text:
Persons claiming to be associated with the "hacking" group Anonymous say they hacked into an ISIS-supporting website, replacing its content with a message to calm down alongside an advertisement for an online pharmacy that sells Viagra and Prozac for bitcoins.
ISIS sites have supposedly been moving onto the "dark web" in an attempt to avoid discovery. But a hacking group called Ghost Sec, which says it is related to Anonymous, took the site down and replaced it with a message telling readers that there was "Too Much ISIS."
"Enhance your calm," the full message read. "Too many people are into this ISIS-stuff. Please gaze upon this lovely ad so we can upgrade our infrastructure to give you ISIS content you all so desperately crave."
And now, some questions.
Despite this story being widely-published by global media, none of the articles seems to include a link to the "hacked" site. This raises the bullsh*t potential.
Lots of people, including naughty teens and basement-dwelling jihadis, throw up sites that are "ISIS." It is very, very unclear how many of these are actually connected in anyway to the actual ISIS core membership. Whatever was hacked, which may or may not actually have happened, may or may not have had much to do with ISIS.
Lots of people, including naughty teens and basement-dwelling cyber jihadis, claim to be associated with Anonymous, so that their juvenile pranks, which may or may not actually have happened, get more attention.
Exactly what is the propaganda value of a site on the dark web, that is by definition hard to locate and often inaccessible without knowledge and software not casually available? It seems like useful propaganda needs wide dissemination to do its job. For example, stories about "Anonymous" taking down an "ISIS" website.
Lastly, so what? Even if (a big if) most of this is true, so what? Wow, says ISIS, I guess our plans for a worldwide caliphate are all off now, because we got pranked on one of our dark web sites. Well, we had a good run in Iraq and Syria, anyway.
I call bullsh*t on this whole thing. Same as all those stories about ISIS running a 24/7 Help Desk to assist jihadis with encryption turned out to be false.
These things are sensationalist media fluffing at best, and more likely western-planted propaganda.
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
So file this one under "What Could Possibly Go Wrong?" subcategory, "Everything."
American ally the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has dispatched hundreds of Colombian mercenaries to Yemen to fight in that country's raging conflict, adding a volatile new element in a complex proxy war that has drawn in the United States and Iran, reports the New York Times.
It is the first combat deployment for the mercenary army that the Emirates has built up over the past five years. And — small world –the army was raised and for its few years run by Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater. The mercs are presently controlled by the small Emirati military while Prince presumably has moved on to create private merc armies for others we'll someday learn about.
The arrival in Yemen of 450 Latin American troops — among them are also Panamanian, Salvadoran and Chilean soldiers — adds to the volatile stew of government armies, armed tribes, terrorist networks and Yemeni militias currently at war in the country. Earlier this year, a coalition of Sunni countries led by Saudi Arabia, including the United States, began a military campaign in Yemen against Shia Houthi rebels supported by Iran. So, in theory, the merc army is semi-on the same side as the U.S.
As background, we all do remember that the U.S. government previously employed Erik Prince's Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq as security for the American embassy and State Department diplomats.
After Blackwater imploded, killing 14 innocent Iraqi civilians and wounding 17 others, in Nisour Square and after a few name changes (Xe, Academi) to hide the fact that Blackwater was still employed by the State Department long after, the mercenary contracts moved to other similar but unrelated companies. Those companies in turn employed mercenaries from various countries in service to the USG. In addition to many mercs from Central and South America, popular hired guns also were recruited from Africa, where child soldiers and constant warfare created a steady pool of trained recruits.
"Mercenaries are an attractive option for rich countries who wish to wage war yet whose citizens may not want to fight," said Sean McFate, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order.
"The private military industry is global now," said McFate, adding that the United States essentially "legitimized" the industry with its heavy reliance on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan over more than a decade of war.
BONUS: Erik Prince is now chairman of another security firm, Frontier Services Group. It focuses heavily on providing logistics and aviation support in Africa. The company has a fleet of Cessna aircraft and "holds important customer approvals from the United Nations, the British government and the U.S. government."
And what could possibly go wrong with all that?
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
Who could have anticipated that the French government would misuse its post-Paris massacre "emergency powers?"
In just a blink of a tear, France has twisted its new powers designed to fight ISIS into a tool of repression against climate change activists. Any more transparent and the whole thing would look like Miley Cyrus' underwear.
At least 24 activists who advocate for climate change have been placed under "house arrest" ahead of United Nations talks in Paris. France used emergency laws that were implemented after the Paris shootings to arrest the green campaigners, the French government confirmed on Saturday.
Activist Naomi Klein said French leaders are carrying out "a gross abuse of power that risks turning the summit into a farce." Hearing the voice of activists is important at an event where lots of world leaders will be present, she added. "Climate summits are not photo opportunities to boost the popularity of politicians. That is democracy, messy as it may be. The French government, under cover of anti-terrorism laws, seems to be trying to avoid this, shamefully banning peaceful demonstrations and using emergency powers to preemptively detain key activists."
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve insisted the activists were planning to carry out violent protests at the talks. "These 24 people have been placed under house arrest because they have been violent during demonstrations in the past and because they have said they would not respect the state of emergency," Cazeneuve said.
"These people have no connection at all with the terrorist movement, but our forces need to be totally focused on the protection of the French people," Cazeneuve added.
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A new study says children living near the Fukushima nuclear meltdown site have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer at a rate 20 to 50 times that of children elsewhere.
The difference contend undermines the Japanese government's position that more cases have been discovered in the area only because of stringent monitoring.
Fukushima Children Suffer Thyroid Cancer 20-50x Normal Rate
"This is more than expected and emerging faster than expected," lead author Toshihide Tsuda told The Associated Press. "This is 20 times to 50 times what would be normally expected." Children are particularly susceptible because their thyroids are growing rapidly.
Residents of Fukushima prefecture in northeast Japan should be monitored in the same way as survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, say the researchers, who offer one of the most pessimistic assessments so far of the health implications of the world's second worst nuclear disaster.
The new information is far from unexpected.
A screening program in 2012 found 36 percent of children in Fukushima Prefecture had abnormal (though not necessarily cancerous) cysts or nodules in their thyroid glands. As of August 2013, 40 children were found to have actual thyroid and other cancers in Fukushima prefecture.
The new study was released online this week and is being published in the November issue of Epidemiology, produced by the Herndon, Virginia-based International Society for Environmental Epidemiology. The data comes from tests overseen by Fukushima Medical University. It is significant that the published version of this comes from a journal outside of Japan; the story seems to have received little play in Japanese mainstream media. Flagship NHK News, a quasi-government organization, does not appear to be covering it in any detail. The largest media outlet offering noteable coverage appears to be left-of-center Asahi news.
But Critics Say Little Reason for Concern
Critics contend that no causal link has been established between the release of radiation and the cancers, leaving open the possibility of a statistical anomaly or an as yet unknown precipitator. A somewhat disingenuous report by Japan's Institute of Radiological Sciences found some children living close to the plant were exposed to "lifetime" doses of radiation to their thyroid glands unrelated to the nuclear meltdown. Looking harder with routine check-ups, some say, leads to discovery of more tumors, inflating the tallies in a so-called "screening effect."
David J. Brenner, professor of radiation biophysics at Columbia University Medical Center, took a different view. While he agreed individual estimates on radiation doses are needed, he said the higher thyroid cancer rate in Fukushima is "not due to screening. It's real."
Background on the Disaster
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was caused by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. The earthquake caused electrical and equipment failures at the plant, cutting off cooling to the nuclear reactors. Emergency backup diesel generators came online, and operated until the tsunami destroyed the generators, due to their location in unhardened low-lying areas. This triggered the release of radioactive materials. Though classified as the largest nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown, almost from the beginning Japanese and American authorities sought to downplay its danger.
For example, immediately after the 2011 disaster, the lead Japanese doctor brought in to Fukushima repeatedly ruled out the possibility of radiation-induced illnesses. A full five days after the meltdown, the American Embassy in Tokyo stated only that "we are recommending, as a precaution, that American citizens who live within 50 miles of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant evacuate the area or take shelter indoors if safe evacuation is not practical." The Japanese government continued to hold to its earlier recommendation to evacuate only within 12 miles of the plant.
The Embassy characterized American citizens' reaction in Japan simply as "people are calling with concerns, but I would call it just a concern at this point." The embassy did however quietly authorize the departure of its own dependents six days after the accident.
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America, your ability to panic and overreact is both predictable and stupid.
Before we go on, please look out the window: do you see any ISIS out there? How about yesterday, any terror attacks? How about for the past 14 years, any ISIS or al Qaeda stuff go down in your neighborhood?
Fun Fact: In the last decade, 24 Americans were killed by terror acts. Deaths otherwise by guns tally 280,000.
But why focus on that, when panic about what might happen is so attractive?
And so we learn Penn State (Slogan: "Home of the Pedophile") has put a moratorium on recreational class trips to New York City and Washington D.C., since both cities are, in the eyes of the university, highly volatile targets of post-Paris terrorism.
In a memo sent to staff from the university's Office of Risk Management, any planned recreational trips to either city "must be cancelled due to safety concerns" through the end of the semester," presumably at which point global terrorism will have been defeated and the trips can resume. Trips to other places are still OK, since Penn State has figured out that everywhere else is safe. So relax, Boston, Chicago and Bangor, you're good.
