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Archive for the ‘Middle East’ Category

Draft-free America

Posted in Middle East, Military Polilcy, United States on November 20, 2011| Leave a Comment »

America’s involvement in wars in the Middle East has opened a number of difficult discussions here at home.  First and foremost, why did we get involved in the first place and why have we mortgaged our future pursuing those wars?

But those are questions that have been discussed since our invasion of Iraq and that will be discussed for decades to come.  It is possible that before all the Bush era decision-makers have passed on, we might even learn why we got so involved.

There is one more issue that is now beginning to be discussed.  It is an issue that is even more difficult than those above and that stems from the way America has come to run its military and to make wars.  It is, moreover, an issue of how we treat those who actually fight those wars.

In 1971, a nation tired of the Viet Nam war passed legislation ending the military draft in favor of an All-Volunteer Force (AVF).  The end of the draft was formally announced in 1973.  This status quo went along relatively smoothly until we got involved in our first unpopular post-Viet Nam war.

In that regard, in 2010, roughly seventy percent of Americans said the Iraq war was not worth it.   Sixty percent are opposed to our continued military involvement in Afghanistan.  It is parenthetically interesting to note that in the Muslim Middle East, 90% are against US military involvement where 57% of Israelis support that involvement.  And we thought we were in it to bring democracy to Islam!

In purely practical terms, the AVF has amounted to a Praetorian Guard for both the Republicans under Bush and the Democrats under Obama.  Aided and abetted by a compliant Congress that has largely opted out of its constitutional responsibility for declaring war, those administrations have been able to do pretty much whatever they wished with the AVF, including initiating and continuing two very expensive, unfunded and unpopular wars.

Today’s AVF is often criticized for not being representative of the US population.  According to a 2006 Rand study, “Recruits come primarily from families in the middle or lower middle classes. Few recruits come from upper-income families”, and recruits from the Southern states are overrepresented.  Nevertheless, despite such criticism, the AVF has functioned extremely well in its combat role.

So what’s the complaint?  We have a AVF that does its job well, in the process, using less privileged Americans and thus absolving the “upper classes” of bearing any responsibility for manning our military.

When we had an army of conscripts, as was the case in Viet Nam, jut about all of us had a dog in the fight.  We had relatives or friends who were in uniform.  For that reason, when we turned against the Viet Nam war, we had real influence.

We were able to actually affect the conduct of the war and that reality led to our withdrawal.  That is no longer the case.  Now, only a few of us have that dog in the fight.  There is little personal incentive to do the things necessary for a citizen to affect policy.

The toughest aspect of this new reality comes in the way we treat those who are in the fight.  We all remember how badly we Americans treated our troops when they came back from Viet Nam.  We spat on them, both figuratively and literally.  We don’t do that now.  Now we shower them with platitudes.  “Thank you for your service to our country” we say, thanking the Lord that we don’t really know them and that they are not actually related to us.

So, what do you do if you think that these 21st Century wars never should have been undertaken?  What do you say when you consider the trillions of dollars that our Middle East adventures have cost us?  Precisely how do you deal with the dichotomy that very brave and dedicated young men and women have been and now are participating in conflicts that you think are the result of terrible errors in leadership judgment?

The increasing number of Americans who believe that these wars have not been in our national interest clearly have to continue to argue against such involvements.  However, far more importantly than that, we have to recognize the extraordinary physical and mental damage these wars have done to those who actually participated in them.  The effects of that involvement will be with us as long as those veterans live.  It will be monumentally and increasingly expensive.

What we can all do is accept that fact and support those troops that way, irrespective of how we feel about the wars that caused that reality.

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Israel’s soul at stake

Posted in foreign policy, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Uncategorized on November 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Originally published in the Rutland Herald and the Barre Times-Argus

Article published Nov 6, 2011

Currently, the Arab world seems to be in nearly complete ferment, not necessarily heading for liberal democracy as we know it but probably toward self-determination, the result of which, if fulfilled, is likely to add to stability in the region.

Even though the process of getting to self-determination is likely to be exceedingly rough — take Libya, for example — it is inexorably under way. Every country in the region will be profoundly affected, most emphatically including Israel, which in the long run could face an even more united, less accommodating Arab world. Even today there is talk in Egypt of doing away with the 1979 peace agreement with Israel.

Recently, more than 110 members of the United Nations General Assembly announced their support for a Palestinian state. It is possible that in the coming months, the General Assembly will vote to recognize Palestine as a state defined by its pre-1967 borders. Such a motion would not be subject to Security Council veto and would have far-reaching ramifications for both countries.

And through all of this, Israel and the United States are talking about restarting Palestine-Israel negotiations. However, the likelihood of their taking place seems daily more remote.

The Palestinians, backed by the Arabs, and Israel, backed by the United States, remain equally resolute in setting up preconditions that the other side cannot or will not meet. Mutual recognition, establishing borders, negotiating the right of return and the ongoing Israeli settlement program are prominent among those issues.

To further complicate matters, UNESCO has just voted overwhelmingly to admit Palestine as a member state. Such a motion will not be subject to Security Council veto and is also likely to have a direct effect on Palestine’s ongoing attempts in the General Assembly to become a member state.

