Antiwar.com Blog

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan gave an interview to the Guardian today, and the throw-away final sentence is causing a small stir. Quote:

He insisted that the Turkey-Israel strategic alliance – which some AKP insiders have said privately is over – remains alive but chided the Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who he said had threatened to use nuclear weapons against Gaza.

Which has led the Israeli press to fly into speculation about how it would impact Israeli-Turkish relations, and led Lieberman’s office to mock it as “nonsense.”

A shrewd political operator as well as a war enthusiast, Lieberman obviously would not have made blatant mention to Israel’s “secret” nuclear arsenal. But Erdogan didn’t just make up this claim either.

At the tail end of the Gaza War, Lieberman was harshly critical of ending the war, declaring instead “we must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II” and going into detail about how the US nuclear strikes had “broken the will” of Japan.

Lieberman’s comments came in the context of an opposition figure capitalizing on the Israeli public’s enthusiasm for continuing the war, which killed over 1,400 Palestinians, a political move which swept him into power months later. Technically not a “threat” since he wasn’t in power at the time, yet also far from “nonsense” that Erdogan made up on the spot.

Two major bomb blasts ripped through Baghdad Sunday, killing an estimated 130 147 men, women and children and wounded some 520 721, according to reports.

Twin car bombs targeted two government buildings in downtown Baghdad Sunday, wrecking pillars of the state’s authority and cutting like a scythe through snarled traffic during the morning rush hour. The government said at least 132 people were killed and 520 wounded in one of the worst attacks in Baghdad.

The first bomb struck an intersection near the Justice Ministry and the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works at around 10:15 a.m. on the first day of the Iraqi work week, when streets are always more crowded. Less than a minute later, a second blast targeted the Baghdad provincial headquarters, draped in a sign heralding its renovation. (snip)

Bodies were hurled into the air,” said Mohammed Fadhil, a 19-year-old bystander. “I saw women and children cut in half.” He looked down at a curb smeared with blood. “What’s the sin that those people commited? They are so innocent.”

Ali Hassan, an employee at the provincial headquarters, said the building was filled with women with their children seeking compensation for past terrorist actions.

“Now they’ve become the victims again,” he said.

American lawmakers and bloviating think tankers among the Washington establishment have long since shelved Iraq like a neat little box, cross-posted under the categories of “Model COIN Operations” and “Why George Bush Was Right.” That basic services are still lacking,  violence remains a threat, ethnic tensions are flaring and there is still no political reconciliation, seems to bother no one, anymore. Like trees falling in a forest.

So what am I missing in Afghanistan?

Isn’t this like a really dumb bank robber being caught in the act (stealing almost a million votes) – and then – instead of booking him on charges, being given another chance to rob the same bank?

The U.S. government and NATO are going to let Karzai take another swing at the ballot boxes. Why? To see if he became a smarter vote thief since August?

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.