Trips classified as academic or service-oriented may continue as planned, provided that a university employee is present at all times and that any free time is abolished in favor of structured "alternative activities." If there's one thing we know about terrorists, it's that they relentlessly target students who appear to be unchaperoned.
So, be sure to bring along a scoutmaster at least one year older than you. Also, be sure not to have any free time, as that is when the terrorists… will… strike. Instead, be sure to schedule those alternative activities such as hanging out near the scenes of expected mass shootings by angry, crazed white males (movie theatres recommended.)
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Serial idiot Lindsey Graham, among too many others, stated that if only more people in Paris had been armed, the tragedy would have been lessened.
He echoed a popular right-wing meme in America, that "all it takes is a good guy with a gun to defeat a bad guy with a gun," and that therefore any form of gun control in these United States would render us more vulnerable to attack.
Such statements ignore multiple realities, one of which is that a bunch of would-be vigilantes would go to nightclubs and restaurants always armed, and that their blasting away inside a dark, crowded place in the midst of a panic would not kill more innocent people than the terrorists. Many people, for example, dramatically overestimate their own skills, never mind the accuracy of a handgun at distances of more than a few yards. Add in accidental shootings, deadly overreactions to things that are not threats, amateurs unsure who the bad guys are killing each other, stray rounds and that fact that many people in nightclubs and restaurants have had a drink or two, and you have a recipe for even more danger, not less.
But before we even worry about that, let's enjoy the hypocrisy of this: it is perfectly legal in the United States for person on the FBI terrorist watch list to purchase guns and explosives, and many of them do.
Who in America other than terrorists cannot legally buy guns. That list includes felons, fugitives, drug addicts and domestic abusers. Fair enough.
But not terrorists (unless they are also felons, fugitives, drug addicts or domestic abusers.) A report from the Government Accountability Office hilighted by the Washington Post says at least 2,043 known and suspected terrorists in the United States legally purchased firearms between 2004 and 2014.
"Membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law," the Government Accountability Office concluded. This includes persons on the FBI's consolidated terrorist watchlist. Note that records for 2011 and 2012 are incomplete "because of a programming error the FBI subsequently fixed," according to the GAO. So no one really knows how many terror suspects legally bought guns over the last 11 years.
A bipartisan bill offered this year (the "Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2015") is strongly opposed by the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA states the bill is "aimed primarily at law-abiding American gun owners," and that the bill was "sponsored by gun control extremists."
Yes, yes, there are ways to purchase guns illegally on the street, and legally at gun shows, that bypass background checks and any other controls, so any would-be terrorists can still pick up some semi-automatic iron as needed.
At the same time, however, that our First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights are being stripped away in the name of freedom and security, perhaps it is worth also taking another look at what might be done with the Second Amendment at the same time.
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Pressure on the White House to escalate the Syria/Iraq war has no doubt intensified post-Paris.
Should Islamic State take things further and strike an American civilian target, President Barack Obama would be all but forced to "do something." What would that "something" likely look like, and what might be the pitfalls?
Post-Paris, France and the United States immediately increased their air campaign in Syria. The visuals play well on television, as American audiences have seen over the last 24 years of airstrikes on Iraq. For an Obama appeared wary of deeper involvement in Syria, this may be enough to tamp down the pressure assuming no future attack on American civilians. France may also find a short and sharp set of revenge attacks enough for the near term, as Jordan did in at the beginning of this year, after the horrific burning alive of one its pilots captured by Islamic State. Things could settle back into a more routine fight.
However, if Islamic State were to strike against Americans, President Obama would almost be required to escalate, and more of the same airstrikes and colorful missile launches would not satisfy demands for vengeance. They would not have been sufficient a year ago, and certainly not in the midst of a presidential campaign. Any perceived lack of resolve would hand the Republicans a red, white and blue issue to take them through the next 12 months, and Hillary Clinton would be forced to break with the White House.
America's escalation could take only one form: many more American boots on the ground.
No one would call it an invasion, but that is what it would be, regardless of scale. The most likely paths into Syria would be through Turkey if that government blessed it (and remember, Turkey refused to open their borders for the 2003 American invasion of Iraq), or, most likely, via Jordan, with a smaller force from the northeast, across the Iraqi border.
The United States has a notably infrastructure and a compliant government in place in Jordan. In May of this year, thousands of soldiers from 18 countries took part in war games in Jordan, overseen by the American Army. The Jordanians themselves are already considering a militarized "humanitarian corridor" into Syria that could easily morph into an invasion route.
Since 2013, the United States has been growing its military presence in Jordan, to include strike aircraft, missle defenses and strategic planners, lots of planners, the infrastructure of war. An attack against Islamic State from the south might also isolate Damascus for follow-on action against Assad. From a military point of view, Israel and the Golan Heights it controls provide neat protection on the invasion's left flank. Lastly, Jordanian involvement would help dress up the American invasion by giving it something of an Arab face.
Sending large numbers of troops into Syria from the northeast, via Iraq, would likely encouch on Islamic State's strongholds in northern Iraq and sandwich the United States between them and Islamic State fighters in northern Syria. Foreign fighters could also find their way in across the Turkish border. Still, moving airborne and special operations troops through Kurdish-held areas would be possible and necessary to reach Islamic State from another front.
It would very surprising to see any significant American escalation in Iraq proper, absent perhaps inside the Kurdish confederacy. Americans dying once again in the Iraqi desert would be a tough sell domestically, the Iraqi government in Baghdad and its Iranian partners would be less than receptive, and militarily dividing Islamic State into a Syrian force and an Iraqi force would accomplish much on its own without re-inserting American troops into the Iraqi civil war.
The problem with all this chess playing is the identical one that bred Islamic State into existence in the first place.
As the United States saw in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, winning on the battlefield is the easy part. Assuming Islamic State could be physically destroyed (a big assumption itself given its diffuse nature and political support among many Sunnis), what follows? Who will govern "liberated" areas? How much land will the Kurds seize for themselves in northern Syria and how will Turkey react to that? Syria is a wrecked wasteland flooded with internally displaced persons. Who will pay for reconstruction, and why would anyone think it would work any better in Syria than it did in Iraq and Afghanistan? Will the Russians simply stand aside?
Scenarios that put boots on the ground are easy to foresee, and the possible on-the-ground strategies are clear enough to speculate on. How to deal with the aftermath is what really matters, and what's the plan for that?
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Fun game time. Let's see who are the most inhuman monsters in the Middle East, ISIS or Saudi Arabia.
— ISIS commits terror acts against Western targets. Almost all of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, and most believe that Saudi money in part funded 9/11, and that Saudi money in part funds ISIS. Winner: Saudi.
— ISIS beheads people. Saudi beheads people. In 2014, the Saudis beheaded 59 people. The headcount, as it were, for ISIS is unknown. Winner: So, ISIS, by a nose.
— Both ISIS and the Saudis cite the Koran, Islamic teachings (the hadith) and Sharia law as justification for their brutal acts. Winner: Tie.
— The U.S. claims Saudi as one of its closest allies in the Middle East and supplies them with weapons. The U.S. claims ISIS as its worst enemy in the Middle East, and supplies them with weapons stolen or retrieved from other U.S. allies. Winner: Big, big win for ISIS.
— Saudi leaders are regularly invited to the White House. ISIS leaders are not. Saudi, FTW!
— The U.S. claims not to know where Saudi money goes. The U.S. claims not to know where ISIS money comes from. Winner: Double-win for ISIS!
— ISIS publishes a list of hadd crimes considered to be "against the rights of God," such as theft, adultery, slander, homosexuality, and banditry. Saudi Arabia publishes a list of hadd crimes considered to be "against the rights of God," such as theft, adultery, slander, homosexuality, and banditry. Winner: Dead tie.
— ISIS tortures political prisoners. Saudi tortures political prisoners. Winner: Tie again!
— ISIS and the Saudis are dedicated to Wahhabism, an ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam. Tie again!
— ISIS uses atrocities against both its internal and external enemies. Saudi uses atrocities against its domestic enemies who oppose the royal family. Winner: Saudi.
I could go on, but in the interest of efficiency, here, from Middle East Eye, is a handy chart:
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The United States recently unveiled a new approach in Iraq and Syria it insists is not new at all: Special Forces will be sent into direct combat. "The fact is that our strategy… hasn't changed," Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said. "This is an intensification of a strategy that the president announced more than a year ago."
The press secretary is right if you take him at his exact words: the deployment of Special Forces does not change America's grand strategy, it only changes the on-the-ground tactics.
Something tactically new, something strategically old
Tactically, downplaying these moves as intensification, or as somehow not boots on the ground (one imagines American Special Forces hopping from foot to foot to protect Washington's rhetoric) is silly. America has entered a new stage, active ground combat, and anyone who thinks a handful of Special Forces is the end of this is probably among the same group who believed air power alone would resolve matters a year ago.
However, in the bigger picture, the White House is spot-on. Broader strategy for the Middle East has not changed at all. That is baked into the American belief that there is an imposable solution to every foreign problem, and that it is the responsibility of the US to find and implement that solution. This thinking has rarely been even close to right since the Vietnam War, and is most certainly wrong when looking at the Middle East in 2015. It has led directly to the mess in Iraq and Syria, and remains tragically unchanged.
The state of Iraq and Syria is not pretty.
