitudes toward national institutions have regularly ranked the armed services first. While confidence in the executive branch, the Congress, the media, and even organized religion is diminishing, confidence in the military continues to climb. Otherwise acutely wary of having their pockets picked, Americans count on men and women in uniform to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. Americans fearful that the rest of society may be teetering on the brink of moral collapse console themselves with the thought that the armed services remain a repository of traditional values and old fashioned virtue.

Confidence in the military has found further expression in a tendency to elevate the soldier to the status of national icon, the apotheosis of all that is great and good about contemporary America. The men and women of the armed services, gushed Newsweek in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, “looked like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. They were young, confident, and hardworking, and they went about their business with poise and élan.” A writer for Rolling Stone reported after a more recent and extended immersion in military life that “the Army was not the awful thing that my [anti-military] father had imagined”; it was instead “the sort of America he always pictured when he explained… his best hopes for the country.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this Obama – Nobel Peace Prize business today, actually I’ve been trying to ignore it but I’ve run into several people today who think it’s a great idea and going to spur Obama to do something good… or at the very least spur him to not do something really, really bad.

But that’s not the way any of the other Nobel prizes work. Willard Boyle (one of this year’s Physics laureates) got it because 40 years ago he invented the CCD, which is an enormously valuable piece of technology. Herta Müller got the literature prize because she wrote some poetry people really liked.

Suppose the selection committee gave the Nobel Prize in Physics to some high school student in the hopes she’d be inspired to do something great. Suppose they gave the Prize in Medicine to an entry level employee at some drug company in the hopes he’d eventually discover something really useful. Wouldn’t we think they were putting the cart before the horse?