by Daniel Luban

The last couple months have seen the spread of a particular argument about the war in Syria among members of the self-described “anti-imperialist” left. This line of thought argues that the war (along with the Arab Spring more broadly) cannot be considered a true “revolution” and thus the left [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Daniel Luban

The last couple months have seen the spread of a particular argument about the war in Syria among members of the self-described “anti-imperialist” left. This line of thought argues that the war (along with the Arab Spring more broadly) cannot be considered a true “revolution” and thus the left should be wary of supporting anti-Assad forces — not merely with military or material support, but even sympathy or solidarity. What constitutes a “revolution” is not always spelled out, but Tariq Ali (who was among the first to make this argument) defines it in the loosely Marxist sense of “a transfer of power from one social class (or even a layer) to another that leads to fundamental change,” and he takes the lack of such an explicit class struggle in the Syrian war to be proof that the left should resist siding either with Assad or his opponents.

Recently the argument was revived by Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada. After protests caused Middle East Monitor to take Winstanley’s piece down, it was republished by the leftist magazine Jacobin, whose editors describe themselves as holding “a plurality of positions on Syria” but consider the piece to be a “useful contribution to the discussion” and publish it in order “to further this dialogue”. (This is all well and good, and I disagreed with Middle East Monitor‘s initial decision to remove the piece, but I’m not entirely clear which “dialogue” the Jacobin editors are hoping to further. As far as I can tell, all their coverage of Syria has taken a similar line — namely, that there’s little moral difference between the two sides and that the left should avoid getting behind either one.

I am by no means a Syria expert (although neither, as far as I can tell, are Ali or Winstanley). Nor do I have any clear suggestion for how those of us in Western countries should respond to the Syrian war. I think the left was correct to oppose the Obama administration’s recent push to bomb Syria, not least because it would have done nothing to end the war. And it’s certainly possible that the rebels have been taken over by hardline Islamists to such an extent that we should be wary of rooting for them to triumph — although determining whether this has happened would require a much more fine-grained knowledge of the situation on the ground than I (or Ali, or Winstanley) possess. (Incidentally, it’s been disheartening how many leftists who are perfectly capable of distinguishing various strands of Muslim militancy when discussing Palestine or Pakistan have, in the Syrian context, adopted the kind of monolithic view of Islamist totalitarianism that more properly belongs on the right.)

In any case, this argument for the moral equivalence of the two sides is deeply unconvincing. The problem with the argument isn’t so much that it gives the wrong answer to the question it poses. The problem is that it asks the wrong question altogether.

Let’s assume that the struggle against Assad does not qualify as a “revolution” in the classic Marxist sense or something similar to it. The implicit premise of Ali’s and Winstanley’s argument seems to be that if this is true, then the claims of Assad’s opponents to our support — let’s simply say our moral support, setting aside arguments about military intervention by Western governments — would fall away. But why is this the case? After all, it’s hard to think of many groups of people anywhere who are engaged in large-scale action that would meet Ali’s or Winstanley’s strict criteria for “revolution”. Does it follow that none of them deserve our support?

To take a couple of examples that Western “anti-imperialists” have an easier time wrapping their heads around: Palestinians in the occupied territories are not currently engaged in anything that we could plausibly call a “revolution,” but it doesn’t follow that we should be indifferent when they are bombed or driven from their land. Similarly, the residents of Pakistan’s tribal areas are not engaged in “revolution,” but it doesn’t follow that we should be indifferent when they are blown up by drone strikes.

It’s quite possible, in fact likely, that most of the Syrians opposing Assad don’t aim to impose a world-historical Revolution of the sort that would satisfy many Western leftists — that they simply want to remove the regime that has bombed them, gassed them, starved them, tortured them, and driven them from their homes. It’s hard to see why this forfeits their claims to our moral support.

Given the weakness of this argument from “revolution,” it’s not surprising that its proponents make a set of subsidiary arguments designed to show that there is no real difference between the two sides. None of these are much stronger.

For instance, Ali suggests that we “do not know with certainty” whether it was the regime or the oppositions that perpetrated the Aug. 21 chemical attack in Ghouta. This may have been a defensible claim in early September, when his piece was published, but it has become steadily less so ever since. Likewise, Winstanley points to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights‘ statistics showing that “the majority of [those killed] are combatants — and the majority of those on have been on the pro-Assad side,” which he takes to discredit the media’s “untenable narrative about a revolution of unarmed Syrian protesters which only took up arms after being shot down by the evil Assad regime.” Now, it’s not clear how any view about the origins of the war can be discredited by statistics about what has happened since it got going. More to the point, even if it’s true that the majority of combatant fatalities have been from Assad’s forces, this does nothing to dispel the widely-accepted conclusion that the majority of civilian fatalities have been killed by the regime.