Iraq the nation is no more, replaced by a Kurdish confederacy in the north, a Shia-controlled south and a semi-governed ISIS-Sunni area to the west. Syria is divided into a northern area increasingly under Kurdish control, a southern section still under Assad's rule, and a lot of contested space being fought over by the United States, Russia, Britain, Jordan, Turkey, France, Canada, Australia, Iran, a handful of Gulf nations, Islamic State, its cohorts, Bashar Assad's forces, the Kurds, and a complex mélange of local religious and tribal alliances.
But no unicorns. Those mythical creatures, the moderate rebels of Syria, couldn't be created via wishing, hoping or training, and the forces the US now supports in Syria are either Kurds out for their own interest in creating a nation-state (that the U.S. is facilitating the non-Arab Kurds to "liberate" Arab lands will be long-noted in the region) or the usual collection of thugs. America will no doubt soon dub them freedom fighters. Is the name "Sons of Syria" already taken?
American goals in Iraq seem to be along the lines of destroy ISIS and unify the country. In Syria, the goals, as best as can be discerned, are to destroy ISIS and depose President Assad.
The problem with "destroying ISIS" is that every time the United States kills off some fighters, ISIS simply gets more, using as their recruiting tool the American military's return to Muslim lands. ISIS is the physical embodiment of a set of ideas – religious, anti-imperialist, anti-western – and one cannot blow up ideas. Unless a popular rebalancing of power likely favouring a version of Islamic fundamentalism is allowed to take hold and create some measure of stability, count on the US fighting the sons and grandsons of ISIS for years to come.
The other American goals are equally far-fetched.
Obama is the fourth American president to bomb Iraq, and inevitably his successor will be number five. Yet even after decades of bombing and years of occupation, fiddling, reconstructing and meddling, the United States has not pulled Iraq together. Special Forces cannot accomplish what all that already failed to do.
An Assad-less Syria is possible, following an assassination, a coup, or perhaps a plane crash. However, removing one government, then hoping another will emerge Big Bang-like, has a very poor track record (see Iraq with Saddam and Libya with Qaddafi.) Any negotiated form of regime change in Syria, such as an offer of exile to Assad, is now subject to a Putin veto, given Russia's military presence there.
It is unlikely in the extreme that more American involvement, never mind a mere handful of Special Forces, will have much effect in either Iraq or Syria. But the US is escalating anyway.
But the US must do something… right?
But what if there is no "solution" in Iraq and Syria but to allow, however reluctantly, the forces now in play to find their own balance? The outcome will undoubtedly be distasteful to many in Washington, some sort of Syrian state with Russian allies, a Shia Iraq with Iranian supporters, an ISIS-Sunni statelet, and a trans-border powder keg of Kurdish nationalism on the loose.
But whether America takes a deep breath of realism and steps back or not, there is little that can be done to change any of those things anyway; the Iraq invasion, if nothing else, made clear the American military cannot dictate policy outcomes in the Middle East. American force might postpone the changes, or allow friends like the Kurds a more favorable bargaining position, but that's about it, Special Forces or no Special Forces.
But what about ISIS?
The idea that absent American intervention Islamic State will pop up in Times Square is simply a new flavor of the old scare tactic politicians have consistently used to cow the American public. The bogey man has just seamlessly changed from Communists to Sandinistas to post-9/11 al-Qaeda to Saddam to the Taliban to ISIS. Note that despite American intervention, Islamic State is as strong or stronger now than it ever has been, and yet has never directly struck outside its own neighborhood. Indeed, as a terror group, ISIS must know it is accomplishing most of its political goals vis-a-vis the US using only Twitter.
As for Islamic State being evil, they are. Yet in a time when hospitals are bombed by America in Afghanistan and by its Saudi allies in Yemen, and when civilian areas in Gaza are shelled by ally Israel, one should be careful when invoking morality.
Maybe they were right all along
Ironically, after Syria's Arab Spring became a civil war, the White House met with Pentagon planners, looking for options. They came up empty-handed. "Nobody could figure out what to do," a senior Pentagon official said.
They may have had it right from the beginning: there was nothing the U.S. could do. What some call Obama's indecisiveness may have just been realism. History, as well as his political enemies, is likely to claim Obama "lost" Iraq and Syria. That is unfair, as it presumes that it was ever possible to win.
And so perhaps the White House is right in characterizing the deployment of Special Forces into a combat role as nothing really so new. What is happening now in Iraq and Syria is just the dragging of the same decades old failed strategy forward.
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
What is the price of America's war against Islamic State? Higher than you think.
Last week saw the first American ground combat death in Iraq since 2011. Sadly, such deaths are a price always paid in war. The cost of the fight against Islamic State in dollars is staggering; more than $2.7 billion so far, with the average daily cost around $11 million.
But costs should also be measured in the chaos the war has spawned, and in the additional problems for American foreign policy it has created.
Vast areas of Syria have been reduced to rubble, and refugee flows have created a humanitarian disaster; more than 240,000 people have died in the conflict, and nearly 12 million people – half the country's population – have been driven from their homes. Whereas at one point an American goal was to depose Bashar Assad because he (only) was bombing his own people, those same people now suffer attacks from the air and the ground by the United States, Russia, Britain, Jordan, Turkey, France, Canada, Australia, Iran, a handful of Gulf nations, and Islamic State and its cohorts.
The de facto strategy seems to be evolving into a Vietnam War-era "destroying Syria in order to save it." The reconstruction of Syria will be expensive, though it is unclear who will pay that bill. But allowing the country to become a failed state, a haven for terror groups like Sudan in the 1990s and Afghanistan post-9/11, will be even more expensive.
The price being paid, however, extends beyond Syria's borders.
NATO ally Turkey has long supported Islamic State, leaving its border with Syria open as a transit point, and allowing Islamic State to broker oil on the black market. Turkey's actions are intimately tied to its violent history with the Kurds. A weak Islamic State empowers the Kurds. Initial American efforts to enlist Turkey into the Islamic State fight thus met with little success.
That appeared to change in August 2015, when Washington reached a deal allowing it to fly strike missions against Syria from inside Turkey. However, there appeared to be a quid pro quo: on the same day Turkey announced it would help fight Islamic State, it also began an air campaign against Kurdish groups tied to the only effective fighting force the United States has so far found – the unicorn – the peshmerga.
The Kurds' vision for their nation extends beyond their confederacy in Iraq, into Turkey and Syria. It endangers whatever hopes America may still have for a united Iraq. It also ensures Kurdish national ambitions denied since the end of World War I will need to be addressed alongside any resolution in Syria, as Kurdish forces occupy areas in the north of that country. That's a tall diplomatic order.
The fight against Islamic State is also playing out elsewhere in Iraq, as the United States has had to accept Iranian leadership, special forces, and weapons inside same the nation Americans died "saving" only a few years ago. The growing Iranian influence is closely coupled with American acceptance of Shi'ite militias now in the field, after the Iraqi Army ran away from Islamic State.
The government in Iraq today is a collection of mostly Shi'ite factions, each with one of those militias on call. With a weak prime minister, and with Islamic State for the time being pushed back from the gates of Baghdad, the Shi'ites are free to maneuver for power. A price to be paid for the conflict with Islamic State could easily be a civil war inside a civil war.
And of course there is Russia, who, under the loose cover of fighting Islamic State, quickly re-established itself as a military force in the heart of the Middle East. It is difficult to imagine them leaving. Until now, the United States has had a relatively free hand in the region as no one had the military power to seriously challenge an American move. That has changed. Any significant change in Syria is now subject to a Putin veto.
Meanwhile, despite the costs, Islamic State remains as strong as it has ever been, with American actions serving as its best recruitment tool.
"Defeating Islamic State" is far too simplistic for a regional strategy. And who can really afford that?
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Wars are expensive. The recruitment and sustainment of fighters in the field, the ongoing purchases of weapons and munitions, as well as the myriad other costs of struggle, add up.
So why isn't the United States going after Islamic State's funding sources as a way of lessening or eliminating their strength at making war? Follow the money back, cut it off, and you strike a blow much more devastating than an airstrike. But that has not happened. Why?
Many have long held that Sunni terror groups, ISIS now and al Qaeda before them, are funded via Gulf States, such as Saudi Arabia, who are also long-time American allies. Direct links are difficult to prove, particularly if the United States chooses not to prove them. The issue is exacerbated by suggestions that the money comes from "donors," not directly from national treasuries, and may be routed through legitimate charitable organizations or front companies.
In fact, one person concerned about Saudi funding was then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who warned in a 2009 message on Wikileaks that donors in Saudi Arabia were the "most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide."
At the G20, Russian President Vladimir Putin said out loud what has otherwise not been publicly discussed much in public. He announced that he has shared intelligence with the other G20 member states which reveals 40 countries from which ISIS finances the majority of its terrorist activities. The list reportedly included a number of G20 countries.
Putin's list of funders has not been made public. The G20, however, include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the European Union.
One source of income for ISIS is and has robustly been oil sales. In the early days of the air campaign, American officials made a point to say that the Islamic State's oil drilling assets were high on the target list. Yet few sites have actually been targeted. A Pentagon spokesperson explained that the coalition has actually been trying to spare some of ISIS's largest oil producing facilities, "recognizing that they remain the property of the Syrian people," and to limit collateral damage to civilians nearby.
The U.S. only this week began a slightly more aggressive approach toward the oil, albeit bombing tanker trucks, not the infrastructure behind them. The trucks were destroyed at the Abu Kamal oil collection point, near the Iraqi border.