These could be ominous events for an Israel intent on maintaining the status quo. Remember, absent a two-state solution, the threat is to Israel’s Zionist roots of Jewishness and democracy, not to Palestine, which after half a century of statelessness has nothing much left to lose.

In addition, at a time when both Palestinians and Israelis need flexibility to reach any kind of acceptable solution, Israeli politics appear to be increasingly in the political grip of the settlers and their supporters, among whom we find Israel’s religiously conservative political right, the most strident of Israeli’s Christian and Jewish American supporters and the increasingly dogmatic Russian immigration to Israel.

For anyone who really cares about the Zionist future of Israel, a quick look is enough to bring tears to one’s eyes. It really doesn’t matter who is at fault; everything that is happening, every inescapable trend, every policy in place, every incontrovertible reality represents a virtually iron-clad guarantee that Israel is in the process of giving up its soul — its Zionist democratic and Jewish roots.

Unfortunately for Israel, time is not on its side. Demographics will do it in. The only answer for an Israel that decides to retain both its Jewish and democratic character lies in the two-state solution. As time goes on, however, the ongoing West Bank settlement program and ingrained Arab hostility toward the very existence of Israel make that outcome less feasible — some say, impossible.

So, absent the two-state solution, Israel has two options: giving up its democracy for apartheid, or giving up its Jewishness for a one-state solution. Retaining both seems highly unlikely, and neither would be acceptable for a true Zionist.

Recently, some committed Zionist supporters of Israel are showing subtle changes in attitude toward the future. The media contain daily articles questioning the settlement movement and the Likud’s approach to human rights. Israel’s daily Haaretz has just asked, “Is Israel confusing legitimate criticism of its policies with anti-Semitism to avoid having to make difficult existential decisions?”

Here in America, a new organization called J Street, “The political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans,” is gaining membership, particularly among younger Americans, while being totally rejected by the Netanyahu government.

Will American Jewry be able to continue to support Israel if it maintains its current political, social and religious orientations?

Is the situation reaching a point where liberal American Jews will be forced to choose between their values and their emotional attachment to Israel? That would be a sad day, particularly when successful negotiations on four issues — security, borders, refugees and Jerusalem — could save Zionist Israel at the cost of some of the settlements.

That is an impossible goal if Israel continues to refuse to even try. Lose some settlements or lose your Zionist soul.

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No longer king of the hill

Posted in Libya, Middle East, United States on September 11, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Originally published in the Barre Times-Argus and the Rutland Herald

It now appears clear that Muammar Gaddaffi’s Libya will not survive. Like all repressive regimes that have exploited their people for decades, it will cease to exist. The $64 million question is what will replace it?

In a burst of bravado or compassion, or whatever you wish to call it, the United States decided to get involved in the ongoing civil unrest in Libya when it lurched onto the scene in the middle of February of this year. The issue here is not the insurrection, the wishes of our European allies or oil. The issue is very clearly how we view ourselves in today’s world. 

For reasons that probably lie at the heart of the American psyche, we genuinely view ourselves as today’s only benevolent world power. We are the people who are somehow destined to bring peace, prosperity and democracy to the rest of the world. If everyone in the world lived under the rules of our liberal democracy, there would be nothing but peace and prosperity. Having once become caught up in that scenario, it is difficult for us Americans to see the world the way it really is.

Whether or not we realize it, the world most of us grew up in ended with the death of the Soviet Union. That old Cold War world had resolved a very simple dilemma for the rest of the world. In the battle between democracy and communism, whose side were you on? With a variety of defense and aid packages, we and the Soviets signed or bribed the Third World into our respective camps and tolerated their brutalities in return for their support.

Today, no such Cold War competition exists. There are no further existential choices to be made between democracy and communism. This new reality has allowed all of the rest of the countries in the world to focus on and be guided by their national and regional interests. Yemen does not have to choose anymore because, frankly, the lack of Cold War competition means that there is no free lunch coming to them from either America or the USSR.

So in many respects, particularly given the results to date of our adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, America has become a toothless tiger. We no longer hold sway over much of the rest of the world, as we had during the Cold War. 

Having found a startling level of foreign disinclination to help us with our Iraq adventure, we went ahead with a new, aggressive, unilateral policy. Under Bush, we would do whatever we wished whether the world agreed with us or not. As a basis for foreign policy, that approach is not likely to find many friends. In fact, over the years since that 2003 invasion, we have come to be known around the world as self-interested and hypocritical — touting democracy while running Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, secret jails, renditions, “enhanced interrogations” and a reduction in our own civil and individual rights. Not many countries outside NATO, and not all within, are interested in supporting our foreign adventures.

This would be acceptable if we had unlimited resources and imperial inclinations. As can be seen in American public opinion polls on Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Libya, the fact is that Americans are not so inclined. A quick look at our divisive governance, our financial problems and our seriously overcommitted “all volunteer army” gives no indication that we have the necessary imperial capabilities.

And yet in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria and all the other Middle East countries struggling for their freedom from homegrown oppressors, we continue to meddle in their internal affairs.

The problem here is that we, as a country and people, have not acknowledged this new world. We have not recognized the extent to which foreign countries and peoples have put aside their relationships with us in favor of concentrating on what they see to be their own true national interests.

