Not much to say about this other than that it’s surprisingly candid.
The Pentagon is amping up efforts to explain its war strategy in Afghanistan to an increasingly war-weary public.
….
“We are trying to get back to the Petraeus model that worked so well in Iraq,” said Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell.
Some creepy excerpts:
A curious line I found skimming through the most recent war supplemental:
For an additional amount for ‘Defense Working Capital Funds’, $1,134,887,000, to remain available until expended.
It sounded a little like one of those shady investment wings that large industrial corporations have been using, or in this context, a slush fund. I looked up some documents and found a few things, starting with this report (pdf) from the DoD comptroller. The stated purpose:
A. Revolving funds were established to satisfy recurring Department of Defense requirements using a businesslike buyer-and-seller approach. The generators of requirements justify the need for funds to the Congress, but are not always the organizations that execute the requirement. In some instances, the ”customers” or “buyers” contract with DoD “provider” or ”seller” organizations that have expertise in the service or product required, and operate under business financial management principles. Unlike profit-oriented commercial businesses, the revolving funds goal is to break even over the long term. Revolving fund selling prices established in the budget are stabilized or fixed during execution to protect customers from unforeseen fluctuations that would impact on their ability to execute the programs approved by the Congress.
Multiple GAO reports have been saying that this has not been happening.
David Weigel resigns from the Washington Post for his unprofessional behavior, making an apology on the way out.
I’m a member of an off-the-record list-serv called “Journolist,” founded by my colleague Ezra Klein. Last Monday, I was deluged with angry e-mail after posting a story about Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.) that was linked by the Drudge Report with a headline intimating that I defended his roughing-up of a young man with a camera; after this, the Washington Examiner posted a gossip item about my dancing at a friend’s wedding. Unwisely, I lashed out to Journolist, which I’ve come to view as a place to talk bluntly to friends.
The WaPo ombudsman explains that Weigel, “bears responsibility for sarcastic and scornful comments he made,” on Journolist, which he describes as “supposedly private” and that this raises questions about the role of Serious bloggers.
With bloggers such as Weigel, “I think The Post needs to decide what it wants to be online,” said Dan Gainor, a vice president at the conservative Media Research Center. “Does it want to be opinion? Or, does it want to be news? The problem here was that it was never clear.”
“If it’s going to be opinion, it ought to have somebody on the conservative side — something Dave Weigel never was,” he said.
If The Post wants to assign a “good neutral reporter” to cover conservatives, “we’d be thrilled,” said Gainor. But quickly added, Weigel “wasn’t one. He looked at the conservative movement as if he was visiting a zoo. We’re more than that.”
Gainor raises valid points. Klein’s blog posts clearly pass through a liberal prism. For that reason, liberals have a comfort level with what he writes, and conservatives know where he’s coming from, even if they disagree. In contrast, Weigel’s blog seemed to confuse many conservatives who contacted me. Was he supposed to be a neutral reporter, some wondered? Others complained that he was a liberal trying to write about conservatives he disdained.
Which brings me to the Serious “liberal” Ezra Klein, who made some very revealing comments on this and what he sees as related.
I was on all sorts of e-mail lists, but none that quite got at the daily work of my job: Following policy and political trends in both the expert community and the media. But I always knew how much I was missing. There were only so many phone calls I could make in a day. There were only so many times when I knew the right question to ask. By not thinking of the right person to interview, or not asking the right question when I got them on the phone, or not intuiting that an economist would have a terrific take on the election, I was leaving insights on the table.
That was the theory behind Journolist: An insulated space where the lure of a smart, ongoing conversation would encourage journalists, policy experts and assorted other observers to share their insights with one another.
Suddenly, he brings in the Rolling Stone profile that got McChrystal fired and reporting on Afghanistan generally.
In a column about Stanley McChrystal today, David Brooks talks about the union of electronic text, unheralded transparency, 24/7 media and a culture that has not yet settled on new rules for what is, and isn’t, private, and what is, and isn’t, newsworthy. “The exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important,” he writes.
….
