To Neocons Screaming, "We Gotta DO SOMETHING!" Chill.

. . . or in this instance, "We shoulda done something."

They're everywhere these days - America's chest-thumpers, those who insist that the US stand ready to jump in anywhere, anytime, to fix some ill.  Thus, John McCain and his amigos are all over Obama for not getting the US in the fight in Syria - and I suspect that Mitt will be all over that one on Monday.

But the red-blooded American boy I want to spotlight today is Max Boot, who has penned for the LA Times a "too little too late" verdict on Obama's policies in Libya, in which he accuses Obama of repeating George W. Bush's mistake in Iraq.  Boot's point about Iraq, of course, is that Bush went in too light, without a plan to secure the peace and rebuild the country. Anyone who's read Thomas Ricks' account in Fiasco knows that to indeed have been the case.  But Obama's intervention in Libya was intended certainly to be the "un-Iraq" alternative: no boots on the ground, no US involvement in nation-building.  Indeed, the principal rationale for the intervention was the newly emerging R2P ("responsibility to protect") policy, which was seized upon because Qaddafi had begun to mouth off about essentially exterminating the opposition.  Obama knew that the American public had no stomach for major involvement in another Middle Eastern country, and that the teetering American economy ought not be asked to support such an involvement.

Boot seems to have forgotten all of that:

The Obama administration has waited about as long [as Bush did in Iraq] to get serious about security in Libya. Not until last month, just days before the attacks in Benghazi, did the State Department and Defense Department ask Congress to redirect $8 million in Pentagon funds to send Special Forces teams to help build a 500-strong Libyan special operations force, to be modeled on the highly capable Iraqi and Afghan special operations forces that have been created over the past decade.

Good idea, but it's too little too late. Why wasn't such an initiative undertaken a year ago when Kadafi was overthrown? And why is it limited to 500 special operators? However good those troops will turn out to be, by themselves they cannot possibly control thousands of militiamen.

A more ambitious program is needed, to be undertaken not only by the United States but by the same European and Arab allies that waged war to topple Kadafi (especially Britain, France, Qatar and the United Arab Republic). The goal would be to help build a state in Libya capable of controlling its own territory. This won't require the dispatch of large numbers of ground troops, just trainers and advisors. Libyan troops could also be sent to other nations for instruction, just as some Iraqi police recruits were trained in Jordan.

Nation-building (or, more accurately, "state building") is an enormously difficult and time-consuming task, but it is also inescapable if we are to avoid more fiascoes like the deadly assault on our Benghazi consulate.

OK, first - is he serious about the need for the US to go into Libya for nation-building? As if what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan - at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars - has worked out all that well for US interests? Or, more important, for the interests of Iraqis and Afghans?

Second, does Boot really believe that it's the US's proper role to insert its advisors to build a national army for the Libyan government and then expect the Libyan government to sic that army on already established and armed militias?  Is that not a prescription for civil war?  How is that going to serve US, or the Libyan people's, interests?

Third, as Britain deals with new fiscal austerity and Europeans in general are nervous as hell about the global economy, does Boot really expect them to step up and take on mounting even a small expeditionary force to send into a highly volatile Libya?

Methinks Mr. Boot is still stuck in pre-2001 US-is-hyperpower mind-warp.  Of course, Messrs. Romney and Obama will likely feel it politically expedient to retreat there as well on Monday night.  With regard to which, a must-read - especially, seems to me, for Max Boot - is Scott Shane's fabulous NYT essay, which exhorts us all to face up to America's problems, and limits.

The neocons (like Boot) and others who insist ever more shrilly that the US DO SOMETHING - in Libya, in Syria, in Iran - need to take some slow deep breaths, get a grip, and start coming to terms with America's new military and economic realities.  John Wayne's been dead a long time now.

 

Romney's Blown Benghazi Gotcha

Not gonna rehash here the angry broadsides over the Romney-Crowley exchange in the last debate, and what's become a ridiculously inane politicizing of a tragedy (the death of an evidently talented and surely dedicated ambassador in Libya).  But Steve Coll has made an incisive comment that bears posting:

Why are we arguing about bad intelligence reports or misleading characterizations from cabinet officials who were working from second-hand briefings when the facts have been more or less in plain sight since the beginning? There’s an answer, of course: a few weeks out from voting day, campaign strategists find phony but emotional arguments about foreign policy easier to make than subtle, meaningful ones.

Next week, the candidates devote an entire debate to foreign policy. After they are done arguing about who is a better friend of Israel or a more devoted enemy of the Taliban and Iran, what will they possibly talk about? Romney and Vice-Presidential nominee Paul Ryan have both been repeating lately that Obama’s foreign policy is “unravelling before our eyes.” That is such a strange, vacant stretch of an argument that it will be entertaining to watch Romney try to extend it across ninety minutes. Surely by now, when he looks abroad, he no longer trusts his instincts.