As stated, none of this is to imply any position about what (if anything) Western governments should do in response to the Syrian crisis, or what the solution to it should look like. Like many people, I’ve struggled with this question and don’t have any real answer. Generally, I remain sympathetic to the anti-interventionist position, since no one has provided any proposal for Western intervention that would actually solve the conflict rather than exacerbate it. But opposing outside military intervention does not require us to adopt the attitude that there are no moral stakes to the war, or that the sides are equally culpable. The readiness with which many leftists have moved to the latter positions has been dismaying.

Photo: Civilians near Ma’arrat An-Numan. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

by Daniel Luban

Earlier this year, William Saletan published a typically contrarian piece titled “In Defense of Drones”. The subtitle — “they’re the worst form of war, except for all the others” — gives a good indication of the general line of argument; Saletan suggested that the collateral damage of the [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Daniel Luban

Earlier this year, William Saletan published a typically contrarian piece titled “In Defense of Drones”. The subtitle — “they’re the worst form of war, except for all the others” — gives a good indication of the general line of argument; Saletan suggested that the collateral damage of the drone war has been far smaller than in past US military campaigns, and that drones remain a necessary evil far preferable to conventional bombing.

This view of drones as comparatively precise and surgical may be too optimistic; one recent study of the war in Afghanistan by a US military adviser suggested that drone strikes were actually “an order of magnitude more likely to result in civilian casualties per engagement” than attacks from manned aircraft. And there is also some evidence to suggest that drones exact a psychological toll on civilian populations over and above conventional bombing that is not reflected in raw casualty statistics.

But for all that, I think there’s something to Saletan’s argument. That’s not to say (as he seems to) that we should be okay with the way the US is waging the war on terror. It’s merely to say that we shouldn’t attribute all the evils of the war on terror to one specific weapon (drones) in a way that implies that conventional bombers or cruise missiles or commando raids would somehow be gentler or more humane. (In fact, all of these remain key parts of the US repertoire.) Similarly, we should be wary of insisting on the unprecedented brutality of the drone war in ways that minimize the far greater tolls exacted by conventional military actions in the past.

Any critique of the war on terror, in other words, should focus less on means and more on ends. The key question is whether the US should be engaged in assassinating large numbers of suspected militants around the world; the weapons by which it does so are of secondary importance. Public discomfort with drones makes it tempting to put them at the center of the debate — but if the upshot is simply that the US should stop killing targets with Predators and double down on killing them with special forces, this would be a hollow victory or even a Pyrrhic one.

I get into these issues in more depth in a recent review essay for Dissent, where I tried to put the war on terror in a somewhat broader historical perspective by examining three very good recent books: Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves, Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars, and Mark Mazzetti’s The Way of the Knife. A brief excerpt:

[T]here is some risk of fetishizing The Drone at the expense of a wider view of the American War on Terror. The visceral creepiness of the new technology has been crucial in raising awareness of the human consequences of this war, but it can distract us from the fact that Predators and Reapers are simply one type of weapon by which it is being waged. Americans may shiver at the thought of Hellfire missiles falling out of a clear blue sky, but most continue to thrill to the exploits of Seal Team Six, and the latter is just as fundamental a feature of the new American way of war as the former. So, too, are the Kalashnikov-wielding militiamen on the payroll of U.S.-backed warlords in Somalia and the programmers conducting cyber-sabotage against the Iranian nuclear enrichment program. Technological innovation has been key to American military policy since 9/11, but it has by no means been the only driver of change. As the books under review make clear, we might better view these years as a story of the U.S. national security apparatus gradually breaking free of the restraints—both of law and of public scrutiny—imposed on it in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. It is also a story of the military and intelligence wings of this apparatus becoming increasingly intertwined and indistinguishable from one another. A wider view of the War on Terror may be necessary, but it is by no means more comforting.

Those interested should read the whole thing.

by Daniel Luban

For the last few weeks, Lobelog has been noting the continued disagreements among US neoconservatives over how to respond to the military coup in Egypt, with a few prominent neocons such as Robert Kagan denouncing it while many others are supporting it and calling on [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Daniel Luban

For the last few weeks, Lobelog has been noting the continued disagreements among US neoconservatives over how to respond to the military coup in Egypt, with a few prominent neocons such as Robert Kagan denouncing it while many others are supporting it and calling on the Egyptian military to finish off the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). These disagreements are continuing apace; yesterday, the Wall Street Journal‘s Bret Stephens offered the latest salvo with a call for the US to “Support Al Sisi“. The column is vintage Stephens: after offering his typical platitudes about the need to throw off comforting pieties and make the best of a set of bad options, he concludes: “Gen. Sisi may not need shiny new F-16s, but riot gear, tear gas, rubber bullets and Taser guns could help, especially to prevent the kind of bloodbaths the world witnessed last week.” Evidently this clear-eyed apostle of Seeing The World As It Is has determined that the Egyptian military has been massacring protesters with live ammo only because it’s been running low on rubber bullets.