All of these countries face major issues that will inhibit their transition into whatever they ultimately become. They share many of the following realities: A critical lack of direct experience with democratic governance, a lack of political movements that could evolve into actual governance, tribalism, ethnicity, corruption and increasing distrust of the West. None of these realities argues in favor of the successful installation of liberal democracy.

Democracy will not thrive in these kinds of environments. It really is time that we started to support true self-determination where the downtrodden people of these countries really do get to choose the kind of governments under which they live. Only then will any kind of stability come to the world. 

It will take a very long time.

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Crude Oil: What Gives with the Squabbling at OPEC

Posted in Middle East, United States on June 23, 2011|

[Originally published in the Herald of Randolph]

In the most recent OPEC session, the Saudis pushed very hard for approval to raise the output of crude oil.  They were rejected by a majority of the membership.

Such a rise would likely have pushed the price of oil down to the $75 dollar per barrel range, which would have been a boon to all of the countries now trying to deal with the ongoing recession, most emphatically including the United States.

At the same time, you may have noticed that the Saudis are anything but pleased with what they consider to be America’s ill-advised new policy of supporting the Arab Spring.  They are particularly displeased with our support of the Egyptian rebellion.

Why then, would the Saudis want to do something that would be pleasing to the United States, like trying to put some sort of cap on the ever-rising price of crude? Don’t be confused about this, their decision had very little to do with the Unites States or with international politics.  It had to do primarily with their own internal economic situation.

Saudi Arabia has one of the world’s largest oil reserves.  It has very little else going for it economically. As long as its reserves last, which is estimated to be around 75 years, Saudi Arabia will stay economically healthy. But it must keep the rest of the world comfortable and happy with the price of crude oil.

If that price goes too high, the consumer countries, which include the most technically advanced and innovative countries in the world, will start looking for alternative sources of energy. If they can’t easily find them, they will look to create or invent them.  In the end, one or more of those countries will find energy sources that are close enough in price to crude and politically far more stable than the crude oil energy offered by what are, arguably, among the most unstable countries in the world.  That would be bad news for Saudi Arabia.

This internal economic reality runs headlong into political reality in OPEC where Saudi interests are in keeping customers by maintaining reasonable prices. Unfortunately for the Saudis (and the world’s leading consumer – the United States), this view is not shared by that majority of OPEC members who do not have the oil reserves required for them to have a truly long-term policy on crude.

In fact, such producers, most of whom simply cannot significantly raise the output of their product because they have neither the reserves nor the facilities, want to avoid a drop in the price of crude at all costs.  A drop from today’s price of $100 per barrel to the Saudi’s hope for $75 per barrel would mean a cut of 25% in the income of those countries from oil.

A perfect example of this dilemma is in Algeria, where a cut of 20% in income from crude oil sales would result in a 10-15% drop in their overall GDP!  That is a massive economic blow to a country like Algeria. Because so many of these low-volume OPEC oil producers are countries that do not enjoy the benefits of either affluence or real self-determination, GDP cuts in that range are highly destabilizing and thus to be avoided at all costs.

Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, Libya, Nigeria, Ecuador, Qatar, Venezuela and Angola, for example, are 10 of today’s 12 OPEC member states.  Most of those states are far more interested in the income produced by crude today than they are in crude produced in 100 years.  Thus, they represent a bloc opposed to any Saudi plans to lower the price of crude today.

However, the reality is that the Saudis are going ahead and raising production on their own by up to 13%, with the sale of the surplus going largely to China and other expanding Asian economies.  The net result of this overall rise in world production will be a drop in the worldwide price of crude oil.

The lesson for Americans who consume such an outrageously large proportion of the world’s production is that we are going to run out of oil.  No matter what you hear from the Oil and Gas industry in their constant barrages on television, we will be without oil far sooner than anyone realizes. If our past behavior is predictive, we will ignore this reality because we can drive, heat and cool, etc. today. We will rather stupidly wait for the inevitable Armageddon.

Imagine the misery we could avoid and the money we could make if we addressed and solved the problem of alternate forms of energy before the crude runs out!

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How we helped al-Qaida

Posted in foreign policy, Middle East, terrorism, United States on June 19, 2011|

[Originally published in the Barre Times-Argus and the Rutland Herald]

Terrorism is not designed to overwhelm. It is designed to undermine. In that context, whatever it does to cause or initiate anxiety in populations, it relies on the reaction of those populations equally as much to achieve its final goal.

The reaction of the Bush administration to the slaughter of 9/11, largely continued under Obama, was precisely what bin Laden and al-Qaida would have prayed for as it created an environment which made life for Americans difficult, induced levels of paranoia and ultimately resulted in the loss of many of its citizens’ basic human rights in the name of the fight against terrorism. Terrorism has now been fully planted in our collective psyche. To wit:

We have lived for almost a decade with an insane, multicolored “terrorist warning system” designed primarily to cover the posterior of the administration that designed and implemented it.

Transportation has become a nightmare. The simple preparation for air travel takes infinitely longer now than it did 10 years ago. Controls in airports have become so repressive and intrusive that air travel now proceeds at a crawl.

We have become paranoid and morbidly suspicious and distrustful of anyone we think might be a Muslim.

