The nation’s current attempt at catharsis through a gargantuan report prepared by the Democratic staff of a Senate committee exhibits some familiar patterns. Most of them involve treating a government agency as if it were Dorian Gray’s portrait, which can take on all the hideous marks of our own transgressions while we present ourselves as pure and innocent. The saturation coverage of the report and most early comment about it have displayed several misconceptions and misdirections.
One misconception is that we, the public, and our representatives in Congress are learning something new from this report that better enables us to make policies and set national priorities—better than we already could have done, based on what we already knew about this whole unpleasant business. In fact, the main directions of the activity in question and even many of the relevant gory details have long been public knowledge. Many people seem to believe that wallowing in still more gory details is a form of expiation. The basis for that belief is hard to understand.
The report itself and almost all the coverage of it misses what is the main, big story—missed perhaps because we ourselves are characters in it. The story is that the American people, and thus our political leaders, have had a major change in fears, mood, and priorities from the early days after the 9/11 until the present. In the aftermath of 9/11 Americans were far more militant, more willing to take on costs and risks, and more willing to compromise long-held values in the name of counterterrorism. The interrogation techniques that are now the subject of controversy and abhorrence were condoned or even encouraged back then by our political leaders in both the executive and legislative branches. As time has gone by without another terrorist spectacular in the U.S. homeland, pendulums have swung back, moods have changed again, and old values have reasserted themselves. It is difficult for anyone, but perhaps most of all for elected politicians, to admit this kind of inconsistency. Thus we get the current effort to focus ignominy on a single agency, where people who were on the tail end of that entire political process happened to work, as a substitute for such admission.
This is by no means the first time that waves of fear in America have resulted in deviation from liberal values, with the deviation later becoming a source of shame and regret. There is a long history of this, going back at least to the Alien and Sedition Acts in the eighteenth century. Another example, now universally seen as a black mark on American history, was the internment during World War II of American citizens of Japanese ancestry.
Another misconception is that because a report comes from a Congressional committee or some ad hoc commission, it is the Voice of God and the ultimate source of truth on whatever subject it addresses rather than what it really is, which is one particular set of perspectives or opinions. Another official pronouncement is the CIA’s report on the report, which for anyone who bothers to look at it comes across as a sober and balanced treatment of the subject that carefully differentiates between the valid observations in the Senate committee staff’s report and the significant errors in it. The CIA’s report was prepared under senior officers who had no stake in the interrogation program. It is by no means the reaction of someone in a defensive crouch. Unfortunately few people will look at that report and make any effort to learn from it. The Washington Post barely mentioned its existence, let alone any of the substance in it, in its saturation coverage of the Senate committee report.
Anyone who did bother to look and learn from the CIA report would realize how mistaken is another notion being widely voiced: that the abusive interrogation techniques were the result of an agency or elements within it “running amok.” The program in question was authorized by the topmost authorities in the executive branch, as those authorities have confirmed in their public statements or memoirs. Congressional overseers were informed, according to the instructions of those topmost authorities and according to standard practice with sensitive covert actions. Overseers had ample opportunities to object but did not.
A final misconception being displayed from people on various sides of this issue is that the question of whether any useful information was gained from application of the controversial techniques has to be treated in an all-or-nothing manner. People, including authors of the Senate committee report, wishing to make an anti-torture statement seem to believe that they have to argue that the techniques never gained any useful information. They don’t have to argue that. In acting as if they do, they are exhibiting another American trait, which the political scientist Robert Jervis noted almost four decades ago, which is to resist recognizing that there are trade-offs among important values. The coercive interrogation techniques involve such a trade-off. One can accept that the techniques did yield some information that contributed to U.S. security and still oppose any use of such techniques because they are contrary to other important American values, as well as hurting the standing of the United States abroad and yielding bad information along with the good. This is the position expressed by former CIA director Leon Panetta.
Amid all that is misleading in the committee report itself and in reactions to it, some kudos are in order for other reactions. One compliment should go to the Obama White House, which provided in its statement on the subject a principled declaration that torture is wrong along with some recognition of the public emotions and moods that underlay what was done several years ago. A particularly graceful touch was a reference to how “the previous administration faced agonizing choices” in how to secure the United States amid the post-9/11 fears. This fair and correct way of framing the recent history was the opposite of what could have been a partisan “those guys did torture and we didn’t” approach.
Also worthy of compliments in the same vein is Senator John McCain, who made an eloquent speech on the floor of the Senate opposing any use of torture. McCain often is as hard-minded a partisan warrior as anyone, but on this matter he spoke on the basis of principle.
Finally, kudos should go to the CIA for not going into a defensive crouch but instead recognizing deficiencies in performance where they did exist and, unlike the Senate committee report, coming up with specific recommendations for improvement. This response, too, represented important American values. As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper noted in his own statement, “I don’t believe that any other nation would go to the lengths the United States does to bare its soul, admit mistakes when they are made and learn from those mistakes.”
This article was first published by the National Interest and was reprinted here with permission.
]]>A variety of recent opinion polls indicate that a significant portion of the American public remains deeply fearful of international terrorism. Many Americans even feel less safe now than they did before the 9/11 attacks.
A CNN poll conducted in September found that 53% of Americans believe that more terrorist attacks on the homeland are likely. Seven out of ten Americans meanwhile believe that Islamic State (ISIS or IS) has operatives in the United States who are planning future attacks.
These deep-seated fears formed part of the backdrop in the recent US midterm elections that swept Democrats from power in the Senate and added to the Republican majority in the House. America today lives in an age of fear, loathing, and anxiety that might have produced good copy by Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, if he was alive today, but which bespeaks a republic that has lost its confidence as well as its emotional and intellectual moorings.
Yet it’s hard to understand why if we consider our present circumstances. As noted by terrorism expert Peter Bergen at a recent symposium (echoing figures from a variety of sources) 22 Americans have lost their lives in the United States since the 9/11 attacks in violence perpetrated by attackers expressing support for Islamic extremist causes. Of those 22, 13 were killed in a single attack inside a US military base at Fort Hood, Texas in November 2009.
The numbers of Americans killed outside their borders due to terrorist attacks is somewhat higher, but still remains small. According to the State Department, 16 Americans lost their lives as a result of terrorism related violence around the world in 2013.
In short, Americans have more to fear from slipping in the shower or falling down the stairs than they do of terrorist-inspired violence. They definitely have more to fear from random handgun-related violence in their neighborhoods, which has lead to nearly 1,000,000 fatalities and injuries since 9/11 in the United States. Yet many people resist even rudimentary steps to control access to guns at home while enthusiastically supporting America’s trigger-happy foreign policy around the world.
How do we explain the incongruence and disconnects between the American public’s perceptions and these realities? Political and military leaders are part of the problem.
Instead of reassuring the public about the threat of terrorism relative to other dangers, political leaders have actively played upon public fears by continually asserting the imminent dangers of new and more dangerous attacks.
One result has been the establishment of the national security surveillance state by the generation of Vietnam War protesters that once took to the streets to protest the overreach of the state in the 1960s and 70s. Even the postal service recently disclosed that it had received 50,000 requests from the government to read people’s mail during 2013 in national-security related surveillance. Not to mention the intercepted phone calls and emails, to say nothing of those who are being watched in other countries. The public has greeted this development with little more than a yawn.
Of course, even as political leaders from both sides of the aisle mercilessly exploit people’s fears, the fact is that they are mirroring general public attitudes and perceptions. The slide of the American public into fear and loathing post-9/11 has paralleled the state’s political descent into anarchy at home. Republican religious zealots and conservative ideologues have brought their version of the Taliban home to the United States, just as our armies sought in vain to drive the group away from major Afghan cities in America’s longest war.
Therein lies the strategic consequences of the 9/11 attacks that went far beyond Osama Bin Laden’s wildest dreams when he and his lieutenants concocted the idea of flying airplanes into buildings. It’s the gift that just keeps on giving to Islamic extremists as America spies on its citizens at home and careens around the world blasting away at real and imagined enemies in a vain attempt to bomb them into submission. Unfortunately, the latest crusader army that has been taking shape since the end of the Bush administration only confirms the extremists’ vision of a Western-led war against Islam.
The atmosphere of fear and loathing at home in the United States will only gather momentum with the Republican-led Congress, and the squeamish, defeatist democrats meekly following along. Republican candidates around the country cloaked their winning message in the fear and loathing parlance for which the party has become known for in the post-9/11 era. And it’s not entirely clear what the Republicans are hoping for any more—other than aiding the wealthiest among us and enhancing fortress America to keep out immigrants.
What does this mean for the Middle East? It means that America’s fruitless bombing campaign will continue for the foreseeable future—a slippery slope of commitment that will inevitably involve additional ground troops in the region. America’s quarter century of war in Iraq isn’t ending any time soon.
Another casualty of this campaign may be the failure to reach an agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program—if a weakened and chastened Obama administration retreats in the face of the Republican (and Israeli) pressure. Meanwhile, a new intifada in the simmering occupied territories would serve as icing on the proverbial cake of America’s failed endeavors that litter the Middle East like shattered glass.