Conservative estimates are that Islamic State takes in one to two million dollars a day from oil sales; some see the number as high as four million a day. As recently as February, however, the Pentagon claimed oil was no longer ISIS' main way to raise money, having been bypassed by those "donations" from unspecified sources, and smuggling.
One of the issues with selling oil, by anyone, including ISIS, is bringing the stuff to market. Oil must be taken from the ground using heavy equipment, possibly refined, stored, loaded into trucks or pipelines, moved somewhere and then sold into the worldwide market. Large amounts of money must be exchanged, and one to four million dollars a day is a lot of cash to deal with on a daily basis. It may be that some sort of electronic transactions that have somehow to date eluded the United States are involved.
Interestingly, The Guardian reported a U.S.-led raid on the compound housing the Islamic State's chief financial officer produced evidence that Turkish officials directly dealt with ranking ISIS members, including the ISIS officer responsible for directing the terror army's oil and gas operations in Syria.
Turkey's "open door policy," in which it allowed its southern border to serve as an unofficial transit point in and out of Syria, has been said to be one of ISIS' main routes for getting their oil to market. A Turkish apologist claimed the oil is moved only via small-diameter plastic irrigation pipes, and is thus hard to monitor.
A smuggled barrel of oil is sold for about $50 on the black market. This means ">several million dollars a day worth of oil would require a very large number of very small pipes.
Others believe Turkish and Iraqi oil buyers travel into Syria with their own trucks, and purchase the ISIS oil right at the refineries, transporting themselves out of Syria. Convoys of trucks are easy to spot from the air, and easy to destroy from the air, though up until now the U.S. does not seem to have done so.
So as is said, ISIS' sources of funding grow curious and curiouser the more one knows. Those seeking to destroy ISIS might well wish to look into where the money comes from, and ask why, after a year and three months of war, no one has bothered to follow the money.
And cut it off.
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
You don't want to read this, and I take no pleasure in writing it, and no one really wants to hear it right now. But I believe it needs to be said.
I join the world in grieving for the dead in Paris. I have grieved for the dead from 9/11 forward — the Australians who died in terror attacks on Bali in 2002, Londoners who died in terror attacks in 2005, the French citizens who died in the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January of this year, the Russians whose plane went down over the Sinai a week or so ago. So many more non-Western deaths barely noticed in the U.S. media. I grieve also for those killed in smaller attacks already smuggled deep into the obscurity of our memory.
And so we Tweet hashtags and phrases in high school French and post GIFs to Facebook. We know what to do; we've done this before.
But it has to be said, especially looking at the sick repetition of the same story, that despite fourteen plus years of a war on terror, terror seems to be with us as much as ever, maybe even more. It is time to rethink what we have done and are doing.
Since that day in 2001, the one with those terrible sparkling blue skies in New York, we have spied on the world, Americans at home and foreigners abroad, yet no one detected anything that stopped the Paris attacks. We gave up much to that spying and got nothing in return.
Since 2001, the United States has led nations like Britain, France, Australia and others into wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, with drone attacks on people from the Philippines to Pakistan to all parts of Africa. We have little to nothing to show for all that.
Since 2001 the U.S. has expended enormous efforts to kill a handful of men — bin Laden, al-Zarqawi, al-Awlaki, and this weekend, Jihadi John. Others, many without names, were killed outside of media attention, or were tortured to death, or are still rotting in the offshore penal colony of Guantanamo, or the dark hell of the Salt Pit in Afghanistan.
And it has not worked, and Paris this weekend, and the next one somewhere else sometime soon, are the proof.
We gave up many of our freedoms in America to defeat the terrorists. It did not work. We gave the lives of over 4,000 American men and women in Iraq, and thousands more in Afghanistan, to defeat the terrorists, and refuse to ask what they died for. We killed tens of thousands or more in those countries. It did not work. We went to war again in Iraq, and now in Syria, before in Libya, and only created more failed states and ungoverned spaces that provide havens for terrorists and spilled terror like dropped paint across borders. We harass and discriminate against our own Muslim populations and then stand slack-jawed as they become radicalized, and all we do then is blame ISIS for Tweeting.
Note that it is the strategy of Islamic terror to generate a crackdown in France in order to radicalise French Muslims. Hundreds of French citizens have already traveled to Syria to fight with groups including ISIS.
As one of the most intelligent commentators on all this, Bill Johnson, said, terrorism is about killing pawns to affect the king. The attacks in Paris are not about the murder of 150 innocent people. Hell, that many die nearly every day in Iraq and Syria. The true test for France is how they respond to the terror attacks in the long-game — that's the king in all this. America failed this test post-9/11; yet it does not sound like France understands anything more than America. "We are going to lead a war which will be pitiless," French president Hollande said outside the Bataclan concert hall, scene of the most bloodshed.
If I had exactly the right strategy, I'd tell you what it is, and I'd try and tell the people in Washington and Paris and everywhere else. But I don't have the exact thing to do, and I doubt they'd listen to me anyway.
But I do have this: stop what we have been doing for the last 14 years. It has not worked. There is nothing at all to suggest it ever will work. Whack-a-mole is a game, not a plan. Leave the Middle East alone. Stop creating more failed states. Stop throwing away our freedoms at home on falsehoods. Stop disenfranchising the Muslims who live with us. Understand the war, such as it is, is against a set of ideas — religious, anti-western, anti-imperialist — and you cannot bomb an idea. Putting western soldiers on the ground in the MidEast and western planes overhead fans the flames. Vengeance does not and cannot extinguish an idea.
Start with those things and see, even if you won't give it 14 years to succeed, if things improve. Other than the death tolls scaling up further, I can't imagine we could be doing anything worse.
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
A guest article today by Tom Englehardt, orginally published on his own website, TomDispatch.com, as "The American Way of War in the Twenty-First Century"
Let's begin with the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills, Iraqi oil money held in the U.S. The Bush administration began flying it into Baghdad on C-130s soon after U.S. troops entered that city in April 2003. Essentially dumped into the void that had once been the Iraqi state, at least $1.2 to $1.6 billion of it was stolen and ended up years later in a mysterious bunker in Lebanon. And that's just what happened as the starting gun went off.
It's never ended. In 2011, the final report of the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion taxpayer dollars had been lost to fraud and waste in the American "reconstruction" of Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, for instance, there was that $75 million police academy, initially hailed "as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's security." It was, however, so poorly constructed that it proved a health hazard. In 2006, "feces and urine rained from the ceilings in [its] student barracks" and that was only the beginning of its problems.
When the bad press started, Parsons Corporation, the private contractor that built it, agreed to fix it for nothing more than the princely sum already paid. A year later, a New York Times reporter visited and found that "the ceilings are still stained with excrement, parts of the structures are crumbling, and sections of the buildings are unusable because the toilets are filthy and nonfunctioning." This seems to have been par for the course. Typically enough, the Khan Bani Saad Correctional Facility, a $40 million prison Parsons also contracted to build, was never even finished.
And these were hardly isolated cases or problems specific to Iraq. Consider, for instance, those police stations in Afghanistan believed to be crucial to "standing up" a new security force in that country. Despite the money poured into them and endless cost overruns, many were either never completed or never built, leaving new Afghan police recruits camping out. And the police were hardly alone. Take the $3.4 million unfinished teacher-training center in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, that an Iraqi company was contracted to build (using, of course, American dollars) and from which it walked away, money in hand.
And why stick to buildings, when there were those Iraqi roads to nowhere paid for by American dollars? At least one of them did at least prove useful to insurgent groups moving their guerrillas around (like the $37 million bridge the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built between Afghanistan and Tajikistan that helped facilitate the region's booming drug trade in opium and heroin). In Afghanistan, Highway 1 between the capital Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar, unofficially dubbed the "highway to nowhere," was so poorly constructed that it began crumbling in its first Afghan winter.
And don't think that this was an aberration. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) hired an American nonprofit, International Relief and Development (IRD), to oversee an ambitious road-building program meant to gain the support of rural villagers. Almost $300 million later, it could point to "less than 100 miles of gravel road completed." Each mile of road had, by then, cost U.S. taxpayers $2.8 million, instead of the expected $290,000, while a quarter of the road-building funds reportedly went directly to IRD for administrative and staff costs. Needless to say, as the road program failed, USAID hired IRD to oversee other non-transportation projects.
In these years, the cost of reconstruction never stopped growing. In 2011, McClatchy News reported that "U.S. government funding for at least 15 large-scale programs and projects grew from just over $1 billion to nearly $3 billion despite the government's questions about their effectiveness or cost."
The Gas Station to Nowhere
So much construction and reconstruction — and so many failures. There was the chicken-processing plant built in Iraq for $2.58 million that, except in a few Potemkin-Village-like moments, never plucked a chicken and sent it to market. There was the sparkling new, 64,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art, $25 million headquarters for the U.S. military in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, that doubled in cost as it was being built and that three generals tried to stop. They were overruled because Congress had already allotted the money for it, so why not spend it, even though it would never be used? And don't forget the $20 million that went into constructing roads and utilities for the base that was to hold it, or the $8.4 billion that went into Afghan opium-poppy-suppression and anti-drug programs and resulted in… bumper poppy crops and record opium yields, or the aid funds that somehow made their way directly into the hands of the Taliban (reputedly its second-largest funding source after those poppies).