Personally, I'm convinced that no matter who wins the debate Monday, and despite my many misgivings and complaints about steps that Obama has taken (or not taken) as president and commander-in-chief, he is - and will be - vastly more competent than Romney to lead the US's efforts in the wider world over the next four years.  He's a well-informed, sober calculator who has also surrounded himself with other mostly well-informed, sober-calculator, experienced experts.  Romney, on the other hand, though he presents himself to us as a would-be international leader, has no real experience on the international scene beyond organizing an Olympics in a (globally speaking) backwoods locale and making what amounted to a combination of pandering religious pilgrimage and tributary visit (to Bibi) to Israel.  In essence, he's not much more on this score than a taller, older, slcker version of Sarah Palin.

Romney furthermore has surrounded himself with advisors who include Bush-administration neocon dead-enders (to borrow a Bush-administration phrase) whose blustering, wrong-headed policies inflicted upon the US its worst-ever strategic disaster as well as brought it to the brink of economic catastrophe.  

That the Romney campaign now tries to pin the aftermath of both disasters on Mr. Obama should disgust any American who's been paying attention. And the possibility that the nation's security might be entrusted to the hands of such a non-statesman-like, patently vacillating politician and self-aggrandizing businessman ought to scare the be-jeezus out of all of us

Will Damascus Go the Way of Baghdad?

For centuries, the region that we have come to refer to (with unduly homogenizing overgeneralization) as the "Arab world" was dominated, and energized, by three great and ancient cities: Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo.  Cairo (Arabic "al-Kahira," or "victorious") was founded officially by the new Shi'i conquerors of Egypt during the 10th century (although the area roundabout had been a heartland of great cities for millennia, going back to Memphis, the capital of the earliest pharaohs).  Founded a couple of centuries earlier by the Arab conquerors of Mesopotamia, Baghdad too lay in the original heartland of cities (to borrow the phrase of the great American anthropologist/archaeologist Robert M. Adams); Babylon lies close by.  Damascus is the most ancient city of them all, its roots extending into the Early Bronze Age, but its fame is most associated with the first truly imperial Muslim Arab dynasty, the Umayyads, who in 661 made Damascus the capital of their already vast, yet still-expanding empire.

Today, all three cities are pale reflections of what they were at their respective apogees.  Cairo's impoverished population are awash in trash, even as the new Islamist-led government likewise tries to dig itself out from under a long-depressed national economy and decades of corrupt authoritarianism  under Egypt's preceding military-based rulers.

Anyone who's paid attention over the last few decades knows of the devastation the people of Baghdad have endured, beginning with Saddam Hussein's war launched against Iran in 1980.  Those horrors culminated in the Anglo-American conquest of the city in 2003, which touched off a massive breakdown of political and social order that led to Baghdad's self-cannibalization.  With the demons of Iraq's sectarianism resurrected, the city's Sunni and Shi'i populations turned against each other - and against the American occupiers of the city.  The evidence of the carnage looms everywhere across the city, which has lost a huge portion of its Sunni Arab - and Christian - population.

As this NY Times report today indicates, Damascus is now poised at the brink of its own self-cannibalization.  The civil war that has been tearing at what was an already loosely woven Syria national fabric is now beyond Damascus' lintel and making its way into the city's ancient interior.  Like Baghdad, Damascus has been the abode of a plethora of sectarian groups, all of whom had been living in relative harmony.  That harmony is fraying:

The reality of war has crept into daily life, and there is a sense of inevitability. Even supporters of the government talk about what comes next, and rebels speak of tightening the noose around this city, their ultimate goal.

 

Damascus was once known for its all-night party scene. Now, few people venture out after dark, and kidnappings are rampant. Gasoline is increasingly scarce, and as winter approaches, people are worried about shortages of food and heating oil. Streets are closed at a moment’s notice, traffic diverted, bridges shut down. Even longtime residents and taxi drivers get lost and have to weave in and out of parking lots to avoid barriers and dead-end streets. Shelling and machine-gun fire are so commonplace, children no longer react.

 

As recently as summer, while war raged in various neighborhoods surrounding the city, Damascus existed in a bubble of denial. War, people seemed to feel, was happening elsewhere — and the residents of Mr. Assad’s stronghold were determined to live their lives as if nothing had changed. There were garden parties and fashion shoots, and the Opera House hosted Italian tenors. There were elegant dinners at embassies — before the ambassadors fled, that is.

 

But as summer faded, the strangulation of Damascus began. More checkpoints appeared. The shabiha — Arabic for ghosts — progovernment paramilitary forces who are often held responsible for the most violent crimes, were defiantly visible in foreign hotels.

 

Now, suicide bombings are more frequent, and the rebels of the Free Syrian Army say they are slowly establishing control of the suburbs that ring the city, with the aim of slowly strangling the government. Some families say they are taking their children out of school and teaching them at home, because the drive to school is too dangerous.

 

Discussions among friends are no longer “of the real world,” as one writer put it. Talk turns more naturally to the fate of the homeless in the city’s parks, or the traumatization of the children.

 

“People,” one woman said, “talk of death.”

 

To a reporter based in Paris who has been granted three visas in recent months to report freely in the country, Damascus seems now like a city under siege, where for most people danger is a wearying companion — so much so that the last names of those interviewed for this article are being withheld for their protection.