Hunter S. Thompson would have had a field day in today’s world. His drug-infused delirium, which led to his famous novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, was his only release from the madness surrounding him—but what about us? Unfortunately, it’s Osama bin Laden who has so far had the last laugh from his watery grave in this plot—and the joke is on us.
Photo: Hunter S Thompson with his IBM Selectric Typewriter. Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty
]]>Twenty-five years ago, on “9/11”—November 9th in European date-notation—the Berlin Wall opened and, it seemed, everything changed. Freedom was no longer just an aspiration across much of Europe but a rising reality. The transformation was so profound that it is now hard to remember the bad old days of communist oppression and Soviet dominance, when peoples all across Central Europe lacked hope for the future and feared the secret police.
A quarter century beyond the settlement of the 75-year European civil war (1914-89), what is the balance of achievement following that remarkable overturning of European history and of much of global politics and economics? There is much good, but also some bad, and history did not “come to an end.”
The Soviet empires—internal and external—are both gone, and so is the Cold War, which was the most dangerous time in all of history, when the planet was at risk of being destroyed. The world escaped, although as the Duke of Wellington said about the Battle of Waterloo: It was a damn close-run thing.
Other good things happened, notably a definitive answer to the 120-year-old question: “What do we do about Germany?” It became unified, was anchored to the West, and, with the wisdom of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, it surrounded itself with NATO and the EU and sank the Deutschmark in the Euro. Thus Germany is again becoming economically the top nation in Central Europe, but there is no valid basis for fearing a German national menace.
Meanwhile, President George H.W. Bush led in working to create a “Europe whole and free” and at peace. The US stayed in Europe, NATO was not wrapped up but has continued to keep European history pacified. Central Europe was taken off the geopolitical chessboard with the Partnership for Peace Program and, for many countries, NATO and EU membership. Ukraine was encouraged in its Western, democratic vocation, but without first being pulled into a Western alliance system that could be perceived as a challenge to Russian Federation. (The fact that a succession of Ukrainian governments largely funked the task is another matter).
The first President Bush, followed by Bill Clinton, also tried to prevent the growth of revanchism in Russia, to avoid what happened with the Treaty of Versailles, whose punitive features against Germany helped produce Hitler. This effort, too, went awry, as leaders in the G. W. Bush and then Barack Obama administrations forgot this central lesson and heaped fuel on the fire of Russian nationalism that was set alight by Vladimir Putin. Maybe the result (in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine) would have been the same, under Putin or any other Russian leader who appealed to his people’s sense of lost position and prestige, but the US failure to take account of legitimate Russian concerns certainly did not help.
There have been other negatives, unintended byproducts of success following the Berlin Wall’s opening. Many West European countries wisely shifted limited security resources from military spending not needed after the Cold War to economic support for Central Europe—beginning with the Federal Republic of Germany’s investment of trillions of Euros in the old East Germany. But the US did not. Today in the United States, non-military instruments are starved while it maintains the mightiest military in history at a time where there is no “peer competitor.” Thus, while priding itself on being the “indispensable nation,” the US was caught short by the Ebola epidemic and has done so much less in other countries compared to the good it could do and the security it could promote in the broadest sense of that term.
The US did not totally ignore Will Roger’s warning: “When you get into trouble 5,000 miles from home, you’ve got to have been looking for it.” But after our “9/11,” the US did overdo Afghanistan by trying to get its political and social cultures to leapfrog centuries of development; and the US then committed one of the worse follies in American history, by invading Iraq for no good reason. The results have been more than 5,000 US servicemen and women dead, thousands more wounded, little promise in either Afghanistan or Iraq, and more than 3 trillion dollars of treasure wasted when it could have been used to refurbish the American homeland and create a more solid and lasting basis for US power and influence.
It is doubtful that either excess—in Afghanistan or Iraq—would have been possible during the Cold War, when the United States had to be worried about a superpower competitor, prepared to promote its own, contending interests. The lesson for today has to be that, just because it is possible to do something, it is not necessarily wise or prudent to do it.
So chto delat? As Lenin asked, “What is to be done?” Here are some ideas, mostly for America:
- Reassess what we do in the outside world. What is needed for our security and that of friends and allies, and what can be “given a pass” or handed off to others (including our European friends)? Where is it wiser, in our own interests, to stand apart rather than to become engaged?
- Recruit a first-class team of people in the Obama administration who know how to “think strategically.” This essential quality began to decline near the end of the Cold War and continues on a steep downward trajectory. With the collapse of the Cold War’s organizing principle, it seemed that less strategic thinking was needed. Yet it has been just the reverse, when so much is in play, there are so many variables, the US cannot “do it all,” it cannot count on the American people to support all foreign ventures, and it thus faces a greater need to set priorities and to make choices than it did when the Soviet threat could justify a wide range of courses of action and involvement. At the same time, press the think-tank community to do the same, instead of continuing to serve largely as means of building political consensus to implement an agreed foreign policy—when there is no clarity of strategy purpose and methodology around which to build a consensus to meet America’s future needs.
- Put more money into USAID, change the balance of funding between military and non-military instruments from the current 13:1 to a ratio that will better enable us to promote our interests and values, and recreate the United States Information Agency, one of our best “unsecret weapons” that was foolishly scrapped.
- Recommit the US to being a European power. Washington’s interest in NATO dropped to an all-time low before Mr. Putin stirred up interest by his misbehavior in Ukraine. Now that interest is sinking again, and the number of people in Washington fully engaged in European security or in other aspects of US engagement in Europe is declining radically. The Pentagon, meanwhile, is charged with implementing decisions of last September’s NATO summit in Wales, in part to reassure Central European allies wary of Russia, but it is doling out only peanuts for people in and out of government to think through what has to be done.
- Challenge the Europeans allies to do even more for security on the continent and in selected places beyond—not through increased defense spending in each allied country to at least 2% of GDP, an American obsession left over from the Cold War. Most of that 2% should go to non-military political and economic instruments to help integrate Central Europe more fully in Europe, to do more in Africa, and to get on with the critical work of building a solid Ukrainian economy. Also tell the Ukrainians to dismantle their kleptocracy and tell Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, either to restore his country’s democracy or both NATO and the EU will send it packing.
- Start work on a long-term security structure for the Persian Gulf and other parts of the Middle East. End the illusion that getting rid of the Assad regime in Syria is the answer to anything—it would likely only produce more regional chaos and a Shi’a bloodbath. Meanwhile, put the Saudis and others who have turned a blind eye to the export of terrorism and the fostering of al-Qaeda and Islamic State, to stop immediately the flow from their countries of Islamist ideas, money, and arms, as the price of continued good relations with the US.
More needs to be done to deal effectively with the requirements of a world newly created in the wake of the end of the Cold War’s certainties, a product of the Berlin wall’s opening, but this is enough to be getting on with. It befits America’s role as a great power, a champion of freedom, a protector of those most in need of protecting, a beacon of hope. It is what we expect in terms of leadership by our president and Congress. It would be a fitting commemoration of what a lot of courageous people did across Central Europe a quarter century ago. Can we be less committed and far-sighted than they were?
]]>by Shireen T. Hunter
Throughout the recent handwringing about how the US and other Western countries failed to foresee the emergence of ISIS, one factor has been totally ignored, either intentionally or inadvertently: the impact of Washington’s hostility towards Iran, especially its persistent tendency to treat any anti-Iranian movement or idea in the Middle East as either good or the lesser evil compared to dealing with Tehran. This attitude has been coupled with a consistent unwillingness to support positive forces for change and reform in Iran; indeed, actually undermining them by insisting on their meeting preconditions that the West knows can’t be met due to Iran’s internal political dynamics. Significantly, this Western and especially American attitude predated any dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.
The first Western mistake followed the end of the Iran-Iraq war, the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the coming to power of Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in 1989. Instead of taking advantage of Iran’s vulnerability at the time, as well as Rafsanjani’s efforts both to move Iran towards moderation and openness domestically and internationally and to reach out to the West to help him achieve these goals, the United States chose to put all of its eggs into Saddam Hussein’s basket and adamantly refused to acknowledge his many transgressions—against Iraq’s neighbors and own people—until his fateful 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Nevertheless, with great difficulty—due to leftist opposition—Rafsanjani managed to secure Iran’s neutrality in the Persian Gulf War, a fact that facilitated US military operations. He also secured the release of the last of the Western hostages held in Lebanon. Yet, instead of encouraging the moderate political trends in Iran, the US under President George H. W. Bush embarked on a policy of containing Iran (soon to be replaced by the Clinton administration’s “dual containment” policy, which was then followed in 1996 by Congress’ enactment of the first oil sanctions against Iran at a time when Rafsanjani was actively encouraging American oil companies, notably Conoco, to invest). This policy of containment was first announced during a trip to Central Asia in 1992 by then-Secretary of State James Baker who declared containing Iran’s influence in the region would constitute a major goal of US policy.