Broadly speaking, neither journalism nor the public has quite decided on how to handle this explosion of information about people we’re interested in. A newspaper reporter opposing the Afghanistan war in a news story is doing something improper. A newspaper reporter telling his wife he opposes the war is being perfectly proper. If someone had been surreptitiously taping that reporter’s conversations with his wife, there’d be no doubt that was a violation of privacy, and the gathered remarks and observations were illegitimate. If a batch of that reporter’s e-mails were obtained and forwarded along? People are less sure what to do about it. So, for now, they use it.
So is he implying that being critical of the war in Afghanistan is grounds for being fired? This is pretty interesting because the public is split over Afghanistan:
You would think that a roughly even split would merit commentary “opposing the Afghanistan war” occasionally, especially through the “liberal prism” (a majority of Democrats oppose the war), but no, it’s the job of Serious People to determine the range of acceptable opinion. If they were serious (as opposed to Serious) about reporting, they might raise some of the following points:
First, this argument tends to lump the various groups we are contending with together, and it suggests that all of them are equally committed to attacking the United States. In fact, most of the people we are fighting in Afghanistan aren’t dedicated jihadis seeking to overthrow Arab monarchies, establish a Muslim caliphate, or mount attacks on U.S. soil. Their agenda is focused on local affairs, such as what they regard as the political disempowerment of Pashtuns and illegitimate foreign interference in their country. Moreover, the Taliban itself is more of a loose coalition of different groups than a tightly unified and hierarchical organization, which is why some experts believe we ought to be doing more to divide the movement and “flip” the moderate elements to our side. Unfortunately, the “safe haven” argument wrongly suggests that the Taliban care as much about attacking America as bin Laden does.
Second, while it is true that Mullah Omar gave Osama bin Laden a sanctuary both before and after 9/11, it is by no means clear that they would give him free rein to attack the United States again. Protecting al Qaeda back in 2001 brought no end of trouble to Mullah Omar and his associates, and if they were lucky enough to regain power, it is hard to believe they would give us a reason to come back in force.
Third, it is hardly obvious that Afghan territory provides an ideal “safe haven” for mounting attacks on the United States. The 9/11 plot was organized out of Hamburg, not Kabul or Kandahar, but nobody is proposing that we send troops to Germany to make sure there aren’t “safe havens” operating there. In fact, if al Qaeda has to hide out somewhere, I’d rather they were in a remote, impoverished, land-locked and isolated area from which it is hard to do almost anything. The “bases” or “training camps” they could organize in Pakistan or Afghanistan might be useful for organizing a Mumbai-style attack, but they would not be particularly valuable if you were trying to do a replay of 9/11 (not many flight schools there), or if you were trying to build a weapon of mass destruction. And in a post-9/11 environment, it wouldn’t be easy for a group of al Qaeda operatives bent on a Mumbia-style operation get all the way to the United States. One cannot rule this sort of thing out, of course, but does that unlikely danger justify an open-ended commitment that is going to cost us more than $60 billion next year?
Fourth, in the unlikely event that a new Taliban government did give al Qaeda carte blanche to prepare attacks on the United States or its allies, the United States isn’t going to sit around and allow them to go about their business undisturbed. The Clinton administration wasn’t sure it was a good idea to go after al Qaeda’s training camps back in the 1990s (though they eventually did, albeit somewhat half-heartedly), but that was before 9/11. We know more now and the U.S. government is hardly going to be bashful about attacking such camps in the future. (Remember: we are already doing that in Pakistan, with the tacit approval of the Pakistani government). Put differently, having a Taliban government in Kabul would hardly make Afghanistan a “safe haven” today or in the future, because the United States has lots of weapons it can use against al Qaeda that don’t require a large U.S. military presence on the ground.
Fifth, as well-informed critics have already observed, the primary motivation for extremist organizations like the Taliban and Al Qaeda is their opposition to what they regard as unwarranted outside interference in their own societies. Increasing the U.S. military presence and engaging in various forms of social engineering is as likely to reinforce such motivations as it is to eliminate them. Obama is hoping that a different strategy will eventually undercut support for the Taliban and strengthen the central government, but it is still an open question whether more American involvement will have positive or negative effects. If we are in fact making things worse, then we may be encouraging precisely the outcome we are trying to avoid.
The humanitarian purpose? The State Department was alright with the situation in the 90’s. From a 1997 State Department cable:
But it’s the guy that reports on tea partiers that gets fired for a lack of objectivity.