 

Kidnapping of wealthy Syrians is on the rise, sowing fear in the city’s finest precincts. In Mezze, a politically and ethnically mixed neighborhood once known as the Beverly Hills of Damascus, people talk of the daughter of a local businessman who was kidnapped three weeks ago and ransomed for about $395,000. She was returned to her family, according to local residents, sexually abused, tortured and traumatized.

 

Residents say the kidnappers are from either the Free Syrian Army or renegade offshoots of radical groups or are, in the government’s catchall phrase, “foreign terrorists.”

 

One man, an Armenian Christian — “a minority within a minority,” he joked — said he was wary of laying blame on any one group.

 

“I am not aware of a unified opposition,” he said. “People call themselves groups — F.S.A., Salafists.” In the past, he added, neighbors lived so close together — Druze, Christians, Muslims — that “when something happened, we all offered condolences.”

 

“We went to each other’s funerals,” he said. “We did not have a feeling that one was different than the others.” Now, the man, a professor of linguistics, says, “I have a lump in my throat when I think about it.”

 

While people will openly complain of government corruption — even in Alawite pro-Assad regions like Latakia — they also fear what will come if and when Mr. Assad falls. Many are painfully aware that the breakdown of society into sectarian groups has echoes of earlier tragedies, in Bosnia and neighboring Iraq. As Samir, a resident of a Christian neighborhood, Baba Touma, said, “No one knows who is who anymore — what side they are on.”

If all goes as planned, Iraq will be awash in hundreds of billions of dollars of oil revenue, some of which the central government may try to apply to Baghdad like a massive band-aid.  Things may improve there; or things may not - corruption is endemic to Iraq's government and politicians -  but the Baghdad that will be thus (if ever) restored will be a very different city from the glory days of the 1970s.

If the wave of violence and vengeance swamps Damascus, however, there will be no real oil money to band-aid the devastation.  Nor, for that matter, may there be an effectively functioning national government there to direct the triage and reconstruction.

The governments of Iran (the Syria government's chief patron) and Turkey (major patron of the opposition), along with UN envoy Lakdar Brahimi, are calling for a cease-fire in Syria.  Even if they succeed, I don't expect any cease-fire to last.  Assad is too dug in; the rebels are too fragmented; both sides will likely use a cease-fire as a breathing space for regrouping before resuming.

Short of a miraculous intervention, a horrible fate awaits Damascus.  The victims, as ever, will be most immediately the innocents caught in the crossfire.  But we all will be the losers in the devastation of one of the planet's most celebrated, historic, beautiful cities - one that I was so fortunate to be able to visit in 1990.  I visited the Umayyad mosque - one of the more rewarding spiritual experiences of my life.  I wandered the great souk in Damascus - and now shudder to think that it may suffer the same fate as the historic souk of now embattled Aleppo.

Here's to praying for that miracle.

Taliban Thwarting the War on Polio in Pakistan? Yes, but . . .

Thus claims this story via NPR, which notes how 

In July, the Taliban flat-out banned any polio teams from entering North and South Waziristan until the U.S. drone attacks stopped.

Rumors about the polio vaccine are rife: It'll make the children sterile; it contains the AIDS virus; the vaccinators are really CIA agents.

Those rumor sound absurd, don't they?  Makes an already hateful bunch (the Taliban) seem even more reprehensible.

Thing is . . . that bit about the vaccinators being CIA agents is not without substance.

More than a year ago, when that Navy SEAL team took out Osama Bin Laden, the intelligence that set up that event was provided, at least in part, by agents, employed by the CIA, whose cover was to act as medical personnel providing polio vaccinations for the locals in and around Abbottabad, where OBL was holed up.  As The Guardian reported at the time [emphasis mine}:

The National Disaster Management Authority, which oversees disaster relief, said it was issuing travel permits on a priority basis. "We are committed to facilitate aid workers in their pursuit of assisting affected communities," said spokesman Brigadier Sajid Naeem.

 

Tensions were exacerbated by news that the CIA ran a fake vaccination programme in Abbottabad to identify the occupants of Bin Laden's house. "It's adding fuel to the fire in terms of mistrust," said a senior UN official. "Now the Pakistanis can say 'We were right all along – these NGOs are only doing spy work.' "

 

Médecins Sans Frontières said the CIA operation was "a dangerous abuse of medical care" that would compromise humanitarian work.

 

The Taliban's intervention against polio vaccinations is cynical and reprehensible, surely.  But let's spread the credit around when it's so warranted.  And unfortunately - indeed, tragically - impoverished, frightened Pakistanis have reason to believe the Taliban when they claim that vaccinators are working for the CIA.

The Limits of American Power

Will our people and politicians ever get over the later 20th century?  

You know, that era when "we" KO'd the Germans and Japanese to win World War II, then TKO'd the Soviets to win the Cold War, then circled the ring with a victory lap by waxing Saddam's Iraq in the Persian Gulf "Desert Storm" war?  When so may Americans became convinced that the "USA USA" was THE eternal, divinely ordained hyperpower that had brought the planet (to use Francis Fukuyama's expression) "the end of history" with the permanent and indelible victory of democracy and capitalism?