But the neocons are only one segment of the US right-wing coalition, and their disagreements may not be symptomatic of what’s happening in the rest of it. Indeed, a wider focus could suggest that US right-wing support for the Egyptian military is even stronger than it might otherwise appear.

One particular aspect of the story that we might miss by focusing only on the neocons is the religious angle. Read National Review, still the flagship of the right and a place where various elements of the coalition mingle, and you will find very little on the killing of MB supporters, the rumored release of former President Hosni Mubarak, or other stories that have dominated mainstream coverage of Egypt. Instead, there’s a whole lot of coverage — and I do mean a whole, whole lot of coverage — of the plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority. The Copts are facing a “jihad,” a “pogrom,” a “Kristallnacht“; unsurprisingly, the magazine’s editors have urged the US to “back Egypt’s military,” in large part to protect the Copts, whose status is “a good bellwether for whether progress is being made in Egyptian society.”

Meanwhile, other NR commentators are going farther. Witness David French (former head of Evangelicals for Mitt [Romney] and prominent Christian Zionist) demanding that the US leverage its aid to force the Egyptian military to step up its anti-MB campaign in defense of Christianity: “The Muslim Brotherhood is our enemy, the Egyptian Christians are victims of jihad, and the American-supplied Egyptian military can and should exercise decisive force.” While French does not spell out exactly what he means by “decisive force,” given the current political context it can only be taken as a show of support for the military’s indiscriminate massacres of MB supporters.

None of this, of course, is to diminish the plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christians — those of us living in security elsewhere should not scoff at the justified fear and foreboding that they must feel. It’s merely to say that reports on their predicament, like Andrew Doran’s, which make claims like “bizarrely, Western media have largely portrayed the Muslim Brotherhood [rather than Christians] as the victims of violence” — while making no mention whatsoever of the hundreds of MB supporters who have been killed in recent weeks — give readers a rather skewed perspective on the current situation.

Yet this is a perspective that we discount at our own peril. The foreign policy commentariat may tend to view the situation in Egypt through the lens of realism versus neoconservatism, or democracy promotion versus authoritarianism. But for large segments of the US public, the situation in Egypt is first, foremost and last a struggle between Muslims and Christians, and when viewed through this lens their unstinting support for the coup leaders is all but guaranteed.

Photo Credit: Mohamed Azazy

by Daniel Luban

Charles Krauthammer, July 1, denouncing the Obama administration for refusing to speak out against Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi:

“Obama the bystander again. Here are the Egyptians in the millions, out on the street, trying to bring down an Islamist government — increasingly dictatorial, increasingly intolerant, arresting journalists and [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Daniel Luban

Charles Krauthammer, July 1, denouncing the Obama administration for refusing to speak out against Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi:

“Obama the bystander again. Here are the Egyptians in the millions, out on the street, trying to bring down an Islamist government — increasingly dictatorial, increasingly intolerant, arresting journalists and judgues, trying to Islamicize the military — and the people are saying, ‘No,’ and what does the president of the United States do? He takes a position of studied neutrality; he says he’s not supporting either side.”

Krauthammer compared the Egyptian situation to that of Iran during the abortive Green Revolution of 2009, during which “the same thing happened . . . they were shouting ‘Obama, Obama, are you with us or against us? And he took a position that was essentially support of the regime . . . . That was a shameful episode.”

We might note that Krauthammer’s remarks came immediately after the Egyptian military had given Morsi a 48-hour deadline to resolve the situation — a time when any public support of the protesters by Obama would clearly (and fairly) have been interpreted as support for a potential coup.

Fast forward one week, one coup and one massacre later.

Charles Krauthammer, July 8, praising the Obama administration for refusing to take a stance on events in Egypt:

“I don’t think I’ve ever said this, but I think Carney actually got it exactly right today,” Charles Krauthammer remarked on Special Report Monday evening when asked about the Obama administration’s decision to postpone an official response to the ousting of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi by the Egyptian army last week.

Krauthammer explained that the U.S. is “not in a position to decide” which side to take in the upheaval and agreed that the White House should “wait and see” how the situation develops.