Which is to say none, really. Keeping in mind the bankruptcy of the “safe haven” argument, let’s see what government officials and the press have to say about changes after McChrystal’s embarrassing exit.
A debate over the administration’s war strategy is already underway, as Democratic and Republicans lawmakers clashed Sunday over whether Obama should rethink his pledge now that a new commander will oversee the war.”I’m against a timetable,” Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Warning that a timetable emboldens the enemy to wait for Americans to depart, he added, “A high-ranking Taliban prisoner said, ‘You’ve got the watches and we’ve got the time.’ ”
But Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the committee chairman, said a timetable is crucial to show “urgency to the Afghan government that they must take responsibility … for their own security.”
“The only way you get things done is by setting dates,” Levin said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
The dispute over the start of the U.S. withdrawal is likely to be a prominent issue Tuesday when Petraeus faces senators in a hearing on his confirmation. Petraeus, now head of all U.S. forces in the Middle East, was chosen for the top post in Afghanistan after the removal of Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal for comments critical of civilian leaders in a magazine article.
And as a bonus:
CIA Director Leon Panetta, appearing on ABC News’s “This Week” on Sunday, said the agency had awarded Xe Services LLC — the company formerly known as Blackwater — a contract to protect its installations in Afghanistan. The contract, reported by the Washington Post to be worth $100 million, is in addition to a separate contract Xe has with the State Department to protect U.S. officials in the country.
Blackwater was involved by a series of controversial incidents, including a deadly shootout in Baghdad in 2007 that claimed the lives of Iraqi civilians and became a political liability for the U.S. government.
Extending the corporate safety net: ARPA-e
Recognizing the need to reevaluate the way the United States spurs innovation, the National Academies released a 2006 report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm”, that included the recommendation to establish an Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy (ARPA-E) within the Department of Energy (DOE). The America COMPETES Act (PDF 39 KB), signed into law in August of 2007, codified many of the recommendations in the National Academies report. Authorized but without an initial budget, ARPA-E received $400 million funding in April 2009 through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). ARPA-E is modeled after the successful Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the agency responsible for technological innovations such as the Internet and the stealth technology found in the F117A and other modern fighter aircraft. Specifically, ARPA-E was established and charged with the following objectives:
- To bring a freshness, excitement, and sense of mission to energy research that will attract many of the U.S.’s best and brightest minds—those of experienced scientists and engineers, and, especially, those of students and young researchers, including persons in the entrepreneurial world;
- To focus on creative “out-of-the-box” transformational energy research that industry by itself cannot or will not support due to its high risk but where success would provide dramatic benefits for the nation;
- To utilize an ARPA-like organization that is flat, nimble, and sparse, capable of sustaining for long periods of time those projects whose promise remains real, while phasing out programs that do not prove to be as promising as anticipated; and
- To create a new tool to bridge the gap between basic energy research and development/industrial innovation.
Would refraining from giving patents funded by public research to private corporations just this once really be that hard? I know it’s the standard for how we do things in the U.S., but getting this technology out there is kind of important.
It looks like while Blackwater is being sold, Mr. Prince is running off to the United Arab Emirates:
Sources close to Blackwater and its secretive owner Erik Prince claim that the embattled head of the world’s most infamous mercenary firm is planning to move to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Middle Eastern nation, a major hub for the US war industry, has no extradition treaty with the United States. In April, five of Prince’s top deputies were hit with a fifteen-count indictment by a federal grand jury on conspiracy, weapons and obstruction of justice charges. Among those indicted were Prince’s longtime number-two man, former Blackwater president Gary Jackson, former vice presidents William Matthews and Ana Bundy and Prince’s former legal counsel Andrew Howell.
Have fun with the corrupt Islamic monarchs!
Before, they concealed it behind a veneer of expertise and formal institutions, but their truly stunning failures have apparently given rise to a desire to do things a little more hands on and behind the scenes. The Atlantic has a new article about Paul Romer’s plan to force poor people around the world to behave how he wants them to. The entire article is a stunning example of just how shameless some hacks that serve as self-appointed sources of “enlightened opinion” are, but I’m going to keep it short and try to focus on the proposal.
