Desecration of Arab history

The Reuters Global News Blog reports that the tomb of Michel Aflaq, one of the pioneering figures of Arab nationalism and a founding father of the Baath party, is now being used by the US military as a shopping mall.

I honestly don't know what disgusts me more: that the US military would be so clueless about a monument to a man so important in the history not only of Iraq, but the Middle East; or that the current prime minister of Iraq, a religious Shii who is now trying to sell himself as an Iraqi nationalist, would knowingly permit such a desecration.  Yes, Saddam was a Baathist, as are some of those currently in both Iraq and Syria who are trying to pull him down.  But first and foremost, Aflaq was a pioneer of secular Arab nationalism, one of the central principles of which was resistance to the colonial/imperial policies of the West in the Middle East.

Some sage counsel from Zbig Brzezinski

This is one of the more straight-shooting proposals I've heard about how the US ought to respond to an Israeli attack on Iran.  Says Jimmy Carter's former national security adviser: If they try to fly over Iraq en route, the US Air Force ought to shoot them down.  Let's give Zbig points for boldness . . . and, IMO, there are worse courses of action.  And, while we're on the topic, kudos to Mr. Medvedev for pointing out that an Israeli attack would likely open the gates of hell.
www.voanews.com/english/2009-09-20-voa12.cfm

How the Taliban capitalize on the corrupted Afghan elections

Interesting piece in the WaPo this morning describes how the Taliban can use the corrupted recent elections against the Karzai government, and - by association - the US military effort.

Obama widens the Hamas-Fatah-PA Divide - and trashes his good-will

It's now reported widely (here's the VOA report)  how the US has tag-teamed with Israel to smear the recently released Goldstone report  as being heavily biased against Israel.

Let's say it again: the report is by a highly respected jurist, with impeccable credentials, a Jew himself, with deep ties to Israel.  In a new, excellent op-ed piece on the New Majority site (in which she harshly critiques - with good reason - George Gilder's new book), Hillary Mann Levett notes that Goldstone is

one of the world’s most eminent jurists, who is, along with his many other accomplishments, a trustee of Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a board member of Brandeis University’s Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life.

He has called it as he sees it.  That the US can so readily dismiss the report is, as I said yesterday, shameful.  For the Netanyahu government, it's business as usual.

But it's not hard to see the political calculations underlying the US stance.  Obama is desperate for some kind of movement in the "peace process" - so, from his perspective, this is not the time for the US to drive Netanyahu away by letting Israel swing in the wind of international reaction to Goldstone.  Instead, the US and Israel will clamor for blame for what happened in Gaza to be laid at the feet of Hamas.

Talk about easy pickings for the US.  We have long declared Hamas to be "bad guys" - which makes therefore all the Palestinians in Gaza guilty by association.  Palestinian Authority president Mahmud Abbas, on the other hand, is our official Palestinian "good guy."  After Yasser Arafat died in 2004, he became George Bush's and Ariel Sharon's regular go-to guy for sunny photo-ops to show how dedicated they were to the "peace process."  For those reasons, among many others, Abbas' credibility among most Palestinians  - and most Arabs across the Middle East, not to mention Iranians - is zilch.

But Abbas has also been a long-time leader of Fatah, the Palestinian nationalist party that was long headed by Arafat and that is the bitter, entrenched enemy of Hamas.  Hamas threw Fatah out of Gaza, after the US sponsored an attempted Fatah coup against the Hamas leadership there.  Abbas, therefore, has no problem watching the US and Israel dis the Goldstone report, at least to the extent that they can take swings at Hamas in the process.  And actually, Abbas has no real choice here.  Any luster that he still may have, he owes to their support.

But does Obama understand that by doing this, he's only damaging his own initiatives?

He's quite likely driving the wedge between Hamas and Fatah even deeper.  Without some reconciliation between these two factions, the Israelis can continue to use Hamas as the pretext for resisting the creation of a real Palestinian state - something to which Obama supposedly is committed.

By rejecting the Goldstone report, Obama rejects the possibility that Israel can be held accountable for its actions when it comes to brutalities inflicted on Palestinians.  Hereafter, he can hardly claim that the US can be a fair broker between the two sides.

