April 18, 2012| News | John Glaser

The Los Angeles Times has released just two of 18 photographs depicting U.S. soldiers posing happily next to Afghan corpses, or pieces of bodies. As with previous such incidents, the dehumanization of the “enemy” – a virtual necessity in war – runs deep.

Source: LA Times

Other unreleased photos show “Two soldiers posed holding a dead man’s hand with the middle finger raised. A soldier leaned over the bearded corpse while clutching the man’s hand. Someone placed an unofficial platoon patch reading “Zombie Hunter” next to other remains and took a picture.”

The Army of course promised to “take appropriate action” against those involved, just after reciting the same line about how this isn’t representative of the rest of the soldiers. These are hard to listen to when news of such behavior is anything but new. It’s worth noting also that the U.S. military officials the Times approached to ask questions about the photos before their release, requested they not be published. Big surprise there.

The release of the images comes at a time when the Obama administration is losing its grip on the war. The last few months have held a number of high-profile failures and embarrassments. First, a video went viral depicting U.S. soldiers urinating on Afghan corpses. After that, the controversy over the U.S. Army’s burning of Muslim holy books sparked country-wide protests and violence. Then Staff Sgt. Robert Bales (& Co.) slaughtered 17 Afghan civilians in an unprovoked massacre of men, women, and children. Just last weekend, insurgents mounted spectacular coordinated attacks that set off an 18-hour battle with NATO forces, an indication of their annual spring offensive and a public relations embarrassment for the U.S. at what seems to be the lowest point in the war.

Posing with dead, tortured Muslims or their body parts is an all-too-common exercise in the military since 9/11 – whether in the Abu Ghraib torture dungeon, the urban kill zones of Iraq, or the arid plains of blood-soaked Afghanistan. But it’s not just smiling and flashing a thumbs up for the camera, it’s killing civilians. The “Kill Team” in Afghanistan, the army unit that planned and committed executions of multiple innocent, unarmed Afghan civilians, framed the dead as having been a threat and mutilated their corpses as trophies. They also took photos of their gruesome escapades.

The lives of Afghans, insurgents or not, become less valuable than other human lives, like last October when American troops forced civilians to march ahead of them on roads believed to have been filled with bombs and landmines planted by insurgents. On routine house searches, writes formerly embedded journalist Neil Shea, U.S. soldiers would demolish the home and its contents for the fun of it.

Kill Team Photo, Rolling Stone

War requires dehumanizing some enemy. The enemy becomes not only less than human, but also the origin of all your troubles. Nazis managed to proliferate this feeling towards Jews. But its prevalent in all of America’s wars as well.

Americans became aggressively anti-German during the First World War. In 1918, for example, a mob in St. Louis attacked a German immigrant named Robert Prager, who had tried to enlist in the Navy. They beat him up, wrapped him in the American flag, and lynched him. A jury found the mob leaders not guilty, citing a case of what they called “patriotic murder.”

U.S. troops fighting the Japanese in WWII commonly mutilated their corpses, severing their body parts to take as “war trophies,” just as the Kill Team did with Afghans. One famous photograph shows a decapitated Japanese head hung on a tree after a battle with American soldiers. Crimes by both sides served to intensify the dehumanization on both sides.

Abu Ghraib, Wikipedia

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo calls this part of the Lucifer Effect. “At the core of evil,” he writes, “is the process of dehumanization by which certain other people or collectives of them, are depicted as less than human, as non comparable in humanity or personal dignity to those who do the labeling…Discrimination involves the actions taken against those others based on the beliefs and emotions generated by prejudiced perspectives.”

Dehumanization is “fundamental to a nation’s public support for war,” writes Kimberly Elliot, “Dehumanizing others renders the requisite horrors of war tolerable.” Soldiers as well as American citizens have to go through indoctrination about the strategic justifications for war, which have all but evaporated in Afghanistan, as well as indoctrination about who it is we’re fighting. That such indoctrination has to occur for the war to be fightable is a good indication that it isn’t worth another second of anybody’s life.

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April 17, 2012| News | John Glaser

James Harkin argues at Foreign Policy that the internationalization of the conflict in Syria has exacerbated the civil strife there. Part of the problem lies with the Syrian National Council – the exile group allying itself with the opposition fighters – and their “orchestrated effort to turn Homs into a Syrian Benghazi — the eastern Libyan city whose imminent destruction by Muammar al-Qaddafi’s forces provided the catalyst that sparked the international intervention in Libya last year.”

