by Tom Lippman*
The Middle East’s seemingly endless conflicts are diverting attention and resources from a graver long-term threat that threatens the whole region, the growing scarcity of water, and the situation will get worse before it gets better — if it ever does get better. Years of war, careless water supply [...]]]>
by Tom Lippman*
The Middle East’s seemingly endless conflicts are diverting attention and resources from a graver long-term threat that threatens the whole region, the growing scarcity of water, and the situation will get worse before it gets better — if it ever does get better. Years of war, careless water supply management, unchecked population growth, ill-advised agricultural policies, and subsidies that encourage consumption have turned a basically arid part of the world into a voracious consumer of water. The trajectory is not sustainable.
Those were the gloomy if unsurprising conclusions of a three-day conference on the subject in Istanbul last week. From Libya to Iraq to Yemen, too many people and too many animals have stretched water resources beyond their limits. Some countries where the urgency is greatest, including Syria and Yemen, are the least equipped to stave off serious water crises.
Jordan, always short of water, has been overwhelmed by a flood of refugees from Syria. Iraq, which once had ample water, has lost critical water supplies to war and to dams built by Turkey upstream on the Tigris and Euphrates. Egypt has twice as many people as it did 50 years ago, with no additional water resources. The isolated Gaza strip has been grappling with a water crisis for years. And Yemen’s scarce water supply is being gobbled up by the unchecked production of qat, a high-water crop with no nutritional value. Chewing the mildly narcotic qat leaf is Yemen’s national pastime.
“If you give them more water, they’ll just grow more qat,” one gloomy conference participant said.
Not all the news is bad. Stable countries with lots of money, led by Saudi Arabia, are making notable progress in supply, management and consumer education. Elsewhere, however, the prognosis is grim. No one predicted an outbreak of “water wars,” or armed conflict over water supply, a specter that has often been evoked but has never materialized. But at some point in the not too distant future, water shortages could provoke mass migrations, human hardship, crop failures and some form of “triage” among populations as governments are forced to allocate supplies, said conferees, who cannot be named due to conference rules.
It’s not as if all this has gone unnoticed. The Middle East’s water issue has been the subject of news articles, analyses by groups such as the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, and studies by think tanks and humanitarian groups for years. The Istanbul conference of scientists, policy analysts and academics from eight countries — conducted on an island in the Sea of Marmara under the title “High and Dry: Addressing the Middle East Water Challenge” by the Hollings Center and the Prince Muhammad Bin Fahd Strategic Studies Program at the University of Central Florida — is the latest of many such gatherings. But little has come of them because the region has never been stable enough, long enough, to make possible some comprehensive, multilateral solution.
According to analyses by the World Bank, the U.S. State Department and others, a majority of the countries defined as “water-poor” — those with access to less than 1,000 cubic meters per person per year — are in the Middle East and North Africa. The State Department also predicts that climate change will add to the problem by bringing “consistently lower levels of rainfall.”
No government or international agency can increase rainfall or snow runoff, but the Istanbul conferees heard that the example of Saudi Arabia — the world’s largest country without a river — shows that a lot can be done in countries with deep pockets and enough time to focus on this issue.
Saudi Arabia reorganized its government in the 1990s to centralize water planning and management. Most of the country’s water for personal and household use is supplied by massive desalination plants. The decision to build them, starting in the 1970s, was an obvious one for the kingdom, but the plants are expensive to construct and operate, leaving them beyond the financial reach of a country like Yemen.
Saudi Arabia meanwhile leads the region in the recapture and reuse of wastewater. Under a new regulation from last year, for example, its giant dairy farms are required to operate on recycled water purchased from the National Water Company rather than on groundwater as in the past. Once the world’s fifth- or sixth-largest exporter of wheat — the production of which requires massive amounts of water — Saudi Arabia has banned the cultivation of wheat as of 2016 and is refocusing its agriculture on greenhouse production of vegetables and fruit. Growing animal fodder crops such as alfalfa has been banned; owners of livestock are required to purchase imported fodder, conference participants said. Plagued by leaks in distribution pipes that drained off as much as 25 percent of the water it had, Saudi Arabia privatized its distribution network and encouraged foreign engineering and management companies to participate.
Saudi Arabia has raised the price of water for businesses and institutions, but it has not yet ended the subsidies for households that make water so cheap; there is little incentive to limit consumption. Doing so would be politically risky in a country where subsidies for water, gasoline, and electricity are expected by a population that has no vote or other influence over the government.
Egypt, by far the most populous country in the region, has a different consumer attitude problem. Egyptians have taken the availability of water for granted since completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1970. As a result, they use waster casually in the home and pump more irrigation water than is necessary onto their fields. But Egypt’s biggest concern now is Ethiopia’s plan to construct a giant hydroelectric dam on the headwaters of the Nile, reducing the flow and the amount of water stored in Lake Nasser, behind the Aswan Dam. Asked recently if negotiations over Nile water allocations were taking place between Egypt and the upstream countries, Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy replied, “No. I wish there were.”
Participants in Istanbul agreed that there is no single remedy for the water crisis. The available fixes range from the simple and obvious, such as consumer education and the installation of low-flow bathroom fixtures, to the aspirational, such as the development of desalination plants powered by solar energy, which are thus affordable. As usual with such events, the organizers will prepare a paper outlining recommendations. The fact is, however, that solutions, even if available, will be hard to implement until the shooting stops, refugees are resettled, and governments are sufficiently stable to address them. That won’t be soon.
*Any republication of this article must be authorized with IPS consent and sourced back to the original source link at www.lobelog.com.
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Photo: Much of the Middle East is seen in this night-time image photographed by one of NASA’s Expedition 31 crew members aboard the International Space Station as it flew some 240 miles above the Mediterranean Sea on June 4, 2012. The Nile River Delta is easily recognizable in center frame, and city lights make it easy to see both Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt near the Delta. Two Russian spacecraft — a Soyuz (left) and a Progress — appear in the frame while they are docked to the station.
]]>Enemies, innocent victims, and soldiers have always made up the three faces of war. With war growing more distant, with drones capable of performing on the battlefield while their “pilots” remain thousands of miles away, two of those faces have, however, faded into the background [...]]]>
Enemies, innocent victims, and soldiers have always made up the three faces of war. With war growing more distant, with drones capable of performing on the battlefield while their “pilots” remain thousands of miles away, two of those faces have, however, faded into the background in recent years. Today, we are left with just the reassuring “face” of the terrorist enemy, killed clinically by remote control while we go about our lives, apparently without any “collateral damage” or danger to our soldiers. Now, however, that may slowly be changing, bringing the true face of the drone campaigns Washington has pursued since 9/11 into far greater focus.
Imagine if those drone wars going on in Pakistan and Yemen (as well as the United States) had a human face all the time, so that we could understand what it was like to live constantly, in and out of those distant battle zones, with the specter of death. In addition to images of the “al-Qaeda” operatives who the White House wants us to believe are the sole targets of its drone campaigns, we would regularly see photos of innocent victims of drone attacks gathered by human rights groups from their relatives and neighbors. And what about the third group — the military personnel whose lives revolve around killing fields so far away — whose stories, in these years of Washington’s drone assassination campaigns, we’ve just about never heard?
After all, soldiers no longer set sail on ships to journey to distant battlefields for months at a time. Instead, every day, thousands of men and women sign onto their computers at desks on military bases in the continental United States and abroad where they spend hours glued to screens watching the daily lives of people often on the other side of the planet. Occasionally, they get an order from Washington to push a button and vaporize their subjects. It sounds just like — and the comparison has been made often enough — a video game, which can be switched off at the end of a shift, after which those pilots return home to families and everyday life.
And if you believed what little we normally see of them — what, that is, the Air Force has let us see (the CIA part of the drone program being off-limits to news reporting) — that would indeed seem to be the straightforward story of life for our drone warriors. Take Rene Lopez, who in shots of a recent homecoming welcome at Fort Gordon in Georgia appears to be a doting father. Photographed for the local papers on his return from a tour in Afghanistan, the young soldier is seen holding and kissing his infant daughter dressed in a bright pink top. He smiles with delight as the wide-eyed child tries on his military hat.
From an online profile posted to LinkedIn by Lopez last year, we learn that the clean-cut U.S. Army signals intelligence specialist claims to be an actor in the drone war in addition to being a proud parent. To be specific, he says he has been working in the dark arts of hunting and killing “high value targets” using a National Security Agency (NSA) tool known as Gilgamesh.
That tool is named after a ruthless Sumerian king who ruled over Uruk, an ancient city in what is now Iraq. With the help of the massive trove of NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill recently explained that Gilgamesh is the code name for a special device mounted on a Predator drone that can track the mobile phones of individuals without their knowledge by pretending to be a cell phone tower.
Lopez’s resumé yields more details on what Gilgamesh is capable of. The profile writer claims that he “supervised a team of four personnel supporting the lead targeting force in Laghman and Nuristan provinces [in Afghanistan]. Assisted top-level commanders with developing concepts, approaches, and strategies to Capture/Kill HVTs [high value targets].”
Last year, on completing his time in the military, Lopez says he took a civilian job operating Gilgamesh for Mission Essential, an intelligence contractor providing technical support for Pentagon drones. For that company, he says he conducted “pattern of life analysis” and provided support for “targeting and strike operations.” Lopez lives in Grovetown, Georgia, home to a joint Army-NSA code-breaking and language translation operation, involving 4,000 personnel that, since 9/11, has taken the lead in analyzing real-time data feeds from Central Asia and the Middle East.
Gilgamesh is just one of several NSA tools used on drones to track targeted cell phones. Another program, Shenanigans, was designed specifically for use by the Central Intelligence Agency. According to other documents leaked by Snowden, an operation code-named Victorydance used these tools in March 2012 to map every computer, router, and mobile device in Yemen.