Photo Credit: Jonathan Rashad

by Daniel Luban

This week, as you’ve probably heard, marks the ten year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Most people who have commented on the milestone have agreed that the war was a catastrophic mistake. But why, exactly, did the Bush administration decide to go into Iraq in the [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Daniel Luban

This week, as you’ve probably heard, marks the ten year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Most people who have commented on the milestone have agreed that the war was a catastrophic mistake. But why, exactly, did the Bush administration decide to go into Iraq in the first place? Even a decade later, there’s still not much of a consensus — although Jim’s piece from 2003, reposted yesterday, provides as good a contemporaneous account as you’ll find. Is there anything more we can say with the benefit of ten years’ hindsight?

I tried to sort through possible war motives in a piece I wrote several years ago. (Space constraints meant that the final version was cut rather heavily, and I’d be happy to provide the original version, which included more evidence and fuller argumentation.) I argued there against the somewhat conspiratorial notion that there was a single “real motive,” concealed from the public and shared by all administration backers. The Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) argument was clearly far from the whole story, as Paul Wolfowitz himself conceded. But individual actors and factions within the administration had their own reasons for wanting war.

More to the point, the motives tended to overlap: most war-backers would not have said that invading Iraq was desirable to stabilize oil supplies but not to spread democracy, or to improve Israel’s security but not to deter nuclear terrorism. Rather, they tended to hold a rather utopian belief that invading Iraq would further all of these goals simultaneously. For that reason, assessing motives is more a matter of teasing out emphasis and priority than of reaching categorical judgments about which motives were or were not in play.

With all that said, however, I think we can identify at least four relatively distinct motives that played a role. I provide more in-depth evidence in my RightWeb piece, so I’ll just sketch out some of the conclusions here.

Oil. The allegation that Iraq was a “war for oil” was one of the most frequently leveled charges against it, and one that clearly has some legs. (Just yesterday, for instance, Glenn Greenwald touched on the theme.) However, the notion of a “war for oil” is an imprecise one. It can mean two different things, one less plausible and one more so.

The first (and seemingly most widespread) meaning is that the Iraq war was primarily intended to allow the US (or US oil companies) to get their hands on oil reserves located on Iraqi soil. This is largely unpersuasive. There’s evidence (some of which Greenwald cites) that US policymakers such as Dick Cheney hoped that a post-reconstruction Iraq would greatly step up oil production and provide an alternative to Saudi oil, but there’s little evidence that this was regarded as a primary reason for invasion rather than simply a welcome collateral benefit. US oil companies themselves were lukewarm about the invasion, fearing that it might destabilize the region — and indeed, they haven’t been the primary beneficiaries of oil development in postwar Iraq.

The second (and more plausible) meaning is that the Iraq war was centrally concerned with preserving the stability of US oil supplies in the broader Gulf region as a whole. Here, the evidence is stronger: such “wars for oil” have been semi-official US policy since the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine in 1980, and this was certainly a primary motive for the first Gulf War in 1991. Saddam Hussein was regarded with more alarm than similarly brutal dictators elsewhere in the world largely because the risks of aggression in a geopolitically vital region like the Gulf were viewed as so much higher. Whether or not protecting the Gulf oil supply from Saddam was the primary reason for war, it was certainly an important one.

Israel. For many neoconservatives in the Bush administration, a major (perhaps the major) reason for ousting Saddam was to improve Israel’s security. Since the 1990s, when several future Bush administration figures prepared the notorious “Clean Break” report for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, neoconservatives had been preoccupied with the notion that regime change in Iraq would touch off a broader regional transformation that would disempower Israel’s opponents in the Middle East.

There are some caveats that should be made. First, although neoconservatives were the leading proponents of war, the broader “Israel lobby” as conventionally conceived did not play a particularly strong role (a clear point of contrast with the current campaign for war against Iran). Second, the fact that many in the US pushed for war out of Israel-related concerns did not mean that Israelis themselves were necessarily strong proponents — although figures on the Israeli right with strong ties to neoconservatives, such as Netanyahu himself, certainly were.

Even if neoconservatives inside and outside the administration were motivated in large part by concerns about Israeli security, this still doesn’t answer the question of how influential they were. After all, we should be wary of turning the top leadership (especially Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld) into mere vessels for neoconservative designs. As suggested below, I don’t think the Israel motive was paramount in the minds of this top leadership, although it was undoubtedly present. On the other hand, we shouldn’t downplay the instrumental role that neoconservatives played in setting the terms of debate over Iraq both before and after 9/11.

Payback. “We have been hit very hard,” a Cheney adviser told journalist Barton Gellman, “and we needed to make clear the costs to those who might have been supporting or harboring those who were contemplating those acts.” Or, as Jonah Goldberg (channeling Michael Ledeen) put it more bluntly, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” On this line of thought, 9/11 required the US to make an example out of someone to demonstrate its continued strength. The Taliban was too small and weak to serve this purpose, but Saddam — who had already been in the crosshairs for unrelated reasons — fit the bill nicely.

