The road to ruin

The current war on Libya was sanctioned by United Nations Security Council resolution #1973 that was passed on March 17 and authorized “all necessary measures … to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.” It should be noted that the resolution expressly excludes “a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory” which means that another resolution will be required if bombing alone does not result in the removal of Gadhafi from power and they want to send troops in.

The resolution passed with ten votes in favor and five abstentions. It is noteworthy that apart from Germany, the other four abstentions consisted of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, countries that constitute the newly formed so-called BRIC bloc, that is emerging as an economic counterweight to the US and Europe.

Immediately after the vote both Russia and China issued very critical statements on the bombing campaign. Since either of them could have vetoed the resolution, it seems highly hypocritical for them to complain now since they had to have known what was coming. (Even if they had vetoed it, the US, Britain, and France would have found some other pretext for bombing, but that is not the point at issue here.)

So why didn’t China and Russia veto the UN resolution? I wonder if they want to lure the US and its NATO allies into these wars so that they will simply bleed themselves dry by one misbegotten military adventure after another. Russia, in particular, learned this painful lesson first hand when the US lured them into a long, costly, tragic, and ultimately losing war in Afghanistan. Maybe this is their revenge.

Stephen Walt discusses how the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists in the US, supposedly on the opposite ends of the political spectrum, are actually very similar when it comes to taking the country to war.

The only important intellectual difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is that the former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on U.S. power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance… So if you’re baffled by how Mr. “Change You Can Believe In” morphed into Mr. “More of the Same,” you shouldn’t really be surprised. George Bush left in disgrace and Barack Obama took his place, but he brought with him a group of foreign policy advisors whose basic world views were not that different from the people they were replacing.

Libya is another example of how we really have just one pro-war/pro-business oligarchy that rules the country.

Walt also wonders if whether China may not be the ultimate beneficiary of the Libyan war, saying “And who’s the big winner here? Back in Beijing, China’s leaders must be smiling as they watch Washington walk open-eyed into another potential quagmire.”

It might seem to a naïve or conspiracy minded observer that there is some plan being implemented, aided by the political leadership, to deliberately drive America into the ditch. Look at all the efforts currently underway to defund the government and thus destroy public services so that libraries cut back, regulatory agencies are made toothless, public schools are undermined, workers are impoverished, retirement funds are looted, national parks are destroyed by development, logging and mining, roads and bridges fall apart, police and fire protections and other social services are reduced or eliminated, all the while waging more and more wars on other countries that not only cost a lot but breed anger and resentment against the US.

Of course, such an explicit plan is unlikely and is unneeded. All these things are happening as a logical consequence of an oligarchy run amok that seeks only to advance its immediate short-term interests by cutting taxes on the wealthy and eliminating any form of government oversight and restraint and doesn’t give a damn about anything else. When coupled with outside forces that seek to draw the US into expensive overseas military adventures and overblown internal security measures (these are, after all, the stated goals of al Qaeda), we are well on the path to the implosion of a once powerful country.

Truth or Treason: Panel discussion on WikiLeaks

I will be on a panel discussing WikiLeaks on Thursday, March 24 at 5:30 pm in Nord 310 on the Case quad of the CWRU campus. The other panelists will be Laura Tartakoff and Pete Moore from the Political Science department.

The event is organized by the CWRU chapter of the Young Americans for Liberty and is free and open to the public. Pizza and drinks will be provided.

And now, another war

So now the US (along with the UK and France) is at war with Libya.

I find it incredible that the US goes so casually into war, as if bombing a country was just another foreign policy option. Now the government does not even go through the bother of making up lies to justify its actions of the kind that we were regaled with in the run up to the Iraq invasion, such as weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds, haven of terrorists, etc.

The US has used its superior airpower so routinely and frequently that in one sense what is happening in Libya not new. The list of countries that have been bombed by the US is long and growing longer by the day. (This is an old list and does not include Pakistan.)