What do men like Lopez actually think about the sort of human destruction, not to speak of the destabilization of whole regions, that Gilgamesh and its like help to unleash? In his online job pitch, Lopez indicates straightforward pride in his work: “My efforts, both as a contractor and in the military, yielded success in identifying, locating, and tracking high value targets, and protection of U.S. and coalition forces.” It would be easy enough to assume that the kind of analytical work such remote pilots do would result in a sense of job satisfaction and little more. And that, it turns out, would be a mistake.
Haunted by Death
In recent months, the first evidence that drones are not only killing thousands in distant lands, but also creating an unexpected kind of blowback among the pilots themselves, provides a curious parallel to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the 5,000-year-old poem about the Sumerian king. In the ancient saga, the gods are said to have sent Enkidu to befriend the cruel king and divert him from the oppression of his subjects. When the pair travel together to slay a monster named Humbaba, Gilgamesh begins to have nightmares about death and war, causing him to question their plan.
Today, like Gilgamesh of old, signals intelligence personnel connected to the drone programs have started reporting themselves haunted by the deaths that they have participated in, and plagued by the knowledge that, in the end, they often had next to no idea who they were actually killing. The publicity about a “kill list” in the White House has left the impression that those who find themselves on the other end of a drone-launched missile have been carefully identified and are known to the drone pilots. “People get hung up that there’s a targeted list of people,” one drone pilot told the Intercept two months ago. His view, however, was quite different: “It’s really like we’re targeting a cell phone. We’re not going after people — we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.”
Brandon Bryant, a 28-year-old U.S. airman, whose squadron has been credited with 1,626 kills, was among the first to be openly critical of the impact of remote tracking and targeting, of, that is, robot war. Bryant was a “sensor operator,” which meant that he operated the cameras on the drone aircraft as part of a three-person team that included a pilot and an intelligence analyst.
In an interview with GQ magazine last October, Bryant offered a vivid description of a targeting operation in Afghanistan he took part in when he was just 21. “This figure runs around the corner, the outside, toward the front of the building. And it looked like a little kid to me. Like a little human person,” he said. “There’s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there’s no person there.”
Bryant says he asked the pilot: “Did that look like a child to you?” The message came back from another intelligence analyst: “Per the review, it’s a dog.”
After six years, Bryant couldn’t take it any more. He saw a therapist who diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder. This was a novel, even shocking development for an airman who had hardly ever come close to a battlefield. Bryant was suitably taken aback and, as a result, began speaking out against the system of killing he had been enmeshed in and what it does both to the killers and those killed. “Combat is combat. Killing is killing. This isn’t a video game,” he wrote in an angry tirade on Facebook. “How many of you have killed a group of people, watched as their bodies are picked up, watched the funeral, then killed them, too?”
Killing for the CIA
Bryant’s campaign against drone war without accountability took on new life in late April when Tonje Hessen Schei, a Norwegian filmmaker, released her film Drone. In it, Bryant reveals that his former colleagues in the Air Force had not just been carrying out drone strikes on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq where the military was involved in open warfare. They were also conducting the strikes in the supposed CIA drone assassination campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen.
This was news. The CIA’s “covert” drone wars in those countries were, it turns out, secretly Air Force operations. “The CIA might be the customer, but the Air Force has always flown it,” Bryant says in the film. “A CIA label is just an excuse to not have to give up any information. That is all it has ever been.”
Schei’s film also reveals the name of the U.S. Air Force unit that does the CIA killing — the 17th Reconnaissance Squadron at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. “From what I was able to gather, it was pretty much confirmed they were flying missions almost exclusively in Pakistan with the intent to strike,” Michael Haas, another drone pilot, told Chris Woods at the Guardian.
Thanks to the film, Bryant made an unusual connection in the world of drone pilots — to the victims of Washington’s drone campaign, previously just so many pixels on a screen to him. Invited to Belgium and Norway to speak at the premieres of Schei’s film, he met with Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who runs the Foundation for Fundamental Rights and has been leading a campaign to put a face — quite literally — on the death and destruction CIA drone strikes have caused in his country.
Faces of the Victims
Up in the mountains of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in northern Pakistan, a giant image of an orphan girl is now laid out next to the mud houses of the locals. She is nameless, but according to her photographer, Noor Behram, she lost her parents in a drone strike in 2010 in the village of Dande Darpa Khel. Her picture, the size of a soccer playing field, is a product of Akbar’s planning with the help of JR, a French street artist, and Clive Stafford-Smith, the founder of Reprieve, a British human rights organization. Their intent: to create images of the victims of Washington’s drone wars that could be seen from the sky. Smaller images have, in fact, been placed on rooftops in Waziristan. Their target audience: drone pilots like Bryant, Haas, and Lopez who, searching for targets to kill, might just see the face of the child of one of their previous victims. (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which keeps a tally of drone victims in Pakistan, offers a provisional figure of up to 957 civilians, including as many as 202 children, killed between 2004 and the present day.)
For the last five years, Akbar and Smith have worked tirelessly on similar projects. One of their first efforts was to reveal the name of the CIA station chief in Pakistan: Jonathan Banks. In December 2010, they brought a $500 million lawsuit against him in that country, causing him to flee. The next summer they put together a collection of Noor Behram’s photographs of the dead, as well as their relatives and neighbors, that was exhibited in London.
Last year, Akbar even made plans to take the relatives of drone victims to testify before the U.S. Congress. Though he himself was denied entry to the country, he succeeded. Rafiq-ur-Rehman and his two children, nine-year-old Nabila-ur-Rehman and 13-year-old Zubair-ur-Rehman, did speak at a special hearing arranged by Representative Alan Grayson.
Now, with the unexpected support of a small but growing group of former drone pilots, a campaign against “targeted killings” might well take on a new life in the U.S. At least six other drone pilots have already spoken anonymously to Woods, largely confirming what Bryant and Haas have said publicly.
The Strain of Long-Distance War
There is evidence that other drone pilots are also beginning to crack under the pressure of drone war. Two recent studies by the Air Force strongly suggest that Bryant’s PTSD diagnosis is no anomaly, that no matter how far you may be from the battlefield, you never quite leave it.
Published in June 2011, the first study by Wayne Chappelle, Joseph Ouma, and Amber Salinas of the School of Aerospace Medicine at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio concluded that nearly half of the drone pilots studied had “high operational stress.” A number also had “clinical distress” — that is, anxiety, depression, or stress severe enough to affect them in their personal lives. The study attributed this to long “flying” hours and erratic shifts, but did not compare drone pilots to those in combat aircraft fighting above the battlefield.
A second study by Jean Otto and Bryant Webber of the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, published in March 2013, compared drone pilots to those performing standard military missions. The level of stress, it found, was almost the same, a surprising conclusion for those who assumed that drone pilots were essentially video gamers.
“Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” Otto told the New York Times. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”
Some believe that drone stress is significantly related to a major shortage of pilots for such planes. A Government Accountability Office report released in April tersely notes that “high work demands on RPA [remotely piloted aircraft] pilots limit the time they have available for training and development and negatively affects their work-life balance.”
Speaking from the Heavens
There is, however, likely to be far more to it than that. After Bryant came forward, for instance, Heather Linebaugh, a former drone intelligence analyst, broke her silence, too. Writing in the Guardian in late December, she summed up the largely unpublicized failure of Washington’s drones this way: “What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is not usually clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited cloud and perfect light. The feed is so pixelated, what if it’s a shovel, and not a weapon? We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian’s life all because of a bad image or angle.” (And she didn’t even point out that, in the areas being attacked in Pakistan and Yemen, carrying a weapon is commonplace and not necessarily a sign that you are a “terrorist.”)
Linebaugh explained that, under these circumstances, a “mistake” had terrible consequences, and not just for those erroneously targeted, but even for the pilots. “How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile? How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?” She added, “When you are exposed to it over and over again it becomes like a small video, embedded in your head, forever on repeat, causing psychological pain and suffering that many people will hopefully never experience.”
And don’t count on Linebaugh being the last drone analyst to speak out, either. Whether future Rene Lopezes ever actually look down from the computerized “heavens” and see the picture of that little Pakistani orphan girl, we already know that they will see horrors that are likely to prove hard to absorb.
It is this third face of war, along with those of the “enemy” and innocent victims, which provides the crucial evidence that the drone project, Obama’s remote control campaign, is a failure; that it is not clinical but bloody and riddled with error; that it creates enemies even as it kills others; that it is, above all, no more a video game for those who fly the planes and loose the missiles than it is for those who die in distant lands.
Pratap Chatterjee, a TomDispatch regular, is executive director of CorpWatchand a board member of Amnesty International USA. He is the author ofHalliburton’s Army and Iraq, Inc.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook and Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars — The Untold Story.
Copyright 2014 Pratap Chatterjee
*This article was first published by Tom Dispatch and was reprinted here with permission.
]]>by Emile Nakhleh
The Bahraini Arabic language newspaper al-Wasat reported on April 9 that a Cairo court began to consider a case brought by an Egyptian lawyer against Qatar accusing it of being soft on terrorism. The “terrorism” charge is of course a euphemism for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt, Saudi [...]]]>
by Emile Nakhleh
The Bahraini Arabic language newspaper al-Wasat reported on April 9 that a Cairo court began to consider a case brought by an Egyptian lawyer against Qatar accusing it of being soft on terrorism. The “terrorism” charge is of course a euphemism for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have designated a “terrorist” organization and have vowed to dismantle.
The two partners and the UAE also loathe Qatar for hosting and funding al-Jazeera satellite TV. The continued incarceration of the Al-Jazeera journalists and dozens of other journalists on trumped up charges is no coincidence.