There were the billions of dollars in aid that no one could account for, and a significant percentage of the 465,000 small arms (rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and the like) that the U.S. shipped to Afghanistan and simply lost track of. Most recently, there was the Task Force for Business Stability Operations, an $800-million Pentagon project to help jump-start the Afghan economy. It was shut down only six months ago and yet, in response to requests from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the Pentagon swears that there are "no Defense Department personnel who can answer questions about" what the task force did with its money. As ProPublica's Megan McCloskey writes, "The Pentagon's claims are particularly surprising since Joseph Catalino, the former acting director of the task force who was with the program for two years, is still employed by the Pentagon as Senior Advisor for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism."
Still, from that pile of unaccountable taxpayer dollars, one nearly $43 million chunk did prove traceable to a single project: the building of a compressed natural gas station. (The cost of constructing a similar gas station in neighboring Pakistan: $300,000.) Located in an area that seems to have had no infrastructure for delivering natural gas and no cars converted for the use of such fuel, it represented the only example on record in those years of a gas station to nowhere.
All of this just scratches the surface when it comes to the piles of money that were poured into an increasingly privatized version of the American way of war and, in the form of overcharges and abuses of every sort, often simply disappeared into the pockets of the warrior corporations that entered America's war zones. In a sense, a surprising amount of the money that the Pentagon and U.S. civilian agencies "invested" in Iraq and Afghanistan never left the United States, since it went directly into the coffers of those companies.
Clearly, Washington had gone to war like a drunk on a bender, while the domestic infrastructure began to fray. At $109 billion by 2014, the American reconstruction program in Afghanistan was already, in today's dollars, larger than the Marshall Plan (which helped put all of devastated Western Europe back on its feet after World War II) and still the country was a shambles. In Iraq, a mere $60 billion was squandered on the failed rebuilding of the country. Keep in mind that none of this takes into account the staggering billions spent by the Pentagon in both countries to build strings of bases, ranging in size from American towns (with all the amenities of home) to tiny outposts. There would be 505 of them in Iraq and at least 550 in Afghanistan. Most were, in the end, abandoned, dismantled, or sometimes simply looted. And don't forget the vast quantities of fuel imported into Afghanistan to run the U.S. military machine in those years, some of which was siphoned off by American soldiers, to the tune of at least $15 million, and sold to local Afghans on the sly.
In other words, in the post-9/11 years, "reconstruction" and "war" have really been euphemisms for what, in other countries, we would recognize as a massive system of corruption.
And let's not forget another kind of "reconstruction" then underway. In both countries, the U.S. was creating enormous militaries and police forces essentially from scratch to the tune of at least $25 billion in Iraq and $65 billion in Afghanistan. What's striking about both of these security forces, once constructed, is how similar they turned out to be to those police academies, the unfinished schools, and that natural gas station. It can't be purely coincidental that both of the forces Americans proudly "stood up" have turned out to be the definition of corrupt: that is, they were filled not just with genuine recruits but with serried ranks of "ghost personnel."
In June 2014, after whole divisions of the Iraqi army collapsed and fled before modest numbers of Islamic State militants, abandoning much of their weaponry and equipment, it became clear that they had been significantly smaller in reality than on paper. And no wonder, as that army had enlisted 50,000 "ghost soldiers" (who existed only on paper and whose salaries were lining the pockets of commanders and others). In Afghanistan, the U.S. is still evidently helping to pay for similarly stunning numbers of phantom personnel, though no specific figures are available. (In 2009, an estimated more than 25% of the police force consisted of such ghosts.) As John Sopko, the U.S. inspector general for Afghanistan, warned last June: "We are paying a lot of money for ghosts in Afghanistan… whether they are ghost teachers, ghost doctors or ghost policeman or ghost soldiers."
And lest you imagine that the U.S. military has learned its lesson, rest assured that it's still quite capable of producing nonexistent proxy forces. Take the Pentagon-CIA program to train thousands of carefully vetted "moderate" Syrian rebels, equip them, arm them, and put them in the field to fight the Islamic State. Congress ponied up $500 million for it, $384 million of which was spent before that project was shut down as an abject failure. By then, less than 200 American-backed rebels had been trained and even less put into the field in Syria — and they were almost instantly kidnapped or killed, or they simply handed over their equipment to the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front. At one point, according to the congressional testimony of the top American commander in the Middle East, only four or five American-produced rebels were left "in the field." The cost-per-rebel sent into Syria, by the way, is now estimated at approximately $2 million.
A final footnote: the general who oversaw this program is, according to the New York Times, still a "rising star" in the Pentagon and in line for a promotion.
You've just revisited the privatized, twenty-first-century version of the American way of war, which proved to be a smorgasbord of scandal, mismanagement, and corruption as far as the eye could see. In the tradition of Watergate, perhaps the whole system could be dubbed Profli-gate, since American war making across the Greater Middle East has represented perhaps the most profligate and least effective use of funds in the history of modern warfare. In fact, here's a word not usually associated with the U.S. military: the war system of this era seems to function remarkably like a monumental scam, a swindle, a fraud.
The evidence is in: the U.S. military can win battles, but not a war, not even against minimally armed minority insurgencies; it can "stand up" foreign militaries, but only if they are filled with phantom feet and if the forces themselves are as hollow as tombs; it can pour funds into the reconstruction of countries, a process guaranteed to leave them more prostrate than before; it can bomb, missile, and drone-kill significant numbers of terrorists and other enemies, even as their terror outfits and insurgent movements continue to grow stronger under the shadow of American air power. Fourteen years and five failed states later in the Greater Middle East, all of that seems irrefutable.
And here's something else irrefutable: amid the defeats, corruption, and disappointments, there lurks a kind of success. After all, every disaster in which the U.S. military takes part only brings more bounty to the Pentagon. Domestically, every failure results in calls for yet more military interventions around the world. As a result, the military is so much bigger and better funded than it was on September 10, 2001. The commanders who led our forces into such failures have repeatedly been rewarded and much of the top brass, civilian and military, though they should have retired in shame, have taken ever more golden parachutes into the lucrative worlds of defense contractors, lobbyists, and consultancies.
All of this couldn't be more obvious, though it's seldom said. In short, there turns out to be much good fortune in the disaster business, a fact which gives the whole process the look of a classic swindle in which the patsies lose their shirts but the scam artists make out like bandits.
Add in one more thing: these days, the only part of the state held in great esteem by conservatives and the present batch of Republican presidential candidates is the U.S. military. All of them, with the exception of Rand Paul, swear that on entering the Oval Office they will let that military loose, sending in more troops, or special ops forces, or air power, and funding the various services even more lavishly; all of this despite overwhelming evidence that the U.S. military is incapable of spending a dollar responsibly or effectively monitoring what it's done with the taxpayer funds in its possession. (If you don't believe me, forget everything in this piece and just check out the finances of the most expensive weapons system in history, the F-35 Lightning II, which should really be redubbed the F-35 Overrun for its madly spiraling costs.)
But no matter. If a system works (particularly for those in it), why change it?
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
Everything I hate about who we have become as Americans happens around airplanes.
Our Infrastructure
Getting to any major airport not built in the last few years is a disaster. Utter lack of efficient public transportation is the norm. In most cases the best you get is an old, slow city bus with no room for luggage in place to ferry low-wage workers to their Cinnabon for the morning shift. Outside the big cities, you are lucky if you have even that. Either get there by private car, pay for a ride out the nose, or walk. Inside the airport, hah! Filthy toilets, lack of amenities, too hot/too cold/too crowded and usually smells like King Kong's first dump of the day.
Security Theatre
OK, 9/11. So now 14 years later every airport is protected by petty thugs who make up rules that make little sense. We parade around dirty floors in bare feet, pour shampoo into little bottles, don't bring water aboard but can buy it later for $5 a bottle, remove our laptops and belts, get x-rayed and scanned and whatever new was recently introduced. Or not. You can be randomly selected to just bypass a bunch of that, or if you can pay for some program so you can bypass all of that (nobody ever heard of sleeper agents?) or sometimes nobody checks and you bypass all that by "forgetting" to take your laptop out. Whatever. To avoid accusations of racial profiling while racial profiling, the occasional little old lady in a wheelchair is given the third degree.
Our Apartheid of Money
The airline will treat you less awful if you have money. Have it in the form of more frequent flier miles, the right credit card or the purchase of first class, and you have a shorter TSA line, get seated first, avoid the scrum when everyone else boards, don't fight for overhead space and have your own elite potty. If all you have done is pay hundreds of dollars for a seat as a customer, to hell with you, get in the back and shut up.
To avoid the checked baggage fee, I am bringing aboard my entire drum kit, two giant stuffed pandas, a live goat and a couple of taped together cardboard boxes with grease stains. If my zone is called before yours, no overhead space for you, so Suck. It. The cabin attendants have no interest in refereeing fights, so back off or swing hard, your call.
Selfishness, Part II
If I want to eat fried snake bladder and garlic aboard, that's my privilege. If I want to recline my seat into your face, I will. If I haven't showered in a month and mouth-breathe, too bad. If I am so obese that I literally drip over the armrest, deal with it. If my kids want to kick you, vomit, scream or demand treats unavailable at 40,000 feet, throughout an entire 12 hour flight, I have no obligation to deal with that. And oh yes, waiting until you are on an airplane is exactly when you should clip your nails.