Harkin has been in and out of Syria for years and was last there in February and from his own experiences and direct sources inside Homs, he explains how many of those stories were simply fabricated. With an eye toward the Libya example, “the exiled Syrian opposition seems to have aimed to exaggerate the civilian losses in the city into the claim of genocide in order to push buttons within the international community.” And the media, he argues, largely cooperated.

With regards to the international response, Harkin sees outside support for the opposition fighters to be counterproductive at best:

The SNC’s apparent decision to accept money from the Gulf States to pay salaries to Free Syrian Army guerrillas sounded breathtakingly arrogant, and makes for shockingly bad politics. Not only does lend credence to the conspiracy theories peddled by the government that the uprising is the handiwork of foreign agitators; it risks splitting the indigenous opposition movement and empowering exactly the kind of Sunni extremist groups who are most likely to stoke sectarian tensions.

This criticism of intervention by the Gulf States holds for the West as well, as I’ve argued many times. While countries like the U.S. and Britain claim to be supplying the Syrian opposition fighters with non-lethal aid, empowering the more militant religious extremists over the reform-minded political activists is still likely. As Marc Lynch has argued, if foreigners arm the rebels “fighting groups will rise in political power, while those who have advocated nonviolence or who advance political strategies will be marginalized.” Ed Husain of the Council on Foreign Relations also explained recently that “there are Saudi Salafis, as well as al-Qaeda elements, and others who are included toward more extreme versions of religiosity present in that conflict. Given that we don’t really know who the Syrian opposition is composed of in detail, how wise is it to then bring down another regime and put in its place yet another Muslim Brotherhood-led government?” Lynch has also argued previously that outside intervention would vindicate the Assad regime’s accusations and “would only invite escalations from Syrian regime forces.”

Harkin ends with a hard-hitting quip:

Who knows: If the unthinking drift toward creating neo-mujahideen in Syria and Iran (a strategyadvocated by Foreign Policy’s own James Traub) continues, following a decade in which radical Sunnis became America’s Public Enemy No. 1, Osama bin Laden might have to be posthumously converted back into the freedom fighter America saw him as in the 1980s, marching into battle to drive out one of the last vestiges of godlessness in the Middle East.

I argued the same back in February when the first reports of possible al-Qaeda fighters in Syria came forth. Unfortunately, to say that the leadership in the U.S. is explicitly advocating merging U.S. policy with al-Qaeda’s tactical plans is not enough to stop interventionists in their tracks.

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April 17, 2012| News | John Glaser

From ACLU’s Blog of Rights:

Today the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking information about a horrific U.S. missile strike that killed dozens of civilians in Yemen.

This was the Obama administration’s first known missile strike in Yemen, carried out with one or more cruise missiles launched from an American warship or submarine on December 17, 2009. The U.S. military reportedly used cluster bombs, killing at least 41 people in the remote mountain village of al-Majalah in Yemen’s Abyan province. The government was purportedly targeting “militants,” but those killed include at least 21 children and 14 women. Entire families were wiped out. It is the worst reported loss of civilian life from a U.S. targeted killing strike in Yemen to date.

…The U.S. asserts the right to use lethal force against suspected terrorists anywhere in the world, a claim that is legally questionable and deeply controversial, not least because killings far from any battlefield increase the risk that innocent civilians will die. Government officials repeatedly minimize or deny civilian deaths caused by the targeted killing program, but increasing reports of civilian casualties caused by strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere raise serious questions about whether the government is violating international and domestic law by failing to distinguish between civilians and combatants, and by using lethal force away from active battlefields.

See the full video here.

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April 17, 2012| News | John Glaser

There is a fixation in elite foreign policy circles these days to speculate on the impending decline of America’s global economic and military hegemony and to lament that decline as the dangerous end to international order. Without global American dominance, goes the thinking, lawless competition and chaos will rule.

Former Carter administration national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s latest book Strategic Vision goes through this lament. He worries that, absent U.S. hegemony, regional powers will be less restrained. Russia will bully tiny Caucasian states like Georgia; China will bully Taiwan; North Korea will threaten South Korea; diminished unilateral support for Israel would destabilize the Middle East; et cetera.