The court case is symptomatic of the current Saudi-Egyptian relationship in their counter-revolution against the 2011 pro-democracy upheavals that toppled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his fellow autocrats in Tunisia, Yemen, and Libya.
The pro-autocracy partnership between the Egyptian military junta and the Saudi ruling family goes beyond their opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood and the perceived threat of terrorism. It emanates from the autocrats’ visceral opposition to democracy and human rights, including minority and women’s rights.
What should be most critical to them as they contemplate the future of their coalition of counter-revolutionaries, however, is the growing Western conviction that dictators can no longer provide stability.
The Egyptian Field Marshall and the Saudi potentate also abhor the key demands of the Arab uprisings and reject their peoples’ calls for freedom, dignity, justice, and genuine economic and political reform.
They are equally terrified of the coming end of the authoritarian paradigm, which could bring about their demise or at least force them to share power with their people. The Saudis and their Gulf Arab allies, especially Bahrain and the UAE, are willing to trample on their people’s rights in order to safeguard family tribal rule.
The Saudi-Egyptian partnership is also directed at the Obama administration primarily because of Washington’s diplomatic engagement with Iran.
According to media and Human Rights Watch reports, at least 16,000 secular and Islamist activists are currently being held in Egyptian prisons, without having been charged or convicted. This number includes hundreds of MB leaders and activists and thousands of its supporters.
Many of them, including teenagers, have also been tortured and abused physically and psychologically. These mass arrests and summary trials and convictions of Islamists and liberals alike belie the Saudi-Egyptian claim that theirs is a campaign against terrorism.
A brief history of Egyptian-Saudi relations
Egyptian-Saudi relations in the past 60 years have been erratic, depending on leadership, ideology, and regional and world events. During the Nasser era in the 1950s and ‘60s, relations were very tense due to Saudi fears of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab nationalist ideology.
The Saudis saw Nasser as a nationalist firebrand arousing Arab masses against colonialism and Arab monarchies. He supported national liberation movements and wars of independence against the French in North Africa and the British in the Arab littoral of the Persian Gulf.
The Saudi monarchy viewed Nasser’s call for Arab unity “from the roaring ocean to the rebellious Gulf” as a threat to their survival and declared a war on “secular” Arab nationalism and “atheist” Communism. They perceived Nasser’s war in Yemen against the tribal monarchy as an existential threat at their door and began to fund and arm the royalists there against the Egyptian military campaign.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia were the two opposite poles of the “Arab cold war” during the 1950s and ‘60s. Nasser represented emerging Arab republicanism while Saudi Arabia epitomized traditional monarchies. Nasser turned to the Soviet Union; Saudi Arabia turned to the United States.
In the late 1960s, Saudi Arabia declared the proselytization of its brand of Islam as a cardinal principle of its foreign policy for the purpose of fighting Arab nationalism and Communism.
It’s ironic that Saudi Arabia is currently supporting and funding the military junta in Egypt at a time when the military-turned-civilian presidential shoe-in Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is resurrecting the Nasserist brand of politics. In the next three to five years, the most intriguing analytic question will be whether this partnership would endure and how long the post-2011 generation of Arabs would tolerate a coalition of secular autocracy and a religious theocracy.
Saudi Arabia supported Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat’s war against Israel in 1973 but broke with him later in that decade after he visited Jerusalem and signed a peace treaty with Israel.
By the early 1980s, however, the two countries re-established close relations because of their common interest in supporting Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war and in pushing for the Saudi-articulated Arab Peace Initiative.
The Saudi King viewed President Hosni Mubarak warmly and was dismayed by his fall. He was particularly incensed by Washington’s seeming precipitous abandonment of Mubarak in January 2011.
The Saudi monarchy applauded General al-Sisi’s removal of President Muhammad Morsi and pumped billions of dollars into the Egyptian treasury. They also indicated they would make up any deficit in case American aid to Egypt is halted.
The Saudis have endorsed Sisi’s decision to run for president of Egypt and adopted similar harsh policies against the Muslim Brotherhood and all political dissent. Several factors seem to push Saudi Arabia closer to Egypt.
The Saudis are concerned about their growing loss of influence and prestige in the region, especially their failure in thwarting the interim nuclear agreement between the Iran and world powers known as the P5+1. Their policy in Syria is in shambles.
Initially, they encouraged jihadists to go to Syria to fight the Assad regime, but now they cannot control the pro-al-Qaeda radical Salafi jihadists fighting the Damascus tyrant.
The Saudis also failed in transforming the Gulf Cooperation Council into a more unified structure. Other than Bahrain, almost every other state has balked at the Saudi suggestion, viewing it as a power grab.
In an absurd form of retaliation against Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain recalled their ambassadors from that country. The Saudis are engaged in tribal vendettas against their fellow tribal ruling families, which is out of place in a 21st century globalized and well-connected world.
The oil wealth and the regime’s inspired religious fatwas by establishment clerics have a diminishing impact on the younger generation connected to the global social media.
Despite the heavy-handed crackdown, protests, demonstrations, and confrontations with the security forces are a daily occurrence in Egypt. It’s becoming very clear that dictatorial policies are producing more instability, less security, and greater appeal to terrorism.
It won’t be long before Western governments conclude that autocracy is bad for their moral sensibilities, destructive for business, and threatening for their presence in the region. The Saudi-Egyptian coalition of autocrats will soon be in the crosshairs.
In order to endure, such a coalition must be based on respect for their peoples, a genuine commitment to human rights, and a serious effort to address the “deficits” of liberty, education, and women’s rights that have afflicted Arab society for decades.
Photo: Photo released by the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) shows Egypt’s Interim President Adly Mansour (L) listening to Saudi Crown Prince Salman after his arrival in the Saudi Red Sea port city of Jeddah on Oct. 7, 2013. Credit: Xinhua/SPA
]]>Failure to account and justify lethal drone activity by the United States represents a major violation of international law and international human rights law, a former U.N. rapporteur said Wednesday.
Since the beginning of drone attacks in 2001, the U.S. has conducted around 450 lethal drone strikes that have [...]]]>
Failure to account and justify lethal drone activity by the United States represents a major violation of international law and international human rights law, a former U.N. rapporteur said Wednesday.
Since the beginning of drone attacks in 2001, the U.S. has conducted around 450 lethal drone strikes that have raised humanitarian and international legal issues.
“About 370 have taken place in Pakistan, with the next largest, 60 to 70, in Yemen,” said Steve Coll, dean of Columbia’s Journalism School, and a former Pulitzer prize winning reporter for the Washington Post and New Yorker.
Speaking during a panel discussion, he said: “The peak was in 2010 where there were 120 drone strikes in Pakistan. That equates to about one every three days.”
With reports by Pakistan military stating that 2,160 militants and 67 civilians were killed through drone attacks that were carried out through covert operations, the panel agreed that the U.S. government needs to address this human rights issue.
Former UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Philip Alston said the U.S. failed to justify the basis for the use of armed drones, failed to acknowledge if a law has been broken or if civilian casualties have occurred.
“This failure regardless of anything else represents a major violation of international law and sets the U.S. up as an actor that sees itself as not accountable,” he said.
“The entire structure of both international humanitarian law and human rights law are premised on the notion that states accused of violating laws will respond with sufficient information to enable an evaluation and assessment to be undertaken.”
“There have been two fronted covert aerial wars in two different settings. The Obama administration finally acknowledged (in 2013) for the first time that the drone campaign exists,” Coll said.
Although the use of drones lies under U.S. law and policy framework of a “memorandum of notification”– a legal document authorised by the U.S. president to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to carry out covert action — it does not mean it aligns with international law, he said.
Alston added that after he challenged the CIA about the strikes, he received no response as to their involvement and rationale.
He said the response he did receive was that “we, the CIA have no obligation to tell you anything and we have not told you anything. What we have done is to leak various statements when it suits us, including the John Brennan (director of the CIA) statement that not a single civilian was killed.”
The controversial topic of drone strikes by the U.S. has raised concern from numerous organizations, including the United Nations.
In a statement last August, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that the use of armed drones should be subject to the rules of international law and international humanitarian law.
He added, “Every effort should be made to avoid mistakes and civilian casualties.”
The United Nations has deployed unarmed drones, which it describe as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) , in at least one of its peacekeeping missions in Africa.
Jassmyn Goh is a trainee at the IPS United Nations bureau in New York.
]]>
via Tom Dispatch
[This epilogue to Scahill’s bestselling book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, is posted with the kind permission of its publisher, Nation Books.]
On January 21, 2013, Barack Obama was inaugurated for his second term [...]]]>
via Tom Dispatch
[This epilogue to Scahill’s bestselling book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, is posted with the kind permission of its publisher, Nation Books.]
On January 21, 2013, Barack Obama was inaugurated for his second term as president of the United States. Just as he had promised when he began his first campaign for president six years earlier, he pledged again to turn the page on history and take U.S. foreign policy in a different direction. “A decade of war is now ending,” Obama declared. “We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.”
Much of the media focus that day was on the new hairstyle of First Lady Michelle Obama, who appeared on the dais sporting freshly trimmed bangs, and on the celebrities in attendance, including hip-hop mogul Jay-Z and his wife, Beyoncé, who performed the national anthem. But the day Obama was sworn in, a U.S. drone strike hit Yemen. It was the third such attack in that country in as many days. Despite the rhetoric from the president on the Capitol steps, there was abundant evidence that he would continue to preside over a country that is in a state of perpetual war.
In the year leading up to the inauguration, more people had been killed in U.S. drone strikes across the globe than were imprisoned at Guantánamo. As Obama was sworn in for his second term, his counterterrorism team was finishing up the task of systematizing the kill list, including developing rules for when U.S. citizens could be targeted. Admiral William McRaven had been promoted to the commander of the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and his Special Ops forces were operating in more than 100 countries across the globe.