People Don't Care About Their Job
Here's a can of soda. Never ask me for anything ever again during this flight or I'll claim you are disruptive and have security haul you away. Sort out your own carry-on and intra-passenger issues. Just stare straight ahead if your screen does not work. Once we land, fight your way to the front of the plane to get off eight seconds before someone else, I don't really care what you do. I'll be in the back complaining to the other cabin attendants about my job and eating Chipotle I brought aboard and which I alone am allowed to microwave.
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
Brandon Caro's debut novel, Old Silk Road, is an important, tough read, both for the dirt-under-its-nails portrayal of soldiers at war, and for a complex plot that rewards a reader with insights into America's longest war, in Afghanistan.
But be careful. This is not a typical book by another soldier (though Caro spent a year in Afghanistan as a combat medic.) Almost every one of those books follows an outline you'd think they issue to servicepeople as they muster out: get energized following 9/11, throw in a boot camp montage and then drop into Iraq or Afghanistan all wide-eyed. The death of a buddy and/or local child changes everything. Wrap it up with some angst and ship it off to the bestseller list.
Caro instead gives us three distinct but overlapping stories, the first two only lightly fictionalized.
The first portion of the book is the one soldiers will want to hand to friends who ask "what was it like over there." Caro captures two of the most common aspects of modern war: endless tension about what might happen next, and endless boredom between occasional acts of horror. The narrator, Specialist Norman Rogers, himself a combat medic, and his small team, drift among America's archipelago of bases in Afghanistan, at one point setting off on a "mission" to eat Mongolian BBQ at a Forward Operating Base.
The details are carefully rendered. It's a travelogue of sorts, but pay attention; scenes that seem to drift past play tightly into the book's conclusion. One detail disclosed early on is that Rogers is addicted to the morphine he is issued to use as a painkiller on wounded soldiers.
Caro offers us something of a training sequence in the second part of his book, but with a twist. He lays things bare in a seminal chapter called The Goat School (excerpt). The reference is to a controversial military training technique, in which medics practice on wounded goats (pigs are also used in real life.) This is not PETA-friendly. The animals are shot at close range, and left in the care of would-be medics to treat. About half-way through, the instructor shoots the animal again.
The final story told in the book is the most compelling. Rogers' addiction turns him deeper and deeper into the drug, to the point where his hallucinations take over his life, and thus the story. He is guided through his visions by a shaman, appropriately and ironically in the guise of Pat Tillman.
(Tillman was America's once-walking propaganda dream. A pro football player making a $3.6 million salary, he gave that all up and volunteered for combat. When he died in Afghanistan, his family was told he'd been killed by enemy fire charging up a hill. After media interest tapered off, the Pentagon notified Tillman's family he had actually died as a result of friendly fire.)
Through his drugs and his shaman, Rogers (and author Caro) present a deeply sad meditation on America's war in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is known as the graveyard of empires, and America's longest war is held up alongside others who failed earlier: the Greeks, the Mongols, the British and the Soviets. Echoes of the questions many Americans should be asking are present – Why did we invade? 14+ years later why are still occupying? Why do we believe we will win when everyone else failed? Rogers unwinding as a human being mirrors America's own efforts at war.
Criticisms are few. The book shifts in time, in narrator and between the character's world in and out of his morphine haze. The reader must pay careful attention. Some passages meant to show the hurry-up-and-wait nature of Army life may themselves drag a bit.
But no matter. Old Silk Road is an important addition to post-9/11 war literature. While the message in the hands of others could have been pedantic or whining, Caro is a skilled writer and presents a statement that is not anti-soldier and not anti-American, but clearly anti-war.
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
We hear a lot about the "one percent" and the "99 percent" but what kind of net worth scores you a top slot in the real-life Hunger Games here in America? How much money do you need to be just average? The answers tell you just about everything you need to know about modern day America.
Short answer: Oh, we're so screwed.
The Federal Reserve's 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances released in September of 2014 is among the most recent data. The nice folks who compiled all of this waded through massive amounts of data. They caution they did not include 11 ultra high net worth individuals due to identity issues whatever that means, so the very top of this accounting could actually be even worse in reality. And don't forget, the super-rich have had two whole years to accumulate even more money since this all was tabulated.
Let's start at the top. The term "one percent" is now semi-meaningless, though you will need about $8 million to join them anyway. What really matters now is the top .1 percent. To crack that level you need to have well over $30 million in net worth.
But I get it, no one here is packing those kind of bucks. We're all sort of average Americans, right? Maybe. To count yourself in at the 50 percent mark you need to possess some $82,000. How are we doing, students and young marrieds? Keep in mind net worth is what you own minus what you owe, not necessarily how much money you earn. So those students loans and that VISA card debt count against your ranking here, sorry.
The good news is that if you own nothing, have no savings or investments but also have no debt — you are precisely at zero — you are in the 11.8th percentile of net worths. Yep, that means about 11 percent of us have negative net worths. About a third of us have a net worth of only $15,000, not exactly a significant bumper against some bad luck, like losing your job or getting sick.
It's a pretty bleak picture, but here it is:
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
One of the most basic precepts of detective work is always to first ask, "who benefits from a crime (cui bono)?" That answer will often point you toward your perp, and his motive.
With the downing of a Russian passenger jet over the Sinai, departing one Egyptian airport bound for another, a full list of who might benefit from the tragedy is long. Depending on your politics, some of these that seem like conspiracy theories to you will be likely culprits to others:
— the U.S. could benefit by inflaming feelings worldwide about ISIS, reinforcing the narrative of how evil they are;
— the U.S. could also benefit by sending a message to the Russians that they have chosen to play inside a dangerous sandbox;
— the Russians could benefit by enraging their own people, prepping them for a longer fight in the region;
— Chechnyan terrorists could benefit by carrying on their war against Russia, having found a security weak spot inside Egypt;
But it is ISIS, or another of the radical Muslim terror groups at war with the pro-U.S. thugs now running Egypt, that seem to benefit the most. The downing of the airplane has hit tourism to Egypt very hard, a painful blow to an unpopular government given that tourism brings in $11 billion of revenue and employs 12 percent of the Egyptian workforce. This is a clearly destabilizing situation.
And that's just tourism in general in Egypt. The choice to down a Russian airplane does not seem random. Egypt is the most world's most popular warm weather holiday spot for Russians. In the first half of 2015, over one million Russians visited the country, many to the same resort area from which the doomed plane departed. A clear signal was sent: Russians (and your money) stay away.
It seems to be working. According to the New York Times, bookings from Russia to Egypt fell 70 percent overall in the aftermath of the Metrojet plane crash. Before the crash, more than 25 flights travelled from Egypt to Russia every day. To give you a better idea of the scope of tourism, suspension of scheduled service has stranded more than 45,000 Russians in Egypt.
So perhaps there is more than a little validity to the idea that ISIS, or another radical Muslim group, is behind the downing of the Russian plane. But not for the crude narrative reasons the United States and Britain are pushing out. This is more about Egypt than anything else, and the real weapon being used is tourism dollars (rubles?)
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
The same ridiculed and useless techniques used by the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) to not find terrorists at America's airports are now being used at Orlando theme parks, including Disney World, Seaworld and Busch Gardens, to not find terrorists.
A Billion Dollars Hits the SPOT
The Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT, program is TSA's one billion dollar "behavioral detection" scheme. SPOT requires TSA staff to be on the lookout for indicators, "tells" to you poker players out there, that give away bad guys. Some of the actual indicators are listed on the graphic, above.
There are actually 92 individual indicators (terrorists are sneaky!), divided into various categories with a point score assigned to each. Those categories include a preliminary "observation and behavior analysis." Those passengers pulled over for additional inspection are scored based on two more categories: whether they have "unusual items," like almanacs and "numerous prepaid calling cards or cell phones," and a final category for "signs of deception," which include "covers mouth with hand when speaking" and "fast eye blink rate."
TSA agents are also told to watch out for persons traveling "wearing a disguise."
You can also be judged less suspicious. Points can be deducted from someone's score based on observations that they are part of an "apparent" married couple, as long as both people are over 55. No word on same sex couples. That's two points deducted. Women over the age of 55 have one pointed deducted; for men, the point deduction doesn't come until they reach 65.
SPOT On Failures
As to how well the SPOT program works, let's check in with the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security.
That office found in 2013 that TSA had failed to evaluate SPOT at all, and thus "cannot ensure that passengers at United States airports are screened objectively, show that the program is cost-effective, or reasonably justify the program's expansion."
The Government Accounting Office and independent scientists who bothered to evaluate SPOT say it performs no better than a coin-toss at catching terrorists.
Enter the Mouse
With that kind of track record, you are left shaking your head when you learn that Orlando TSA officers trained 400 local cops and security for area attractions like Disney in the SPOT system, all of whom are now watching for "excessive throat clearing," "improper attire," "gazing down," and "wide open staring eyes" as signs of potential theme park terrorism.
At least now, with SPOT, everyone has a "scientific basis" for their racial profiling.
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
So this tells you about what you need to know about the cops' respect for the First Amendment and the public's right to know, as well as their contempt for the judicial system when caught in a lie.
A New York police officer who arrested a journalist/photographer on assignment for The New York Times in 2012 was convicted, albeit three years after the fact, in what was a simple, straightforward case, of falsifying a record to justify the unlawful arrest.