Guided by this objective, the US subsequently bought into Pakistan’s argument that the Taliban would constitute a credible barrier to Iran’s influence in Afghanistan and, through it, in Central Asia as well. Hence Washington did not object to Pakistan’s arming and promoting the Taliban, a step that eventually led to the fall of the Afghan government of Burhaneddin Rabbani and Ahmad Shah Masood, two leaders who supported a version of Islam far more moderate than that of the Taliban. It is forgotten today that the Afghan civil war began with attacks by the Pakistan-based and more radical Islamists, first through Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and, when Islamabad judged him to be too difficult to control, through the Taliban.
Even after the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, followed by the 9/11 attacks and the US invasion of Afghanistan, which Iran directly and actively supported, Washington continued to rely on Pakistan as its key regional partner. Despite massive US aid, Islamabad actively—if covertly—undermined US strategy in Afghanistan while it scorned Iran’s offers to help stabilize the country.
Just as Washington ignored or rebuffed Rafsanjani’s efforts to moderate Iran’s domestic and international policies, it similarly declined to help his successor, President Mohammad Khatami, who promoted a tolerant and reformist Islam and a less confrontational approach to relations with the West and Iran’s neighbors. Thus, holding out for the best—namely, a secular, pro-western government in Tehran—the US lost the relatively good. And when Iran actively helped the US both to oust the Taliban and facilitate the transition that followed, it was rewarded by President George W. Bush with membership in the “axis of evil,” paving the way for new and ever more punitive sanctions.
After the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Tehran quietly put forward an offer for a comprehensive deal with the US not only to cooperate on efforts to stabilize Washington’s latest conquest, but also to address all outstanding issues between the two countries, from acceptance of Israel and Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Palestinian resistance groups to Iran’s nuclear program. The Bush administration did not even bother to respond. Moreover, fearful that Iran might become the unintended beneficiary of the Ba’ath regime’s removal, Washington essentially stood by as its regional Sunni allies worked to undermine the fledgling Shia-led government in Baghdad not only by denying it aid and formal diplomatic recognition, but also, in the case of some Gulf states, encouraging and supporting the burgeoning Sunni insurgency, including al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which did not hesitate to attack US personnel, as well as their Shia brethren. Ironically if predictably, Washington’s policy of ignoring Sunni extremists forced Iraq’s Shia government to move closer to Iran.
Of course, the unanticipated insurgency and the increasing sectarian violence that it fostered also derailed hopes by the Bush administration—especially its neoconservative faction—that its “success” in Iraq would lead to “regime change”—either through destabilization or an actual attack—as well. At the same time, however, the administration bought into the idea that the increasingly sectarian nature of the conflict could also be used to curb Iran’s influence, notably by forging a de facto alliance between Israel and the Sunni-led states against Tehran and what Jordan’s King Abdullah ominously called the “Shia Crescent.” Of course, not only did Washington’s acceptance and even promotion of this idea contribute to rising sectarian tensions and extremism throughout the region, but it also failed to produce any progress toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Once again, rather than working with Iran to stabilize Iraq, which would have required exerting real pressure on its Sunni allies that were supporting the insurgency, containing Iran’s influence remained Washington’s overriding priority.
It was in this context that the so-called Arab Spring blossomed and, with it, renewed hopes in Washington to reshape the Middle East, if not by achieving “regime change” in Iran, then at least by weakening its regional influence, particularly in the Levant. Even as the Obama administration publicly depicted the movement as the dawn of open and democratic societies, its closest regional partners—to which Washington had so often and so counter-productively deferred in Iraq—saw it as a way to redress the region’s strategic balance that had been upset by the 2003 invasion and the empowerment of Iraq’s Shia majority.
As the movement progressed from Tunisia and Egypt to Libya and the (thwarted) pro-democracy movement in Bahrain, it eventually reached Syria and the minority Alawite regime of President Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s most important regional ally. While the Gulf states and Turkey led the charge against the regime, the US and much of the West were not far behind. Predictably, however, in its desire to see Assad overthrown and Iran weakened, the US and its allies largely ignored the steadily growing influence of groups such as al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, and similar foreign-backed Sunni extremist groups whose violence toward Syrian Shias, Alawites, Alevis, and Christians has been exceeded only by AQI’s successor, the Islamic State (ISIS).
Thus, for the past 25 years or more, the West—especially the United States—has made containing Iran its overriding priority in the Gulf and has too often seen the Wahhabi/Salafi version of Islam and its violent offshoots as an effective counterweight to Iranian influence. In doing so, it has unintentionally helped create monsters like Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and now Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi.
This critique by no means absolves Iran, Syria, Shia militias, or Iraq’s Shia-led government of their own mistakes and crimes. They have their own not insignificant share of responsibility in creating the region’s current problems and conflicts. And they have to do their part if the region’s problems are to be resolved. But as great powers that claim the world’s moral and political leadership with the power to intervene at will in other countries, the US and other Western countries must be judged by higher standards.At the very least, they need to offer a coherent and positive vision of a functioning Middle East and South Asia.
This requires going beyond the platitudes about wanting to advance democracy and human rights.
While the Western powers do not have a clear vision of what kind of Middle East they want and even less how to achieve it, ISIS, al-Qaeda, and al-Nusra have their own regional plans, based on ethnic and sectarian cleansing as we have already seen in both Syria and Iraq.
In short, until the US and the West admit at least to themselves that they have made mistakes in the region in the last few decades, particularly in their efforts to isolate and weaken Iran, and learn from those mistakes and change course, their efforts at defeating extremism and stabilizing the region are bound to fail.
The West cannot get all that it desires in the region, because political engineering has its limits. But if it embarks on a strategy of conflict resolution—fostering regional cooperation, instead of fighting it; and promoting compromise instead of complete capitulation by Iran or any other local power—its interests and those of the region will be better served. Until such a strategy is adopted and seriously implemented, however, every day that passes will make it that much harder to end the violence in the Middle East and encourage compromise and reconciliation. The same is equally true for the regional players. By pursuing maximalist goals they will all end up losers.
]]>The recent burst of recriminations about what the U.S. intelligence community did or did not tell the president of the United States in advance about the rise of the extremist group sometimes called ISIS, and about associated events in Iraq, is only a variation on some well-established tendencies in Washington discourse. The tendency that in recent years has, of course, become especially strongly entrenched is that of couching any issue in the way that is best designed to bash one’s political opponents. For those determined to bash and frustrate Barack Obama at every turn, it is a tendency that trumps everything else. Thus we now have the curious circumstance of some of Mr. Obama’s Republican critics, who in other contexts would be at least as quick as anyone else to come down on U.S. intelligence agencies (and most other parts of the federal bureaucracy) like a ton of bricks, saying that the president got good information but failed to act on it. (Some critics, however, have tried to lower their cognitive dissonance by saying that “everyone” could see what was coming with ISIS.)
Relationships between the intelligence community and presidential administrations over the past few decades have not fallen into any particular pattern distinguishable by party. One of the best relationships was with the administration of the elder George Bush—perhaps not surprisingly, given that president’s prior experience as a Director of Central Intelligence under President Gerald Ford. Probably the worst was during the presidency of the younger George Bush, whose administration—in the course of selling the Iraq War—strove to discredit the intelligence community’s judgments that contradicted the administration’s assertions about an alliance between Iraq and al-Qaeda, pushed for public use of reporting about alleged weapons programs that the community did not consider credible, and ignored the community’s judgments about the likely mess in Iraq that would follow the ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Relations also have varied under Democratic presidents. Mr. Obama, given the evidently deliberate and methodical way he weighs input, including from the civilian and military bureaucracy, before major national security decisions, probably has been one of the better users of intelligence, at least in the sense of paying attention to it. His remark on 60 Minutes that led to the accusations about ISIS, however, did sound like gratuitous blame-shifting.
One very longstanding and bipartisan tendency that this recent imbroglio has diluted (because the political motive to attack Obama is even stronger than political motives to attack intelligence agencies) is to assume that any apparently insufficient U.S. reaction to an untoward development overseas must be due to policymakers not being sufficiently informed, and this must be because intelligence services failed. It is remarkable how, when anything disturbing goes bump in the night overseas, the label “intelligence failure” gets quickly and automatically applied by those who have no basis whatever for knowing what the intelligence community did or did not say—in classified, intra-governmental channels—to policymakers.
The current case does demonstrate in undiluted form, however, several other recurrent tendencies, one of which is to affix the label “surprise” to certain events not so much because of the state of knowledge or understanding of those who make national security policy but more because we, the public—and the press and chattering class—were surprised. Or to be even more accurate, this often happens because those of us outside government weren’t paying much attention to the developments in question until something especially dramatic seized our attention, even though we actually had enough information about the possibilities that we should not have been surprised. Thus the dramatic gains by ISIS earlier this year have been labeled a “surprise” because a swift territorial advance and gruesome videotaped killings grabbed public attention.