If the debacle of the Bush-and-Obama Afghan and Iraq adventures has reminded us anything, it's that history indeed moves on, that all empires have their inevitable rise and fall - and nowhere more so than in the Middle East and Asia.  The reasons have varied.  The Assyrians fell victim to the resurgence of once subjugated, resentful Babylonians and Iranians.  Alexander's was brought down by internal fragmentation and the rise of new powers east and west.  Roman/Byzantine, Arab, Seljuk, Ottoman . . . they waxed, sometimes for centuries; they dominated; they faded and they fell. When modern European nations stepped in - none with a bigger, heavier footprint than Great Britain . . . same story.  In the case of the British empire, the historian Paul Kennedy argued convincingly (in his seminal work, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers)  that its demise was the result of imperial overstretch, as the size of British dominion came to exceed the ability of the imperial economy to sustain it.  The US seems to have reached the limits of its dominion much more abruptly, for sure.  In 1991 the US military seemed able to work its will wherever it might choose to in the Middle East; and a few years later, the booming US economy produced a surplus in the federal coffers.  Imperial apogee.

Perhaps we owe George W. Bush a big thank-you after all.  Yes, by 2008 his ill-fated (to describe them kindly) ventures in the East helped to run the national economy aground and imposed unsustainable burdens upon a military that had been counted as invincible only a few years before.  But in the abruptness of the process, Mr. Bush equally abruptly forced upon the nation a realization that, under other circumstances, might have dawned much more slowly and, ultimately, have caused the American people, and the planet, much more pain.

That realization? The American empire, such as it was, was an unsustainable chimera that could never have lasted.  Whatever the US's military and economic might, it would (as in the case of all of history's empires) never be sufficient to sustain a permanent domination.  And more importantly, especially given the "values" upon which Americans have predicated so much of their national pride, the right of Middle Eastern peoples to self-determination, whatever form that self-determination might take, was bound to assert itself.

That is indeed what has been going on across the region, especially over the last couple of years of "Arab Spring," but just as surely with the post-World War II decolonization (of which the Palestinian struggle with Israel is a part) and even (yes . . . the horror, the horror) the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution. 

Unfortunately, as some of the rhetoric of the current election season reveals, too many American pols and pundits still don't get it.  When Paul Ryan can speak (as he did last Thursday's vice-presidential debate) of the need to preserve "our gains" in Iraq and Afghanistan; when the WaPo's Jackson Diehl can hammer Obama for "bungling" Syria's civil war (as if that conflict was somehow America's to manage and control so that it would serve "our" interests); when pundits galore can anguish and point fingers over who "lost" Egypt, or Iraq, or Turkey; and when Mitt Romney signs up neocon "thinkers" like Dan Senor and John Bolton as campaign advisors  . . . all of them stand in the way of this nation's coming to terms with a reality that, like it or not, history was always moving it inexorably towards.

How the US Makes Stuff Happen

Read this obituary (from The Economist) for former spook Edwin P. Wilson.  The CIA didn't know; then it knew . . . yada yada.

Then go reflect on all those things you were taught about American values in school.

Mitt Romney's Flawed Global Vision

Twitter is atwitter (sorry) and on-line sources alight with coverage and commentary on Mitt Romney's foreign-policy speech today at VMI.  Predictably, it's long on sermonizing, short on specifics, and replete with references to US leadership and domination and the continuation of the "American century."  The WaPo editors have already weighed in with their concern that the speech failed to outline a more "robust" policy in the Middle East - this, of course, obviously reflecting the views of Jackson Diehl, who's been wringing his hands for months over Obama's reluctance to jump into the Syrian fray with both feet.

I have to recommend most heartily Fred Kaplan's take (at Slate), where he characterizes Romney's speech as the most dishonest of what's now a long string of the Mittster's mendacious public statements.  As have many others (including Paul Pillar and, very pungently, Maureen Dowd), Kaplan reminds us that Romney's foreign-policy mentors include some of the same neocon "visionaries" who gave us the strategic and humanitarian debacle of George Bush's Mesopotamian adventure.  But perhaps most important, Kaplan highlights both Romney's ineptitude overseas (including his insults to the Brits in London and to the Palestinians for their deficient "culture") and the sense that he's stuck in a Cold War time-warp:

Romney proclaimed, “The 21st century can and must be an American century.” This is where he and his advisers, many of them Bush-Cheney neo-cons, share a dangerous assumption about the world. They seem to believe that the United States can wield the same force and influence it did during the Cold War, if only a strong president sat in the White House again. Yet the rise of American power after World War II was facilitated by the geopolitics of the day: a bipolar international system, a faceoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, with much of the rest of the world choosing, or falling into, one camp or the other. When the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union imploded, this international system collapsed as well—and, as yet, nothing has taken its place. Power has dispersed as power-centers have weakened.