By backing Israel in the face of such a credible, yet damning report, Obama puts the lie to his Cairo speech to the Muslim world, to his Nowruz greetings to the Iranian people, and to any future initiatives he might take to demonstrate American fairness and goodwill when it comes to the Middle East.

Obama's missile-shield backtrack

The MSM are all over President's Obama's decision to scrap the Bush plan (with origins going back to Reagan) to install missile-defense shield in East Europe.  The Financial Times provides a fine review of perspectives from all around, including the East European countries (who hate it, and feel betrayed), John McCain (who calls it "seriously misguided"), and uber-neocon John Bolton (who speaks of it as a catastrophe - any surprise there?).  The feeling among many is that Obama is throwing Poland, the Czech Republic, etc., to the wolves (or better, the Russian bear) in return for Medvedev/Putin support on sanctions vs. Iran.

I hope that's not the reason.  More sanctions will accomplish very little, nor is Russia (or China) going to support them significantly in any event.  They've got too much invested in maintaining good relations with Iran.  (Although unfortunately Mr. Ahmadinejad keeps providing possible pretexts for the world at large to step farther away.  The Telegraph and CSM report yet another denial of the Holocaust from him.)

But stepping away from the shield may have some salutary effects on other scores:

1. For the US effort in Afghanistan, and in the energy-rich pipeline heaven that Central Asia is headed toward becoming, the US needs to be able to work with Russia.  Proceeding with the missile shield as scheduled was sure to jeopardize that.

2.  George Stephanopolous raised the question on his ABC News blog this morning: Is Obama using this to deter Israel from bombing Iran?  Remember, the East Europeans are upset because they were counting on that shield as insurance against Russian aggression against them, but it was also intended to be part of a network to defend against the advent of an Iranian missile-delivered nuclear threat.

UPDATE: Have a look at David Corn's take (at the Mother Jones website) on John McCain's anguish over this decision.  It was only recently that McCain was praising the administration for relying more on the ship-based, mobile, tried-and-true missile defense that Obama is now going to trust.  And the corker?  One of the US Navy missile-equipped destroyers that's a cog in the system is the USS John McCain (named for the senator's grandpa and dad!).

UPDATE 2:  Al-Jazeera reports on a new NATO proposal that the US, Russia and the NATO allies link their missile systems to defend against other enemies - i.e., North Korea, and Iran.

The US's Shameful Response to the Goldstone Report

Report from Reuters that the US's UN rep., Susan Rice, essentially rejected the findings of the recently submitted Goldstone Report on war crimes committed by both Hamas and the IDF during the Gaza "Cast Lead" operation of Dec. 2008 - Jan. 2009.  The mandate from the UN Human Rights Council, for which the report was prepared, is flawed, says she, and therefore the report's recommendations that the Security Council discuss the report and perhaps forward recommendations to the International Criminal Court at The Hague can be ignored.

Mind you, this report was researched and compiled by an internationally respected, experienced jurist whose previous work in South Africa and Bosnia received great acclaim.  In this case, though, his findings discomfit Israel (which rejects them as one-sided - - goodness, what a surprise!) and also threaten to derail Obama's progress to an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.

Except . . . how can he expect any Palestinian leader to ante up anything toward that goal when the supposedly "fair broker" - the US - refuses to take seriously an authoritative report detailing how Israeli forces brutalized the Palestinian population of Gaza.  Israel disputes the facts, and the conclusions.  OK, let 'em; who expected otherwise?  But for Obama to simply tag along with their rejection is utterly shameless.  And it completely undercuts the ballyhooed outreach of his Cairo speech and Persian Nowruz greetings to Iran.

You make eloquent speeches, Mr. President, but too much of what you're doing - your "war of [dubious] necessity" in Afghanistan, your bogus shutting-down of Guantanamo ( hardly a step forward if you're simply going to "rendition" people to an even darker black-hole at Bagram), and now this - tells me that you're steering much too close to Mr. Bush's course.

I don't think thats what we elected you to do.

Afghanistan Debate is Surging, as is Israel's Anger

The Times of London reports on Adm. Mike Mullen's call (before the US Senate, no less) for more US troops to Afghanistan, and spins it as exposing a major rift within the US leadership.  Indeed, it does - with Mullen (and major Republican senators) calling for a new "Surge" a la Iraq 2007, Carl Levin and much of the Democratic establishment leaning the other way, and now, a number of respected academic and otherwise notable commentators sending Obama a letter questioning the entire Afghan enterprise.