Another tendency is to believe that if government is working properly, surprises shouldn’t happen. This belief disregards how much that is relevant to foreign policy and national security is unknowable, no matter how brilliant either an intelligence service or a policymaker may be. This is partly because of other countries and entities keeping secrets but even more so because some future events are inherently unpredictable—given that they involve decisions that others have not yet made, or social processes too complex or psychological mechanisms too fickle to model. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was referring to this epistemological reality in the comment that he made recently about the Iraqi army’s collapse and that the president erroneously characterized in his 60 Minutes interview. Clapper was not saying that the intelligence community messed up on this question; he instead was observing that this type of sudden loss of will in the heat of battle has always been unpredictable.
Yet another recurring tendency is to think that proper policy responses always flow from a good empirical understanding of the problem at hand, including the sort of information, analysis, and predictions that a well-functioning intelligence service might be expected to provide. In fact, proper responses often do not flow that way from an understanding of the problem. Often there are conflicting national interests at stake, there are serious costs and risks to possible responses, and the likely benefits of responses may not outweigh the likely costs. No matter how accurate a picture of ISIS the intelligence community may be providing to the president and his policy advisers, that picture is not likely to constitute a case for the United States to take more, rather than less, forceful action in Syria or Iraq. If President Obama is now taking more forceful measures in those places than he was earlier, it is neither because he is belatedly reacting to good intelligence nor because the intelligence community is belatedly getting its judgments right, but instead because he is responding to how the rest of us have decided that we are not just surprised but alarmed by ISIS.
This article was first published by the National Interest and was reprinted here with permission.
]]>by Derek Davison
Fear was the word of the day at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday, as former Vice President Dick Cheney talked about the nearly infinite number of grave threats he sees confronting the United States. Greeted by a standing ovation from the attendees, Cheney spent the bulk of his [...]]]>
by Derek Davison
Fear was the word of the day at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday, as former Vice President Dick Cheney talked about the nearly infinite number of grave threats he sees confronting the United States. Greeted by a standing ovation from the attendees, Cheney spent the bulk of his roughly 30-minute remarks listing those threats and championing a much more hawkish American response to all of them.
Regarding the most immediate threat, the Islamic State or ISIS (“the situation is dire,” he commented), Cheney had suggestions for President Barack Obama—if you consider “recognize ISIS as a strategic threat” a suggestion. Cheney supported a commitment of additional arms, troops, advisors and trainers to Iraq, as well as “immediate, sustained action” in Syria. What form that action should take, and how it should be implemented without helping Bashar al-Assad (who Cheney also cited as a significant threat) or Iran (ditto), was not addressed in Cheney’s remarks. It probably goes without saying that the former vice president ignored the role his own administration’s ill-fated war on Iraq played in creating the ISIS threat in the first place. Nor did he spend any time engaging the reasoned argument that the Islamic State currently represents only a potential threat to the United States—not a realized, let alone “dire,” one.
If you’re trying to keep score at home, Cheney suggested at various points in his speech that America ought to commit substantial military forces toward countering threats in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Nigeria, and Afghanistan, with no particular sense about which of these should take priority over the others. Oh, and maybe in Ukraine as well; that part wasn’t as clear.
At this point, Cheney is effectively the living, breathing embodiment of Maslow’s Hammer, only instead of a hammer his tool is an overwhelming commitment of American military forces—so to him every problem looks like an existential threat to the United States. Again and again he leveled harsh criticism at the Obama administration, particularly Obama himself, for failing to appreciate the magnitude of the many dangers America faces. He chided Obama for declaring in a 2012 speech that “the tide of war is receding,” a quote that must seem almost as untimely as Cheney’s 2005 declaration that the Iraqi insurgency was “in the last throes, if you will.” We were, but they weren’t.
Cheney also criticized the administration’s treatment of America’s Middle Eastern allies, noting in particular a perception in the region that the United States is working with the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a popular conspiracy theory in military-led Egypt and other regional anti-MB countries, and is rooted in a deliberate misreading of the administration’s initial response to the Arab Spring, when it tentatively supported democratization efforts even if they meant that moderate Islamist political parties would be the immediate winners. In reality, the US made a decision to accept the results of whatever elections the Arab Spring produced, not ally itself with the Muslim Brotherhood—but don’t try and tell that to Egyptian state-controlled media.
This is a policy, by the way, that regional experts now say the administration has dropped, and not for the better; the Arab Spring’s failure to bring about widespread democratic change in the region has actually empowered both Islamic extremists like ISIS and the authoritarian regimes opposing them.
Cheney characterized the Muslim Brotherhood as “the ideological source for most of the radical Islamist terrorists around the globe,” particularly Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) and through it, al-Qaeda. This reading of history glosses over the fact that EIJ broke offfrom the Muslim Brotherhood over the latter’s commitment to nonviolence and to gaining power through peaceful means. Moderate Islamist political parties like the Brotherhood may not be ideal conduits for American interests in the region, and they can govern in anti-democratic ways, but when they are outlawed or suppressed those among them who support peaceful political change are only driven into extremist camps and potentially more violent organizations. And no matter how much the Muslim Brotherhood has been suppressed, it has always found a way back.
Speaking of Egypt, Cheney especially zeroed in on the administration’s response to the 2013 coup that toppled Egypt’s nascent democracy and brought back Mukbarak-era deep state governance, contending that America should have ignored the coup (which it pretty much did) and worked to strengthen ties with coup leader and now elected (well, sort of) Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. This, Cheney said, would have strengthened security in the region and diminished any talk that the US and Muslim Brotherhood were in cahoots. Cheney also remarked that he was “very impressed” with Sisi, which seems odd given that he was talking about a man who is responsible for the deaths of over a thousand of his fellow Egyptians, but there’s no accounting for taste.
Cheney also spent a considerable portion of his speech railing against cuts to the Defense budget, which is understandable given that he’s backing military commitments in at least ten different countries. He noted, for example, that “other major powers are seriously adding to their military capabilities” (maybe someday one of them will spend as much as half of America’s annual defense budget) while the US is making “irrational budget cuts” to its capabilities. Of course, it’s hard to take this argument seriously when the US is prepared, for example, to throw $1.5 trillion at an aircraft system that may be needed but definitely doesn’t work). Then again, if all you have is a hammer, it makes sense to seek the biggest hammer money can buy.
]]>James A. Russell
The predictions of doom in the Middle East that are dominating thinking in the foreign policy commentariat of Washington and other capitals over the spread of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could use a little perspective.
An unlikely source of insight transpired the other day when [...]]]>
James A. Russell
The predictions of doom in the Middle East that are dominating thinking in the foreign policy commentariat of Washington and other capitals over the spread of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could use a little perspective.
An unlikely source of insight transpired the other day when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, not known for clear-headed strategic thinking, equated Hamas with ISIS. The suggestion was part of a long-running Israeli narrative that seeks to link its periodic muggings of the Palestinians with the American-led war on Islamic extremists launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Netanyahu’s suggestion, however, is not far off the mark when it comes to framing regional events—though not for the reasons that he would think. The fact is that the Middle East is mired in several overlapping and competing national wars of liberation and state formation by various factions and states that seek a common variable in these wars: political power and authority over a demarcated geographic area. ISIS and Hamas are certainly participants in these wars, as are the Israelis.
None of these wars are in any way remarkable by historical standards—a point worth remembering as the Obama administration faces massive pressure to “do something” about the advances of ISIS. Americans generally suffer from short historic memories and easily forget their role in post-World War II era wars including in China (1949), Vietnam (1950s-60s), and Greece (1948).
Like the United States, Britain and France involved themselves in these wars directly and indirectly—most of which turned out badly for the Western powers. If anything, the involvement of outside powers in these wars prolonged them—much to the detriment of the groups involved in the struggle for political power.
The Middle East’s wars of national liberation and state formation were never really settled—hence the prevalence of the phenomenon today. The longest running is the unfinished war of Israeli independence launched in 1948. It’s unsettled because Israel’s borders are still in question due to its ongoing annexation of territory that presumably one day will become part of the state. It seems clear that the annexation fits within the governing Likud Party’s vision of “greater Israel,” which includes the Palestinian territories (Judea and Samaria) that stretch all the way to Jordan River.
This war is ongoing because Hamas and Likud share the same objective—achieving a state that stretches from Gaza to the Jordan River. Hamas is a classic radical religious nationalist movement that seeks to create its own state and, like Israel, is prepared to use force to achieve its goals. Thrown into this mix is the Palestinian Authority, the group that initially took up arms to achieve Palestinian independence but which as of late has tried in vain to achieve its objectives of state formation at the negotiating table.
We can expect this war to continue for the foreseeable future. The involvement of the United States and the blank check it has given to Israel has prolonged the battle; the Israelis have to take no responsibility for their actions and hence have no real incentive to reach a negotiated settlement until the Likud achieves its objective.
The other main war for national independence and state formation in the Middle East involves the fight for political power and authority in the Mukhabarat States of Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq—where (except in Saudi Arabia) the security sector created during colonization seized political power after the external powers departed. Libya is also engaged in a war of state formation that, like in Syria and Iraq, will likely be bloody and take a number of years.