After General David Petraeus’s career was brought to a halt as a result of an extramarital affair, President Obama tapped John Brennan to replace him as director of the CIA, thus ensuring that the Agency would be headed by a seminal figure in the expansion and running of the kill program. After four years as Obama’s senior counterterrorism adviser, Brennan had become known in some circles as the “assassination czar” for his role in U.S. drone strikes and other targeted killing operations.
When Obama had tried to put Brennan at the helm of the Agency at the beginning of his first term, the nomination was scuttled by controversy over Brennan’s role in the Bush-era detainee program. By the time President Obama began his second term in office, Brennan had created a “playbook” for crossing names off the kill list. “Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it,” noted the Washington Post.
Brennan played a key role in the evolution of targeted killing by “seeking to codify the administration’s approach to generating capture/kill lists, part of a broader effort to guide future administrations through the counterterrorism processes that Obama has embraced,” the paper added. “The system functions like a funnel, starting with input from half a dozen agencies and narrowing through layers of review until proposed revisions are laid on Brennan’s desk, and subsequently presented to the president.”
Obama’s counterterrorism team had developed what was referred to as the “Disposition Matrix,” a database full of information on suspected terrorists and militants that would provide options for killing or capturing targets. Senior administration officials predicted that the targeted killing program would persist for “at least another decade.” During his first term in office, the Washington Post concluded, “Obama has institutionalized the highly classified practice of targeted killing, transforming ad-hoc elements into a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war.”
Redefining “Imminent Threat”
In early 2013, a Department of Justice “white paper” surfaced that laid out the “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen.” The government lawyers who wrote the 16-page document asserted that the government need not possess specific intelligence indicating that an American citizen is actively engaged in a particular or active terror plot in order to be cleared for targeted killing. Instead, the paper argued that a determination from a “well-informed high level administration official” that a target represents an “imminent threat” to the United States is a sufficient basis to order the killing of an American citizen. But the Justice Department’s lawyers sought to alter the definition of “imminent,” advocating what they called a “broader concept of imminence.”
They wrote, “The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons will take place in the immediate future.” The government lawyers argued that waiting for a targeted killing of a suspect “until preparations for an attack are concluded, would not allow the United States sufficient time to defend itself.” They asserted that such an operation constitutes “a lawful killing in self-defense” and is “not an assassination.”
Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU called the white paper a “chilling document,” saying that “it argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen.” Jaffer added, “This power is going to be available to the next administration and the one after that, and it’s going to be available in every future conflict, not just the conflict against al-Qaeda. And according to the [Obama] administration, the power is available all over the world, not just on geographically cabined battlefields. So it really is a sweeping proposition.”
In October 2002, as the Bush administration prepared to invade Iraq, Barack Obama gave the first major speech of his national political career. The then-state senator came out forcefully against going to war in Iraq, but he began his speech with a clarification. “Although this has been billed as an anti-war rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances… I don’t oppose all wars.” Obama declared, “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.” During his first campaign for president, Obama had blasted the Bush administration for fighting the wrong war — Iraq — and repeatedly criticized his opponent, Senator John McCain, for not articulating how he would take the fight to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
As his first term in office wound down, the overwhelming majority of U.S. military forces had been withdrawn from Iraq and plans for a similar drawdown in Afghanistan in 2014 were being openly discussed. The administration had succeeded in convincing the American public that Obama was waging a smarter war than his predecessor. As he ran for reelection, Obama was asked about charges from his Republican opponents that his foreign policy was based on appeasement. “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top al-Qaeda leaders who have been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement,” Obama replied. “Or whoever is left out there, ask them about that.”
As the war on terror entered a second decade, the fantasy of a clean war took hold. It was a myth fostered by the Obama administration, and it found a ready audience. All polls indicated that Americans were tired of large military deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan and the mounting U.S. troop casualties that came with them. A 2012 poll found that 83% of Americans supported Obama’s drone program, with 77% of self-identified liberal Democrats supporting such strikes. The Washington Post–ABC News poll determined that support for drone strikes declined “only somewhat” in cases where a U.S. citizen was the target.
President Obama and his advisers seldom mentioned the drone program publicly. In fact, the first known confirmation of the use of armed drones by the president came several years into Obama’s first term. It was not in the form of a legal brief or a press conference, but rather on a Google+ “Hangout” as the president took questions from the public. Obama was asked about his use of drones. “I want to make sure that people understand actually drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties,” Obama said. “For the most part, they have been very precise, precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates. And we are very careful in terms of how it’s been applied.”
He rejected what he called the “perception” that “we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly” and asserted that “this is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists, who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases, and so on.” Obama added: “It is important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash. It’s not a bunch of folks in a room somewhere just making decisions. And it is also part and parcel of our overall authority when it comes to battling al-Qaeda. It is not something that’s being used beyond that.”
Michael Boyle, a former adviser in the Obama campaign’s counterterrorism experts group and a professor at LaSalle University, said that one of the reasons the administration was “so successful in spinning the number of civilian casualties” was the use of signature strikes and other systems for categorizing military-aged males as legitimate targets, even if their specific identities were unknown. “The result of the ‘guilt by association’ approach has been a gradual loosening of the standards by which the U.S. selects targets for drone strikes,” Boyle charged. “The consequences can be seen in the targeting of mosques or funeral processions that kill non-combatants and tear at the social fabric of the regions where they occur.” No one, he added, “really knows the number of deaths caused by drones in these distant, sometimes ungoverned, lands.”
Using drones, cruise missiles, and Special Ops raids, the United States has embarked on a mission to kill its way to victory. The war on terror, launched under a Republican administration, was ultimately legitimized and expanded by a popular Democratic president. Although Barack Obama’s ascent to the most powerful office on Earth was the result of myriad factors, it was largely due to the desire of millions of Americans to shift course from the excesses of the Bush era.
Had John McCain won the election, it is difficult to imagine such widespread support, particularly among liberal Democrats, for some of the very counterterrorism policies that Obama implemented. As individuals, we must all ask whether we would support the same policies — the expansion of drone strikes, the empowerment of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the use of the State Secrets Privilege, the use of indefinite detention, the denial of habeas corpus rights, the targeting of U.S. citizens without charge or trial — if the commander in chief was not our candidate of choice.
But beyond the partisan lens, the policies implemented by the Obama administration will have far-reaching consequences. Future U.S. presidents — Republican or Democratic — will inherit a streamlined process for assassinating enemies of America, perceived or real. They will inherit an executive branch with sweeping powers, rationalized under the banner of national security.
Assassinating Enemies
In 2012, a former constitutional law professor was asked about the U.S. drone and targeted killing program. “It’s very important for the president and the entire culture of our national security team to continually ask tough questions about ‘Are we doing the right thing? Are we abiding by the rule of law? Are we abiding by due process?’” he responded, warning that it was important for the United States to “avoid any kind of slippery slope into a place where we’re not being true to who we are.”
That former law professor was Barack Obama.
The creation of the kill list and the expansion of drone strikes “represents a betrayal of President Obama’s promise to make counterterrorism policies consistent with the U.S. constitution,” charged Boyle. Obama, he added, “has routinized and normalized extrajudicial killing from the Oval Office, taking advantage of America’s temporary advantage in drone technology to wage a series of shadow wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Without the scrutiny of the legislature and the courts, and outside the public eye, Obama is authorizing murder on a weekly basis, with a discussion of the guilt or innocence of candidates for the ‘kill list’ being resolved in secret.” Boyle warned:
“Once Obama leaves office, there is nothing stopping the next president from launching his own drone strikes, perhaps against a different and more controversial array of targets. The infrastructure and processes of vetting the ‘kill list’ will remain in place for the next president, who may be less mindful of moral and legal implications of this action than Obama supposedly is.”
In late 2012, the ACLU and the New York Times sought information on the legal rationale for the kill program, specifically the strikes that had killed three U.S. citizens — among them 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki. In January 2013, a federal judge ruled on the request. In her decision, Judge Colleen McMahon appeared frustrated with the White House’s lack of transparency, writing that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests raised “serious issues about the limits on the power of the Executive Branch under the Constitution and laws of the United States, and about whether we are indeed a nation of laws, not of men.”
She charged that the Obama administration “has engaged in public discussion of the legality of targeted killing, even of citizens, but in cryptic and imprecise ways, generally without citing to any statute or court decision that justifies its conclusions.” She added, “More fulsome disclosure of the legal reasoning on which the administration relies to justify the targeted killing of individuals, including United States citizens, far from any recognizable ‘hot’ field of battle, would allow for intelligent discussion and assessment of a tactic that (like torture before it) remains hotly debated. It might also help the public understand the scope of the ill-defined yet vast and seemingly ever-growing exercise.”
Ultimately, Judge McMahon blocked the release of the documents. Citing her legal concerns about the state of transparency with regard to the kill program, she wrote:
“This Court is constrained by law, and under the law, I can only conclude that the Government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and so cannot be compelled by this court of law to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and laws of the United States. The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful and extensive consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules — a veritable Catch-22. I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.”
How to Make Enemies and Not Influence People
It is not just the precedents set during the Obama era that will reverberate into the future, but also the lethal operations themselves. No one can scientifically predict the future consequences of drone strikes, cruise missile attacks, and night raids. But from my experience in several undeclared war zones across the globe, it seems clear that the United States is helping to breed a new generation of enemies in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and throughout the Muslim world.
Those whose loved ones were killed in drone strikes or cruise missile attacks or night raids will have a legitimate score to settle. In an October 2003 memo, written less than a year into the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld framed the issue of whether the United States was “winning or losing the global war on terror” through one question: “Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?”