Paul Romer is promoting the idea of “charter cities” where people with enough money and certainty about their benevolent intentions would actually buy themselves colonies:
By building urban oases of technocratic sanity, struggling nations could attract investment and jobs; private capital would flood in and foreign aid would not be needed….Romer looks to the chief source of legitimate coercion that exists today—the governments that preside over the world’s more successful countries. To launch new charter cities, he says, poor countries should lease chunks of territory to enlightened foreign powers, which would take charge as though presiding over some imperial protectorate. Romer’s prescription is not merely neo-medieval, in other words. It is also neo-colonial.
There’s really a lot to appreciate just in the wording here, such as “oases of technocratic sanity” which might well be surrounded by barren deserts of democracy, but again, I’m going to have to resist the urge because there’s a lot to cover.
To drive home the importance of good rules to economic growth, Romer sometimes shows a photograph of Guinean teenagers doing their homework under streetlights. The line of hunched, concentrating figures presents a mystery, Romer says; from the photo it is clear that the teens are not dirt poor, and youths like these generally own cell phones. Yet they evidently have no electric light at home, or they would not be studying by the curbside. “So here is the puzzle,” Romer declares: Why do these kids have access to a cutting-edge technology like the cell phone, but not to a 100-year-old technology for generating electric light in the home? The answer, in a word, is rules. Because of misguided price controls in the teenagers’ country, the local electricity utility has no incentive to connect their houses to the power grid. Their society lacks the rules that make technological advance meaningful.
You might be tempted to wonder why he’s so fascinated by this when his own country has problems like massive unemployment being exacerbated by employers increasingly performing credit checks to determine if they should hire people who can’t buy things because they don’t have jobs. A crucial requirement for enlightened foreign powers is that they never question their wisdom because it would pose a serious challenge to claims of enlightenment. This brings me to a passage about Cuba:
It must have occurred to [Raúl] Castro, Romer says, that his island could do with its own version of Hong Kong; and perhaps that the Guantánamo Bay zone, over which Cuba has already ceded sovereignty to the United States, would be a good place to build one. “Castro goes to the prime minister of Canada and says, ‘Look, the Yankees have a terrible PR problem. They want to get out. Why don’t you, Canada, take over? Run a special administrative zone. Allow a new city to be built up there,’” Romer muses, channeling a statesmanlike version of Raúl Castro that Cuba-watchers might not recognize. “Some of my citizens will move into that city,” Romer-as-Castro continues. “Others will hold back. But this will be the gateway that will connect the modern economy and the modern world to my country.”
How Cuba ceded Guantanamo Bay provides a great deal of insight on how little has changed in colonialism. US control stems back to a 1903 treaty imposed by force on a defeated Cuba at the end of the Spanish-American War. Cuba had been a Spanish colony until the Cubans waged a war for independence that they were on the verge of winning when the United States declared war ostensibly against the Spanish, but in reality against a truly liberated Cuba. Cuba contests this claim and has been refusing to cash checks for “rent” on the territory for quite some time.
Romer has apparently already tried to do this in Madagascar with very ugly results as “the idea of giving up vast swaths of territory to foreigners [became] increasingly unpopular.”
“Anything that involves land can be manipulated by people who want to rise up against a leader,” [Romer] began. “You have to find a place where there’s a strong enough leader with enough legitimacy to do this knowing that he’s going to get attacked. It narrows the options quite a bit. But we shouldn’t give up without trying a few more places.” In short, a disappointment with one client is no excuse for failing to pitch other ones. Any entrepreneur knows that.
To summarize the virtues of this scheme as seen by its proponents, I can’t really top direct quotes:
Rather than getting a vote at the ballot box, Romer is saying, the residents of a charter city would have to vote with their feet. Their leaders would be accountable—but only to the rich voters in the country that appointed them.
….
Romer is hardly the only person to doubt that democracy is a necessary condition for economic progress. And to the extent that opt-in charter cities offer a third way—something between pure democracy and pure authoritarianism—those who care for liberty might do well to embrace the experiment. Charter cities make it harder for authoritarians to claim that their system offers the only fast route out of poverty.
The Center for Public Integrity reports another factor in the Deepwater Horizon response:
At least three Coast Guard aircraft and one cutter suffered serious mechanical problems that delayed, cut short or aborted rescue missions during the Gulf incident, the logs reveal. The Coast Guard averaged one problem for every seven rescue sorties it operated during the first three days of the oil spill crisis in April, according to logs obtained by the Center.
