Category: Hawkwatch

The whole Bushite discourse of the US being involved in a “Global War on Terror” is, it seems to me, not only misleading but actually inimical to the best interests of the US citizenry.
GWOT is how “people in the know” like to refer to it. Gee, what the heck are you talking about? is my response to them.
Who was it who, not so long ago, wrote something to the effect that, “Terror is, like blitzkrieg, a tactic that a commander can choose to use or not to use. But who would declare a ‘war on blitzkrieg’? No, ‘terror’ is not in itself a political force that–like Nazism, or Japanism militarism–can be campaigned against and perhaps vanquished…”

[It was Zbigniew Brzezinski. He put it much more succinctly than I did. The actual quote was posted on the Comment board here by Bill. Check it out. ~HC]

I agree completely with that. I also think that by responding to Al-Qaeda’s intense provocation by declaring and pursuing a ‘Global War on Terror’, the Bush administration lost its ability to focus on and deal effectively with the main threat: that from Al-Qaeda.
Exhibit # 1 in this regard? The invasion of Iraq.
But the damage, it seems to me, goes much further than the mere diversion of effort. There has also developed such a huge degree of conceptual fuzziness around the whole concept of “global terrorism” that the Bushies seem almost unable to disaggregate the campaigns being waged by, for example, the Iraqis or Palestinians against foreign military occupation, or by the Chechens for (as far as I understand it) national independence from Russia, from the still-present threat from Al-Qaeda to US and allied interests around the globe.

Continue reading “Escaping from ‘terrorism’”

The abuse of prisoners that has started to be revealed in the U.S. detention center in Abu Ghraib is quite disgusting to contemplate. I have tried to imagine the broader context within which those half-dozen ill-supervised soldiers committed those foul acts– and in which, moreover, they felt quite “comfortable” taking those photos so they could brag and snicker about their actions later.
Clearly, what they did was not just a “one-off”, furtive set of abusive actions; but it must have been embedded in much broader patterns of systematic abuse and an expectation of the toleration or even encouragement of it.
I have been trying to imagine the dimension of the whole iceberg of which the disgusting acts recorded on those photographs were “just” the tip.
Is this iceberg as large as a systematic structure of abuse of prisoners by U.S. forces in Iraq and elsewhere? There are growing indications–from the illegal holding center in Guantanamo Bay, whose commander had travelled to Abu Ghraib last fall to help set up the detention system there; and from Afghanistan, and elsewhere– that it is. And perhaps even larger than this?

Continue reading “Breakdown of U.S. Mideast policymaking”

Ah, you’re saying, why is Helena wittering on about the Golden Dunce’s Cap when there have been so many other important things going on? Well okay, be patient, I’ll get to them. I actually do have a life as well as this strange thing, a blogging presence.
It was so weird, yesterday, watching that painfully third-rate performance by Mr. Deer in the Headlights trying to sound as though he was, y’know, in command of all this information about that country halfway ’round the world that has suddenly turned out to be so, well, pesky and just downright confusin’, if you know what I mean.
The Prez did not start out well. A grammatical error in the first sentence; a mis-speak in the second. Then he got a bit of a grip. For a while. Though it all sounded very canned and noticeably stilted. In the Q&A, his main instructions to himself seem to have been to filibuster (=to waste time saying nothing). So he got into these lengthy and very confused riffs on this ‘n’ that, floundering around and repeating things he’d already said in the main presentation.
(Did you gather I didn’t think he did well at all? Also, though, I thought several of the press corps’s questions were decided softballs; and only journo even attempted to ask a ‘follow-up’ question after getting the non-answer that nearly all of them got.)
What stayed with me, though, in addition to his notable non-answers on all the things that really matter, was the broad conceptual design of his presentation. The U.S. had to “stay the course” in Iraq, he was telling us, mainly because it was “civilization” itself that was under attack there. Oh, he never actually said “Judeo-Christian civilization”, though you sense he’d have loved to. He did mention that it was “Christians” and “Jews” who were getting targeted by the fores of civilization– conveniently leaving out that it is non-extremist Muslims who have borne the main brunt of the extremists’ anger so far. At one point, he did, thank God, spell out that it was not all Muslims who were “the enemy”, but only that usual “small fringe”, or whatever.

Continue reading “Bush and ‘civilization’”

Alert JWN readers will recall that I wrote here just a couple weeks ago about ambitious Charlottesville hometown boy Phil Zelikow, who’s the Exec Director of the 9/11 Commission. (And also, most probably the subject of at least one string of its enquiries, since he was a leading member of the national-security portion of the Bush transition team.) Altogether a very well-connected guy…
So it should have been no small beer, back on September 10, 2002, when he told a hometown audience in Charlottesville:

Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 — it’s the threat against Israel…
And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.

