WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

 

 

Protests should not stop, until police stop killing us.

People demonstrating for a change in the way America polices itself—who are calling for justice and fairness in a system that is clearly unequal—are not responsible for the deaths of two NYC police officers last week. The protest movement—rooted in earlier struggles for civil rights, growing since the death of Trayvon Martin, fueled by the deaths of Mike Brown and others in recent weeks and months is not focused on one city or region.   To stop protesting is to cave-in to the fallacious framing—by PBA officials, national media (especially FOX) and politicians—about what took place on December 20 by those who want respect for those two recently fallen officers. But I wonder—when have officers nationally issued calls for respect for the families of those they have slain? It hasn't happened. So people will continue to protest.   More

 

Wounded Knee Massacre 124 Years Ago

One hundred and twenty-four winters ago, on December 29, 1890, some 150 Lakota men, women and children were massacred by the US 7th Calvary Regiment near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Some estimate the actual number closer to 300… History records the Wounded Knee Massacre was the last battle of the American Indian war.   More

 

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

 

JAMES FALLOWS: The Tragedy of the American Military

Ours is the best-equipped fighting force in history, and it is incomparably the most expensive. By all measures, today’s professionalized military is also better trained, motivated, and disciplined than during the draft-army years. No decent person who is exposed to today’s troops can be anything but respectful of them and grateful for what they do.  Yet repeatedly this force has been defeated by less modern, worse-equipped, barely funded foes. Or it has won skirmishes and battles only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war. Although no one can agree on an exact figure, our dozen years of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and neighboring countries have cost at least $1.5 trillion; Linda J. Bilmes, of the Harvard Kennedy School, recently estimated that the total cost could be three to four times that much…   “We are vulnerable,” the author William Greider wrote during the debate last summer on how to fight ISIS, “because our presumption of unconquerable superiority leads us deeper and deeper into unwinnable military conflicts.” And the separation of the military from the public disrupts the process of learning from these defeats.    More

 

U.S. in the thick of battle against Islamic State

In Iraq’s western Anbar province, more than 300 U.S. troops are posted at a base in the thick of a pitched battle between Iraqi forces, backed by tribal fighters, and well-armed Islamic State militants. The militants, positioned at a nearby town, have repeatedly hit the base with artillery and rocket fire in recent weeks. Since the middle of December, the U.S.-led military coalition has launched 13 airstrikes around the facility. U.S. troops have suffered no casualties in the attacks. But the violence has underlined the risks to American personnel as they fan out across Iraq as part of the expanding U.S. mission against the Islamic State, even as President Obama has pledged that U.S. operations “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.”  More

 

The new Iraq War is doomed

The latest iteration of the Iraq War is already starting to escalate. The day after Christmas, U.S. forces and its allies hit the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) with 31 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. Three thousand U.S. military advisers are now authorized to accompany Iraqi troops into combat, while American helicopter pilots fly combat missions over Iraq. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey and Secretary of State John Kerry want to keep open the option of officially dispatching combat troops… Without viable allies on the ground, the Obama administration has few options for winning the war against ISIL. Hawks at home will pressure him to send additional troops, but there is no evidence that even thousands of more soldiers would succeed. ISIL has already adapted its tactics to fight an unconventional war, hiding among the civilian population. The $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill passed this month authorized $64 billion for the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and other countries. Obama has asked Congress to authorize the wars in Iraq and Syria. Last week the Senate Foreign Relations Committee agreed…   More

 

ANOTHER YEAR OF MORBID SYMPTOMS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.   Antonio Gramsci,  Prison Notebooks

A decade ago, the U.S. was setting the region’s agenda through the effort to re-engineer its politics through the mass projection of military force that began with the invasion of Iraq. That experiment failed, and today Washington’s importance in shaping the decisions of many longtime U.S. allies has considerably diminished — 2014 served up plenty of reminders that Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, for example, no longer follow Washington’s lead and are increasingly willing to pursue their own strategies even when those conflict with U.S. goals.  Expect more of the same in 2015… The Middle East of 2014 was beset by the morbid symptoms of the slow disintegration of an old order. Unfortunately, that disintegration shows no signs of being reversed — or replaced — in the coming year.   More

 

The Afghan war that didn't really end

News websites and broadcasts - and US and NATO press releases - were filled with discussion about the "formal" end of the Afghan war yesterday. But any close reading of the facts will find that they were wrong. Call it semi-formal, or business casual, whatever you like. The reality remains the same: For American soldiers and for the Afghan people the war that began on Oct. 7, 2001 will go on… President Obama claimed yesterday that "we are safer, and our nation is more secure" thanks to the sacrifices of the Afghan war. There's no evidence to support that claim, and plenty to suggest the war has been a long, self-inflicted wound on the country… None of the claimed long term objectives for the war, either from the Bush or Obama administrations, have been achieved. That's  defeat by any measure.   More