More than a decade after 9/11, that question should be updated. At the end of the day, U.S. policymakers and the general public must all confront a more uncomfortable question: Are our own actions, carried out in the name of national security, making us less safe or more safe? Are they eliminating more enemies than they are inspiring? Boyle put it mildly when he observed that the kill program’s “adverse strategic effects… have not been properly weighed against the tactical gains associated with killing terrorists.”
In November 2012, President Obama remarked that “there’s no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.” He made the statement in defense of Israel’s attack on Gaza, which was launched in the name of protecting itself from Hamas missile attacks. “We are fully supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself from missiles landing on people’s homes and workplaces and potentially killing civilians,” Obama continued. “And we will continue to support Israel’s right to defend itself.” How would people living in areas of Yemen, Somalia, or Pakistan that have been regularly targeted by U.S. drones or missile strikes view that statement?
Toward the end of President Obama’s first term in office, the Pentagon’s general counsel, Jeh Johnson, gave a major lecture at the Oxford Union in England. “If I had to summarize my job in one sentence: it is to ensure that everything our military and our Defense Department do is consistent with U.S. and international law,” Johnson said. “This includes the prior legal review of every military operation that the Secretary of Defense and the President must approve.”
As Johnson spoke, the British government was facing serious questions about its involvement in U.S. drone strikes. A legal case brought in the United Kingdom by the British son of a tribal leader killed in Pakistan alleged that British officials had served as “secondary parties to murder” by providing intelligence to the United States that allegedly led to the 2011 strike. A U.N. commission was preparing to launch an investigation into the expanding kill program, and new legal challenges were making their way through the U.S. court system. In his speech, Johnson presented the U.S. defense of its controversial counterterror policies:
“Some legal scholars and commentators in our country brand the detention by the military of members of al-Qaeda as ‘indefinite detention without charges.’ Some refer to targeted lethal force against known, identified individual members of al-Qaeda as ‘extrajudicial killing.’
“Viewed within the context of law enforcement or criminal justice, where no person is sentenced to death or prison without an indictment, an arraignment, and a trial before an impartial judge or jury, these characterizations might be understandable.
“Viewed within the context of conventional armed conflict — as they should be — capture, detention, and lethal force are traditional practices as old as armies.”
The Era of the Dirty War on Terror
In the end, the Obama administration’s defense of its expanding global wars boiled down to the assertion that it was in fact at war; that the authorities granted by the Congress to the Bush administration after 9/11 to pursue those responsible for the attacks justified the Obama administration’s ongoing strikes against “suspected militants” across the globe — some of whom were toddlers when the Twin Towers crumbled to the ground — more than a decade later.
The end result of the policies initiated under President Bush and continued and expanded under his Democratic successor was to bring the world to the dawn of a new age, the era of the Dirty War on Terror. As Boyle, the former Obama campaign counterterrorism adviser, asserted in early 2013, the U.S. drone program was “encouraging a new arms race for drones that will empower current and future rivals and lay the foundations for an international system that is increasingly violent.”
Today, decisions on who should live or die in the name of protecting America’s national security are made in secret, laws are interpreted by the president and his advisers behind closed doors, and no target is off-limits, including U.S. citizens. But the decisions made in Washington have implications far beyond their impact on the democratic system of checks and balances in the United States.
In January 2013, Ben Emmerson, the U.N. special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, announced his investigation into drone strikes and targeted killing by the United States. In a statement launching the probe, he characterized the U.S. defense of its use of drones and targeted killings in other countries as “Western democracies… engaged in a global [war] against a stateless enemy, without geographical boundaries to the theatre of conflict, and without limit of time.” This position, he concluded, “is heavily disputed by most States, and by the majority of international lawyers outside the United States of America.”
At his inauguration in January 2013, Obama employed the rhetoric of internationalism. “We will defend our people and uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law. We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully — not because we are naive about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear,” the president declared. “America will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe; and we will renew those institutions that extend our capacity to manage crisis abroad, for no one has a greater stake in a peaceful world than its most powerful nation.”
Yet, as Obama embarked on his second term in office, the United States was once again at odds with the rest of the world on one of the central components of its foreign policy. The drone strike in Yemen the day Obama was sworn in served as a potent symbol of a reality that had been clearly established during his first four years in office: U.S. unilateralism and exceptionalism were not only bipartisan principles in Washington, but a permanent American institution. As large-scale military deployments wound down, the United States had simultaneously escalated its use of drones, cruise missiles, and Special Ops raids in an unprecedented number of countries. The war on terror had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The question all Americans must ask themselves lingers painfully: How does a war like this ever end?
Jeremy Scahill is national security correspondent for the Nation magazine and author of the New York Times bestsellers Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army and most recently Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (both published by Nation Books). He is also the subject, producer, and writer of the film Dirty Wars, an official selection of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the US documentary cinematography prize, nowavailable on DVD. This essay is the epilogue to his book Dirty Wars.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.
(c) 2013 Jeremy Scahill. Excerpted from Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield (Nation Books). Used by permission of the author and publisher.
]]>via IPS News
Responding to growing criticism by human rights groups and foreign governments, U.S. President Barack Obama Thursday announced potentially significant shifts in what his predecessor called the “global war on terror”.
In a major policy address at the National Defense University here, Obama said drone strikes against [...]]]>
via IPS News
Responding to growing criticism by human rights groups and foreign governments, U.S. President Barack Obama Thursday announced potentially significant shifts in what his predecessor called the “global war on terror”.
In a major policy address at the National Defense University here, Obama said drone strikes against terrorist suspects abroad will be carried out under substantially more limited conditions than during his first term in office.
He also renewed his drive to close the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which currently only holds 166 prisoners.
In particular, he announced the lifting of a three-year-old moratorium on repatriating Yemeni detainees to their homeland and the appointment in the near future of senior officials at both the State Department and the Pentagon to expedite the transfer the 30 other prisoners who have been cleared for release to third countries.
In addition, he said he will press Congress to amend and ultimately repeal its 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) against Al-Qaeda and others deemed responsible for the 9/11 attacks “(in order) to determine how we can continue to fight terrorists without keeping America on a perpetual war-time footing.”
The AUMF created the legal basis for most of the actions – and alleged excesses — by U.S. military and intelligence agencies against alleged terrorists and their supporters since 9/11.
“The AUMF is now nearly 12 years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core Al-Qaeda is a shell of its former self,” he declared. “Groups like AQAP (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves Al-Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States.”
“Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states,” he warned.
His remarks gained a cautious – if somewhat sceptical and impatient – welcome from some of the groups that have harshly criticised Obama’s for his failure to make a more decisive break with some of former President George W. Bush’s policies and to close Guantanamo, and his heavy first-term reliance on drone strikes against Al-Qaeda and other terrorist suspects.
“President Obama is right to say that we cannot be on a war footing forever – but the time to take our country off the global warpath and fully restore the rule of law is now, not at some indeterminate future point,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Romero especially praised Obama’s initial moves to transfer detainees at Guantanamo but noted that he had failed to offer a plan to deal with those prisoners who are considered too dangerous to release but who cannot be tried in U.S. courts for lack of admissible evidence. He also called the new curbs on drone strikes “promising” but criticised Obama’s continued defence of targeted killings.
Obama’s speech came amidst growing controversy over his use of drone strikes in countries – particularly Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia – with which the U.S. is not at war. Since 9/11, the U.S. has conducted more than 400 strikes in the three countries with a total death toll estimated to range between 3,300 and nearly 5,000, depending on the source. The vast majority of these strikes were carried out during Obama’s first term.
While top administration officials have claimed that almost all of the victims were suspected high-level terrorists, human rights groups, as well as local sources, have insisted that many civilian non-combatants – as well as low-level members of militant groups — have also been killed.
In a letter sent to Obama last month, some of the country’s leading human rights groups, including the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights First, questioned the legality of the criteria used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to select targets.
Earlier this month, the legal adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Harold Koh, also criticised the administration for the lack of transparency and discipline surrounding the drone programme.
In his speech Thursday, Obama acknowledged the “wide gap” between his government and independent assessments of casualties, but he strongly defended the programme as effective, particularly in crippling Al-Qaeda’s Pakistan-based leadership, legal under the AUMF, and more humane than the alternative in that “(c)onventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and likely to cause more civilian casualties and local outrage.”
“To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties – not just in our cities at home and facilities abroad, but also in the very places – like Sana’a and Kabul and Mogadishu – where terrorists seek a foothold,” he said.
According to a “Fact Sheet” released by the White House, lethal force can be used outside of areas of active hostilities when there is a “near certainty that a terrorist target who poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons” is present and that non-combatants will not be injured or killed. In addition, U.S. officials must determine that capture is not feasible and that local authorities cannot or will not effectively address the threat.
The fact sheet appeared to signal an end to so-called “signature strikes” that have been used against groups of men whose precise is identity is unknown but who, based on surveillance, are believed to be members of Al-Qaeda or affiliated groups.
If the target is a U.S. citizen, such as Anwar Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric who the administration alleged had become an operational leader of AQAP and was killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen, Obama said there would be an additional layer of review and that he would engage Congress on the possibility of establishing a secret court or an independent oversight board in the executive branch.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department disclosed that three other U.S. citizens – none of whom were specifically targeted – have been killed in drone strikes outside Afghanistan.
On Guantanamo, where 102 of the 166 remaining detainees are participating in a three-month-old hunger strike, Obama said he would permit the 56 Yemenis there whose have been cleared for release to return home “on a case-by-case basis”. He also re-affirmed his determination to transfer all remaining detainees to super-max or military prisons on U.S. territory – a move that Congress has so far strongly resisted. He also said he would insist that every detainee have access to the courts to review their case.