I wish I could have been the one to break that story! But I wasn’t. It was Inter-Press Service’s Emad Mekay who broke it March 29. See e.g. here.
Now, in a sense, this is not “news”, because it’s been easy enough to triangulate all along that with this particular bunch of neo-cons running the DoD, the attention paid to Israel’s needs would evidently be disproportionate. But hearing it from someone as very well connected as Zelikow–as he expressed it at a one-year-after-9-11 forum at U.Va. Law School–somehow gives this theory a lot more impact.
If I were working more wholeheartedly on this story, I’d love to do a follow-up interview with Zelikow now, that is, one year after this disastrous war against Iraq that was still, back in September 2002, just a twinkle in Wolfie and Doug Feith’s respective eyes. (Okay, maybe quite a bit more than that by then… )
But I have this book on Africa to write. Shoot. Still, maybe Mekay or someone else will be following it up.

The Bushies have distorted and twisted the meaning of so many of the words of our fine English language that it might seem irrational of me to take note of one particularly irritating distortion I saw–and not for the first time!–in today’s WaPo.
It’s in a piece by Thomas Ricks on a hot tip that his idol, General Petraeus, will shortly be named to head back to Iraq to oversee the organization of all the “Iraqified” security forces there after this strange self-immolatory event the Coalition is planning for June 30.
Self-immolatory? Well, not quite… Ricks quotes Deputy Secretary of “Defense” Paul Wolfowitz as saying:

There’s not going to be any difference in our military posture on July 1st from what it is on June 30th, except that we will be there then at the invitation of a sovereign Iraqi government, which I am quite sure will want us to stay there until…

Excuse me? What is the meaning of the word “sovereign” in that sentence? I can understand what its function is, there and in a hundred similar sentences. But in the context of this sentence it is particularly clear that this function depends totally on a 180-degree twisting of the real, commonly understood meaning of the word.

This use by the U.S. military of private U.S. contractors for security duty in Iraq is something fairly new and very unsettling in international affairs and international law.
I mean, how weird is it that Paul Bremer, who’s the top representative of the U.S. military’s top civil-affairs unit, gets protected by contract soldiers, not by the U.S. military itself?
What is the status of all these guys under the Geneva Conventions? They are not acting directly in the military chain of command.
Does that make them “unlawful combatants”, I wonder? Or, if taken prisoner, would they be considered to be regular POWs?
Anyway, I learned from ABC News tonight that there are around 15,000 of them there in Iraq now. Many more fighters than even the Brits have in Iraq!
The more I thought about it, the more the whole set-up seems like some kind of a harmonic convergence among so many interests:
* Bombs-Away Don Rumsfeld’s interest in turning the U.S. military into a lean and mobile fighting-machine. (No time for training and maintaining large numbers of ‘boots on the ground!’)
* The Prez’s general desire to outsource everything in sight… Government jobs to non-government companies… US jobs to India and China, etc etc.
* Karl Rove’s desire to keep the number of ‘actual’ U.S. forces who are recorded as casualties as low as possible between now and November 4… and

Continue reading “Contractors in Iraq: the convergence”

And talking of hometown Charlottesville news, here was ambitious hometown boy Philip D. Zelikow in a front-page story in the New York Times yesterday.
Zelikow– in addition to being the Director of U.Va.’s Miller Center of Public Affairs– is also the executive director of the official government panel of enquiry into the 9/11 disaster.
But he has also become a focus of enquiry for the commission since back in Dec 2000-January 2001 he was a leading member of incoming “President” George W. Bush’s transition team.
One of the issues the panel is investigating is the question of the degree of priority (or lack of priority) that the Bush national-security team gave to the terrorism/Al-Qaeda threat in the months leading up to September 11.
Of course, the revelations in the about-to-be-published book by former counter-terrorism boss Richard A. Clarke will also provide a lot of evidence on this point. (Clarke’s tenure as White House counter-terror coordinator spanned the Clinton and GWB administrations.)
What has been revealed from Clarke’s book so far has been pretty damning to the Bush team. See, e.g., this story.
Clarke is due to testify before the 9/11 commission on Tuesday. Also expected up Tuesday or Wednesday, according to yesterday’s NYT story, will be Clinton administration luminaries like Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, and Sandy Berger. The Times reports that they

say they are prepared to detail how they repeatedly warned their Bush administration counterparts in late 2000 that Al Qaeda posed the worst security threat facing the nation– and how the new administration was slow to act.
They said the warnings were delivered in urgent post-election intelligence briefings in December 2000 and January 2001 for Condoleezza Rice, who became Mr. Bush’s national security adviser; Stephen Hadley, now Ms. Rice’s deputy; and Philip D. Zelikow, a member of the Bush transition team, among others.