Many people seem hesitant to attribute the invasion to such a seemingly subjective and psychologized motive; it sounds more hardheaded to attribute it to a material interest like oil. But I think we underestimate the strength of this motive at our own peril, and that — particular for Cheney and Rumsfeld, who to my mind were the two critical decision-makers — it may even have been the primary one.

Democracy. The democracy promotion motive has become somewhat overemphasized in recent years, for several reasons. In the run-up to war, it was the motive that appealed most to pro-war liberal opinion-makers in the media, and thus received a disproportionate amount of discussion. Once the WMDs failed to materialize, the Bush administration fell back on democracy promotion as its main justification for the war, a trend that reached its height in Bush’s 2005 second inaugural address. And once the war went south, it became the easiest line of attack for critics who were eager to cast themselves as hardheaded skeptics and the Bush administration as wide-eyed utopians.

The fact of the matter is that democracy promotion was probably not the central motive for most of the war’s architects. This isn’t to say that it was always or totally insincere, however. Most notably, Bush himself seems genuinely to have bought into his own rhetoric. And although many (myself included) expected the administration simply to set up a friendly dictator to rule over postwar Iraq, this isn’t the course they followed or even really attempted. Whatever the many flaws of Nouri al-Maliki’s government, it is by no means a US puppet, and it did come to power through something resembling a democratic process (backed, to be sure, by a good bit of force).

To what extent were these four motives mutually exclusive? We should note, first of all, that the latter two flow in some sense out of the first two. The US had for decades regarded the Middle East as a geopolitically vital region, due both to its reliance on Gulf oil and its interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict. This intense focus on the Middle East helps explain why, in the significantly transformed post-9/11 landscape, the US seized on Saddam Hussein (rather than a figure with more significant ties to terrorism) as the proper test case for its efforts both at restoring deterrence and at democratic transformation. The hope was that success in Iraq would reverberate throughout the region.

At the same time, however, the tension between the final two motives (between payback and democracy) helps indicate some of the contradictions of the project. Thomas Friedman got at some of this tension when he suggested the “right reason” for war was “to partner with Arab moderates in a long-term strategy of dehumiliation and redignification,” but the “real reason” was “to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something — to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society.” In typical fashion, Friedman did not bother to question whether these two goals were complementary or contradictory, and whether “shock and awe” was reconcilable with “dehumiliation and redignification.” But we’ve witnessed the various contradictions between these motives play out for ten years now.

Photo: President George W. Bush signs H.J. Resolution 114 authorizing the use of force against Iraq. Secretary of State Colin Powell, center, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, right, also attended the signing. White House photo by Paul Morse. 

by Daniel Luban

The death of Hugo Chavez has triggered a predictably dizzying amount of commentary, and I’ll leave it to the experts to evaluate his complicated legacy in Venezuela and in Latin America more broadly. The accusations of “totalitarianism” from the right were clearly absurd and hypocritical — whatever his [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Daniel Luban

The death of Hugo Chavez has triggered a predictably dizzying amount of commentary, and I’ll leave it to the experts to evaluate his complicated legacy in Venezuela and in Latin America more broadly. The accusations of “totalitarianism” from the right were clearly absurd and hypocritical — whatever his misdeeds, Chavez’s record paled in comparison to the right’s favorite juntas from the Cold War era. On the other hand, after talking to those more knowledgeable about Venezuela than I am, I get the sense that even many who were sympathetic to Chavez’s broad goals ended up being rather disappointed in him, and that opening up space for a generation of Latin American leaders who might share many of his virtues without some of his vices might be his greatest legacy in the region.

But domestic politics aside, Chavez is also noteworthy as a champion — perhaps the last prominent champion — of the kind of “anti-imperialist” politics characteristic of the Cold War era.

(I put “anti-imperialist” in quotes to emphasize that this style of politics was a historically specific phenomenon, not synonymous with opposition to imperialism in general.) Gamel Abdel Nasser was probably the progenitor of this style, and it proved highly influential on leftism during the Cold War — above all, in its frequent identification of imperialism with capitalism, and capitalism with the United States and Western Europe.

Chavez played from this script throughout his political career, initially with a fair amount of success. This success, of course, was centrally tied to the fact that the US and its allies frequently played their own (imperialist) role to the hilt as well. Most strikingly, there was the Bush administration’s endorsement of the 2002 coup against Chavez; more ubiquitously, there were all the free-trade pacts and IMF austerity programs imposed throughout Latin America in that period. Chavez’s brand of anti-imperialism resonated, in other words, because it frequently continued to jibe with reality.