Egypt’s internal battles between the security sector and the Islamists, which raged for 20+ years before briefly subsiding in the 1990s, look as if they may start up again due to these two group’s opposing and perhaps irreconcilable goals for the shape and identity of the state. For its part, Algeria won its civil war against the Islamists in the 1990s. In Tunisia, there may be a process of peaceful transition away from the Mukhabarat regime of Ben Ali to some form of representational government that involves all political parties.
In Syria, Iraq, and Libya, the national wars of liberation and state formation are currently underway. ISIS must be seen as an unfortunate but perhaps inevitable consequence of the battle for power in Syria, which has seen the Saudi-Gulf State support network funnel arms, people, and money into the fight against the Assad-Mukhabarat regime.
The historic genealogy of ISIS reaches back into US-occupied Iraq and the Saudi-Pakistani-US supported war by the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Its intellectual and religious roots lie within the toxic mix of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi clerics and the Sayyid Qutb-inspired militant Islamic resistance to Nasser in Egypt.
To a limited extent, Hamas can be considered a distant cousin of ISIS; both spring from radical Sunni Islamic political and religious ideology. Importantly, however, they are engaged in fundamentally different wars of liberation that involve different actors with various objectives in the contest for political power and authority.
In Iraq, the 2003 US invasion turned the existing political order on its head and unleashed long-repressed political aspirations that have blossomed, like in Syria, into another national war of liberation and state formation. ISIS now straddles the Iraqi-Syrian border, and one of the casualties of this war may be the Sykes-Picot boundaries that divided up the Ottoman Empire.
Saudi Arabia is noticeably absent, at least for now, in this intra- and transnational discord in part because, like other Gulf States, it has bought off its population with subsidized good living and sent its radicals to blow themselves up elsewhere. The regime’s periodic muggings of the Shia population in its Eastern Province are supported by the majority of the population. One day, however, the radicals that survived will come home just like those who did from the Afghan jihad in the 1990s.
The only good news on this front is that there is no widespread political support for the Sunni extremist ideology espoused by groups like ISIS. These groups tend to have short shelf lives precisely because they alienate the very people they seek to govern. The bad news is that these groups’ struggle for political power will likely be long and bloody—in part because they are not interested in a negotiated settlement and/or in sharing power with other actors. The blood-soaked Algerian Civil War provides a historic example of what can happen when entrenched, committed Islamic extremists take on an established security establishment.
More bad news: developed states have had almost universally poor results with their interventions in these national wars of liberation and state formation. In almost every case, the developed states were forcibly kicked out of their former domains. The British headlong retreat from Aden in 1967, the French defeat in Vietnam and Algeria, and the American defeat in Vietnam all represented important signposts as the wars of national liberation became prominent in the post-World War II era.
Moreover, the attempts to intervene in these disputes were often marked by ill-informed choices in backing local participants. The American backing of Chiang Kai-shek turned out particularly badly as did the backing of Nguyen Van Thieu. Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki and Hamid Karzai must also now be added to the list of bad choices by the United States.
The hysteria sweeping the West today over who’s up and who’s down in the battle for power in Iraq and Syria and elsewhere in the region needs to be placed in this historic context. There is nothing remarkable about these wars. The lessons of past attempts to involve us in these localized struggles suggest that caution should be exercised in committing our militaries to affect the outcomes. A regrettable but perhaps enduring lesson of international politics is that sometimes keeping your powder dry and being patient is just the best option.
Protesters gathered in Ahrar Square, in the Iraqi city of Mosul, on April 3, 2013 against US-backed Nouri al-Maliki’s government. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS
]]>by James A. Russell
The globe-trotting travails of the fugitive Edward Snowden have given us an unexpected opportunity to hear from our senior intelligence officials about the necessity of their far-reaching surveillance program designed to protect us from terrorism. But as shown by the testimony of General Keith Alexander, the chief [...]]]>
by James A. Russell
The globe-trotting travails of the fugitive Edward Snowden have given us an unexpected opportunity to hear from our senior intelligence officials about the necessity of their far-reaching surveillance program designed to protect us from terrorism. But as shown by the testimony of General Keith Alexander, the chief of the National Security Agency (NSA), few details have been revealed about the actual threat we are facing. These details, we are told, need to be kept secret.
Yet we are awash in information about the terrorist threat from the media. To be sure, frightening images of enemies have always figured prominently for the United States in the conduct of foreign policy and national security. During the Cold War, the specter of godless communist hordes assaulting the ramparts of democracy served as a centerpiece for the American defense buildup and its strategy of containment. Ronald Reagan famously rode his “evil empire” metaphor to election victory in 1980 — while the Soviet Union slowly crumbled before our eyes.
Even if we hyped their claims, there is no getting around the fact that the Soviet Union threatened the United States and Western Europe with incineration courtesy of its thousands of nuclear weapons. This very real threat caused the United States to pursue various arms control initiatives with its bitter adversary — much to the annoyance of the neoconservative “cold warriors” who later re-emerged to lead the country into the disastrous war in Iraq.
The 9/11 attacks provided us with the pretext needed after the end of the Cold War to prop up another boogeyman — international terrorism — to replace the dreaded “red menace”.
Of course, the spectacular nature of the 9/11 attacks deeply and rightfully disturbed Americans. The images of crumbling towers with thousands of innocent people trapped inside seemed like an apt metaphor for a new age of unrestricted warfare pitting us against shadowy networks of terrorists armed with new, dastardly and unconventional weapons.
Much of the right-wing and its neoconservative acolytes eagerly seized upon the new boogeyman to justify a decade of war and targeted assassinations abroad while shredding the constitution by unleashing the NSA to listen to our phone calls, read our e-mails and cruise our Facebook profiles.
As usual, democrats cowered in fear, not wanting to be seen as “weak” on defending the country. Government officials, terrified of another Pearl Harbor attack on their watch, left no stone unturned in expanding the reach of the state — all in the name of protecting us from the new, 10-foot tall terrorist boogeyman. In essence, the Vietnam-generation that had once protested so vigorously against the abuse of state power in the 1960s consolidated the national security surveillance state — without so much as a shoulder shrug — as they took over responsibility for governing 40 years later.
But while America’s perception of the world changed on 9/11, the world pretty much remained the same.
The 9/11 attacks turned out to be an outlier and were not followed by a new age of mass casualty terrorist war. According to figures compiled by the Rand Corporation, an average of 341 people were killed annually in attacks attributed to international terrorism from 1985-2000; from 2001 through 2008, an average of 582 people were killed.
As noted in all of the databases collecting information on terrorism, the overwhelming number of terrorist incidents around the world occur in the context of local and/or national political disputes and are confined to a relatively small number of states including Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, India, Yemen, Syria and Somalia. International terrorism is virtually nonexistent at this point. Regrettably, the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have played a role in the prominence of terrorist violence in these locations.
According to the State Department, 12 Americans were either killed or wounded as a result of terrorist violence around the world in 2012. By contrast, over the decade of America’s wars abroad, 1,000,000 Americans were killed or wounded in the United States as a result of gun-related violence.
If the foreign policy establishment and its finger-wagging commentariat bothered to dig a little deeper, they would discover that terrorism is a comparatively minor form of international violence that is not a strategic threat to the United States or the international community.
They would also discover that the world is actually becoming a safer place, with a steady reduction in the number of interstate wars since 1990, continued declines in the numbers of people being killed in these wars, and the complete absence of wars between developed states following the end of the Cold War.
The world’s oceans are almost completely free of political violence and it is safer to board an airplane than it is to get into your car. Conflict, terrorism and international violence are phenomena associated with failed and/or failing states in the developing world.
Like the exaggerated claims of an impending Soviet takeover of the world in the 1980s, we need to view this issue for what it really is and reign in the urge to see terrorists lurking behind every corner. They are not the equivalent of the nuclear-armed Soviet Union. Instead, we get bombarded with hysterical assertions of a dangerous and threatening global environment that is simply not supported by evidence. It is a canard being foisted on the public — one that obscures the actual and serious security challenges facing the United States and the international community.
We need leaders, columnists and citizens to discuss these central points. The discourse should be used as the basis for a national debate over our proper security posture. The world has moved on — and we need to move along with it.
]]>by Victoria Brittain
via Tom Dispatch
A four-month hunger strike, mass force-feedings, and widespread media coverage have at last brought Guantanamo, the notorious offshore prison set up by the Bush administration early in 2002, back into American consciousness. Prominent voices are [...]]]>
by Victoria Brittain
via Tom Dispatch
A four-month hunger strike, mass force-feedings, and widespread media coverage have at last brought Guantanamo, the notorious offshore prison set up by the Bush administration early in 2002, back into American consciousness. Prominent voices are finally calling on President Obama to close it down and send home scores of prisoners who, years ago, were cleared of wrongdoing.