Thomas P.M. Barnett in World Politics Review takes a look at Ian Bremmer’s forthcoming book Every Nation for Itself, another lament of American decline. Post-hegemony, states will be “superseded by a generalized anarchy” in “an era [that] begets a ‘free for all’” and witnesses Asia’s rise, or even more ominously, China’s rise. Bremmer fears a world without the “global leadership” of America to “keep the peace.”

Indeed, this is the most interesting insight I drew from Bremmer’s book: The real danger of a G-Zero world is not the accelerated decline of the West but the unbridled — and unpoliced — appetites of the East. As Bremmer points out repeatedly, Western states need not fear a “world of regions,” his term for an era of pronounced regionalism. By and large, their national structures are more than robust for that scenario. But if it’s regionalism run amuck, the clash of civilizations most unlikely to unfold is not East versus West or West versus South, but East versus South — without a West as referee.

To buy into this is to have very little ability to self-criticize. This line of thinking assumes that the West, and America specifically, has acted like an impartial referee over the international system, which is really an absurd suggestion. What people like Brzezinski and Bremmer and Barnett really fear is not that the Benevolent Empire and the “global order” it preserves will be no more. Rather, the fear is that the selfish, unscrupulous, hypocritical, coercive disposition of other states will prevail instead of the U.S. government’s selfish, unscrupulous, hypocritical, coercive behavior. Other states will get to do the horrible things that only we’ve been able to do for decades.

Overthrowing governments that threaten the state’s supremacy, supporting the world’s worst dictators, committing the supreme international crime of unprovoked war, military bases spanning the globe…these things will no longer be solely American prerogatives.

“The concern over “’decline,’” writes Nikolas Gvosdev, “ is not that the U.S. is about to stop being a superpower; it is that future likely adversaries are not going to be the pushovers the U.S. has gotten used to for the past 20 years.” Daniel Larison comments:

What doesn’t make much sense about “anti-declinist” fearmongering along these lines is that relative decline isn’t something that the U.S. can avoid by making certain policy choices rather than others. It’s certainly possible to sap and exhaust U.S. resources in the fruitless quest to reclaim an unsustainable position. We have spent the last decade doing just that.

The U.S. can react to a multipolar world by demonizing and vilifying other major powers and by punishing them when they fail to fall in line on every international issue, which seems to be the preferred response of the most vocal “anti-declinist” presidential candidate, or it can attempt to find common interests with these other powers. The latter seems advisable, not least because a multipolar world is one in which the demands on and costs to the U.S. are fewer.

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April 16, 2012| News | John Glaser

The “increasingly large chorus of nations” in Central America arguing for decriminalization of drugs instead of Washington’s failed drug war seem not to have received their warranted share of focus at the Summit of the Americas conference this weekend. The havoc and blood wrought by drug prohibition and efforts by Washington to militarize the issue have been so detrimental to nations like Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, et al. that they are pushing the Obama administration for a change. Obama said no, although apparently “agreed to direct the Organization of American States to name a group of experts to study the issue.”

Instead of confronting this vital issue, the Obama administration’s focus at the Summit was apparently Cuba. New York Times: “Americas Meeting Ends With Discord Over Cuba.”

A summit meeting of Western Hemisphere nations ended without a final statement of consensus on Sunday, after the United States and some Latin American nations remained sharply divided over whether to continue excluding Cuba from such gatherings.

The issue of Cuba’s exclusion from events like the Summit of the Americas gathering has been a perennially divisive one, and increasingly so lately, more than 50 years after the United States imposed its embargo of the island nation after the military takeover by Fidel Castro in 1959. While the push to include Cuba was led by leftist governments in the region, including Venezuela and Bolivia, Mr. Santos also joined in the effort, calling the American position a cold war anachronism.

“Cuba, unlike the other countries that are participating, has not yet moved to democracy,” Mr. Obama said. And referring generally to other Latin American countries’ success in overcoming dictatorship and oppression in favor of democracy, Mr. Obama asked “why we would ignore that same principle here.”