As well they should.  The war-weary US public is no longer behind an enterprise that is costing billions of dollars that could otherwise be used for dire needs back home (crumbling infrastructure, vanishing jobs, health care, education, psychotherapy - cf. Serena Williams, Kanye West, Joe Wilson, Glenn Beck . . .).  (In fact, as a report in the CSM notes, "For the first time, the war in Afghanistan in the next budget year will cost Americans more than the war in Iraq. By the end of the next fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1, the total military budget costs for both wars will have exceeded $1 trillion".)  Nor are most of the US's NATO allies, including Canada, all of whom seem to feel the losses of young soldiers more deeply than do we (again, cf. all the buzz - and attention - on the afore-named "celebrities").

Yet even as the debate about the Afghan war thickens, the pressure is being ramped up to launch yet another war, with Iran.  As Stephen Walt recently noted at Foreign Policy, the same crazies that were calling for invading Iraq seven years ago are now screaming their war-cries against Iran - most recently, Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal.  Today it's widely reported that the IDF plans to attack Iran if crippling sanctions aren't imposed on Iran - or diplomacy hasn't cowed Iran - by the end of this  year.  (PLEASE READ today's latest from Roger Cohen on the lunacy of that idea, and on how to proceed farther down that diplomatic road.)

And Israeli anger is growing not only in re Iran.  The release of the UN-sponsored report from Richard Goldstone on Israel's Operation Cast Lead campaign against Gaza last December and January has instigated a new round of howling and breast-beating there about anti-Israel bias, etc., etc.  As Haaretz reports, Israel president Shimon Peres (that once upon a time partner for peace with the Palestinians) claims that the "UN Gaza report makes mockery of history."  I've not read the report as yet, only some brief summaries, but the author's credentials are impeccable, and he points blame at both sides (the IDF and Hamas, though the IDF comes out the worse).   Nonetheless, Israel is rejecting it, out of hand.

The larger point here (although Israel's accountability for the horrors it inflicted on Gaza then, not to mention the blockade since then, are themselves a large point) is that by their actions (and this goes back to much earlier than Gaza 2008), the Israelis have turned world opinion decidedly against themselves, at a time when (at least in their official statements) they scream out to the world that they face mortal peril from a would-be nuclear Iran.  Odds are, they are not going to get the sanctions they want against Iran; nor is Iran going to give up its enrichment program; nor does the US public want a new war against Iran.

But if Israel bombs Iran, will Obama let Netanyahu drag the US down with him?

McChrystal: No significant al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan

If this is indeed the case, and if Obama was serious in his definition of the goals for the Afghanistan intervention (= to keep al-Qaeda from setting up shop there), isn't it logical to conclude that a major infusion of troops (dare we say, "Surge") is not needed.

Unless the actual goal is to completely eliminate the Taliban.  They are indeed a hateful bunch in so many ways, but the fact of the matter is that they have become, to a significant degree, an expression of nationalist resistance (be it Afghan nationalism or, perhaps more likely, Pashtun ethnic nationalism) against foreign occupiers.  Inserting tens of thousands more US forces is not going to defeat or eliminate them, just as inserting hundreds of thousands US forces into South Vietnam neither eliminated the Viet Cong nor brought Vietnam into the US's political orbit.

Graham, Lieberman, and McCain: The US must "prevail" in Afghanistan

. . . or so they insist in their WSJ op-ed piece.  Actually, in some ways it's a remarkable essay, in that they (= two prominent Republicans, as well as a "Democrat" who backed Bush right down the line on Iraq) also point the finger directly at the Bush administration for mismanaging the effort there for 8 years.  That certainly has to sting Bush, Cheney, and Condi Rice.

But they once again fall back on the "we must prevail" trope.  To do that, say they, we must do the following, among other things:

1. We must trust our new genius-general, Stanley McChrystal, just as we "trusted" his now superior, David Petraeus - who, of course, brought the US "success" in Iraq because (don't you remember?) the Surge "worked."  That's why Iraq is so calm right now.  (That remark is meant to be sarcastic, of course, but Americans can't entirely be faulted for thinking that Iraq these days is calm.  Iraq has disappeared from the mainstream-media coverage, but it remains very volatile, with an ever-widening fault line between Arabs and Kurds, especially over Kirkuk and oil.)  But to date I've seen nothing reported to indicate that McChrystal is enjoying much success, or that suggests that he's turning anything around.