Our government has been able to get whatever it wanted in terms of surveillance rights. We have been subject to warrantless surveillance of all kinds.

We have watched our government torment, torture and incarcerate people without any regard for human rights or international law and convention.

The sad thing is that we have acquiesced to all of this because of our concerns about our own personal safety. But will we ever get our human rights back or will we lose more? In the dark days of 1775, Benjamin Franklin wrote perceptively, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

The key here is that without the active, witless involvement and effective acquiescence of our government, al-Qaida terrorism would have caused us far less pain than it ultimately has.

When it came to planning the attack on 9/11, most of the al-Qaida operational management was dead set against it. The plan prevailed solely because Osama bin Laden, their oracle, was its champion.

Ultimately, those in al-Qaida who opposed the 9/11 plan were proven correct. The 9/11 attack was the beginning of the decline of al-Qaida, who did just about everything wrong. They provoked a nasty, powerful and retributive America which turned on them full force. We invaded Afghanistan, denying them their operational base and stability. We methodically began to eliminate their senior and mid-level operational management. We pursued bin Laden so relentlessly that it completely changed al-Qaida’s modus operandi.

Al-Qaida became a franchise operation, the McDonald’s of terrorism. All a wannabee jihadi had to do was get a group of like-minded folks together and find a building from which to operate. At that point, visits to training facilities in Pakistan or Yemen or wherever, would teach them how to make bombs and how to run a business. Just like McDonald’s.

This progression was largely the result of the environment in which al-Qaida lived. As they ramped up their operations, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq and later in Yemen and in North Africa, they created another entire category of enemy — those Muslims who objected to their killing of other Muslims. Since they were killing Muslims in droves, that meant that they could no longer be sure that their living environment was benign.

Worst of all from the Muslim point of view, they began to justify those killings by indiscriminately and in Muslim eyes, inappropriately employing takfir, the practice of branding other Muslims as unbelievers and making them thereby “legally” executable by al-Qaida.

Add to that the fact of lethal Western pursuit of their members, and we see al-Qaida going underground and paranoid. Bin Laden hid in the open in suburban Pakistan. But he was so paranoid that he had no phone, no Internet connection. Under those circumstances, there ceased to be an “al-Qaida Central.” All that was left were the franchises around the world. Given his personal circumstances, bin Laden could not conceivably have exercised classic command and control over them.

Which is precisely where we are now. We see disparate groups freelancing on their own in whatever operations appeal to them and doing so in operational environments that are increasingly hostile to them. Osama’s death hasn’t changed much.

If we could only bring ourselves to mitigate those of our activities, like our Middle East military operations, that provoke moderate Muslims and therefore strengthen al-Qaida, we might find ourselves in a far stronger counterterrorist position than that in which we find ourselves today.

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In Egypt, a perilous journey to democracy

Posted in Egypt, foreign policy, Middle East on June 5, 2011|

[Originally published in the Barre Times-Argus and the Rutland Herald]

 By Haviland Smith


What is happening in Egypt may be unique to that country, but it is certainly a portent of what may come to pass in the Middle East and North Africa. Time will tell as the “Arab Spring,” President Obama’s “new” policy toward the region and American congressional attitudes unfold.

Our president has just said we will support the legitimate wishes of the Arab people for self-determination. But what if that turns into an Islamist government or a military dictatorship in Egypt?

Egyptians will have their first presidential election this fall. There is only one political party that is in any way “established” in Egypt. That is the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in 1928 as an Islamist movement.

Egypt doesn’t have a lot of options. With a broad array of political candidates and virtually no established democratic institutions, the Egyptian military is the only other organization with any real power.

Mohamed El-Sayed Habib, first deputy of the chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood, recently made a bold statement in which he outlined his party’s positions. Whether you believe him or not, and many Egyptians do not, he has come out along the following lines.

He said the brotherhood believes in political reform, democracy, pluralism and the peaceful rotation of political power. He sees the nation as the primary source of national power.

Further, the brotherhood is in favor of the termination of the state of emergency, restoring public freedoms, including the right to establish political parties, whatever their tendencies may be. It also supports freedom of the press, freedom of criticism and thought, freedom of peaceful demonstrations and freedom of assembly.

He concluded that the brotherhood also supports the end of Hosni Mubarak’s exceptional courts and exceptional laws. It wishes to establish the independence of the judiciary and fully supervised general elections, and remove all obstacles that restrict the functioning of civil organizations.

Whatever you may have heard about the brotherhood, this statement certainly contains just about all the elements we Americans, as purveyors of liberal democracy, would like to see embedded in constitutions around the world.

And remember, this statement was made for internal Egyptian consumption prior to the fall 2011 presidential election, in which roughly 20 percent of the population is estimated to support the brotherhood; it is unclear if it will even be allowed to run its own presidential candidate.

With the presidential election coming up this fall, the U.S. Congress has already weighed in. The Republican chairman and the Democratic ranking member of the House Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs vowed in May at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference to deny aid to Egypt if the Muslim Brotherhood should happen to gain strength in the upcoming elections.

Over the last 50 years, the Egyptian military has invested in and now “owns” somewhere between 5 percent and 40 percent of the entire Egyptian economy. That makes it the only cohesive force in Egypt that has a real, ongoing stake in the status quo, and it is the only ones with guns.