As he has on other occasions, Romney asserted that a president must “use America’s great power to shape history,” not to let events shape America. But the fact is there are no superpowers in today’s world; no country has as much power to shape history—or as little immunity to the influences of others—as America did in the Cold War era. To exercise true leadership, a president must come to grips with the limits of his or her power. This has nothing to do with notions of “American decline.” It has to do with the shattering of the Cold War world.

What seems ever more frighteningly evident to me is that Romney really has not been paying attention to how geopolitics has changed and become more complex over the last decade or so, and how America has run up against (or run aground on) the limits of what its military can do and what the nation's economy can afford to undertake.  Admittedly, he's playing to voters by trying to cast himself as the "can-do" entrepreneur / potential president, versus Obama as the professorial, cerebral, consider-all-the-angles ditherer.  (It kind of hearkens back to the old, absurd bromide: Those who can, do.  Those who can't, teach.")

But I've heard nothing, either in today's speech or in anything else Romney has said, to assure me that he has any depth of understanding of the scope and complexity of the US's relations with the rest of the world.  His most basic belief seems to be: America - must - dominate - period.  With the debacle in Iraq, and at the start of the 12th year of America's longest war (and quite possibily its least successful one), it ought to be clear that that horse has been rode hard, put down wet, and is shivering in its stall. 

Everything beyond demanding US global domination seems, for Romney, simpldetails.  But a leader needs to demonstrate some mastery of those details.  From what I've heard so far, the extent of Romney's actual working knowledge of the details of international affairs could fit easily on a 3 x 5 index card.

 

 

The Stupidity of the US's Anti-Palestine Stance at the UN

I wanna vote for Obama, I really do - and given the dangerous ignorance that Mitt Romney would bring to the global (and domestic) scene, I probably still will.

But damn, Barack, you make it hard.

Report from The Guardian (via @TonyKaron on Twitter) that the US has warned European governments (via a "private memo"!?) that any backing of the Palestinian initiative for recognition by the UN General Assembly,

saying such a move "would be extremely counterproductive" and threatening "significant negative consequences" for the Palestinian Authority, including financial sanctions.

The US demands that a settlement between Israel and Palestinians must be obtained only by direct negotiations between those two parties.  In other words, the so-called "peace process."

This is the epitome of stupidity. Why?

• the peace process is a joke. It has gone nowhere, and it's going nowhere, ever.  Why? Because . . .
• Netanyahu is using his never-ending demand for a viable "peace partner" to play for time, pure and simple, even while the Judaization of East Jerusalem and colonization of the West Bank proceed apace.  Any semi-sentient human being knows this; our professorial president surely knows it - yet he and his cohort acquiesce in it.  

This is a time when the US needs to be charting a new course in the Middle East that will reflect awareness of new political realities.  Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya now have popularly elected governments whose leaders need to be responsive to their respective publics.  Any poll you want to consult will tell you that those publics expect their leaders/governments to be mindful of the situation of the Palestinians at the hands of Israel, and to do what they can to hold the US accountable for its support of Israel as regards that situation.  

The newly resurgent Turkey - a country that the US would dearly love to reclaim as a dependable friend and ally - is led by a well-entrenched political party (the AKP) whose rise to power was predicated on responding to popular politics, and whose leader has made clear that he expects Israel to deal more fairly with the Palestinians.  

Moreover, assuming that Bashar al-Asad's regime is eventually toppled in Syria, the government likely to emerge there will have a significant Islamist element that (you can bet your bottom dinar) will insist that Israel's expansion in the West Bank be reined in.  

The US's only remaining strong allies in the Middle East are two hereditary monarchies - those of the ibn Saud in Saudi Arabia and the ibn Hashim in Jordan.  The future of neither of them looks particularly stable, and the possibility that one or both of them will fall in the not too distant future is quite real.

This is no time for the US to be falling back on its default mode when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians.

Arab-Turk Popular Political Front Emerging vs Israel?

AP (via Boston.com) reports on Egypt PM Muhammad Morsi's speech at the convention of Turkey leader Erdogan's AKP in Ankara, where he proclaimed:

‘‘Our common goal is to support other people who are standing up against their administrations or regimes, to support Palestine and the Syrians in their efforts . . . . The events in Syria are the tragedy of the century,’’ . . .  ‘‘We will be on the side of the Syrian people until the bloodshed ends, the cruel regime is gone and Syrian people reach their just rights.’’

Whether this Turkey-Egypt front can be termed a "popular democratic" front is somewhat uncertain.  Both Erdogan and Morsi govern states that are structured as democracies, but both leaders have come under fire for authoritarian tendencies.  Watching the progress of "democracy" in both countries in the years to come will be an interesting exercise.

Nonetheless, both men seem to enjoy support on their respective domestic scenes; both men can claim popular mandates (achieved via the ballot box) to take the political bit firmly in their jaws and move forward.  Turkey's economy has burgeoned under Erdogan - enough so that, as this report notes, Turkey can pony up $2 billion to boost Egypt's economic reconstruction - without which Morsi, and Egypt's democracy, may well founder.

And as the report also notes, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal was prominently in attendance. Erdogan spoke directly to the Palestinian cause.  As the report notes:

 

Erdogan said Turkey is determined to speak out against what he called Israel’s ‘‘state terrorism’’ in the region and praised Morsi for his support to Palestinians.