Still unnoticed and out of the news, however, is a comparable situation in the U.S. itself, involving a pattern of controversial terrorism trials that result in devastating prison sentences involving the harshest forms of solitary confinement. This growing body of prisoners is made up of Muslim men, including some formerly well-known and respected American citizens.
At the heart of these cases is a statute from the time of the Clinton presidency making it a crime to provide “material support” to any foreign organization the government has designated as “terrorist.” This material support provision was broadened in the USA PATRIOT Act, passed by Congress just after the 9/11 attacks, and has been upheld by a 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. Today, almost any kind of support, including humanitarian aid, training, expert advice, “services” of all sorts, or “political advocacy” undertaken in “coordination” with any group on the State Department’s terrorist list, can lead to such a terror trial. The Court has never defined what “coordination” actually means.
In that Supreme Court ruling, Justice Stephen Breyer was joined in dissent by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Breyer proposed a narrower interpretation of material support: individuals should not be subject to prosecution unless they knowingly provided a service they had reason to believe would be used to further violence. At the time, the position of the dissenting judges was backed by key editorials in major newspapers. In the three years since, however, more material support cases have resulted in long sentences with very little public notice or critical comment.
Pre-Trial Punishment
In the U.S. these days, the very word “terror,” no less the charge of material support for it, invariably shuts down rather than opens any conversation. Nonetheless, a decade of researching a number of serious alleged terrorism cases on both side of the Atlantic, working alongside some extraordinary human rights lawyers, and listening to Muslim women in Great Britain and the U.S. whose lives were transformed by the imprisonment of a husband, father, or brother has given me a different perspective on such cases.
Perhaps most illuminating in them is the repeated use of what’s called “special administrative measures” to create a particularly isolating and punitive atmosphere for many of those charged with such crimes, those convicted of them, and even for their relatives. While these efforts have come fully into their own in the post-9/11 era, they were drawn from a pre-9/11 paradigm. Between the material support statute and those special administrative measures, it has become possible for the government to pre-convict and in many cases pre-punish a small set of Muslim men.
Take the case of Ahmed Abu Ali, a young Palestinian-American who is now serving life in the Administrative Maximum Facility, a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, and is currently under special administrative measures that restrict his communications with the outside world. A university student in Saudi Arabia, he was arrested in 2003 by the Saudi government and held for 20 months without charges or access to a lawyer. The Washington Postreported that the U.S. government finally asked for his return just as his family filed a lawsuit in Washington.
At the time, it seemed like a victory for the family and the various human rights organizations that had supported them, but on arrival Ahmed was charged with material support for al-Qaeda and plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush. The evidence to convict him came from an anonymous alleged co-conspirator and from taped confessions he made, evidently after being tortured in Saudi Arabia, a common practice there. The evidence of his torture wascontested at his trial. The case was described by a staff member of Amnesty International USA as “unusual in the annals of U.S. outsourcing of torture.” An appeal of Ahmed’s 30-year sentence actually resulted in the imposition of an even more severe sentence: life without parole.
In addition, special administrative measures have been applied to him. These were originally established in 1996 to stop communications from prison inmates who could “pose a substantial risk of death or serious risk of injury.” The targets then were gang leaders. Each special administrative measure was theoretically to be designed to fit the precise dangers posed by a specific prisoner. Since 9/11, however, numerous virtually identical measures have been applied to Muslim men, often like Ahmed Abu Ali with no history of violence.
A question to Ahmed’s sister about how her brother is doing is answered only with a quick look. She is not allowed to say anything because special measures also prohibit family members from disclosing their communications with prisoners. They similarly prevent defense lawyers from speaking about their clients. It was for a breach of these special measures in relation to her client, the imprisoned blind sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, that lawyer Lynne Stewart was tried and sentenced to 10 years in prison in the Bush years.
Although these measures have been contested in court, few have ever been modified, much less thrown out. Those court challenges and evidence provided to the European Court of Human Rights by American lawyers have, however, provided a window into what one of them described as a regime of “draconian and inhumane treatment.”
Under such special administrative measures at the Metropolitan Correction Center in New York City, a prisoner lives with little natural light, no time in communal areas, no radio or TV, and sometimes no books or newspapers either, while mail and phone calls are permitted only with family, and even then are often suspended for minor infractions. Family visits are always no-contact ones conducted through plexiglass.
“The conditions have quite simply wreaked havoc on Mr X’s physical and mental well-being,” one lawyer wrote for the European Court of Human Rights, describing a seven-month period in which a prisoner at the Metropolitan Correction Center was allowed no family phone calls. Another highlighted his client’s lost concentration, which made it impossible to work on his case effectively. “Their world shrinks dramatically,” was the way Joshua Dratel, a lawyer who has represented several men under these measures,described the situation.
In cases where special administrative measures are in place pre-trial, such as the well-documented ordeal of American post-graduate student Syed Fahad Hashmi, lawyers have often been obliged to prepare cases without actually sitting with their clients, or being able to show them all court materials. After three pre-trial years mainly in solitary confinement under special administrative measures at the Metropolitan Correction Center, Hashmi accepted a government plea bargain of one count of material support for terrorism and was given a 15-year sentence.
His crime? He allowed an acquaintance to stay at his student apartment in London, use his cell phone, and store a duffel bag there. The bag contained ponchos and waterproof socks that were later supposedly delivered to al-Qaeda, while the phone was used by that acquaintance to make calls to co-conspirators in Britain.
Silencing Palestinian-Americans
Just as the Bush administration found the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and ignored them, so the principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” a part of Western civilization since Roman times, has all but disappeared for Muslims who face accusations of “material support” for terrorism.
Such cases have, at times, involved high-profile men and once received significant media attention. Civil rights activist and University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian, accused of being a leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (a State Department-designated terrorist organization), was, for instance, treated like a man already being punished for his crime even before his trial. Previously, he had been a respected American-Muslim political leader with contacts in the White House and in Congress. Now, walking to pre-trial meetings with his lawyers, his arms were shackled behind him, so that, humiliatingly, he had to carry his legal papers on his back.
Amnesty International described Al-Arian’s pre-trial detention in Coleman Federal Penitentiary as “gratuitously punitive.” It cited his 23-hour lockdown in his cell, the strip searches, the use of chains and shackles, the lack of access to any religious services, and the insistence on denying him a watch or clock in a windowless cell. He was transferred to 14 different prison facilities in 6 states. He ended up spending three and a half years in solitary confinement without being convicted of anything. At his trial, the government called 80 witnesses, including 21 from Israel, while his counsel called no defense witnesses, only citing the U.S. Constitution. A Florida jury nonetheless acquitted him on half of the counts, and deadlocked on the other half. (Ten out of 12 jurors wanted to acquit him on all charges.) He later struck a plea deal on one minor charge.
Today, the Palestinian-American professor is still in legal limbo, under house arrest, awaiting a judge’s ruling on whether he has to testify in a separate case. An articulate U.S. Muslim political leader, who helped bring in the Muslim vote for George W. Bush after the candidate came out publicly against the use of secret evidence in trials, when the Gore campaign did not and so contributed to his Florida victory in the 2000 presidential campaign, has been silenced for his openly expressed pro-Palestinian opinions.
Successful and influential Palestinian-American Ghassan Elashi, a founder and the chairman of what was once America’s largest Muslim charity, the Holy Land Foundation, and Shukri Abu Baker, its president, were similarly silenced along with three other foundation officials. The two of them received prison sentences of 65 years for giving charity to orphanages and community organizations in Gaza (also supported by the European Union and the U.S. Agency for International Development). The Holy Land leaders were accused of giving “material support” to a foreign terrorist organization: Hamas, the elected government in Gaza. There were no accusations of inciting or being involved in acts of violence. This case, like Professor Al Arian’s, would never have been possible if Justice Breyer’s views had prevailed at the Supreme Court.
Even then, it took a second trial before a jury returned a guilty verdict against the Holy Land leaders. Nancy Hollander, counsel for one of the men, summed up the situation this way: “The thought that somebody gets sixty-five years for providing charity is really shameful, and I believe this case will go down in history, as have others, as a shameful day.” In 2012, the Supreme Court refused to rehear the case, and four of the five convicted men remain confined to the especially restrictive “communications management unit” at the U.S. penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, where Muslims make up two-thirds of the inmates.
There were also 246 unindicted co-conspirators named in the Holy Land Foundation case, including major Muslim organizations. The case and the particularly long sentences sent a shot of fear through Muslim communities in the U.S., as was surely intended.
The men’s daughters still speak out on their fathers’ case. Noor Elashi, for example, told me, “His is the poster case for ‘material support.’” In the meantime, 15-minute weekly prison phone calls, monitored in real time from Washington, are the thinnest of threads to hold family relationships together, as are rare visits to distant prisons. Mariam Abu Ali once described to me her annual visit to her older brother Ahmed Abu Ali. The expense was difficult to absorb: two flights, a rental car, and a motel for a three-day visit of about four hours a day, for a family already shouldering heavy debts for legal fees.