Still, recent years have revealed the limits of the old Cold War anti-imperialism, and Chavez’s reputation (on the left as much as elsewhere) has suffered as a result. The Arab Spring, in particular, demonstrated the pitfalls of taking every regime at odds with the US as an exemplar of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. By continuing to view the world through the Cold War prism, as Juan Cole notes, Chavez found himself in bed with Bashar al-Assad, Muammar Qaddafi, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; he insisted on seeing in them models of socialist self-determination that had little or nothing to do with reality. (One does not have to favor US. intervention in Syria, Libya, or Iran to understand that anyone who views their leaders as heroic anti-imperialists deserving our steadfast support has gone badly astray.)

Some on the left take these developments as evidence that Chavez took a wrong turn — that he went from champion of liberation to apologist for tyranny. I think, on the contrary, that he was fairly consistent, and that the things he got wrong indicate the weaknesses of his underlying style of politics (just as the things he got right indicate its strengths.) In any case, the style itself was a throwback to an earlier era, and it may very well die with Chavez.

This weekend, Ariel Sharon’s son Gilad published an instantly-notorious op-ed in which he called for Israel to abandon any attempt to distinguish combatants from civilians and “flatten all of Gaza” — a proposal of genocide or something close to it. The same day, however, saw the publication of via Lobe Log

This weekend, Ariel Sharon’s son Gilad published an instantly-notorious op-ed in which he called for Israel to abandon any attempt to distinguish combatants from civilians and “flatten all of Gaza” — a proposal of genocide or something close to it. The same day, however, saw the publication of another piece that was slightly more understated but arguably more striking, in that it came from Walter Russell Mead, a pillar of the East Coast foreign policy establishment who takes pains to market himself as a skeptical moderate. Mead suggested that although foreigners might take umbrage with Israel’s current assault on Gaza, “Americans” — or at least the red-blooded Jacksonian Americans about whom he frequently rhapsodizes — do not. Scorning the principle of proportionality (which he glosses as “[i]f the other guy comes at you with a stick, you can’t pull a knife”), “Americans” have a different view:

An endless war of limited intensity is worse, many Americans instinctively feel, than a time-limited war of unlimited ferocity. A crushing blow that brings an end to the war—like General Sherman’s march of destruction through the Confederacy in 1864-65—is ultimately kinder even to the vanquished than an endless state of desultory war….Certainly if some kind of terrorist organization were to set up missile factories across the frontier in Canada and Mexico and start attacking targets in the United States, the American people would demand that their President use all necessary force without stint or limit until the resistance had been completely, utterly and pitilessly crushed. Those Americans who share this view of war might feel sorrow at the loss of innocent life, of the children and non-combatants killed when overwhelming American power was used to take the terrorists out, but they would feel no moral guilt. The guilt would be on the shoulders of those who started the whole thing by launching the missiles.

He continues on in this vein, and by the end of the piece (where he rants about “the appalling blood lust of the unhinged loons who start a war they can’t win, and then cower behind the corpses of the children their foolishness has killed”) one can practically feel the spittle flying across one’s face through the computer screen.

We might note, first of all, that Mead seems to have no idea what “proportionality” means under the laws of war. It does not mean that “if the other guy comes at you with a stick, you can’t pull a knife,” an absurd proposition that would forbid any party from deploying superior technology on the battlefield. In the ius in bello context, which is what Mead is discussing, proportionality means that one is forbidden to use tactics that would cause an excessive amount of civilian collateral damage. (Indeed, it is this prohibition on indiscriminate attacks — enshrined in the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, Article 51 — that makes Hamas’s rocket attacks war crimes in their own right.) Mead’s visible contempt for international law does not seem to rest on even a passing familiarity with what it actually says.

What’s more striking is Mead’s apparent endorsement of the sort of bloodbath that Gilad Sharon has proposed. As usual, it’s difficult to pin Mead down, since in a typically cowardly and evasive manner he insists on attributing his views to “the American people” rather than arguing for them outright. (I’ve discussed his fallacious pro-Israel boosterism and overstatement of American popular support for Israel in this context before.) Rather than emitting yet another paean to the folksy wisdom of Jacksonian America, perhaps Mead would serve his readership better by stating explicitly what he’s proposing. Does he agree with his stylized version of the American people that Israel should “completely, utterly, and pitilessly” crush resistance in Gaza? Why or why not?