‘‘Through Morsi’s leadership, our Palestinian brothers in Gaza and in all other Palestinian cities are able to breathe easily,’’ he said.

Erdogan said Turkey would not reconcile with former ally Israel until it lifts its blockade of Gaza and apologizes for an attack in 2010 that killed nine mostly Turkish pro-Palestinian activists in a raid on a flotilla that tried to breach the blockade.

 

Mr. Netanyahu has been able to distract much of the West's leadership (Mr. Obama included) by (literally, at his recent UN General Assembly presentation) waving the picture of an Iranian bomb before their eyes.  But, along with the Iranian situation, there is no Middle East issue more urgent among the West's leaders as damping down the civil war in Syria before the flames there spread to Iraq, Lebanon, and beyond.  They likely are going to need the involvement, if not the leadership, of Messrs Erdogan and Morsi in achieving that.

Admittedly, Erdogan has his own dog in the Syria fight, what with Syrian refugees increasingly taxing Turkey's largesse, Turkey's own Alawis angry at Erdogan's hammering of the Alawi president of Syria, and Syria's resurgent Kurds beginning to establish an autonomy that Turkey's Kurds hunger for - and doing it along the Turkey-Syria border, no less.

But bear in mind that Israel now finds itself confronted, on its south, not only by a besieged and angry Hamas in Gaza, but also by a newly democratic Egypt whose leaders, if they are to remain in power, need to accommodate somehow the popular Egyptian "street"'s anger against Israel's long-time brutalization of Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza.  To its north, Israel may likewise soon find itself confronted (assuming Assad's eventual downfall) by a new Sunni-dominated government whose leaders may rush to fellow religious-Sunni Erdogan's doorstep in hopes of obtaining help to rebuild an already shattered country.  Any such support from Erdogan will surely come with a price, or at least, expectations: that Syria position itself firmly alongside Turkey (and perhaps alongside Turkey's new ally, Egypt?) in holding Israel finally accountable for its policies in the West Bank and Gaza.

Mr. Netanyahu would have us believe that the direst existential threat to his country looms in Tehran. A Turkey-Syria alliance need not be an existential threat to Israel.  But it just might be what's needed to put paid to Netanyahu's dream of "Greater Israel" - and with it, Bibi's hammerlock on the rise of a real, viable Palestinian state.

Iraq, Afghanistan: America's Wasted Treasure

Among the many dismal pieces of news that awaited me in the morning's email were two bulletins from Time's Samantha Grossman: another Sunni-on-Shia attack in Iraq, and another American killed in Afghanistan.  Especially notable about the latter: the death was the 2000th of an American soldier in Afghanistan, the US's longest war.  What was the point of that death, or of the many more deaths that will follow in the months prior to the 2014 withdrawal (which, we know, will not be a total withdrawal), no one seems able to explain.  And Messrs Obama and Romney are giving the Afghan war a wide berth in the run-up to the November election.  (It will be interesting to see how they might dance around that issue in this week's first debate.)

The AP (via NYT) provides details of the attacks in Iraq:

 insurgents struck Shiite neighborhoods and security forces, officials said, killing at least 26 people.

 

Insurgents coordinated attacks in multiple cities, the latest strikes in a campaign apparently intended to rekindle widespread sectarian conflict and undermine public confidence in the beleaguered government.

 

The frequent bombings have raised concerns about the government’s ability to contain the violence, since the last American troops left in December after more than eight years of occupation and civil war that upended Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led minority power base and empowered Iraq’s long-repressed Shiite majority.

 

The deadliest attack on Sunday came in Taji, a former Al Qaeda stronghold north of Baghdad, where three explosive-rigged cars went off within minutes of one another. The police said eight people were killed and 28 were wounded in the early morning explosions.

 

In all, at least 94 people were wounded in attacks that stretched from Kirkuk in northern Iraq to the southern Shiite town of Kut.

 

An eight-year invasion followed by occupation in Iraq ended with 4000+ US soldiers killed, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.  (It seems a war crime in itself that we'll never have an exact accounting of Iraqis killed.  The Pentagon couldn't be bothered, especially in the war's early phase.  After all, they were only dead hajjis, right?)  Iraq is really no closer to being a functional, unitary state now than it was when the US removed Saddam Hussein.  Rival Arab- and Kurdish-dominated governments in Baghdad and Erbil, respectively, vie for advantage over oil and territitorial claims.  The Kurds nurture grievances against the Arabs that the US occupation did nothing to assuage - and it was only a hubristic conceit of the US to believe that it might be able to do so.  The Sunni Arabs of Anbar province and other regions in Iraq deeply resent the Shiite dominance that is now entrenched in Baghdad, and that continues to arrest and imprison Sunni leaders as "Baathist terrorists."  Many of the now disenfranchised Sunnis fear the resurgence of al-Qaeda jihadists in Iraq, but likely shed no tears over the deaths of Shiites at al-Qaeda's hands.  And as the largely Sunni-Arab-based insurgency against Bashar Assad's regime in Syria gathers momentum and forces him from power (while the US cheers them on), it's quite likely that Sunni fighters there - a goodly number of them, from Iraq - will then turn their efforts to restoring their Sunni confreres to some greater measure of power in Iraq.