The real ordeal, though, was emotional, not financial. “They bring him in shackled at the waist and legs,” she told me. “We see them take off the handcuffs as he puts his hands out through a gap in the door. It’s emotionally draining… he’s there but so far away behind the glass. Only one of us can hear him at a time as he speaks though a phone… I’ve tried to lip read when it isn’t my turn, but it really doesn’t work. I feel very exhausted and sometimes I fall asleep during the visit. I cry every time, especially when he leaves… It’s not like a death. You don’t grieve and then finish, because this is not in the past. In fact, it is not even in the back of my mind — it is always there… This is chronic after nine years and it is not going to end.”
In itself, solitary confinement has devastating effects, as Dr. Atul Gawande has vividly pointed out, and is becoming ever more common in U.S. prisons in breach of internationally recognized norms on the humane treatment of prisoners. It tends to break the will of inmates, sometimes even robbing them of their sanity. However, in its most extreme use, combining those special administrative measures with the isolation imposed in prison communication management units, it is mainly applied to American Muslims.
The stories of what happens to Muslim men today in U.S. prisons and of the judicial cases that land them there under the harshest of conditions bear a startling resemblance to the cages at Guantanamo Bay and the charade of a legal system that is still in operation there.
Miscarriages of Justice
In addition to the examples of prominent, formerly successful Palestinian-Americans, there are a series of haunting cases of newer Muslim arrivals in the U.S., each of them an evident miscarriage of justice. These include the Fort Dix Five, originally from Albania, and that of Imam Yassin Aref, an Iraqi Kurd. Their entrapment cases, typically based on “sting” operations manufactured by FBI informants, sent men respected in their communities into solitary confinement for long years on what were probably trumped-up charges. In such cases, the only “plot” is often manufactured by the government itself.
This, then, is the state of so many cases of “terrorism” in the U.S. today in which disparate Muslim men have been swept up in a system in which guilt is assumed and people’s lives are quickly turned into waking nightmares in what used to be called the “justice system.” Some great miscarriages of justice do get overturned. Black Panther Robert King spent 31 years in prison, 29 in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit. His release in 2001 came about by chance when his persistent letter writing attracted the attention of a young lawyer and the founder of The Body Shop, Anita Roddick, who became his champion alongside a grassroots campaign for his release. Since then, King has himself campaigned at home and abroad for the release of his two colleagues in “the Angola Three,” who still remain in prison, and against the system that could have broken him as it has so many others.
Thanks to the special administrative measures applied in his case, Ahmed Abu Ali cannot do what Robert King did, or what the lawyer and a friend of WikiLeaks informant Private Bradley Manning did to get his prison conditionswidely known, or what Mumia Abu Jamal has done throughout his 30 years in solitary confinement via his books and his talks on prison radio. Ahmed cannot contact the world outside in search of the support he and his family need, nor can his family members.
The painful impact of all this on the families is difficult to imagine. Chilean novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman once wrote that torture “presupposes the… abrogation of our capacity to imagine someone else’s suffering, to dehumanize him or her so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer… but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness.”
Perhaps such a state helps explain why people around the world are far more aware than most Americans of what happens to Muslim men in the post-9/11 “justice system.” The particular cruelty of the punishments they endure even before their unfair trials, will someday, like the abuses at Guantanamo, gain the attention they deserve.
Victoria Brittain, journalist and former editor at the Guardian, has authored or co-authored two plays and four books, including Enemy Combatant with Moazzam Begg. Her latest book, Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2013), has just been published. This is her second piece for TomDispatch.
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.
Copyright 2013 Victoria Brittain
]]>by Andrew J. Bacevich
via Tom Dispatch
For well over a decade now the United States has been “a nation at war.” Does that war have a name?
It did at the outset. After 9/11, George W. Bush’s administration wasted no time in [...]]]>
by Andrew J. Bacevich
via Tom Dispatch
For well over a decade now the United States has been “a nation at war.” Does that war have a name?
It did at the outset. After 9/11, George W. Bush’s administration wasted no time in announcing that the U.S. was engaged in a Global War on Terrorism, or GWOT. With few dissenters, the media quickly embraced the term. The GWOT promised to be a gargantuan, transformative enterprise. The conflict begun on 9/11 would define the age. In neoconservative circles, it was known as World War IV.
Upon succeeding to the presidency in 2009, however, Barack Obama without fanfare junked Bush’s formulation (as he did again in a speech at the National Defense University last week). Yet if the appellation went away, the conflict itself, shorn of identifying marks, continued.
Does it matter that ours has become and remains a nameless war? Very much so.
Names bestow meaning. When it comes to war, a name attached to a date can shape our understanding of what the conflict was all about. To specify when a war began and when it ended is to privilege certain explanations of its significance while discrediting others. Let me provide a few illustrations.
With rare exceptions, Americans today characterize the horrendous fraternal bloodletting of 1861-1865 as the Civil War. Yet not many decades ago, diehard supporters of the Lost Cause insisted on referring to that conflict as theWar Between the States or the War for Southern Independence (or even theWar of Northern Aggression). The South may have gone down in defeat, but the purposes for which Southerners had fought — preserving a distinctive way of life and the principle of states’ rights — had been worthy, even noble. So at least they professed to believe, with their preferred names for the war reflecting that belief.
Schoolbooks tell us that the Spanish-American War began in April 1898 and ended in August of that same year. The name and dates fit nicely with a widespread inclination from President William McKinley’s day to our own to frame U.S. intervention in Cuba as an altruistic effort to liberate that island from Spanish oppression.
Yet the Cubans were not exactly bystanders in that drama. By 1898, they had been fighting for years to oust their colonial overlords. And although hostilities in Cuba itself ended on August 12th, they dragged on in the Philippines, another Spanish colony that the United States had seized for reasons only remotely related to liberating Cubans. Notably, U.S. troops occupying the Philippines waged a brutal war not against Spaniards but against Filipino nationalists no more inclined to accept colonial rule by Washington than by Madrid. So widen the aperture to include this Cuban prelude and the Filipino postlude and you end up with something like this: The Spanish-American-Cuban-Philippines War of 1895-1902. Too clunky? How about the War for the American Empire? This much is for sure: rather than illuminating, the commonplace textbook descriptor serves chiefly to conceal.
Strange as it may seem, Europeans once referred to the calamitous events of 1914-1918 as the Great War. When Woodrow Wilson decided in 1917 to send an army of doughboys to fight alongside the Allies, he went beyond Great. According to the president, the Great War was going to be the War To End All Wars. Alas, things did not pan out as he expected. Perhaps anticipating the demise of his vision of permanent peace, War Department General Order 115, issued on October 7, 1919, formally declared that, at least as far as the United States was concerned, the recently concluded hostilities would be known simply as the World War.
In September 1939 – presto chango! — the World War suddenly became theFirst World War, the Nazi invasion of Poland having inaugurated a Second World War, also known as World War II or more cryptically WWII. To be sure, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin preferred the Great Patriotic War. Although this found instant — almost unanimous — favor among Soviet citizens, it did not catch on elsewhere.
Does World War II accurately capture the events it purports to encompass? With the crusade against the Axis now ranking alongside the crusade against slavery as a myth-enshrouded chapter in U.S. history to which all must pay homage, Americans are no more inclined to consider that question than to consider why a playoff to determine the professional baseball championship of North America constitutes a “World Series.”
In fact, however convenient and familiar, World War II is misleading and not especially useful. The period in question saw at least two wars, each only tenuously connected to the other, each having distinctive origins, each yielding a different outcome. To separate them is to transform the historical landscape.
On the one hand, there was the Pacific War, pitting the United States against Japan. Formally initiated by the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, it had in fact begun a decade earlier when Japan embarked upon a policy of armed conquest in Manchuria. At stake was the question of who would dominate East Asia. Japan’s crushing defeat at the hands of the United States, sealed by two atomic bombs in 1945, answered that question (at least for a time).
Then there was the European War, pitting Nazi Germany first against Great Britain and France, but ultimately against a grand alliance led by the United States, the Soviet Union, and a fast fading British Empire. At stake was the question of who would dominate Europe. Germany’s defeat resolved that issue (at least for a time): no one would. To prevent any single power from controlling Europe, two outside powers divided it.
This division served as the basis for the ensuing Cold War, which wasn’t actually cold, but also (thankfully) wasn’t World War III, the retrospective insistence of bellicose neoconservatives notwithstanding. But when did theCold War begin? Was it in early 1947, when President Harry Truman decided that Stalin’s Russia posed a looming threat and committed the United States to a strategy of containment? Or was it in 1919, when Vladimir Lenin decided that Winston Churchill’s vow to “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle” posed a looming threat to the Russian Revolution, with an ongoing Anglo-American military intervention evincing a determination to make good on that vow?
Separating the war against Nazi Germany from the war against Imperial Japan opens up another interpretive possibility. If you incorporate the European conflict of 1914-1918 and the European conflict of 1939-1945 into a single narrative, you get a Second Thirty Years War (the first having occurred from 1618-1648) — not so much a contest of good against evil, as a mindless exercise in self-destruction that represented the ultimate expression of European folly.