What might happen if the Muslim Brotherhood gets favorable results in a new, free election? It got 20 percent in the rigged 2005 election when it was not even allowed to label its own candidates as belonging to the brotherhood. Will a favorable result trigger the withdrawal of U.S. aid from Egypt? Will that withdrawal include our generous provision of military aid?

If that plays out as our congressmen vow it will, what is the Egyptian military likely to do? For it, everything is at stake. It relies heavily on U.S. aid. What happens immediately after the election is critical for Egypt’s hopes for future liberalization. The military has already begun to threaten some of the civil rights gained after the Tahrir Square revolution.

It has the power and is not about to give it up. Any election result will have to be at least tacitly approved by the military. It may or may not object to the Muslim Brotherhood; however, it can probably re-establish a military dictatorship whenever it wishes.

The military would certainly react badly to a loss of billions in U.S. aid. If ultimately there is a military coup, will it be because Congress is miffed at what it considers to be positive brotherhood election results and halts all aid to Egypt? Do we support real self-determination in the Middle East or not?

America must not kill the Egyptian Spring, ultimately returning Egypt to military dictatorship, simply because of our fear of and suspicions about Islam.

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Syria’s struggle is not our fight

Posted in foreign policy, Middle East, Syria, United States on May 22, 2011|

[Originally published in  the Rutland Herald and the Barre Times-Argus]

Syria is a complicated place. Like just about every other modern-day “country” in its region, it has been conquered and reconquered by all the major culprits, Persian, Roman, Greek, Ottoman as well as others.

Since World War II, Syria has evolved much like the other countries in the region. It has survived periods of severe instability and pure repression. In its first 10 years of existence, it went through four constitutional rewrites and 20 separate cabinets.

It suffered through numerous military coups and suffered often under martial law. An emergency law, which effectively ended most of the protections afforded to its citizens by its various constitutions, was declared in l962 and lasted until 2011. In short, throughout its existence, Syria has been the victim of invasion, plotting, coups, instability and chaos.

Like Iraq, Syria is another example of rule by a repressive minority. Syria is roughly 74 percent Sunni, 16 percent Shiite (Alawites) and 10 percent Christian and “others,” including a very few Jews. The Alawites are a mystical minority of Shiite Islam. They came into power with Hafez al-Assad in 1970, which was something of an unwelcome surprise to the three quarters of the population that was Sunni and had held power in Syria for centuries.

The Assad years were anything but rosy for Syrians. His rule was characterized by automatic repression of any opposition. This, of course, was made doubly difficult and doubly repressive by the minority status of the Alawites in Syria. Assad ran a pervasive internal security apparatus comprising thousands of agents, all of whom were reporting primarily on real and imagined dissent.

During the period, he is accused of having been responsible for literally thousands of extrajudicial executions of Syrian citizens. Perhaps the most memorable of these was the Hama massacre in February 1982, when the Syrian army put down a revolt by Sunnis in Hama; it is said that 10,000 to 40,000 Sunni civilians were killed and the city almost completely razed.

In foreign affairs, modern Syria has been involved in the 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars with the Israelis. It has been in the forefront of the opposition to Israeli occupation of Palestine, financing and assisting both Hamas and Hezbollah.

Lebanon, which is considered by Syrian irredentists to be rightfully theirs, has been a constant target for their military and political action. In recent times, during and even after the Lebanese civil war of 1975 to 1990, Syrian troops were invited into Lebanon by partisan factions seeking support from the Assad regime. Particularly sensitive and contentious even today is the popular belief that in more recent years Syrian agents assassinated a pro-Western Lebanese prime minister and several other prominent leaders regarded by Damascus as hostile to Syria’s historic ambitions to control Lebanon.

Now Syria is under new management. Hafez al-Assad’s son, Bashar, has been president of Syria since 2000 when his father died. As Bashar had studied in Great Britain as an ophthalmologist, there were some hopes that Syria might enjoy a less repressive rule under his hand.

That has not proven to be the case. The fact is that he is a minority Alawite working in a government with fellow minority Alawites who are generally resented by the majority Sunnis whom they rule. They have ruled for the past 40 years because they have stuck together and terrorized the majority Sunnis.

There are neighbors who have conflicting stakes in the current Syrian rebellion. For example, anti-American elements like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, which have been closely allied to and supported by Syria, are finding today that many of their youthful members are sympathetic to the protesters being ruthlessly suppressed by the Assad regime.

The result here is simple and pervasive. The Sunnis who are now in fairly full rebellion against the sitting Syrian government are not going to be handed the reins of power. The Alawites will fight them to the end, if only to save their own lives.

We have no dog in this fight. The Syrians, whether they rid themselves of the Assad government or not, have no history, no experience, no training in anything we Americans would recognize as politically attractive or worth actively supporting.

Direct American intervention of any kind and at any level would simply risk being drawn into another potentially costly and bloody civil war in which vital U.S. national interests are clearly not at stake.