The officer, Michael Ackermann, 32, in the center of the photo above, was found guilty of a single felony count of offering a false instrument for filing. Officer Ackermann had claimed the photographer, Robert Stolarik, interfered with the arrest of a suspect by repeatedly discharging his camera's flash in his face.
A subsequent "investigation" found that Stolarik did not own a flash or have one on his camera at the time. One does wonder how long such an investigation might have taken, considering it should have taken about 10 seconds after the arrest. Got a flash, sir? No? Ok, thanks, you are free to go.
"I think it's important; it's rare that people are held accountable for their actions," the journalist said. "In this case, he lied, and he lied to protect himself, and it turned on him."
Officer Ackermann testified during the trial that he had made an "honest mistake" when he claimed Stolarik's camera partially blinded him as he helped fellow officers make an arrest. He said he had mistaken ambient light at the scene for a camera flash.
Wait, could we stop right there for a moment? Who has ever had a flash photo taken of themselves? You know, like when you see spots in front of your eyes for a few moments? Is there anyone other than this cop who can say with a straight face that it is possible to mistake a flash for no flash? In the dark, for God's sake?
The prosecutor rejected Officer Ackermann's explanation and contended that his actions had interfered with the freedom of the press and had subjected Stolarik to unlawful search and seizure, violating his First and Fourth Amendment rights.
Stolarik was taking pictures for a story about the NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk tactics, themselves considered by many to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment, when he saw officers arresting a young black woman. He was thrown to the ground and arrested by Officer Ackermann, charged with obstructing government administration and, of course, resisting arrest. The charges were quickly dropped.
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
They also cannot find their own butt squatting over a mirror, but they sure can grope yours.
Remember airports before 9/11? You walked through a metal detector, had a quick bag check, all done by contract employees who swung between polite, and bored. Shoes stayed on, your laptop could stay in its case, it all took minutes and no one bullied you. No one touched your junk for freedom.
Then, because of massive intelligence failures, some Saudis with simple box cutters were able to commandeer planes and do 9/11. The paradigm then was for passengers and crew to cooperate with hijackers, presuming they wanted the plane or money. Fast forward to now: we take our shoes off because some dumbass failed to blow up a plane with a shoe bomb years ago. We pull out all our electronics because, well, nothing really. We go through scanners that display our junk on screens. The government created a massive bureaucracy of TSA bullies to harass and embarrass us for the audacity of trying to fly somewhere. We all can now enjoy watching old ladies, people in wheelchairs and soccer moms groped in public.
But at least that all keeps us safe, right?
Well, there's the problem.
U.S. lawmakers and federal watchdogs took the occasion Tuesday to deride the Transportation Security Administration's ability, or lack thereof, to adequately detect weapons and other contraband during the passenger screening process at the nation's airports. And TSA didn't just miss a few things. Nope, according to auditors from the Inspector General's Office, posing as travelers, 95 percent of contraband, like weapons and explosives, got through during clandestine testings.
"In looking at the number of times people got through with guns or bombs in these covert testing exercises it really was pathetic. When I say that I mean pitiful," said Representative Stephen Lynch, speaking Tuesday during a House Oversight hearing concerning classified reports from federal watchdogs. "Just thinking about the breaches there, it's horrific," he added.
"The failures included failures in the technology, failures in TSA procedures, and human error," the Inspector General told the committee. "We found layers of security simply missing."
The General Accounting Office piled on, adding "TSA has consistently fallen short in basic program management."
TSA's answer?
Peter Neffenger, the new TSA administrator, said the agency was undertaking a "full system review." It is also considering using dogs to search passengers as well.
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
We are all lucky that the U.S. just wasted $43 million on a natural gas filling station in Afghanistan rather than here in Das Homeland. In America, the money would have likely just been pissed away on schools, roads, bridges or healthcare for the elderly, instead of helping promote freedom among the freaking
Taliban Afghans. Well done, Skippy.
Oh, the details. The sad, nearly-suicidally depressed staff at the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) released a report this week on the Department of Defense's Task Force for Stability and Business Operations (TFBSO) project to construct a compressed natural gas (CNG) automobile filling station in Afghanistan at a cost of $43 million to the American taxpayer.
That SIGAR report noted:
— The CNG station was built at a crazy exorbitant cost to U.S. taxpayers. In comparison to the $43 million spent in Afghanistan, a CNG station in Pakistan costs no more than $500,000 to construct. That makes it about 84 times as expensive in the Afghan edition.
— The Pentagon claimed to SIGAR it is unable to provide an explanation for the high cost of the project or answer any questions about the project. Sure, why not. SIGAR: So why'd this cost $43 million? Pentagon: F*ck, we don't know. Go away.
— In addition, SIGAR "finds it both shocking and incredible" that the Pentagon asserts it no longer has any knowledge about its own Task Force for Stability and Business Operations (TFBSO) project, an $800 million program that reported directly to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Nope, just don't know, brother, sorry, wish we could help you.
— But just before the Pentagon stopped knowing anything about its own program, the former program head said, "We do capitalism. We're about helping companies make money." Indeed.
— No evidence exists that TFBSO conducted a feasibility study before spending $43 million on the station. If TFBSO had conducted a feasibility study of the project, they might have noted that Afghanistan lacks the natural gas transmission and distribution infrastructure necessary to support a viable market for CNG vehicles.
— Additionally, it appears the cost of converting a car to run on CNG may be prohibitive for the average Afghan. TFBSO's contractor stated that conversion to CNG costs $700 per car in Afghanistan, where the average annual income is $690. Oh, so close, assuming the average Afghan family did not wish to eat or purchase ammunition for a full year.
Anyway, freedom.
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
What if the U.S. had not invaded Iraq in 2003? How would things be different in the Middle East today? Was Iraq, in the words of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the "worst foreign policy blunder" in American history?
Let's take a big-picture tour of the Middle East and try to answer those questions. But first, a request: after each paragraph that follows, could you make sure to add the question "What could possibly go wrong?"
Let the History Begin
In March 2003, when the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq, the region, though simmering as ever, looked like this: Libya was stable, ruled by the same strongman for 42 years; in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak had been in power since 1983; Syria had been run by the Assad family since 1971; Saddam Hussein had essentially been in charge of Iraq since 1969, formally becoming president in 1979; the Turks and Kurds had an uneasy but functional ceasefire; and Yemen was quiet enough, other than the terror attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Relations between the U.S. and most of these nations were so warm that Washington was routinely rendering "terrorists" to their dungeons for some outsourced torture.
Soon after March 2003, when U.S. troops invaded Iraq, neighboring Iran faced two American armies at the peak of their strength. To the east, the U.S. military had effectively destroyed the Taliban and significantly weakened al-Qaeda, both enemies of Iran, but had replaced them as an occupying force. To the west, Iran's decades-old enemy, Saddam, was gone, but similarly replaced by another massive occupying force. From this position of weakness, Iran's leaders, no doubt terrified that the Americans would pour across its borders, sought real diplomatic rapprochement with Washington for the first time since 1979. The Iranian efforts were rebuffed by the Bush administration.
The Precipitating Event
Nailing down causation is a tricky thing. But like the June 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that kicked off the Great War, the one to end all others, America's 2003 invasion was what novelists refer to as "the precipitating event," the thing that may not actively cause every plot twist to come, but that certainly sets them in motion.
There hadn't been such an upset in the balance of power in the Middle East since, well, World War I, when Great Britain and France secretly reached the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which, among other things, divided up most of the Arab lands that had been under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Because the national boundaries created then did not respect on-the-ground tribal, political, ethnic, and religious realities, they could be said to have set the stage for much that was to come.
Now, fast forward to 2003, as the Middle East we had come to know began to unravel. Those U.S. troops had rolled into Baghdad only to find themselves standing there, slack-jawed, gazing at the chaos. Now, fast forward one more time to 2015 and let the grand tour of the unraveling begin!
The Sick Men of the Middle East: It's easy enough to hustle through three countries in the region in various states of decay before heading into the heart of the chaos: Libya is a failed state, bleeding mayhem into northern Africa; Egypt failed its Arab Spring test and relies on the United States to support its anti-democratic (as well as anti-Islamic fundamentalist) militarized government; and Yemen is a disastrously failed state, now the scene of a proxy war between U.S.-backed Saudi Arabia and Iranian-backed Houthi rebels (with a thriving al-Qaeda outfit and a small but growing arm of the Islamic State [ISIS] thrown into the bargain).
Iraq: Obama is now the fourth American president in a row to have ordered the bombing of Iraq and his successor will almost certainly be the fifth. If ever a post-Vietnam American adventure deserved to inherit the moniker of quagmire, Iraq is it.
And here's the saddest part of the tale: the forces loosed there in 2003 have yet to reach their natural end point. Your money should be on the Shias, but imagining that there is only one Shia horse to bet on means missing just how broad the field really is. What passes for a Shia "government" in Baghdad today is a collection of interest groups, each with its own militia. Having replaced the old strongman prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, with a weak one, Haider al-Abadi, and with ISIS chased from the gates of Baghdad, each Shia faction is now free to jockey for position. The full impact of the cleaving of Iraq has yet to be felt. At some point expect a civil war inside a civil war.