In addition to addressing the festering drone issue and Guantanamo, however, the main thrust of Thursday’s speech appeared designed to mark what Obama called a “crossroads” in the struggle against Al-Qaeda and its affiliates and how the threat from them has changed.
“Lethal yet less capable Al-Qaeda affiliates. Threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad. Homegrown extremists. This is the future of terrorism,” he said. “We must take these threats seriously, and do all we can to confront them. But as we shape our response, we have to recognise that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.”
“Beyond Afghanistan,” he said later, “we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror’ – but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.”
Obama also disclosed he had signed a Presidential Policy Guidance Wednesday to codify the more restrictive guidelines governing the use of force.
White House officials who brief reporters before the speech suggested that, among other provisions, the Guidance called for gradually shifting responsibility for drone strikes and targeted killings from the CIA to the Pentagon – a reform long sought by human-rights groups.
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
All was not as it seemed during President Barack Obama’s appearances in Jerusalem and Ramallah, where he addressed audiences of Israelis and Palestinians. On the surface, it looked like Obama was swearing fealty to Israel, and pledging unconditional US support for any and all Israeli actions. But a [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
All was not as it seemed during President Barack Obama’s appearances in Jerusalem and Ramallah, where he addressed audiences of Israelis and Palestinians. On the surface, it looked like Obama was swearing fealty to Israel, and pledging unconditional US support for any and all Israeli actions. But a closer look at what was and was not said, as well as some of the surrounding circumstances, suggests that what Obama was really doing was paving a road toward a reduced US role in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The contradictions in evidence abound, and could be seen from the very beginning. Obama kept calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by his nickname, Bibi, at their joint press conference. “Oh, yes, we’re just the best of friends. Don’t worry, AIPAC,” Obama seemed to be saying. “Any friction between us is a thing of the past.” Yet, Obama had made a pointed decision to deliver the keynote speech of his trip not at the Knesset, but to an audience from Israel’s major universities. The many students invited excluded only those from Ariel University, the lone Israeli university located in the West Bank settlements.
The ham-handed excuse offered by the US embassy, that they only invited those universities with whom they partnered, was a convenient one. They don’t work with that university because of the political ramifications, and the exclusion here was for the same reason. And that sent a message to Obama’s “good friend,” Bibi.
Not speaking to the Knesset sent a message as well, and it was reflected in Obama’s speech. There is no reason for Obama to speak in a chamber where there is so much hostility toward him. Instead, he told his young Jerusalem audience: “let me say this as a politician — I can promise you this, political leaders will never take risks if the people do not push them to take some risks. You must create the change that you want to see.” Translation: “I can’t work on peace with your current government. You need to drive the change and open the door.” That, too, was a message to Bibi.
But more important than what was said was what was not said. For all the fawning that Obama did, he offered nothing new or of substance — not the slightest deviation from his well-established policies. There’s no new version of Dennis Ross, Anthony Zinni or George Mitchell being sent to the Middle East. There are no new incentives or confidence-building plans, however pointless. There was just a whole bunch of pronouncements about the unshakeable bond between the US and Israel.
Does that sound like a president who intends to maintain the US’ current level of involvement? It seems more like a President who is telling Israelis exactly what AIPAC is buying. The annual military aid will continue, as will money for Iron Dome, and never mind the many federal employees who were just sequestered out of a job or furloughed. The security and intelligence cooperation is likely to continue as well. Israel will, as Obama put it, remain “…the most powerful country in this region. Israel has the unshakeable support of the most powerful country in the world.”
While the US president sent a clear signal that he holds little hope that the current Israeli government is able or willing to pursue peace in any substantive way, he also cautioned Israelis about their growing peril. “Given the frustration in the international community about this conflict, Israel needs to reverse an undertow of isolation,” Obama said. “And given the march of technology, the only way to truly protect the Israeli people over the long term is through the absence of war. Because no wall is high enough and no Iron Dome is strong enough or perfect enough to stop every enemy that is intent on doing so from inflicting harm.”
Note that it’s Israel that needs to reverse this trend, and there’s no mention of any kind of US charm offensive or even advocacy on Israel’s behalf to assist the effort. The implication is clear: Israel’s policies and actions are to blame for its troubles and the US can’t change that, and, because of the political problems it would cause, this administration will not try. Could that also result in a somewhat diminished defense at the United Nations and other international arenas, on the part of the US? Time will tell.
Obama also let the Palestinian Authority know they should look elsewhere. By choosing to condemn Hamas for the rockets that hit Sderot earlier that day during his Ramallah speech rather than in Israel, he surely alienated many in the crowd he was addressing. By refusing to use even moderately stern language on settlements or promise even the mildest pressure on Israel, he seriously undermined Mahmoud Abbas, the man he was purportedly coming to support. Throughout his speech, despite his expressions of sympathy for the daily struggles of Palestinians, Obama never mentioned Israel’s responsibility to end the occupation, let alone to respect human rights or abide by international law.
That sent a very clear message: don’t look to the United States to deliver the goods. If Abbas was listening at all, he must know that internationalizing his cause, as he did last year at the UN, is the only option Obama has left for him. It was so clear, it had to be a deliberate message.
This might all be considered fanciful until one considers the changing position of Israel in the US view. As Aluf Benn, editor-in-chief of the Israeli daily, Ha’aretz points out, the entire Middle East region is of considerably less importance in the broader geo-political strategic view of the United States. “U.S. President Barack Obama said Wednesday his visit to Israel was meant to be a reassuring one,” Benn writes. “He is here to make it clear to Israelis that America stands behind them and will ensure their security, even though the neighborhood has become tougher… The visit comes at a time when the United States is withdrawing from its deep involvement in the Middle East, amid the growing fear of Israel and other regional allies that America will abandon them to radical Islamic forces.”
Benn’s alarmist language aside, he’s right. A big part of this is the oft-discussed “pivot to Asia,” that is the cornerstone of Obama’s foreign policy. Asia’s importance is growing as the Middle East’s is shrinking. The Middle East, particularly the Arabian Peninsula, was once called the “greatest material prize in history” by the US State Department because of its wealth of oil resources. But the US and Europe both see themselves on the road to “energy independence.” This sounds a little more grandiose than it really is. Local oil resources and increased reliance on alternative energy sources will significantly diminish the role of Middle Eastern oil both in terms of serving energy needs and in terms of its role in the global economy, but it won’t eliminate it. OPEC will still be a major force in determining the price and supply of oil, but it won’t have the near-monopoly it does today.
But that’s not the only factor. The so-called “Arab Spring” is not the simple romantic vision of emerging democracy that so many in the West thought it was, while they watched Egyptians oust Hosni Mubarak. It’s also not just the massive violence of Libya and Syria. Even in Tunisia and Egypt, transitions have been bumpy and marked with dissatisfaction and political jockeying as well as some very fundamental debates about the role of women, the military, religion and other key groups and institutions in their respective societies. Moves toward true independence and self-determination in these countries will be a long and unpredictable road. And no matter who ends up controlling the oil, they will have less leverage over the West than their predecessors with even more of a need to sell their oil there. So the strategic situation will be less favorable for the Arab governments that arise from this situation.
Not to mention the situation on the ground. Israel has elected a new government that has no interest in peace with the Palestinians. Settlement expansion continues while the Israeli bunker mentality is fortified. For their part, the Palestinians remain trapped between a Palestinian Authority which has lost virtually all legitimacy in the eyes of its people but is the only acceptable “partner” for the US and Israel, and a Hamas government that no one will talk to. Both sides of that divide seem as uninterested in reunification as Netanyahu is in a viable Palestinian state.
But then there’s the big mitigating factor, the US Israel Lobby. Obama has a lot of work to do in the next four years, and he needs Congress to do it. Much of that work focuses on domestic economic issues, but there are foreign policy questions as well. He simply cannot afford to spend the political capital of his second term fighting with AIPAC all the time. Nor do his colleagues in the Democratic Party wish to see him jeopardize their chances of making gains in the midterm elections by picking a fight with Israel.
But that domestic pressure is really all that is holding the US to Israel at this point. Powerful as AIPAC is, the President can still set broader policy priorities, as he seems to be. Asia will have its own difficulties, but the interests there are growing, while the US stake in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Yemen, and yes, even Israel and Palestine, are diminishing. To be sure, there is still a significant US stake in the Israel-Palestine conflict. And AIPAC will make sure we pay attention to it, as will the fact that Israel is a long-standing ally and while AIPAC may represent a small minority of US citizens, most do not want to see Israel as vulnerable to attack.
Ultimately though, Obama knows that the US has spent inordinate time and energy on this issue. He also knows that it’s becoming less and less vital for US concerns that really matter to him as time goes on. So, he goes to Israel, warms some hearts and minds and gives AIPAC the platitudes and assurances it wants. As Benn wrote, “With every passing day, Israel becomes less capable of taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities by itself, while its dependence on the United States for military superiority just keeps growing.” The US will continue to lead on Iran, which is something Obama wants.
As for the peace process? Obama would like to see Israel make peace possible, but absent that, he’s sent them a message: we’ll help if you want, but until you show some interest in changing the status quo, we have bigger fish to fry.
Photo: President Barack Obama waves to the audience after delivering remarks at the Jerusalem Convention Center in Jerusalem, March 21, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
]]>by Henry Precht
Two US service members were killed and at least eight others injured Monday in an insider attack at a Special Forces site in Afghanistan. The Taliban asserted responsibility. This incident would seem to nullify President Hamid Karzai’s earlier charge that US and Taliban forces were colluding [...]]]>
by Henry Precht
Two US service members were killed and at least eight others injured Monday in an insider attack at a Special Forces site in Afghanistan. The Taliban asserted responsibility. This incident would seem to nullify President Hamid Karzai’s earlier charge that US and Taliban forces were colluding to bring down his government.