Well, well, well.
Do you think that panel member Philip Zelikow may have to recuse himself because of his close relationship with potential interrogee Philip Zelikow?
Maybe he should ask Justice Scalia for an opinion on this tricky issue…
Anyway, the week ahead promises to be an interesting one for the panel.

I read and re-read James Risen’s interview with David Kay in the NYT today. Kay comes across as a thoughtful person, no patsy by any means; someone who seems prepared to call it like he sees it, and who is still sincerely struggling to understand how the US intelligence “community” could have gotten it all so terribly wrong about Saddam’s WMDs.
To me, the most interesting part of the interview was not Kay’s assessment–based on debriefing of Tarek Aziz and other Saddam-regime detainees–that for the last few years of his time in power Saddam was effectively delusional, and indeed majorly deluded by people who came to him with cock-a-mamie schemes for weapons programs that could never work.
(Hey, the folks in Washington wouldn’t know anything about any of those, I’m sure… )
No, the most interesting part is where Kay is reflecting on the effects of a kind of group-think inside the US intelligence agencies. It comes right at the end of Risen’s interview:

Continue reading “Emperors, clothes, and David Kay on intelligence”

I’ve just finished a quick scroll through strategic expert Jeffrey Record’s riveting and controversial study, “Bounding the Global War on Terrorism”. I found it meticulously written and carefully argued. It hit many nails exactly on the head.
As reported in many newspapers yesterday, Record’s conclusion is that:

The global war on terrorism as presently defined and conducted is strategically unfocused, promises much more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military and other resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security. The United States may be able to defeat, even destroy, al-Qaeda, but it cannot rid the world of terrorism, much less evil.

What’s as significant as these sobering conclusions are Record’s credentials as a professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, and currently a visiting prof at the Army’s War College in Carlisle, PA– plus, the key fact that the study was published by the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute.
(Actually, I’ve published with SSI myself– 1997, on Israel and Syria. Rather a level-headed bunch of folks there, I would say.)
Along the way, Record makes some very good points. He does a great job showing how the excessively heavy use of the discourse of “(anti-)terrorism” ends up obscuring vitally important distinctions, and creates traps of its own:

Continue reading “Inflating perceptions of ‘threat’”

Buried down at the bottom of the long post I put up here yesterday, “Sistani speaks” were some slightly derogatory comments on something my old buddy Tom Friedman put in his NYT column. I guess what had gotten me really upset was reading the part where he said:

This war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan… It is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad and it is a moral and strategic imperative that we give it our best shot…

Anyway, nothing like a bit of emotion to get my writing juices flowing. Today I had to write a column for Al-Hayat. So, based on my reading of Tom’s statements as expressing a peculiarly American view of the US people’s “Manifest Destiny” to spread its system of government over ever greater and greater portions of God’s earth, I wrote a piece that explored the whole idea of “Manifest Destiny going global”, and the fact that Tom Friedman is just the latest in a long line of self-described “liberals” in western society who have put their liberal ideals into the service of imperial ventures.
I can’t say more about the content of that column here. (Hey, you’re supposed to go out and buy the newspaper once it comes out, and read it there. If you read Arabic, that is.)
But seeing as how I grew up in a rapidly and determinedly de-colonizing Britain– a place where the whole discourse of colonialism and imperialism was viewed as incredibly 19th-century, very distasteful, and embarrassing in the extreme– I never actually learned about the American “Manifest Destiny” thing in high school or college.
(I did ask Bill, the spouse, about his recollection of how it was taught to his generation– he went through a public high school in Southern California in the late 1950s. He said that there, similarly, the general impression was given of ‘Manifest Destiny’ as being something 19th-century and slightly embarrassing.)
But guess what, folks! Manifest Destiny, that same old ideology of expanding the lebensraum for “freedom” that in the 1840s sent the US Cavalry off to capture control of the whole area of the today’s continental United States, is now alive and kicking at a global level in the thinking of American “liberals” like Tom Friedman.
I did, of course, have to go into the web and do some quick online research into the history of the MD concept here in the US. I did a quick Google search and came up with some interesting results.

Continue reading “A globalized ‘Manifest Destiny’”