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Don’t leave counterterrorism to the Military

Posted in Afghanistan, foreign policy, intelligence, Middle East, terrorism, United States on May 12, 2011|

The old saw tells us that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”.  But that really isn’t true.  A terrorist is a  terrorist and an insurgent, or freedom fighter, is an insurgent. If we are able to stick to labeling them on the basis of what they actually do, rather than what we think they represent, we will be able to keep them straight and stand a much better chance of dealing effectively with terrorism.

Insurgencies are movements designed to overthrow existing governments.  Some are popular and have pretty good prospects for success. Some are not. Generally they spring from within populations.  If they are successful, it is because they generally represent the population’s views and thus have their support.  That makes them very difficult to defeat, particularly by a foreign government.

It is extremely difficult to define “terrorism” largely because it is such an emotional subject.  The United Nations has been unable to do so. Having said that, there are certain characteristics that are helpful in identifying terrorists.  They use violence and asymmetrical warfare as their primary tools.  They are not typically organized like insurgencies, but rather resemble politically oriented covert action groups. They use their terror psychologically for maximum impact to intimidate populations rather than simply kill individuals.  Finally, they are non-state groups.

Historically, governments have been far more successful against terrorist groups than they have been against insurgencies, primarily because insurgencies tend to enjoy more support from local populations

Today’s American foreign and domestic counterterrorism policies have been built on the “Global War on Terror” or (GWOT).  The Bush Administration labeled everyone it didn’t like a “terrorist”, never taking the time to differentiate between terrorism and insurgency.  That was our first mistake. The Taliban, despite the fact that it commits terrorist acts, is essentially an insurgent organization. Yet, until recently, they were constantly referred to as terrorists, perhaps because we needed terrorists for our GWOT in an Afghanistan where there were hardly any Al Qaeda members left.  Even though Afghans generally hate Taliban policies, and with good reason, they will often chose them over us if they are forced to do so.  We are, after all, the foreigners in the fracas.

Our second mistake was in deciding to “solve” our terrorism problems with the military might that had so brilliantly served us during the preceding fifty years.  In employing a military response, we were using an asset that had been designed in the Second World War to sweep across northern Europe in an attack on Germany and then further fine-tuned during the Cold War to sweep across Germany and Poland to defeat the USSR.  How we figured that was an appropriate tool for dealing with the new terrorism is hard to understand.  The answer probably lies in the fact that the military establishment wanted a piece of the action, and all it had to offer was its sword.

Until the early May operation that dispatched Osama bin Laden, the only example we had that argued that massive military response might not be the best approach, was the initial invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001.  In that operation, a handful of special operations troops accompanied by a small number of intelligence officers, kicked off a blitzkrieg that ended in very short order with the literal destruction of Al Qaida in Afghanistan and, coincidentally, the defeat of the Taliban.  Remember, this was the “GWOT”.  Afghanistan initially had nothing to do with insurgencies, only with 9/11 and the terrorists.  Even though it all went south with the subsequent invasion of Iraq, the lesson was there to be studied, absorbed and implemented.

SOME HISTORY

In 2010, the Rand Corporation reviewed the findings of its own 2008 study of 648 terrorist groups that existed around the world between 1968 and 2006.  It concluded that of those groups, 43% were absorbed quietly back into the environments in which they had been active, 40% were defeated by police and intelligence operations and 7% by military confrontation.

In Islam, as elsewhere, true terrorist groups most often are involved in activities that are dangerous to the general population.  Such groups, as in the case of Al Qaeda, often include members who are foreigners, who have goals inimical to the local population’s goals, or serve non-local causes. In the case of Al Qaeda, they often kill Muslims, a sin under the Koran. In short, they do not necessarily spring from and represent the ideas and desires of the local population.

Terrorists normally operate clandestinely in their local environments, trying to avoid identification by local populations. In fact, they often conduct operations designed to pit one portion of the population against another, simply for the purpose of creating chaos.  That was part of Al Qaeda in Iraq’s (AQI) operational approach under Abu Musab al Zarqawi. AQI provocations were designed specifically to goad Shia into attacking Sunnis or vice versa, simply to keep the pot boiling.

When terrorists are the object of an essentially clandestine response like the one we conducted in Afghanistan in early October 2001, it is they alone, not the local population that are being targeted. That fact gives operational advantages to the special ops personnel and non-military police and/or intelligence officers working against them and permits local resident neutrality or even support for the local authorities.

When terrorist operations become known to local populations and are recognized as threatening or opposed to their interests, those populations often turn against them, as was the case with AQI at the beginning of the 2007 “surge” in Iraq, when the Sunni “Awakening” began to methodically wipe them out.

In direct contrast, when terrorists are confronted with military power, particularly foreign military power, the entire equation changes.

Let’s start here by stipulating that what America seeks from local Muslims in the struggle with radical Muslim terrorism, is optimally their support or, failing that, their neutrality.

As we know from our own experiences in the Middle East, American military confrontation tends to force the local non-combatant population to make a decision about whom to support, particularly if the local population believes that our “terrorist” is his “insurgent”. Will it be the foreigner or the local?  This is the main reason that accurate labeling is so critically important and that a non-military approach is preferable in cases of terrorism. Is he a terrorist who is not seeking the same goals as the population and can be justly opposed? Or is he an insurgent who is on the same page with the population and must be supported?  If he is a terrorist he is less likely to be accepted or protected by the locals.  If he is really an insurgent, he will be one of them and they will back him against the foreigner.