Just three months earlier, 10 of the 12 Coast Guard cutters dispatched to help evacuate victims of the Haiti earthquake encountered serious mechanical problems that affected their ability to conduct rescue missions, officials confirm. Two cutters were so impacted that they had to return to port for repairs, and aircraft were diverted from search and rescue to fly parts in for others, according to officials.It’s a situation that has been in the making for years, according to documents and interviews. The Coast Guard’s multibillion-dollar effort to modernize its fleet was mismanaged by the Coast Guard and contractors during the Bush administration, leaving it without much of the new equipment it paid for.
…..
But the Coast Guard also has itself to blame for many of the problems, according to a Department of Homeland Security inspector general review and Government Accountability Office investigations.
Between 2002 and 2008, the Guard spent $1.8 billion on its Deepwater modernization project to build the next generation of its cutters, only to find many of the new ships were either unusable or required expensive repairs because of design defects.
For instance, it abandoned eight new 123-foot patrol cutters because of such problems as “deformation and cracks in the hull,” records show. That left the Guard to rely on boats that were decades old. It is now trying to recoup some of its money from Integrated Coast Guard Systems, a contractor that was formed by Lockheed Martin Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp. specifically for the Deepwater project.
In the meantime we’ll just award Northrop Grumman with more contracts for really important tasks:
Northrop Grumman Corp. will provide operational support for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s regional preparedness exercises under a 20-month, $5.5 million task order.
Under the terms of the task order, the company will support homeland security preparedness exercises in the 28 states and U.S. territories in FEMA regions VI through X, which includes the south central United States to the West Coast.
The company will design, develop, conduct, evaluate and provide operational support for the exercises.
Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.
Commanders are developing plans for increasing the use of such forces in Somalia, where a Special Operations raid last year killed the alleged head of al-Qaeda in East Africa. Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group.
This has been making me feel borderline insane for a while now. I’ve been able to find government documents acknowledging the existence of these forces under various special programs such as Section 1206, but I haven’t had a way of finding all of them. Congress is so awful about executive oversight that I’m not sure the extent to which they’re even aware for that matter. The authorization for operations in Pakistan for example are covered by one sentence about a “Pakistan counterinsurgency fund” in the annual defense authorization bill.
The report continues:
Special Operations commanders have also become a far more regular presence at the White House than they were under George W. Bush’s administration, when most briefings on potential future operations were run through the Pentagon chain of command and were conducted by the defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“We have a lot more access,” a second military official said. “They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly.”
The White House, he said, is “asking for ideas and plans . . . calling us in and saying, ‘Tell me what you can do. Tell me how you do these things.’ ”
The Special Operations capabilities requested by the White House go beyond unilateral strikes and include the training of local counterterrorism forces and joint operations with them. In Yemen, for example, “we are doing all three,” the official said. Officials who spoke about the increased operations were not authorized to discuss them on the record.
At least some of this is likely run by contractors, particularly the “counterinsurgency” training like they’re doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Jeremy Scahill provides additional details:
The expansion of special forces includes both traditional special forces, often used in training missions, and those known for carrying out covert and lethal, “direct actions.” The Nation has learned from well-placed special operations sources that among the countries where elite special forces teams working for the Joint Special Operations Command have been deployed under the Obama administration are: Iran, Georgia, Ukraine, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru, Yemen, Pakistan (including in Balochistan) and the Philippines. These teams have also at times deployed in Turkey, Belgium, France and Spain. JSOC has also supported US Drug Enforcement Agency operations in Colombia and Mexico. The frontline for these forces at the moment, sources say, are Yemen and Somalia. “In both those places, there are ongoing unilateral actions,” said a special operations source. “JSOC does a lot in Pakistan too.” Additionally, these US special forces at times work alongside other nations’ special operations forces in conducting missions in their home countries. A US special operations source described one such action where US forces teamed up with Georgian forces hunting Chechen rebels.
….