2. We must believe that we now have the right strategy, which, in their minds, is counter-insurgency a la Petraeus in Iraq.  But Petraeus' ideas on counter-insurgency did not "fix" Iraq.  They only dampened down the violence, but without addressing the cause of the violence, which lay largely within the political and social tensions in Iraq's society.  These are matters with which the US was ill-prepared to deal.  Which brings us to . . .

3.  We must hold the Afghan leadership accountable, and ensure that they clean up their act.  How they propose the US do that, however, they don't say.

4.  We must send more troops to Afghanistan, for that is the only way to defeat the Taliban and keep al-Qaeda from reestablishing itself in Afghanistan.  This, however, is mere assertion, just as it was being asserted in the 1960s that failure to defeat the Viet Cong would lead to the loss of all of Asia to the "Free World."  Nor can the esteemed senators detail exactly how more troops will lead to a defeat of the Taliban.  Indeed, Zbigniew Brzezinski and others have suggested that the more troops we introduce, the more the locals will see them as foreign occupiers, and the more they will rally to the Taliban's cause.

But at the end, the senators assure President Obama that they stand behind him in his "war of necessity" (even while senators of his own party - among them, Carl Levin - have expressed deep reservations about any significant troop increase).  Mr. Obama may have boxed himself in with that unfortunate choice of words.  At any rate, the esteemed senators have taken a pre-emptive step to keep him cornered.

Republicans Have Some Explaining to do

This, my friends, is how reasoned discourse in a democracy disappears. And I'll bet that Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Glenn Beck will be oh-so-happy to give their little pals big hugs on-air.

US Embassy Guards at Kabul "Gone Wild"

Oh, those fun-loving mercenaries that your tax dollars are paying for . . . . Beware, the photos are pretty graphic, even with the "fix-ups".

Bring in the "Contractors": How to "Lose" in Afghanistan

Not that I believe that the US can "win" . . . but I've been puzzled for a long time about how the US could ever sufficiently "resource" the mission there, given commitments in Iraq (where the problems are decidedly not getting any easier to solve), declining enlistments, etc.

Well, the NYTimes reports today on one way of doing it. The US now has more "contractors" (let's call them what they are: mercenaries, guns-for-hire) in Afghanistan than members of the US military. "As of March this year, contractors made up 57 percent of the Pentagon’s force in Afghanistan, and if the figure is averaged over the past two years, it is 65 percent, according to the report by the Congressional Research Service."

These, of course, are the same trigger-happy worthies who became notorious - and universally hated - by Iraqis for their tendencies to shoot first, ask questions later (well, maybe sometimes they asked questions. Mostly it was just, shoot.) And relying on them flies completely in the face of the counter-insurgency doctrines that David Petraeus and his understudy, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, claim they want to rely on for the US mission: protect the civilian population by getting out among the locals and winning hearts and minds.
Oddly, this story appears at the same time that a New Republic blog post (at The Plank) appeared about how it's not legit to compare the US's prospects in Afghanistan with the Soviet experience there in the 1980s, because the Soviets were brutal toward the locals whereas Petraeus/McChrystal are taking a different approach.

I might also note that employing people such as these undercuts Obama's message of outreach to, and empathy with, Muslims across the world. The biggest thing Obama had going for him early on was the change of tone from the Bush years, the new message that the US cares about and respects Muslim peoples. Blackwater mercenaries are nobody's idea of a CARE package.

The other big Afghanistan-related story is, of course, George Will's column yesterday in which he asserts that "it's time to get out of Afghanistan." That such a big gun from the conservative side of the aisle weighed in so heavily against the war was sure to draw some fire from the neocon right - and it did. Fred Kagan (who from what I can tell has never sen a US military intervention that he didn't like) castigated Will, but seemed not to address the meat of Will's argument well at all. (Rather, he focused on Will's characterization of the British contribution to the effort there as relatively small - which, compared to the US effort, it is - and blasted Will for denigrating our comrades-in-arms. That obviously is not what Will intended, but Kagan needed to create a straw man upon which to vent his outrage.