So, yes, it matters what we choose to call the military enterprise we’ve been waging not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in any number of other countries scattered hither and yon across the Islamic world. Although the Obama administration appears no more interested than the Bush administration in saying when that enterprise will actually end, the date we choose as its starting point also matters.
Although Washington seems in no hurry to name its nameless war — and will no doubt settle on something self-serving or anodyne if it ever finally addresses the issue — perhaps we should jump-start the process. Let’s consider some possible options, names that might actually explain what’s going on.
The Long War: Coined not long after 9/11 by senior officers in the Pentagon, this formulation never gained traction with either civilian officials or the general public. Yet the Long War deserves consideration, even though — or perhaps because — it has lost its luster with the passage of time.
At the outset, it connoted grand ambitions buoyed by extreme confidence in the efficacy of American military might. This was going to be one for the ages, a multi-generational conflict yielding sweeping results.
The Long War did begin on a hopeful note. The initial entry into Afghanistan and then into Iraq seemed to herald “home by Christmas” triumphal parades. Yet this soon proved an illusion as victory slipped from Washington’s grasp. By 2005 at the latest, events in the field had dashed the neo-Wilsonian expectations nurtured back home.
With the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan dragging on, “long” lost its original connotation. Instead of “really important,” it became a synonym for “interminable.” Today, the Long War does succinctly capture the experience of American soldiers who have endured multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
For Long War combatants, the object of the exercise has become to persist. As for winning, it’s not in the cards. The Long War just might conclude by the end of 2014 if President Obama keeps his pledge to end the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan and if he avoids getting sucked into Syria’s civil war. So the troops may hope.
The War Against Al-Qaeda: It began in August 1996 when Osama bin Laden issued a “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” i.e., Saudi Arabia. In February 1998, a second bin Laden manifesto announced that killing Americans, military and civilian alike, had become “an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”
Although President Bill Clinton took notice, the U.S. response to bin Laden’s provocations was limited and ineffectual. Only after 9/11 did Washington take this threat seriously. Since then, apart from a pointless excursion into Iraq (where, in Saddam Hussein’s day, al-Qaeda did not exist), U.S. attention has been focused on Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have waged the longest war in American history, and on Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, where a CIA drone campaign is ongoing. By the end of President Obama’s first term, U.S. intelligence agencies were reporting that a combined CIA/military campaign had largely destroyed bin Laden’s organization. Bin Laden himself, of course, was dead.
Could the United States have declared victory in its unnamed war at this point? Perhaps, but it gave little thought to doing so. Instead, the national security apparatus had already trained its sights on various al-Qaeda “franchises” and wannabes, militant groups claiming the bin Laden brand and waging their own version of jihad. These offshoots emerged in the Maghreb, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, and — wouldn’t you know it — post-Saddam Iraq, among other places. The question as to whether they actually posed a danger to the United States got, at best, passing attention — the label “al-Qaeda” eliciting the same sort of Pavlovian response that the word “communist” once did.
Americans should not expect this war to end anytime soon. Indeed, the Pentagon’s impresario of special operations recently speculated — by no means unhappily — that it would continue globally for “at least 10 to 20 years.” Freely translated, his statement undoubtedly means: “No one really knows, but we’re planning to keep at it for one helluva long time.”
The War For/Against/About Israel: It began in 1948. For many Jews, the founding of the state of Israel signified an ancient hope fulfilled. For many Christians, conscious of the sin of anti-Semitism that had culminated in the Holocaust, it offered a way to ease guilty consciences, albeit mostly at others’ expense. For many Muslims, especially Arabs, and most acutely Arabs who had been living in Palestine, the founding of the Jewish state represented a grave injustice. It was yet another unwelcome intrusion engineered by the West — colonialism by another name.
Recounting the ensuing struggle without appearing to take sides is almost impossible. Yet one thing seems clear: in terms of military involvement, the United States attempted in the late 1940s and 1950s to keep its distance. Over the course of the 1960s, this changed. The U.S. became Israel’s principal patron, committed to maintaining (and indeed increasing) its military superiority over its neighbors.
In the decades that followed, the two countries forged a multifaceted “strategic relationship.” A compliant Congress provided Israel with weapons and other assistance worth many billions of dollars, testifying to what has become an unambiguous and irrevocable U.S. commitment to the safety and well-being of the Jewish state. The two countries share technology and intelligence. Meanwhile, just as Israel had disregarded U.S. concerns when it came to developing nuclear weapons, it ignored persistent U.S. requests that it refrain from colonizing territory that it has conquered.
When it comes to identifying the minimal essential requirements of Israeli security and the terms that will define any Palestinian-Israeli peace deal, the United States defers to Israel. That may qualify as an overstatement, but only slightly. Given the Israeli perspective on those requirements and those terms — permanent military supremacy and a permanently demilitarized Palestine allowed limited sovereignty — the War For/Against/About Israel is unlikely to end anytime soon either. Whether the United States benefits from the perpetuation of this war is difficult to say, but we are in it for the long haul.
The War for the Greater Middle East: I confess that this is the name I would choose for Washington’s unnamed war and is, in fact, the title of a course I teach. (A tempting alternative is the Second Hundred Years War, the “first” having begun in 1337 and ended in 1453.)
This war is about to hit the century mark, its opening chapter coinciding with the onset of World War I. Not long after the fighting on the Western Front in Europe had settled into a stalemate, the British government, looking for ways to gain the upper hand, set out to dismantle the Ottoman Empire whose rulers had foolishly thrown in their lot with the German Reich against the Allies.
By the time the war ended with Germany and the Turks on the losing side, Great Britain had already begun to draw up new boundaries, invent states, and install rulers to suit its predilections, while also issuing mutually contradictory promises to groups inhabiting these new precincts of its empire. Toward what end? Simply put, the British were intent on calling the shots from Egypt to India, whether by governing through intermediaries or ruling directly. The result was a new Middle East and a total mess.
London presided over this mess, albeit with considerable difficulty, until the end of World War II. At this point, by abandoning efforts to keep Arabs and Zionists from one another’s throats in Palestine and by accepting the partition of India, they signaled their intention to throw in the towel. Alas, Washington proved more than willing to assume Britain’s role. The lure of oil was strong. So too were the fears, however overwrought, of the Soviets extending their influence into the region.
Unfortunately, the Americans enjoyed no more success in promoting long-term, pro-Western stability than had the British. In some respects, they only made things worse, with the joint CIA-MI6 overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953 offering a prime example of a “success” that, to this day, has never stopped breeding disaster.
Only after 1980 did things get really interesting, however. The Carter Doctrine promulgated that year designated the Persian Gulf a vital national security interest and opened the door to greatly increased U.S. military activity not just in the Gulf, but also throughout the Greater Middle East (GME). Between 1945 and 1980, considerable numbers of American soldiers lost their lives fighting in Asia and elsewhere. During that period, virtually none were killed fighting in the GME. Since 1990, in contrast, virtually none have been killed fighting anywhere except in the GME.
What does the United States hope to achieve in its inherited and unending War for the Greater Middle East? To pacify the region? To remake it in our image? To drain its stocks of petroleum? Or just keeping the lid on? However you define the war’s aims, things have not gone well, which once again suggests that, in some form, it will continue for some time to come. If there’s any good news here, it’s the prospect of having ever more material for my seminar, which may soon expand into a two-semester course.
The War Against Islam: This war began nearly 1,000 years ago and continued for centuries, a storied collision between Christendom and the Muslim ummah. For a couple of hundred years, periodic eruptions of large-scale violence occurred until the conflict finally petered out with the last crusade sometime in the fourteenth century.
In those days, many people had deemed religion something worth fighting for, a proposition to which the more sophisticated present-day inhabitants of Christendom no longer subscribe. Yet could that religious war have resumed in our own day? Professor Samuel Huntington thought so, although he styled the conflict a “clash of civilizations.” Some militant radical Islamists agree with Professor Huntington, citing as evidence the unwelcome meddling of “infidels,” mostly wearing American uniforms, in various parts of the Muslim world. Some militant evangelical Christians endorse this proposition, even if they take a more favorable view of U.S. troops occupying and drones targeting Muslim countries.
In explaining the position of the United States government, religious scholars like George W. Bush and Barack (Hussein!) Obama have consistently expressed a contrary view. Islam is a religion of peace, they declare, part of the great Abrahamic triad. That the other elements of that triad are likewise committed to peace is a proposition that Bush, Obama, and most Americans take for granted, evidence not required. There should be no reason why Christians, Jews, and Muslims can’t live together in harmony.
Still, remember back in 2001 when, in an unscripted moment, President Bush described the war barely begun as a “crusade”? That was just a slip of the tongue, right? If not, we just might end up calling this one the Eternal War.
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University and a TomDispatch regular. His next book, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, will appear in September.
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.
Copyright 2013 Andrew J. Bacevich
]]>