Korea and China 1950-53 (Korean War)
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-1961
Guatemala 1960
Congo 1964
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Cambodia 1969-70
Guatemala 1967-69
Grenada 1983
Lebanon 1983, 1984 (both Lebanese and Syrian targets)
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1980s
Nicaragua 1980s
Iran 1987
Panama 1989
Iraq 1991 (Persian Gulf War)
Kuwait 1991
Somalia 1993
Bosnia 1994, 1995
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999
Yemen 2002
Iraq 1991-2003 (US/UK on regular basis)
Iraq 2003-05
Afghanistan 2001-05

Because the US can use its air power with little risk of casualties, aerial bombardment has become the preferred option when the cry goes up to ‘do something, anything’ when some conflict arises somewhere but it is not at all clear what needs to be done or indeed if the US should do anything at all. This kind of war is loved by some liberals and Democrats who resent being seen as wimps. So they love it when they get a chance to launch so-called ‘humanitarian wars’ that involve just bombing, such as in the Balkans when Bill Clinton was president and now in Libya with Obama. These bombing campaigns seem to make the War Party elites giddy with pleasure as they see so-called ‘smart bombs’ attacking their own chosen ‘bad guys’. NPR’s Tom Gjelten is already gleefully talking about the heavy damage inflicted, living up his reputation as the correspondent from National Pentagon Radio.

What is slightly new is that in Libya the US has decided to intervene in a civil war. It has now seemingly decided that it can intervene in a civil war in a country if it does not like the way that war is progressing. But civil wars are always messy and who is in the right and who has legitimacy is rarely clear. What is the current intervention meant to achieve? It seems to have as its purpose to prevent Gadhafi’s forces from retaking some of the cities held by the rebels, so the US has essentially sided with the rebels. But who are the rebels? What do they stand for other than being against Gadhafi? Or is that alone good enough to support them militarily? Suppose the air campaign does succeed in creating some sort of stalemate between the two sides. Then what? Surely the three western countries are now pretty much committed to removing Gadhafi from power and thus will be uncomfortable with a stalemate. There is an inexorable logic to these campaigns. They start out attacking military targets. Then when that fails to achieve the desired results, they target infrastructure such as power and water supplies. And when that fails they go for outright terror by hitting high visibility targets in urban areas. All these things ruin a country and produce huge numbers of deaths. (Josh Marshall shares some of my other concerns about the Libyan intervention.)

Let’s not forget that Libya is a relatively prosperous country and has the highest Human Development Index of all the countries on the African continent. This index is a composite measure of wellbeing, especially child welfare, and is based on life expectancy, literacy, education, and standards of living. Will a sustained bombing campaign throw it into poverty? Remember that Iraq used to be one of the most developed countries in the Middle East before the sanctions and war took effect, making it impoverished.

The US has already come under charges of hypocrisy in attacking Libya while not doing anything about the parallel situations in Yemen and Bahrain. While the US and other countries bomb Libya because of its harsh response to an actual rebellion seeking to militarily overthrow the government, it ignores the killing of non-violent demonstrators in the streets of Yemen and Bahrain by those governments. Normally the mainstream media is so deferential to the US government that they never ask these kinds of embarrassing questions about why there are such obvious contradictions in its policy. And they can avoid doing so because the uncomfortable parallel usually occurred in the past and thus can be dumped conveniently into the memory hole. But in this case it was unavoidable because the rebellions in those other countries are going on at the same time. It is interesting to watch people who support the Libyan attacks try to avoid answering the question of why the two situations are treated so differently, even though Bahrain is using foreign troops (most from Saudi Arabia) to attack its own people.

Meanwhile Saudi Arabia has banned all demonstrations but that country is immune from any repercussions from the US for anything. After all, fifteen of the nineteen people directly responsible for the attacks of 9/11/2001 were from Saudi Arabia. If the fifteen had been from (say) Syria, that country would have been bombed the next day.