Sources say that much of the most sensitive and lethal operations conducted by JSOC are carried out by Task Force 714, which was once commanded by Gen. McChrystal, the current commander of the war in Afghanistan. Under the Obama administration, according to sources, TF-714 has expanded and recently changed its classified name. The Task Force’s budge has reportedly expanded 40% on the request of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, and has added additional forces. “It was at Mullen’s request and they can do more now,” according to a special forces source. “You don’t have to work out of the embassies, you don’t have to play nice with [the State Department], you can just set up anywhere really.”
Further reading on how this stuff works:
Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse: The Shadow War, 666 to 1
Anand Gopal: Afraid of the Dark in Afghanistan
Jeremy Scahill: The Secret US War in Pakistan, The Expanding US War in Pakistan
I happened to have been following this story closely for several days before the attack, so watching the response has been one of the most absurd spectacles I’ve ever seen the media go through–not a statement I make lightly. This is actually the ninth, and by far the largest, attempt by the group that organized this. This story necessarily starts long before the passengers were killed by Israeli commandos. The website for the Free Gaza Movement has details on all of their trips (the first was in August 2008). On May 24th, as some of the ships were preparing to depart from Cyprus, the Sydney Morning Herald wrote a long story describing the groups latest trip that provides good background.
By May 27th, the Israeli navy was preparing to send commandos after several boats filled with unarmed human rights activists from around the world, including a Nobel peace laureate and a former UN Assistant Secretary General from Ireland, three German MPs, an Israeli Arab MK, a Swedish author, a former Prime Minister of Malaysia, a former diplomat and a retired Colonel (who, in his service, survived a previous run-in with the Israeli military) from the United States, a Holocaust survivor, and six to seven hundred others from over twenty countries.
It’s worth noting that there wasn’t exactly unanimous support for attacking the ships carrying aid to Israel, nor is there unanimous support for the policies necessitating the aid in the first place. Israeli organizations petitioned the government to allow the ships through, and a minority in the government held the same position, but the government’s insane right-wing majority was convinced that breaking the blockade was somehow a threat to Israel. Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy wrote a damning column about the decision:
The Israeli propaganda machine has reached new highs its hopeless frenzy. It has distributed menus from Gaza restaurants, along with false information. It embarrassed itself by entering a futile public relations battle, which it might have been better off never starting. They want to maintain the ineffective, illegal and unethical siege on Gaza and not let the “peace flotilla” dock off the Gaza coast? There is nothing to explain, certainly not to a world that will never buy the web of explanations, lies and tactics.
Only in Israel do people still accept these tainted goods. Reminiscent of a pre-battle ritual from ancient times, the chorus cheered without asking questions. White uniformed soldiers got ready in our name. Spokesmen delivered their deceptive explanations in our name. The grotesque scene is at our expense. And virtually none of us have disturbed the performance.
The chorus has been singing songs of falsehood and lies. We are all in the chorus saying there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. We are all part of the chorus claiming the occupation of Gaza has ended, and that the flotilla is a violent attack on Israeli sovereignty – the cement is for building bunkers and the convoy is being funded by the Turkish Muslim Brotherhood. The Israeli siege of Gaza will topple Hamas and free Gilad Shalit. Foreign Ministry spokesman Yossi Levy, one of the most ridiculous of the propagandists, outdid himself when he unblinkingly proclaimed that the aid convoy headed toward Gaza was a violation of international law. Right. Exactly.
The following day, a still unknown number of civilians were dead (likely somewhere between ten and twenty) and dozens more were wounded. There was no turning back now. The government and the military began a public relations campaign to try to minimize the fallout by selectively censoring the domestic media, severely restricting the foreign media, and feeding lies to the US media to be relayed more or less uncritically. This is the point where the absurdity really begins.
It seems that the problem isn’t what happened, but how it will be perceived which is itself a very confusing issue (with overt racial overtones).
A columnist at the Jerusalem Post, where Wolf Blitzer began his career, fumes:
As expected, the provocation mounted by Muslim organizations in association with “peace activists” was successful beyond their wildest dreams: There were casualties. They can now continue pointing the finger at Israel and blaming it for everything under the sun. The organizers of the flotilla, a fanatic Turkish organization known under the initials IHH and its European partners, had repeatedly and explicitly declared before setting out that their purpose was to break the Gaza siege and embarrass Israel.