If we misidentify out of carelessness, stupidity or even willfulness, as may very well have been the case in the past, we will likely employ the wrong techniques against the troublemaker, whatever he really is.

TODAY’S MIDDLE EAST DESTABILIZERS

As if all this terrorism/insurgency discussion is not enough, our problems in the Middle East are made especially difficult by the facts that exist both there and here in America.  The historical, political and cultural differences between us are numerous and important.

The Middle East is rife with ongoing conflicts.  Sometimes they are absolutely overt, sometimes they are less obvious, but they are always there and have been for millennia.  The Shia/Sunni split, the Persian/Arab competition for hegemony in the Gulf, the anomalous position of the Kurds. The hangovers of the Crusaders, Western imperialism and US Regime change operations in Syria and Iran have all added up to a region in which, today, the notion of liberal democracy is quite foreign and its bearer is viewed with extreme suspicion.  There is little history of democracy. The peoples of the region, particularly given their tribalism, ethnic and sectarian differences have no experience that would prepare them for the freedoms and responsibilities that must come with self-rule and liberal democracy.  What they do have is a Koran which gives any believing Muslim an exhaustive blueprint for life.

On the other side of the ledger, we have a United States that is ruled by its own American exceptionalism and eager to save the world by exporting its model.  Yet, we are a wildly impatient, ADHD nation, short on planning, and married to short-term political timetables. In foreign affairs, we tend to evolve policies for American domestic political reasons, eschewing the realities that exist abroad.  We talk democracy and support the most repressive rulers in Islam. For over sixty years we have failed miserably to bring peace to Israel and Palestine. We are so bereft of influence there that the sides are preceding in their own respective directions without reference to America.   Yet, our goal seems to be a desire to install “democracy” in a world that has little reason to want to accept it.  As a result, we are seen as opportunistic, narcissistic and hypocritical.

Many, if not most of these problems have solutions that would help us.   The “Arab Spring” will change the Middle East forever, as the rebellions against existing authority have completely stolen the show from Al Qaeda, rendering their dreams of a medieval caliphate virtually obsolete.  The rebellions have brought some sort of self-determination to those people who outlast the tyrants that have recently ruled them.  If we can bring ourselves to accept self-determination in place of democratization as a viable goal for them, active nation-state hostility to us will subside.

What we can do completely on our own is change our counterterrorism policy.  When we attack terrorism with our military establishment, as we have done in Iraq and Afghanistan after 2003, terrorism morphs into insurgency. That insurgency then demands our involvement in the export of democracy and nation building, all of which are matters at which we are demonstrable failures.

We are proposing to do all of this in the face of popular American disinterest in and lagging support of our adventures in the Middle East.  Reality is additionally determined by a burgeoning national debt, ongoing national economic problems, a wildly expensive military establishment built for wars we do not face and acute national taxophobia.

We need to acknowledge that our current use of military might against terrorism in acutely counterproductive. In the absence of that constant military presence, local governments will find it politically more acceptable to share Al Qaeda as an enemy than they do today.  We need to concentrate on our liaison relationships with friendly countries, our production of intelligence on all terrorism activities and our training and deployment of the kind of special operations teams that we have recently seen operating so successfully.

The effectiveness of those teams and of a program based on them, coupled with the absence of our provocative uniformed military in battle all over the region, will give us a better shot at solving our problems in the region.  At the same time, a change in counterterrorism tactics and the deployment of a greatly reduced, but uniquely competent force should permit the saving of billions of dollars and the opportunity to put our economic house in order here at home, while it raises our prospects of diminishing the future threat of terrorism.


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Zionist dream in peril

Posted in Israel/Palestine, Middle East, United States on May 8, 2011|

[Originally published in the Rutland Herald and the Barre Times-Argus]

Israel’s only hope for the continuation of its Zionist dream of a democratic, Jewish state lies in a solution in which both Israel and the Palestinians have their own separate states — the “two-state solution.”

Absent such a solution and because of demographic imperatives, Israel will become either a non-democratic, apartheid state or a state in which Jews will be in the minority.

This situation has existed since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, after which Israel took possession of East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and large chunks of the West Bank, all previously held by Palestine under the 1948 U.N. partition of Palestine.

In those 44 years of occupation, the two-state solution has been extremely elusive. Israel would seem to have been driven by its desire to hold on (illegally, under international law) to those territories and to expand them through its “settlement” policies, where Palestinian motivation appears to have been driven by their desire to “throw the Israelis into the sea.” Arab countries have fully backed the Palestinians, and we Americans have done the same for Israel. Under those circumstances, there has never been enough momentum for success, and recently, America’s ability to actually influence the situation has faded with our increasing military involvement in the Middle East.

Now, suddenly, the game has changed. Instead of continuing to rely on the United States for support, which has never materialized, and to push for a two-state solution, which is clearly of little to no interest to the Netanyahu government, the Palestinians have changed course. Hamas and Fatah have decided to make nice. They have finally given up on any help from America. Sensing increased international frustration with a lack of progress toward a two-state solution, as mirrored in what many countries see as Israeli intransigence, they have decided to try to gain recognition as a state under the United Nations.