The real problem is that the constitutional requirement that only Congress can declare war is now completely ignored. The framers of the US constitution (Remember that document? Kept in the national archives? Supposed to protect the people from authoritarian rulers?) recognized that war was a deadly serious business and that going to war was not a decision to be made lightly. They were well aware that the Executive branch and the president would use wars to further their narrow and selfish goals if they could, so they gave the power (Article 1, Section 8) to declare war to Congress so that an exhaustive debate by the people’s elected representatives would take place before such a momentous decision was made.

But the Executive branch has usurped that function on its way to creating an authoritarian state and the spineless Congress is only too willing to give up this prerogative since it enables them to avoid taking responsibility for making a decision and they can then waste their time on trivialities and carp from the sidelines about tactics.

The weird anti-intellectual climate in the US

You would think that on issues that should be politically neutral (like climate change and evolution) there would be tendency for the views of political liberals and conservatives to converge with increasing education as the essential facts and arguments become better understood. And in general, you would be right, except for the US. Here it seems that ideology trumps facts and reason.

Obama’s political expediency

It looks like Obama has stopped paying even lipservice to his ringing promise during his election campaign to close down Guantanamo. Glenn Greenwald points out that his excuse (repeated by many of his supporters) that the Congress forced him to back down is the kind of political sleight-of-hand that Obama is becoming increasingly good at.

It is true that Congress — with the overwhelming support of both parties — has enacted several measures making it much more difficult, indeed impossible, to transfer Guantanamo detainees into the U.S. But long before that ever happened, Obama made clear that he wanted to continue the twin defining pillars of the Bush detention regime: namely, (1) indefinite, charge-free detention and (2) military commissions (for those lucky enough to be charged with something). Obama never had a plan for “closing Guantanamo” in any meaningful sense; the most he sought to do was to move it a few thousand miles north to Illinois, where its defining injustices would endure.

The Daily Show points out the obvious.

Cartoonist Ted Rall envisages Obama’s kinder-gentler Guantanamo, while Tom Tomorrow captures Obama’s political expediency.

The feckless John Kerry

Congressman Dennis Kucinich sent a letter to the Defense Department in response to their stalling for over a month on his request to visit Manning.

My request to visit with Pfc. Manning must not be delayed further. Today we have new reports that Manning was stripped naked and left in his cell for seven hours. While refusing to explain the justification for the treatment, a marine spokesman confirmed the actions but claimed they were ‘not punitive.’

Is this Quantico or Abu Ghraib? Officials have confirmed the ‘non-punitive’ stripping of an American soldier who has not been found guilty of any crime. This ‘non-punitive’ action would be considered a violation of the Army Field Manual if used in an interrogation overseas. The justification for and purpose of this action certainly raises questions of ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ and could constitute a potential violation of international law.

Dennis Kucinich has the decency to protest the treatment of Manning. Contrast this with the weasely behavior of John Kerry and his feeble attempt to find excuses for the appalling treatment of Bradley Manning.

This US senator from Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, is rapidly proving himself to be a totally vapid politician, notorious for sonorously going on and on during Senate hearings, who seems to be more fond of hearing his own voice than of standing up for anything. Here is Kerry during Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearings when his introductory comments went on for so long that she looked like she would fall asleep.

Then there was the time when it was discovered that multimillionaire Kerry, married to an heiress, owned a $7 million yacht but avoided paying Massachusetts taxes by keeping it in a neighboring state.

But a far worse example was in 2007 he continued to blather on, and even attempt to joke, while Andrew Meyer, a University of Florida student who questioned him at a public meeting, was wrestled to the ground by campus security offices and tasered even though he had done nothing to merit such harsh treatment. (This was the famous ‘Don’t tase me, bro!” incident.) Kerry did not do anything even as the student’s screams of pain reverberated through the auditorium. You can see the horrifying video.

To some extent I can understand politicians acting cynically, and even criminally, for personal gain, even if I do not excuse them for doing so. What I truly despise are those politicians like Kerry for whom it would cost nothing to do the right thing (like ask for decent treatment of Andrew Meyer and Bradley Manning) but do not have the common decency to do so.