The humanitarian supplies brought on board were just a ploy to hide their avowed objective. Israel did all it could to stop it. Appeals to Turkey went unheeded and that country let the flotilla sail and gave its assistance. Israel offered to have all humanitarian supplies brought to the Ashdod port where they could then be sent to Gaza through our crossings. Israel also asked the “peace militants” to transmit a letter to captured IDF soldier Gilad Schalit, who has been in Hamas custody for almost four years. The militants were not interested in any humanitarian operation. They wanted to carry out their joint Arab-European propaganda offensive against Israel in order to delegitimize the Jewish state, deepen its isolation and provoke an international outcry.
….
Unfortunately we are the target of an Arab and international propaganda offensive characterized by the deliberate refusal to present the Israeli positions and indeed anything positive about that country. This is “political correctness” in its starkest expression. The organizers of the so-called humanitarian operation understood only too well that they could go on with their plans secure in the support of the Arab and European media.
A Haaretz story details how some Israelis (who probably haven’t been told the truth), “brandished their keyboards and went to war, fighting to save Israel’s image” on Facebook and Twitter.
On the floor of Israel’s legislative body, the Knesset, a legislator who was aboard one of the ships (and treated the wounded) is denounced by a member of the governing party:
MK Miri Regev (Likud) said Zoabi is “responsible for a double crime: Joining terrorists, and a moral crime against the state of Israel.” Regev then called at her in Arabic: “Go to Gaza, you traitor.”
“She sat here over a year ago and pledged allegiance to the state of Israel and its laws,” Regev claimed. “I have no intention of stifling free speech, but in the case of MK Zoabi – it is not freedom of speech. The Gaza flotilla was a terrorist flotilla and MK Zoabi needs to be punished. We don’t need Trojan horses in the Knesset.”
This narrative is extremely familiar to our own right-wing nuts and they’ve carried this narrative over to the United States seamlessly. Michelle Malkin has dubbed it the “thug flotilla” and hopes the Israelis kill the passengers on the remaining boat carrying the thuggish 1976 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire.
Former Reagan Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts explains the mentality of his estranged ideological allies:
Many Christian evangelicals, brainwashed by their pastors that it is God’s will for Americans to protect Israel, will believe the Israeli story, especially when it is unlikely they will ever hear any other. Conservative Americans, especially on Memorial Day when they are celebrating feats of American arms, will admire Israel for its toughness. Here in north Georgia where I am at the moment, I have heard several say, admiringly, “Them, Israelis, they don’t put up with nuthin.”
Conservative Americans want the US to be like Israel. They do not understand why the US doesn’t stop pissing around after nine years and just go ahead and defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. They don’t understand why the US didn’t defeat whoever was opposing American forces in Iraq. Conservatives are incensed that America had to “win” the war by buying off the Iraqis and putting them on the US payroll. Israel murders people and then blames its victims. This appeals to American conservatives, who want the US to do the same.
Coincidentally, another former Reagan official was on one of the boats and has been interviewed by NPR:
“We awakened to have the commandos already on board. They’d come up very quietly in their little boats, their Zodiacs. There was just enough time to get a small passive resistance effort started — tried to keep them out of the wheelhouse and away from the engine room. Some people got roughed up, punched and kicked, and you know, arms twisted, and some cuts and bruises and things along that line. Nothing critical at that point.”
“We had talked about what to do and how to be non-violent because the last thing you want to do is provoke armed soldiers. I’ve seen three newspapers since the plane landed in New Jersey, and several times the Israelis have been quoted as saying that their guys were armed with paint guns. Well, indeed they were, as well as pistols and automatic rifles and stun(?) grenades and pepper spray.”
“It was a humanitarian aid mission. And I cannot speak for anybody on that trip except me and the people that I was associated with in going over there. And our hope was that the Israelis come to the conclusion that what they should do, which would avoid the kinds of things that have happened now, was to let the materials come in.”
“Well, you now, nobody wants anything bad to happen to Israel, understand, and I’m certainly in that category. But I fear that bad things are going to happen if they keep doing what they’re doing. And not just to Israel, bad things are going to happen to Palestinians and to Americans, because of what is happening in Palestine and also because of what is NOT happening in Palestine. All three groups are going to suffer.”
I never imagined I’d be wanting people to listen to a former Reagan diplomat so badly.