If this succeeds, as appears likely, the Israelis will be put in the position of occupying parts of a fellow member state of the U.N.

Where would that leave Israel in the international community?

As the author of much if not most of the violence against Israel, Hamas has always been a total anathema to Israelis. Israel has flatly refused to deal with them in any way other than militarily.

All of this has happened without any participation of the United States. We have, in fact, continued our attitude that Israel can do no wrong, despite the obvious fact that either Israeli or Palestinian intransigence will likely lead to a total change in the nature of the state of Israel, leaving an undemocratic apartheid state that would be difficult for Americans to support, or a minority Jewish state impossible for Israeli Jews to support.

Common sense would make one think that the two-state solution would be more and more attractive. But where it may be so for Palestinians and, by extension, Arabs, it would appear not to be for the majority of Israelis. In addition to that, the Palestinians have now apparently made peace between their two previously hostile factions, Fatah and Hamas.

The Netanyahu government has said it will never negotiate anything with Hamas. At the same time, it has pulled out all the stops in trying to block the Palestine recognition move in the United Nations. In doing that, it has cranked up all its “Israel right or wrong” allies, particularly here in the United States, to fight against any consideration of U.N. recognition of Israel, even though that flies directly in the face of hopes for the continued existence of a democratic Jewish state that Israelis and Americans will continue to support.

This leaves only one question. What are the true goals of Israelis and their American supporters who are so stridently opposed to a two-state solution? The only answer that holds water is that they are more interested in the acquisition of Palestinian land than in the Zionist dream. Nothing else makes any sense.

A clue to this phenomenon may lie in the nature of recent Jewish immigration to Israel from the Soviet Union and Russia. In both cases, the raw material that has come to Israel has had neither interest nor experience in democracy. Given their backgrounds, they are the direct antithesis of the Zionists who created and nurtured that Israel.

Zionism may be dead or dying. Today’s Israelis and their supporters appear far more interested in growing the size of Israel than in its democratic nature or its Zionist founders’ dreams.

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The U.S Government and the Arab Spring

Posted in foreign policy, Middle East, United States on April 28, 2011|

[Originally Published in the Herald of Randolph]

What is there about the United States that makes it possible for us to get involved in foreign affairs when we have little, if any idea exactly what is going on or how our involvement, whatever that may be, will effect the outcome.  The “Arab Spring” is the perfect example of this issue.

Since the end of the Second World War, we have supported any regime in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, providing we believed that the regime in question would support US interests.  Over time, that has brought us into uncomfortable relationships with Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the old Soviet Central Asian Republics, now states.

We signed on with those countries simply because we felt it in our interest to do so.  Oil was important, although far less so for us than for Europe and Asia.  What we were really after, whether we articulated it clearly or not, was regional stability. The Cold War caused us to seek allies against the Soviet Union to deny them oil and international support.  In support of that, we believed we needed those states to be politically stable.

The problem was that those geographic entities that called themselves states were inherently unstable largely because they had been created without any particular thought being given to ethnic, tribal, or religious realities by the imperial powers that created them. They were, as can be seen in Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, made up of ethnic, religious and tribal groups that had little sense of nation, and loyalty primarily to their tribe or religion.  Libya is the perfect example.  As a country which is probably likely to turn into two or three separate states, Libya comprises something on the order of 140-150 separate tribes and tribal groupings.

That has always been true and we have always known it.  How can we now employ a policy based on the likelihood that there is hope for unity in Libya? How can we assume that those disparate groupings will cast aside of thousands of years of animosity and suddenly enter into the 21st century world with a welcoming hand?

In Afghanistan, we predicate our success in creating a unified state on being able to assemble and train police and Army forces that will keep order once we leave.  Absent a repressive government like the Taliban we overthrew, how can that be possible?  If we want a police force that represents all the people, we have to have Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Turkmen, Baloch, Aimak, etc, etc, on it and they have to serve throughout the nation, despite the fact that they are historically at odds with each other.  There’s nothing new here.

Iraq is no different, just a bit farther down the road toward internal strife.  Because of their past, the Sunnis, who have always run things, honestly believe they are entitled to do so in the future.  Why, many of they still actually believe they are the majority group in Iraq!

The Shia, never having been allowed to run anything and having been horribly mistreated by the Sunnis, know they are the majority group and believe they should rule.

And the Kurds!  The Kurds have been mistreated by just about everyone in the Region and are not about to let that happen again.  They will look out for their own interests despite the interests and needs of any other group.  And to further complicate everything, the Kurds who at thirty million people are the largest ethnic group in the world without a country of their own, have something up to fifteen million living in Turkey where they are restive, repressed and a source of major concern for Turkish stability.

What started simultaneously with our invasion of Iraq and subsequent re-invasion of Afghanistan was a process of ferment in the Middle East. It is difficult to argue that the invasion was irrelevant to the Arab Spring.  What we have done, quite simply, is start the process that is leading to the forcible removal of all the old tyrants who have been our stability-friendly allies for the past 75 years.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. Unfortunately, with all the religious, tribal and ethnic divisions in the Middle East today and given its dismal record of accommodation, it seems unlikely that there will be comity in the short run or that we will see what we think of as a positive outcome there for a very long time.


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