 

2014 - The deadliest year for Afghan civilians on record

Civilian casualties in Afghanistan rose by 19 percent in the first 11 months of 2014 compared to a year earlier, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). More than 3,180 civilians were killed and nearly 6,430 injured by the end of November. The number of casualties involving children increased by 33 percent. Projections indicate that the civilian casualty count will pass 10,000 for the first time in a single year, the highest number since the organization began systematically documenting civilian casualties in 2009.  More

 

Afghanistan: The Making of a Narco State

Even more shocking is the fact that the Afghan narcotics trade has gotten undeniably worse since the U.S.-led invasion: The country produces twice as much opium as it did in 2000. How did all those poppy fields flower under the nose of one of the biggest international military and development missions of our time? The answer lies partly in the deeply cynical bargains struck by former Afghan President Hamid Karzai in his bid to consolidate power, and partly in the way the U.S. military ignored the corruption of its allies in taking on the Taliban. It's the story of how, in pursuit of the War on Terror, we lost the War on Drugs in Afghanistan by allying with many of the same people who turned the country into the world's biggest source of heroin… According to U.S. officials, a sort of informal bargain was struck at the interagency level: The DEA, the FBI and the Justice and Treasury departments would not pursue top Afghan allies who were involved in the drug trade.   More

 

Al-Qaeda faction in Syria claims to have U.S.-supplied anti-tank weapon

In early November, the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra ousted two U.S.-supplied moderate factions, Harak Hazam and the Syrian Revolutionary Front, from their strongholds in northern Idlib province. Although al-Nusra was thought to have seized significant caches of equipment during the fighting, the exact nature of those arms has been unclear.  On Monday, however, a Twitter account associated with Jabhat al-Nusra posted a photo of a TOW anti-tank guided missile system, a formidable weapon used against armored targets… “This weapon is not a game-changer for them,” said David Maxwell, associate director for Georgetown University’s security studies program.

“The big thing is the political aspect of American equipment falling into enemy hands and what that bodes for providing support to moderate rebels,” he added. “When you supply weapons to an indigenous force you have to be prepared for the fact it can be compromised and that has to be a fact of life.”   More

 

AMERICA’S TOXIC MIDDLE EAST ALLIES

The 9/11 Commission Report acknowledged that charities based in Saudi Arabia provided funds to Al-Qaeda but “found no evidence that the Saudi government” was directly involved. However, the Bush administration excised 28 pages of findings on the subject of possible Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks, citing national security concerns. Current and former members of Congress say those 28 pages contain direct evidence of complicity on the part of certain Saudi officials and entities… Attempts to pressure the Arab Gulf states to cut off the flow of support to terrorist groups have proven largely ineffective… The Gulf states receive tangible benefits from their alliance with the U.S. in the form of advanced military equipment, extensive training programs, protection of their vital natural resources, and the tacit guarantee that Washington will come to their defense if they are threatened or attacked… Washington’s client states in the Persian Gulf engage in behavior that contradicts U.S. interests. Outdated and misguided ideas about the importance of our Persian Gulf allies, driven by an imprudent and expansive grand strategy, continue to incentivize policymakers to overlook the substantial costs associated with them.  More

 

Saudi beheads 83 people in 2014, the most in years

An Associated Press tally of announcements from the official Saudi Press Agency shows 83 people have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia in 2014, including Wednesday's execution.  More

 

Also see this two-part article:

You Can't Understand ISIS If You Don't Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia

With the advent of the oil bonanza -- as the French scholar, Giles Kepel writes, Saudi goals were to "reach out and spread Wahhabism across the Muslim world ... to "Wahhabise" Islam, thereby reducing the "multitude of voices within the religion" to a "single creed" -- a movement which would transcend national divisions. Billions of dollars were -- and continue to be -- invested in this manifestation of soft power.  It was this heady mix of billion dollar soft power projection -- and the Saudi willingness to manage Sunni Islam both to further America's interests, as it concomitantly embedded Wahhabism educationally, socially and culturally throughout the lands of Islam -- that brought into being a western policy dependency on Saudi Arabia  More

 

Egypt is the second-largest recipient of US Aid – after Israel. . .

Worse than the dictators: Egypt’s leaders bring pillars of freedom crashing down

Egypt is enacting authoritarian laws at a rate unmatched by any regime for 60 years, legal specialists from four institutions have told the Guardian. Since the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, Morsi’s successors in the presidency, Adly Mansour and Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, have used the absence of an elected parliament to almost unilaterally issue a series of draconian decrees that severely restrict freedom of expression, association and assembly. The speed at which the decrees have been issued outpaces legislative frenzies under the dictators Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak .  More