The Right has been throwing a fit about a mosque to be built at “Ground Zero” in New York. As the NYT notes,
Since long before the Islamist terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, a storefront mosque has been sitting on West Broadway in TriBeCa, a dozen blocks from the World Trade Center. No one seems to have ever minded its being there.
And
No one is known to have protested the fact that three blocks from ground zero, on Murray Street off West Broadway, there is a strip joint. It prefers to call itself a gentlemen’s club. A man stood on the street corner the other day handing out free passes to willing gentlemen.
On Church Street, around the corner from where Cordoba House would rise, there is a store that sells pornographic videos and an assortment of sex toys. A few doors east of the planned Islamic center, there is an Off-Track Betting office.
So what is all the fuss about? Starting with the mainstream on this, Bret Stephens at the WSJ enlightens us:
Opponents also argue that building the center so close to Ground Zero is an insult to the memory of the victims of 9/11. Germany has spent six decades in conspicuous and mainly sincere atonement for Nazi crimes. But it surely has no plans to showcase the tolerant society it has become by building a cultural center down the road from Auschwitz. Japan is no doubt equally disinclined to finance a Shinto shrine in the vicinity of the Pearl Harbor memorial.
Actually, Auschwitz is in Poland and the Poles turned it into a memorial site in 1947. As for the second example, the US has caused all sorts of problems with military bases on Okinawa since the end of World War II. For what it’s worth, Okinawa is something like a Japanese colony where one of the most horrifying battles in human history took place between the US and Japan, with Okinawans caught in the middle. The Japanese military forced many of them to commit mass suicide with grenades so they wouldn’t be captured.
Okinawa today:
Recently, Okinawans had been fighting to get a single one of these moved away until the Japanese military recently caved to US pressure. Freepers rejoice:
WSJ readers hold similar opinions:
Which I guess puts one of the columns Bret Stephens cited into perspective:
One only need look at the current situations in Muslim-majority countries today, where non-Muslim minorities suffer human rights violations sanctioned under Shariah law, which dominates the constitutions of those nations. The reality of a supremacist system within Islamic culture should be enough to preclude any dialogue with those who live by the U.S. Constitution and subscribe to the modern culture of New York City.
The bases are maintained under a treaty called a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) which effectively put US personnel in Okinawa (and elsewhere) above the law:
In Asia, the SOFA is a modern legacy of the nineteenth-century imperialist practice in China of “extraterritoriality”-the “right” of a foreigner charged with a crime to be turned over for trial to his own diplomatic representatives in accordance with his national law, not to a Chinese court in accordance with Chinese law. Extracted from the Chinese at gun point, the practice arose because foreigners claimed that Chinese law was barbaric and “white men” engaged in commerce in China should not be forced to submit to it. Chinese law was indeed concerned more with the social consequences of crime than with establishing the individual guilt or innocence of criminals, particularly those who were uninvited guests in China.
Following the Anglo-Chinese “Opium War” of 1839-42, the United States was the first nation to demand “extrality” for its citizens. All the other European nations then acquired the same rights as the Americans. Except for the Germans, who lost their Chinese colonies in World War I, Americans and Europeans lived an “extraterritorial” life in China until the Japanese ended it in 1941 and Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang stopped it in 1943. But men and women serving overseas in the American armed forces still demand that their government obtain as extensive extraterritorial status for them as possible. In this modern version, extrality takes the form of heavy American pressure on countries like Japan to alter their systems of criminal justice to conform with procedures that exist in the United States, regardless of historical and cultural differences.
Rachel Cornwell and Andrew Wells, two authorities on status of forces agreements, conclude, “Most SOFAs are written so that national courts cannot exercise legal jurisdiction over U.S. military personnel who commit crimes against local people, except in special cases where the U.S. military authorities agree to transfer jurisdiction.” Since service members are also exempt from normal passport and immigration controls, the military has the option of simply flying an accused rapist or murderer out of the country before local authorities can bring him to trial, a contrivance to which commanding officers of Pacific bases have often resorted. At the time of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001, the United States had publicly acknowledged SOFAs with ninety-three countries, although some SOFAs are so embarrassing to the host nation that they are kept secret, particularly in the Islamic world. Thus, the true number is not publicly known.