The incident — and Karzai’s outburst — certainly did nothing to alter President Barak Obama’s determination to close out our war against al Qaeda and their former hosts and rulers of Afghanistan, the Taliban. By December 2014, the White House has said, our combat operations will have withdrawn and the Afghan government will be more or less on its own. How is this end game to be managed? Perhaps speaking for himself, the top general for the region, Gen. James N. Mattis, told Congress last week that 20,000 troops should remain after 2014.
I asked two experts separately for their views. One served in Afghanistan in the 1960s as a political counselor and the other returned last year from a lengthy assignment that included a period as deputy ambassador.
Here’s what the old timer had to say:
By December 2014 we will have done about all that can be accomplished with regard to (1) al Qaeda (the reason we went into Afghanistan in 2001) and (2) the Taliban insurgency — without the full support of Pakistan. That country’s tribal belt along the Afghan border provides rest and training for both of our adversaries. Our forces, particularly the Marines in Kandahar Province, have badly injured the Taliban and drone attacks have decimated al Qaeda’s leadership which has largely refocused its activities in the Yemen and East and North Africa. The remaining task for our forces is strictly training of the Afghan army and other security forces. Before that can be a reality, however, the Afghan government will have to give American troops (perhaps up to 10,000) legal immunity under a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that the Loya Jirga (a national assembly) must pass. Inevitably, our presence has started to rankle many Afghans, some of whom view us as another occupation force like so many in their history. The Loya Jirga’s debate and vote will be a fateful decision on how we are now perceived by the Afghan people, how confident they are that they alone can successfully contend with the Taliban and handle all the conflicts and rivalries in what is still a very traditional and tribal society.
Turning to the new boy:
The number of our troops who remain should be governed by their missions (and by the SOFA we manage to negotiate with the Afghan government). I see two missions for the post-2014 US military presence: training the Afghan National Army and counterterrorism (going after al Qaeda remnants.)
As the most recent casualty figures reflect, the Afghan Army has taken over the great bulk of the fighting. But they will still need our training, mentoring and assistance in several “high end,” “enabler” areas as the US military likes to call them: medical response, search and rescue, intelligence and its exploitation, logistics, high end equipment maintenance, their fledgling air force and — most important — civilian casualty avoidance. (We have learned a lot in this area.) The Brits, Italians, Germans, Lithuanians and others all have niche expertise to apply to this project, but we have to lead and coordinate with the Afghan government.
Numbers? I’m not a military expert, but would guess that somewhere between 10 and 20,000 will be necessary. They should be based in a few regional centers around the country for economies of effort and Afghan public perceptions.
Civilian complementarity: It’s absolutely essential that we NOT cut back to the bone our USG civilian programs in development, good governance and justice and exchanges as our military presence substantially declines. Even with all the nation’s corruption and poor governance, much social and economic progress, as well as human rights advances especially for Afghan women, has been made these past 12 years. As we have learned in other trouble spots: “there’s no security without development and no development without security.” A leaner but still robust US civilian presence and programs will do much to reassure very anxious Afghans, some of whom are still fence-sitters. Afghans have long memories, and while Afghanistan has changed much since the Soviet withdrawal, some draw parallels. Perceptions matter.
What about Pakistan? — insurgent safe haven, role in the emerging peace process involving the Taliban, the Talibanization of some parts of its territory, nuclear weapons, relationship with India — all matter tremendously, especially for Afghan prospects, but that’s a subject for another day.
There you have it, facts and informed opinions to chew on as the debate over our role in Afghanistan rumbles and rattles on in Washington. Left out of these Foreign Service judgments are any discussion about what American public opinion will tolerate and, perhaps most important, what price for continued engagement our budget will support.
Photo: President Barack Obama and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan participate in a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office, Jan. 11, 2013. Dr. Rangin Dadfar Spanta, Afghan National Security Advisor, left, and National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, attend. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
]]>Lobe Log contributor Emile Nakhleh, an expert on political Islam and Middle Eastern society, recently provided a fascinating primer on Bahrain to the Bahrain Mirror (Arabic version), an e-newspaper run by Bahraini dissidents. As discussed in the Mirror’s introduction, prior to becoming the CIA’s former chief regional analyst, Dr. [...]]]>
Lobe Log contributor Emile Nakhleh, an expert on political Islam and Middle Eastern society, recently provided a fascinating primer on Bahrain to the Bahrain Mirror (Arabic version), an e-newspaper run by Bahraini dissidents. As discussed in the Mirror’s introduction, prior to becoming the CIA’s former chief regional analyst, Dr. Nakhleh conducted field research in Bahrain from 1972-73 as the first US scholar to do so, with complete access to the country’s societal benchmarks. This ultimately resulted in Nakhleh’s book, Bahrain: Political Development in a Modernizing Society, one of the most important references on Bahrain to date. Following is the unedited interview, which has been translated into English from Arabic by the Mirror.
Bahrain Mirror: Does the “Urban Tribalism” model that you discussed in your Bahrain book in the 1970s still
apply today?
Dr. Emile Nakhleh: Despite the passage of 40 years since I researched and wrote my book on Bahrain, the tribal model, unfortunately, still applies to the rule of Al Khalifa family in the country. The hopes that Bahraini citizens—Shia and Sunni—had pinned on the elections of the Constituent Assembly and the National Assembly in 1972-73 and on the constitution which the late Amir Shaykh Issa bin Salman Al Khalifa promulgated in 1974, were dashed two years later. By 1975, the Al Khalifa reverted to its autocratic rule of the country without any input from the citizens. After 1975, when the National Assembly was dissolved and the constitution was frozen, the ruling family continued to view the country and its people as part of Al Khalifa domain.
In fact, many of the key posts—including in the Royal Diwan, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Justice, etc—are currently held by children and grand children of the early founders of Al Khalifa rule. Bahrainis have generally expressed loyalty and allegiance to the head of the Al Khalifa tribe because of at least four reasons. First, Bahrainis generally liked and respected Shaykh ‘Issa. Second, the people were committed to the nationalist idea of an independent Bahrain. Third, many human rights activists in the 1970s, both Shia and Sunnis, remained hopeful that Shaykh ‘Issa would resurrect the National Assembly and re-instate the constitution. Fourth, most human rights activists and a majority of Bahrainis did not view calls for political reform and government accountability as a reflection of a sectarian divide in the country. On the contrary, most activists called for freedoms of speech and assembly and an accountable and transparent government for all Bahrainis. My field research at the time showed that many Bahraini business people resented the pervasive political and financial control that Shaykh Khalifa, the Prime Minister and brother of the Amir, exercised over contracts, dealerships, and projects—from hotel construction to land reclamation and development.
Many of them privately described him as “Mr. 10 percent, 40 percent, or 50 percent” depending on the perceived percentage they thought he got from specific contracts. Pro-reform dissidents maintained the Al Khalifa tribe ran Bahrain as a fiefdom without accountability to the public. After the Iranian Revolution in 1978-79, Shaykh Khalifa and his security forces justified their control as a way to thwart what they perceived as Iran’s support of Shia activism on the Arab side of the Gulf.
Mirror: How will the Arab Spring touch the Gulf Arab states? The 2001 National Charter promised a new reformist constitution, but unfortunately, the people were disappointed because the Amir (renamed King after 2002) reneged on the reform promises he made to the people in 1999. What trajectory will the pro-reform movement take and what impact will it have on the country?
Dr. Emile Nakhleh: Despite the tribal and dynastic nature of rule in Bahrain, the Arab Spring has touched the country, whether the ruling family likes it or not. Demands for dignity, respect, equality, and freedom of expression know no national boundaries. In a sense, the ruling family has been fortunate in that the key demands of the Bahraini opposition initially did not call for regime change. They focused on establishing a nationally elected parliament with full legislative powers, re-instating the 1974 constitution, replacing the Prime Minister, an independent judiciary, a transparent and accountable government, and an end to discriminatory practices against the Shia majority, especially in employment in the security services, the armed forces, hospitals, universities, and government-controlled corporations and financial institutions.
Those demands were neither sectarian nor driven by Iran. Continued regime repression and unlawful arrests of demonstrators have caused some protesters to raise the slogan of “regime change.” Whereas popular upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and now in Syria from day one called for regime change, in Bahrain the regime change demand is very recent. If wise heads and pro-reform leaders within the ruling family do not prevail, and if the King and the Crown Prince remain marginalized, Al Khalifa rule would become much more tenuous, violence would spread, more Bahraini blood would be shed, and radical elements would become a stronger voice within the pro-reform opposition. What is more troubling is that the authority of the King and his son the Crown Prince is slowly eroding and the anti-reform faction within the ruling family, whether the older generation represented by the Prime Minister or some of the younger senior ministers represented by the so-called “al-Khawalid,” are becoming more rabidly anti-Shia and more influential.
This faction is following the Saudi guidelines on how to oppose democratic reforms. Once Saudi troops entered Bahrain under the guise of the GCC security agreement, Bahrain for all intents and purposes fell under Saudi suzerainty. While the Al Khalifa old guard has welcomed this intervention, pro-reform elements within and outside the ruling family resented the Saudi military presence and accused the Prime Minister of engineering it. Although the Saudi military presence might serve Saudi Arabia’s anti-Iran and anti-Shia policy, in the long run it will bring immense harm to Bahraini stability, society, and government. Egypt’s more powerful military and security services failed to silence the youthful awakening at Tahrir Square. Bahraini security forces would equally fail to silence the opposition. The window for genuine dialogue between the King and the opposition over meaningful political reform is rapidly closing. Once the window closes, Bahrain will find itself in real economic and political trouble, and Al Khalifa leadership would lose the bay’ah of its people–Sunni and Shia.