Yes, Iraq has a constitution (with the US's fingerprints still all over it), and a parliament.  And it has an elected prime minister, but he continues to display a penchant for authoritarianism and brutality, as well as a subservience to Shiite sectarian interests, that makes him a far cry from the kind of "democratic" leader whose installation might have warranted the entailed sacrifice in blood and treasure.

Of course, given the dysfunction of American politics these days, one might ask how, or if, the US really has much standing any longer to teach the world about democracy.  Prof. Shadia Drury, Canada Research Chair at the University of Regina in Canada, provides thoughtful, cogent reflection on that very question:

It is ironic that America has embarked on the monumental project of teaching the world about democracy at a time when its own democracy is in a state of decay and degeneration. It seems to me that the most important lesson that America can teach the world in the twenty-first century regards the conditions that signal the imminent demise of the democratic body politic. The elements of democratic health are not a mystery. Like all other forms of government, democracy requires virtue—especially among its ruling elites.

Democracy is not a panacea that brings with it all good things, as Amer­icans are inclined to believe. It is a challenging form of government that re­quires certain conditions to avoid de­scending into chaos, sectarianism, or the tyranny of the majority. The American Founding Fathers were particularly wary of the tyranny of the majority, so they created a republic of laws with a Bill of Rights to protect minorities and individuals from the power of the majority. A constitution that sets limits on the power of the majority is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for democracy.

It has often been said that, more than any other form of government, democracy re­quires virtue. This was the view of Jean-Jacques Rous­seau, who was an advocate of small participatory democracies. Although he did not express it that way, he thought that it was possible for small participatory democracies to arrive at the common good (he called it the General Will) if individuals asked themselves the right questions when it came time to vote. Instead of asking, “What do I want?” they should ask: “What do we need?” If they proceeded in this way, then they were sure to arrive at the common good.

In truth, every form of government needs the kind of virtue that Rousseau espouses—at least among its ruling class. The men and women in Congress must have the virtuous attitude described by Rousseau when they vote on the issues if they hope to make decisions that serve the common good (not just private interests). Unfortunately, American politicians are more devoted to the interests of their corporate backers than they are to the public interest that they are sworn to serve. They are afraid to ask tough questions on committees investigating corporate fraud lest they find their campaign contributions decimated. They have made a valiant effort to conceal their corruption by claiming that the corporate oligarchs they serve are “the job creators” whose interests are identical to the interests of the nation. They have succeeded in duping the public with this sleight of hand, but there are signs that this ploy will not work indefinitely. In foreign policy, they defend the interests of Israel, right or wrong, at the expense of the United States. Again, they are motivated by fear—fear that they will find themselves facing a well-funded opponent when seeking reelection. The result of this widespread corruption is gargantuan profits for large corporations that ship jobs overseas, environmental degradation, impoverishment of the working classes, shrinking of the middle class, and useless wars in the Middle East that serve neither the interests of America nor her client state—they merely augment the financial coffers of security companies and the arms industry. It is time for Amer­icans to look for courage among their elected leaders. It is time to expose the cowards who have not the courage to stand up for the good of their nation.

I highly recommend the rest of her essay, here.

Do Americans truly value and mourn those American lives lost - as well as the hundreds of billions of dollars squandered - in Iraq and Afghanistan?  Or will we choose to keep our eyes shut, our ears closed, and party on?

On Iran's Nuclear Intentions

An extremely interesting - and timely- piece by the WaPo's Walter Pincus several days ago got by me.  He draws from the CIA's recently declassified report on its failed analyses of Iraq's WMD intentions some very cogent lessons for the current imbroglio with Iran.  IMO, it's worth pasting and posting here in full.  The original is here.

 

There are lessons for handling Iran’s nuclear program in the declassified CIA self-analysis of its misreading of the late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s reaction to U.N. inspections of his weapons-of-mass-destruction program.

 

Equally interesting in the report is how Hussein misjudged the capability of international inspectors and the responses — sanctions and then military action — that would come from the United States and its allies.

 

Are these errors that Iran may be making?

 

The 16-page report, first disclosed 13 days ago by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, concludes with some findings relevant to the Iran situation.

 

The study, done in 2006, found that CIA analysts wrongly “tended to focus on what was most important to us — the hunt for WMD (weapons of mass destruction) — and less on what would be most important for a paranoid dictatorship to protect.”

 

Today, the U.S. government views Iran’s actions — many permitted by the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — as signs of a country seeking a nuclear weapons capability, if not the weapons themselves.

 

Why? Because Iran’s original move to build its own enrichment facilities were undertaken secretly and acknowledged only after being discovered by U.S. intelligence and publicized by anti-Tehran exiles.