In the wake of President Obama’s decisive election victory, we’ve seen a fair amount of commentary about how it demonstrates the powerlessness, or spinelessness, of the anti-war left. Some of this commentary (like this piece by Jason Brennan) comes from libertarians and anti-interventionists who are genuinely concerned about Obama’s [...]]]> via Lobe Log

In the wake of President Obama’s decisive election victory, we’ve seen a fair amount of commentary about how it demonstrates the powerlessness, or spinelessness, of the anti-war left. Some of this commentary (like this piece by Jason Brennan) comes from libertarians and anti-interventionists who are genuinely concerned about Obama’s record on civil liberties and national security. Much of the commentary, however, is clearly “concern trolling” — it comes from people who are seeking primarily to vindicate the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war on terror by suggesting that Obama has adopted it wholesale. (Jim Lakely’s piece from today is one example.) Regardless, the general outlines of the argument are clear: by (for the most part) falling in line behind Obama’s reelection, despite policies like his expansion of the drone war and his failure to close Guantanamo, those who criticized Bush’s foreign policy have demonstrated the basic hypocrisy of their position.

The argument has both important elements of truth and notable overstatements. As I’ve written before, it has been genuinely dismaying to see the lack of concern about the drone war among most liberal commentators, and the failure to hold Obama’s feet to the fire on drone strikes (and the administration’s policy of assassinations more generally) has been striking and frequently shameful. On the other hand, while Obama’s record on civil liberties is certainly nothing to be proud of, the notion that he has been “no different from Bush” is exaggerated. On some issues, like banning waterboarding, he has reversed Bush administration policies. On others, like the failure to close Guantanamo, his maintenance of the status quo has stemmed more from demagogic opposition from congressional Republicans than from a desire to continue current policies. (Many of the people who now cite Obama’s failure to close Guantanamo as vindication of Bush’s policies are the same ones who screamed bloody murder about terrorists running loose on American soil when Obama initially attempted to close the prison.)

But in assessing the support for Obama’s reelection among what has been clumsily labeled the “antiwar left,” the real question we should consider is what alternatives were on offer. (I find the term “antiwar left” unhelpful because it runs together several distinct groups united only by their distaste for Bush’s foreign policy — genuine leftists who never really supported Obama, liberals who did, paleoconservatives who increasingly came to.) One could always vote for Jill Stein or another third-party protest candidate, or not vote at all. But if one accepted that either Obama or Romney was going to win, and decided to choose the candidate most aligned with antiwar principles, who would it be?

The charge of hypocrisy would stick better if Romney had run on a platform criticizing Obama’s conduct of the drone war, or his record on civil liberties. Notably, however, Romney chose not to do so. The level of agreement between the two candidates during the final debate in Boca Raton was one sign of Romney’s decision not to attack Obama from the left on foreign policy. On Afghanistan, his campaign vacillated between vague criticisms without ever offering a coherent critique of Obama. On the issues of torture and civil liberties, Romney made clear that he would be far more authoritarian than even Obama — for instance, his famous pledge to “double Guantanamo” during the 2008 campaign, or his advisors’ call to rescind Obama’s executive order banning torture.

The main issue where Romney differentiated himself from Obama on foreign policy was the Middle East, where Romney pledged to basically outsource US foreign policy to Benjamin Netanyahu and take a far more hawkish line against Iran. To what extent he would have followed through on this will remain a mystery. One plausible line of argument suggested that his Iran rhetoric was mostly bluster, and that in office he would follow the more realist line of a Robert Zoellick rather than the bellicosity of a John Bolton. Still, it’s easy to understand why few anti-interventionists would want to invest all their hopes in the possibility that Romney might be lying about his hawkish intentions.

So what was the “antiwar left” to do? Romney basically endorsed every Obama policy that they found troubling, distinguishing himself only by being more openly contemptuous of civil liberties for alleged terrorists and more publicly eager to start a war with Iran. In these circumstances, the left’s support of Obama could be read as hypocrisy — or it could be read as a perfectly defensible willingness to hold one’s nose and vote for the lesser evil.

I wrote last week about the worthwhile new Stanford/NYU study on the civilian impact of the drone war in Pakistan. Today brought the release of another new study of the drone war, this one conducted by the Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s Human [...]]]> via Lobe Log

I wrote last week about the worthwhile new Stanford/NYU study on the civilian impact of the drone war in Pakistan. Today brought the release of another new study of the drone war, this one conducted by the Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights clinic. (I’ll refer to these as the “Stanford” and “Columbia” studies respectively for ease of reference.) This study is similarly worth reading, and its authors provide still more reasons to be skeptical of the Obama administration’s rosy claims about the civilian toll of drone attacks.

However, for reasons that seem mostly to do with the Internet punditocracy’s thirst for novelty and contrarianism, the Columbia study is being held up as if it refuted the pessimistic take of the Stanford study. Thus Wired‘s Noah Shachtman suggests that whereas the Stanford study claims that drones are “covered in children’s blood,” the Columbia study provides a more “nuanced view” that “doesn’t fit neatly into the dominant narratives about the drone campaign, pro or con.” The main piece of evidence for this claim is that the Columbia team stresses the impossibility of knowing how many people have been killed by drones.