Mirror: How do you assess US-Saudi troubled relations over democracy and reform in the region and how do you
envision the relationship to evolve?
Dr. Emile Nakhleh: Saudi-American relations over Arab Spring uprisings upheavals and democratic transitions
became soured since the US President endorsed the pro-democracy movement in Egypt and urged the Egyptian dictator to abdicate. Because of their close relations with Mubarak, the Saudis were angered by the US position and claimed the President was too quick to “throw Mubarak under the bus.” President Obama’s position was that the US would support a leader as long as he enjoys the confidence of his people. Once he loses that, he should go. That was the case with Mubarak in Egypt, Saleh in Yemen, Ben Ali in Tunisia, Qadhaffi in Libya, and now Assad in Syria. The Saudis find it difficult to accept any meaningful role for the people in determining what type of government they should have and who the country’s leader should be. Despite the decades-old strategic relationship between Washington and Riyadh, the Saudi leadership has yet to get over what happened to Mubarak.
This strategic relationship is grounded in a shared American-Saudi view about regional stability, strong military cooperation, oil exports, and Iran’s perceived hegemonic posture in the Gulf region. The US and Saudi Arabia work closely in the military-to military area, coordinate regularly on Iran, and generally see eye to eye on Syria. They disagree on government response to unrest in Bahrain and on the harsh crackdown by Al Khalifa against the Shia majority. Washington did not support the Saudi military intervention in Bahrain and believed such a step would inflame the situation further and would foment sectarianism. Riyadh has not shown any willingness to start a genuine dialogue between Al Khalifa and the opposition, nor does it to envision any meaningful role for the Shia majority in government. Because of concern over Iran’s nuclear program, the horrendous violence in Syria, the presence of the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, and the 2012 presidential election campaign in the US, the uprising in Bahrain was put on the backburner, at least for the time being. Washington, however, has consistently pushed the Bahraini government, albeit ever so gently, toward a dialogue with the pro-democracy movement and has encouraged the Crown Prince to play a more active role in promoting such dialogue. On the other hand, the US maintains a robust military presence throughout the Gulf and coordinates with Gulf governments in fighting terrorism in the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, and in countering potential destabilizing actions by Iran.
The US so far has not used its considerable leverage with Al Khalifa to force a dialogue with the opposition. As many analysts had anticipated, the Saudi military intervention has failed to quash the uprising despite the virulent attitude toward the Shia community. On the contrary, it has energized the opposition despite continued regime repression, has empowered the anti-Shia hardliners within the Al Khalifa family, and has indirectly marginalized the King and his son the Crown Prince.
Mirror: Has Saudi Arabia used US dependence on Saudi oil and the huge US arms sales to the Kingdom to blackmail the US into taking a seemingly more tolerant attitude toward the Al Khalifa harsh tactics against pro-democracy activists? Is it possible to divorce US-Bahraini relations from Saudi-American relations?
Dr. Emile Nakhleh: Saudi Arabia has not attempted to influence US foreign policy toward the Bahraini uprising through blackmail. Such an attempt, if ever done, would be futile and will certainly backfire. As the US becomes self-sufficient in energy, as the war in Afghanistan winds down, and as Iran searches for a negotiated compromise with the international community over its nuclear program, the US would begin to explore strategies to reduce its military presence in the region.
Budgetary and fiscal decisions within the US government could also reduce US American military presence in the Gulf, to include the Fifth Fleet. According to some reports, in a decade and a half from now Saudi Arabia is expected to need between 6-8 million barrels of oil a day for domestic consumption, mainly in power generation and desalination. Consequently, the Kingdom would have less oil to export and less oil revenues. Within the same timeframe, the Saudi government would need more money to provide for the welfare of its citizens, especially in unemployment assistance, education, and health. With less money to spend and a potentially more peaceful relationship with Iran, The Saudi government would be less inclined to spend on massive arms purchases from the US or anywhere else. The government also would be unable to spend billions of dollars on pacifying the restive segments of its population, as King Abdallah did in response to the Arab Spring in 2011. If these projections materialize, the Saudi government would be forced to minimize its support for Sunni hardliners in Bahrain.
Al Khalifa would then be forced to respond to their people’s calls for democracy and justice without Saudi support. Currently, US-Bahraini relations seem to be tied closely to US-Saudi relations because of the pervasive Saudi economic and security influence in Bahrain. As the balance of power changes in the region over the next decade, and as the US reviews its strategic interests and commitments in the region, Al Khalifa would need to explore strategies for genuine reform and economic and social justice. The main challenge would be whether Al Khalifa would have the luxury of time to wait until then. The window of dialogue might close much sooner. If that happens, calls for regime change would trump calls for dialogue. Bahrain has assumed more significance than its size in the past two years because of the power struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia; once, this struggle abates, Bahrain would again revert to being a small player in regional power configurations.
Mirror: How do you assess the pro-democracy forces and the democracy movement in Bahrain?
Dr. Emile Nakhleh: Like every Arab protest movement in the past two years, Bahrain’s pro-democracy uprising started peacefully demanding genuine political reform and government accountability. Like every regime where protests occurred, Al Khalifa resorted to violence and repression. As the government crackdown turned harsher and bloodier, and as the Al Khalifa Sunni government began to whip up the flames of anti-Shia sectarianism and shoot and beat peaceful protesters and torture prisoners, some in the pro-democracy movement began to question whether the ruling family was at all interested in reaching a compromise with the opposition. Calls for justice and dignity in Duwwar al-Lu’lu’ in Manama were not different from those in Tahrir Square in Cairo.
The responses of the Egyptian dictator and the Al Khalifa, however, differed significantly. Mubarak was convinced to abdicate before much blood was shed , while Al Khalifa, especially the Prime Minister, continue to cling to power. Although the Bahraini pro-democracy movement is indigenous and genuine, it is not monolithic. It consists of numerous Shia and Sunni religious and secular groups ranging from al-Wifaq to al-Wa’ad, al-Minbar, and al-Haqq, among others. As confrontations with government became more violent, some within the opposition began to opt for violence as a justified response to government repression. Others rejected violence and responded positively to some government calls for dialogue. There is also a generational divide within the uprising, with the youthful generation becoming more supportive of violence and opposed to dialogue. Al-Wifaq seems to have lost some of its influence, and the Sunni secular movements are becoming more marginalized.
The democracy movement is divided ideologically and generationally. Some factions still hope for a democratically reformed Bahrain under the umbrella of a “constitutional” Al Khalifa monarchy but without the current Prime Minister. Others, who consider the establishment of a constitutional monarchy as highly improbable, have come out for regime change. Despite the deep disagreements within the democracy movement over which strategies to pursue, most factions agree the current situation in Bahrain is unsustainable. The Al Khalifa dynasty can no longer maintain its grip on power as it did before February 2011.
Mirror: How do you assess the regime use of Iran as a scare tactic to gain Western support for its crackdown against the opposition?
Dr. Emile Nakhleh: The democracy and human rights movement in Bahrain has never been about Shia or about Iran despite regime claims to the contrary. Calls for political reform and labor rights started decades ago while Iran was still under the Shah. Most Bahraini Shia do not turn to Iranian Grand ayatollahs as their marja’. In fact, Bahraini Shia for the most part have followed Iraqi religious leaders in Najaf and Karbala as their source of emulation. Since the advent of the Arab Spring, the Al Khalifa government has parroted the argument of their Saudi benefactors that Iran was behind the protest movement in the Gulf Cooperation Council states. The West believes human rights advocates in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere are indigenous groups and not necessarily directed or controlled by Tehran. While continued unrest on the Arab side of the Gulf could benefit Iran’s short-term interests, the current Iranian regime is wary of pro-democracy protests lest they spread to Iran.
The Islamic Republic would not want to see a repeat of the June 2009 massive protests that followed the elections. Iran has already lost much of its influence in the Arab world because of its support of the Assad regime in Syria. Even Shia Hezbollah has lost much of its luster in the Arab street that was built following the 2006 Lebanon war because of its support of Assad. The Bahraini government’s argument that Iran is behind the unrest has not gotten any traction among policymakers in Washington, London, and other Western capitals. The West’s disagreements with Iran and international sanctions against that country are driven by Iran’s nuclear program, not by its perceived support of domestic unrest in Sunni Arab countries. The specter of the so-called Shia Crescent that was raised by Saudi Arabia, Mubarak’s Egypt, and Jordan a few years back has all but faded. In fact, many analysts in the West t now argue that a “Sunni Crescent” is on the ascendancy in the Arab world, and that Iran is becoming more isolated in the region.
]]>The grandfather of the 16-year-old American-Yemeni boy who was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen last year is suing 4 US officials, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Former CIA Director David Petraeus, over his son and grandson’s deaths.
The father of the Colorado-born Abdulrahman al Awlaki’s was an al [...]]]>
The grandfather of the 16-year-old American-Yemeni boy who was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen last year is suing 4 US officials, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Former CIA Director David Petraeus, over his son and grandson’s deaths.
The father of the Colorado-born Abdulrahman al Awlaki’s was an al Qaeda leader. Rights groups and reporters have argued that the boy was extrajudicially killed for his father’s actions. The fact that he was an American civilian killed by the US military in a country with which Washington is not at war also raised legal and ethical questions.
But Americans appear to favor drone strikes over all. A February 2012 Washington Post/ABC poll says 83 percent of Americans support drone strikes and 79 percent approve even when US citizens are targeted. Interestingly, Americans appear far less supportive of drone technology used for domestic law enforcement targeting citizens.
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