 

The CIA report draws attention to Iraq’s “cheat and retreat” policy in the early 1990s of concealing WMD items and activities. The United States and its allies saw the efforts as coverups that validated intelligence analysts’ “assessments that Iraq intended to deny, deceive, and maintain forbidden capabilities.” Thus, when Iraq decided in 1995 to destroy its existing WMDs and come clean, after Hussein’s son-in-law defected and talked about the programs, there was doubt.

 

Has Iran’s original deceptions and subsequent intransigence led the United States and others to disregard Tehran’s claim that it wants to make fuel only for its research reactors and power plants?

 

The CIA report cautions that U.S. analysts should have viewed Hussein’s late WMD disclosures through “an Iraqi prism.” They would have seen the that Iraqis wanted to protect “their reputation, their security, their overall technological capabilities and their status needed to be preserved,” according to the report.

 

The lesson for today is not to accept Iran’s current defiance of the U.N. Security Council as proof that Tehran wants a bomb. The CIA report notes that in Iraq’s case, “deceptions were perpetrated and detected, but the reasons for those deceptions were misread.”

 

The current cleanup at Iran’s Parchin military base, while delaying a visit from inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency, is being viewed as Tehran trying to hide previous work on possible weapons-building experiments. The CIA report says that “Baghdad destroyed rather than revealed items, attempting to make its inaccurate assertions of no program correct in a legalistic sense.” Such Iraqi attempts “to find face-saving means to disclose previously hidden information, however, reinforced the idea that Baghdad was deceptive and unreliable,” the CIA said.

 

The CIA report also showed that some U.S. and U.N. actions led Iraq’s leaders to believe the goal was to change the ruling regime rather than just halt Baghdad’s WMD program. Two steps were noted: one was when U.N. inspectors began to look into Iraq’s security apparatus and concealment apparatus; the other was when the U.S. Congress in 1998 approved the Iraq Liberation Act, which provided funds to Iraqi exile groups.

 

The Obama administration halted the Bush policy of regime change for Iran, but many Republicans still favor it. Some Iranian officials see a pattern in IAEA inspectors seeking to add additional sites for visits that can only end with regime change. They also weigh presidential and congressional campaign statements for signs that regime change is still a U.S. goal.

 

The report reviews Hussein’s misjudgment that the United States would not invade and at worst would only bomb suspected WMD sites, as it had done in 1998. He and his leadership “believed the United States did not have the forces to invade Iraq and press reports that said Washington was not willing to sacrifice U.S. lives.”

 

Iran may face threats of military action by the United States and Israel, but neither country appears prepared at this time to contemplate an invasion.

 

One other cautionary note from the study: When, in fact, Iraq provided its report that said it had destroyed its WMD arms and ended its WMD programs, “past Iraqi deceptions led to suspicion of Iraq’s motives” and its leaders “would have had to take specific steps with [U.N. inspectors] to overcome perceptions of dishonesty.”

 

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, repeated on Aug. 30 assurances that Iran wants only to pursue peaceful uses of atomic energy and is not seeking a nuclear weapon. As early as 2006, he issued a religious fatwa that said the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons was forbidden under Islam.

 

Some current and former U.S. officials believe that this tie to Islamic law provides Khamenei with a means to strike a deal with the West to limit enrichment to low levels. But the broader reaction is that Iran could forget about Islamic law if domestic or foreign events lead to a decision to build a bomb.

On Netanyahu's Red Line

Amid all the chuckling about Bibi's (literally) cartoonish illustration of the Iranian nuclear "threat" (and yes, the Looney Tunes cartoonists of an earlier era would have been proud of that drawing), it's important to remember that this is a bone that Bibi is not going to drop.  The issue of red lines remains.  Mr. Obama refuses to specify one (and I, for one, am happy for that).  But Mr. Netanyahu's red line is clear.

Except that it isn't - nor can it be.

He has been clear for quite some time that he wants no enriched uranium in Iran's hands, and he wants Iran's capacity to enrich uranium dismantled and removed.  This, of course, despite that fact that as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT), Iran has the right, assured under international law, to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.  That horse has been out of the barn a long time.  Ain't no getting it back in, short of all-out war that would entail Iran's unconditional surrender.  Never gonna happen.  No red line possible.

That leaves the weaponization as the only issue in which a red line might feasibly be drawn.  Obama has said that US "will not allow" Iran to have a nuclear weapon.  Whether the US has the will - or even the power (cf. Iraq, Afghanistan) - to prevent that remains to be seen. (Personally, I feel containment is a real option here; but let's not go there now.)  Bibi, on the other hand, demands that Iran be denied the ability to develop one.

How do you do that, short of exterminating all of Iran's physicists, engineers, and such - including their students?  Short of obliterating all of Iran's universities, research institutes, . . . even high-school science departments?  How many plants and shops would have to be demolished?  Given Netanyahu's evident paranoia about Iran's intentions, what would be enough to satisfy him?

Would it require the kind of sanctions regime that the US and its UN allies imposed on Iraq starting in 1990?  Similarly denying Iran "dual-use" materials - prohibitions that virtually destroyed Iraq's economy and infrastructure, and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, many of them children and the elderly?

Truly, what will ever be enough for Bibi?