Maybe because the U.S. has a history of preventing democracy in Central America, not promoting it. Over 100 years ago, the U.S. took advantage of the Cuban revolution against colonial Spain and intervened on behalf of the revolutionaries only to betray an initial promise not to “exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said island,” and instead President McKinley announced that the U.S. would rule Cuba under “the law of belligerent right over conquered territory.” Fast forward through the state terror towards Cuba during the Cold War to present day. Decades of sanctions and non-engagement has almost certainly helped keep the undemocratic Castro regime in power.

The U.S. also overthrew the democratically elected government of Nicaragua in a military coup early in the 20th century, replacing it with a right-wing paramilitary regime. Fast forward to Reagan’s illegal support of terrorist proxies to overthrow the Sandinistas which helped keep the country in bloody conflict and poverty for another generation.

Washington overthrew another democratically elected regime in Guatemala in 1954, replacing it with a military junta headed by Colonel Carlos Castillo. Throughout the 1980s, the U.S. “not only covered up, but aided and abetted war crimes and genocide in Guatemala.” Now, Guatemala receives approximately $1oo million in aid annually from the U.S., despite a record of corruption and ties to the drug gangs. Also currently wreaking mayhem, The Kaibiles, the ruthless U.S.-trained Guatemalan state militia infamous for their role in killing civilians during Guatemala’s civil war, are being recruited in large numbers to violent Mexican drug gangs.

We can go on like this with similar stories for Chile, El Salvador, etc. And support for undemocratic regimes and practices, under the rubric of the war on drugs, continues to this day in places like Colombia, where we’ve supported atrocities by paramilitaries and government lawlessness, and in Honduras, where the Obama administration has supported the coup regime which is cracking down hard on the population. So where does Obama get off complaining about Cuba’s prospective inclusion in regional diplomacy?

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April 16, 2012| News | John Glaser

Laura Rozen in World Politics Review recaps this past weekend’s P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran in Istanbul:

First, the parties agreed that Iran, as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), is obligated to prove that its nuclear program is for purely peaceful energy purposes, as it claims. If it does so, the P5+1 also reiterated, Iran has the right to a civilian nuclear energy program — including, tacitly, the right to enrich uranium for civil nuclear purposes. The parties also agreed to work toward resolving international concerns about Iran’s nuclear program based on a “step-by-step” process, on a reciprocal basis. That means that if Iran agrees to confidence-building measures, such halting its 20 percent uranium enrichment activities and removing its stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium from Iranian territory, the international community would in turn agree to offer something in return, such as providing nuclear fuel for Iran’s medical reactor or easing a set of sanctions.

The fact that these negotiations are even occurring instead of a bombing campaign is itself a laudable development. But its worth pointing out some central tenets of these talks that are, well, quirky.

Iran is a signatory of the NPT and has a right to develop peaceful nuclear energy. Not a single participant in these talks believes Iran is developing nuclear weapons; indeed, there is a consensus in the U.S. intelligence community that no such weapons program exists and that the Iranian leadership has not made the decision to get weapons. Still, the whole purpose behind these talks is to “restore international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program.” Try to imagine this happening with any state other than Iran. In what absurd parallel dimension would such high-level talks take place to reassure the international community of what they already know to be a peaceful nuclear program in, say, South Korea, or Bahrain (also NPT signatories)?

[See here for what the real threat from Iran is (it ain't the nuclear program).]

It’s also strange that one of the central bargaining chips the West is using to negotiate with Iran is the harsh economic sanctions they’ve recently imposed. They’re using as leverage the economic warfare they applied because of Iran’s nuclear program which they have all conceded  is peaceful in nature. Cheeky, isn’t it?

The other quirky aspect of these talks is what’s not being said. Since the peaceful nature of Iran’s current nuclear program is so widely accepted, the only real gripe people have is that Tehran is slightly too opaque on the issue (this, despite all declared enrichment sites being subject to international inspections and having 24-hour video surveillance). Any opaqueness Iran has demonstrated, along with its emphasis on being “nuclear capable,” is merely a defensive posture. But there is a simple solution to this which would vastly decrease the geopolitical tensions in the region. If Israel, Iran’s main adversary and not a NPT signatory, agreed to dismantling its vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons and to a deal enforcing a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East – a deal Iran has repeatedly proposed – Iran’s defensive posture would probably expire.

The talks are firmly based in contradictory assumptions and stark double standards that undoubtedly stoke a sense of inherent unfairness among the Iranians. Let us hope this doesn’t lead to a failure of the talks.

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