Of course, as the reader may have guessed, the claim that drones are “covered in children’s blood” appears nowhere in the Stanford report; it’s Shactman’s hyperbolic gloss on the report’s conclusion (following the Bureau of Investigative Journalism) that 176 Pakistani children have been killed by drone strikes. (Since we can reliably assume that children are civilians, but can’t always do so for adults, it’s easier to accurately assess the number of children killed than civilians as a whole.) However, the Stanford study is keen to stress the unreliability of all the available data, since it comes primarily from US and Pakistani government sources with incentives to fudge the body count. The study explains why the Bureau of Investigative Journalism numbers — which show a significantly higher civilian death toll — are more reliable than those provided by the New America Foundation and the Long War Journal: while all three sources are reliant on government reports, the Bureau is the only one that attempts to supplement these with on-the-ground follow-up investigations. But they certainly make no claims that their numbers are completely exact or sacrosanct; what’s important is that whatever the precise toll, it’s far higher than the Obama administration is claiming.

The Columbia report makes no attempt to delve into the numbers and come at an estimated death toll, but it similarly examines all the factors which suggest that the official civilian body counts may be grossly understated. It also, like the Stanford report, takes note of all the ways that drones negatively impact even those civilians who aren’t killed or injured by strikes — for instance, the devastating impact on the mental health of residents (particularly children) who hear drones hovering above them at all hours of the day and never know if and when they will be hit. On the basic question of whether drones have been as precise and miraculous as advertised, or whether on the contrary they enact a high price upon the lives of civilians, the two studies are completely in agreement.

The way that the Columbia study in being spun seems to reflect the baleful influence of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand Beltway centrism: government officials say that drones have no civilian toll, outside groups say that they have a high one, so the answer must lie somewhere in the middle. This kind of empty “moderation” is no more useful in navigating the drone war than it is anywhere else.

It’s been evident for a long time now that the Obama administration has been offering a wildly embellished account of the drone war that it’s been covertly waging in Pakistan and elsewhere. An important new report, released by researchers at Stanford and NYU law schools, helps make clear just [...]]]> via Lobe Log

It’s been evident for a long time now that the Obama administration has been offering a wildly embellished account of the drone war that it’s been covertly waging in Pakistan and elsewhere. An important new report, released by researchers at Stanford and NYU law schools, helps make clear just how embellished.

For reasons that the report spells out in detail, it’s extremely difficult to figure out just how many people have been killed by drones and how many of them have been civilians. Most American media reports on the strikes come courtesy of anonymous U.S. government officials, who have every incentive to euphemize the civilian toll of the drone war. (Furthermore, according to a May New York Times story, the administration has been counting every military-age male killed in a drone strike as a “militant” until expressly proven otherwise.) Some of the most widely-used indicators of the death toll, such as those offered by the New America Foundation and the Long War Journal, similarly suffer from an overreliance on U.S. intelligence accounts that minimize civilian deaths.

But according to the numbers compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which the report suggests is the most accurate tally currently available, drone strikes have killed between 474 and 881 civilians in Pakistan over the past eight years, including 176 children. Given an overall death toll that is estimated between 2,562 and 3,325 people, this means that civilians have accounted for roughly 14 to 34 percent of those killed.

As the report makes clear, however, the civilian death toll is only the most obvious human cost of the drone war. David Rohde, the New York Times journalist who spent months in captivity with the Taliban, has described life in the Pakistani tribal areas during the war on terror as “hell on earth,” and the accounts of the damage drones inflict on everyday life back up this assessment. Civilians living with the perpetual buzzing of drones overhead have been increasingly afraid to send their children to school, attend social gatherings, and even to provide first aid or burials for the victims of previous drone strikes. While the authors do not engage in diagnosis, their accounts suggest that an enormous chunk of the population of these areas must be living with something like PTSD.

Finally, the much-touted strategic benefits of the drone war appear to be quite overblown. An extremely low percentage of the “militants” killed seem to have been significant operational leaders responsible for terrorist attacks, and the deep unpopularity of the drone strikes has further alienated the Pakistani public and raised the likelihood that the next government might swing in a sharply anti-American direction.

As I’ve written before, there seems to be no major constituency at present pushing to hold the Obama administration accountable for its conduct of the drone war. Democrats have been more than happy to prove their toughness by claiming “terrorist” scalps — witness Osama bin Laden’s starring role at the Democratic convention earlier this month — while Republicans’ down-the-line opposition to the administration’s every move does not seem to extend to a concern for the rights of dark-skinned civilians in far-off Muslim countries. Until that changes, sad to say, the domestic political benefits of the drone war seem likely to ensure that it will continue.