Iran: If there is any unifying authority left in Iraq, it is Iran. After the initial 2003 blitzkrieg, the Bush administration's version of neocolonial management in Iraq resulted in the rise of Sunni insurgents, Shia militias, and an influx of determined foreign fighters. Tehran rushed into the power vacuum, and, in 2011, in an agreement brokered by the departing Bush administration and carried out by President Obama, the Americans ran for the exits. The Iranians stayed. Now, they have entered an odd-couple marriage with the U.S. against what Washington pretends is a common foe — ISIS — but which the Iranians and their allies in Baghdad see as a war against the Sunnis in general. At this point, Washington has all but ceded Iraq to the new Persian Empire; everyone is just waiting for the paperwork to clear.
The Iranians continue to meddle in Syria as well, supporting Bashar al-Assad. Under Russian air cover, Iran is increasing its troop presence there, too. According to a recent report, Tehran is sending 2,000 troops to Syria, along with 5,000 Iraqi and Afghan Shia fighters. Perhaps they're already calling it "the Surge" in Farsi.
The Kurds: The idea of creating a "Kurdistan" was crossed off the post-World War I "to do" list. The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres at first left an opening for a referendum on whether the Kurds wanted to remain part of what remained of the Ottoman Empire or become independent. Problem one: the referendum did not include plans for the Kurds in what became Syria and Iraq. Problem two: the referendum never happened, a victim of the so-called Turkish War of Independence. The result: some 20 million angry Kurds scattered across parts of modern Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria.
That American invasion of 2003, however, opened the way for the Kurds to form a virtual independent statelet, a confederacy if you will, even if still confined within Iraq's borders. At the time, the Kurds were labeled America's only true friends in Iraq and rewarded with many weapons and much looking the other way, even as Bush administration officials blathered on about the goal of a united Iraq.
In 2014, the Kurds benefited from U.S. power a second time. Desperate for someone to fight ISIS after Iraq's American-trained army turned tail (and before the Iranians and the Shia militias entered the fight in significant force), the Obama administration once again began sending arms and equipment to the Kurds while flying close air support for their militia, the peshmerga. The Kurds responded by fighting well, at least in what they considered the Kurdish part of Iraq. However, their interest in getting involved in the greater Sunni-Shia civil war was minimal. In a good turn for them, the U.S. military helped Kurdish forces move into northern Syria, right along the Turkish border. While fighting ISIS, the Kurds also began retaking territory they traditionally considered their own. They may yet be the true winners in all this, unless Turkey stands in their way.
Turkey: Relations between the Turks and the Kurds have never been rosy, both inside Turkey and along the Iraqi-Turkish border.
Inside Turkey, the primary Kurdish group calling for an independent state is the Kurdistan Workers party (also known as the PKK). Its first insurgency ran from 1984 until 1999, when the PKK declared a unilateral cease-fire. The armed conflict broke out again in 2004, ending in a ceasefire in 2013, which was, in turn, broken recently. Over the years, the Turkish military also carried out repeated ground incursions and artillery strikes against the PKK inside Iraq.
As for ISIS, the Turks long had a kind of one-way "open-door policy" on their border with Syria, allowing Islamic State fighters and foreign volunteers to transit into that country. ISIS also brokered significant amounts of black market oil in Turkey to fund itself, perhaps with the tacit support, or at least the willful ignorance, of the Turkish authorities. While the Turks claimed to see ISIS as an anti-Assad force, some felt Turkey's generous stance toward the movement reflected the government's preference for having anything but an expanded Kurdish presence on its border. In June of this year, Turkish President Recep Erdogan went as far as to say that he would "never allow the establishment of a Kurdish state in northern Syria."
In light of all that, it's hardly surprising that early Obama administration efforts to draw Turkey into the fight against ISIS were unsuccessful. Things changed in August 2015, when a supposedly anti-ISIS cooperation deal was reached with Washington. The Turks agreed to allow the Americans to fly strike missions from two air bases in Turkey against ISIS in Syria. However, there appeared to be an unpublicized quid pro quo: the U.S. would turn a blind eye to Turkish military action against its allies the Kurds. On the same day that Turkey announced that it would fight the Islamic State in earnest, it also began an air campaign against the PKK.
Washington, for its part, claimed that it had been "tricked" by the wily Turks, while adding, "We fully respect our ally Turkey's right to self-defense." In the process, the Kurds found themselves supported by the U.S. in the struggle with ISIS, even as they were being thrown to the (Turkish) wolves. There is a Kurdish expression suggesting that Kurds have "no friends but the mountains." Should they ever achieve a trans-border Kurdistan, they will certainly have earned it.
Syria: Through a series of events almost impossible to sort out, having essentially supported the Arab Spring nowhere else, the Obama administration chose to do so in Syria, attempting to use it to turn President Bashar al-Assad out of office. In the process, the Obama administration found itself ever deeper in a conflict it couldn't control and eternally in search of that unicorn, the moderate Syrian rebel who could be trained to push Assad out without allowing Islamic fundamentalists in. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda spin-offs, including the Islamic State, found haven in the dissolving borderlands between Iraq and Syria, and in that country's Sunni heartlands.
An indecisive Barack Obama allowed America's involvement in Syria to ebb and flow. In September 2013, on the verge of a massive strike against the forces of the Assad regime, Obama suddenly punted the decision to Congress, which, of course, proved capable of deciding nothing at all. In November 2013, again on the verge of attacking Syria, the president allowed himself to be talked down after a gaffe by Secretary of State John Kerry opened the door to Russian diplomatic intercession. In September 2014, in a relatively sudden reversal, Obama launched a war against ISIS in Syria, which has proved at best indecisive.
Russia: That brings us to Vladimir Putin, the Syrian game-changer of the moment. In September, the Russian president sent a small but powerful military force into a neglected airfield in Latakia, Syria. With "fighting ISIS" little more than their cover story, the Russians are now serving as Assad's air force, as well as his chief weapons supplier and possible source of "volunteer" soldiers.
The thing that matters most, however, is those Russian planes. They have essentially been given a guarantee of immunity to being shot down by the more powerful U.S. Air Force presence in the region (as Washington has nothing to gain and much to worry about when it comes to entering into open conflict with the Russians). That allows them near-impunity to strike when and where they wish in support of whom they wish. It also negates any chance of the U.S. setting up a no-fly zone in parts of Syria.
The Russians have little incentive to depart, given the free pass handed them by the Obama administration. Meanwhile, the Russian military is growing closer to the Iranians with whom they share common cause in Syria, and also the Shia government in Baghdad, which may soon invite them to join the fight there against ISIS. One can almost hear Putin chortling. He may not, in fact, be the most skilled strategist in the world, but he's certainly the luckiest. When someone hands you the keys, you take the car.
World War I
As in imperial Europe in the period leading up to the First World War, the collapse of an entire order in the Middle East is in process, while forces long held in check are being released. In response, the former superpowers of the Cold War era have once again mobilized, at least modestly, even though both are fearful of a spark that could push them into direct conflict. Each has entangling regional relationships that could easily exacerbate the fight: Russia with Syria, the U.S. with Saudi Arabia and Israel, plus NATO obligations to Turkey. (The Russians have already probed Turkish airspace and the Turks recently shot down a drone coyly labeled of "unknown origin.")
Imagine a scenario that pulls any of those allies deeper into the mess: some Iranian move in Syria, which prompts a response by Israel in the Golan Heights, which prompts a Russian move in relation to Turkey, which prompts a call to NATO for help… you get the picture. Or imagine another scenario: with nearly every candidate running for president in the United States growling about the chance to confront Putin, what would happen if the Russians accidentally shot down an American plane? Could Obama resist calls for retaliation?
As before World War I, the risk of setting something in motion that can't be stopped does exist.
What Is This All About Again?
What if the U.S. hadn't invaded Iraq in 2003? Things would undoubtedly be very different in the Middle East today. America's war in Afghanistan was unlikely to have been a big enough spark to set off the range of changes Iraq let loose. There were only some 10,000 America soldiers in Afghanistan in 2003 (5,200 in 2002) and there had not been any Abu Ghraib-like indiscriminate torture, no equivalent to the scorched earth policy in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, nothing to spark a trans-border Sunni-Shia-Kurd struggle, no room for Iran to meddle. The Americans were killing Muslims in Afghanistan, but they were not killing Arabs, and they were not occupying Arab lands.
The invasion of Iraq, however, did happen. Now, some 12 years later, the most troubling thing about the current war in the Middle East, from an American perspective, is that no one here really knows why the country is still fighting. The commonly stated reason — "defeat ISIS" — is hardly either convincing or self-explanatory. Defeat ISIS why?
The best Washington can come up with are the same vague threats of terrorism against the homeland that have fueled its disastrous wars since 9/11. The White House can stipulate that Assad is a bad guy and that the ISIS crew are really, really bad guys, but bad guys are hardly in short supply, including in countries the U.S. supports. In reality, the U.S. has few clear goals in the region, but is escalating anyway.
Whatever world order the U.S. may be fighting for in the Middle East, it seems at least an empire or two out of date. Washington refuses to admit to itself that the ideas of Islamic fundamentalism resonate with vast numbers of people. At this point, even as U.S. TOW missiles are becoming as ubiquitous as iPads in the region, American military power can only delay changes, not stop them. Unless a rebalancing of power that would likely favor some version of Islamic fundamentalism takes hold and creates some measure of stability in the Middle East, count on one thing: the U.S. will be fighting the sons of ISIS years from now.
Back to World War I. The last time Russia and the U.S. both had a powerful presence in the Middle East, the fate of their proxies in the 1973 Yom Kippur War almost brought on a nuclear exchange. No one is predicting a world war or a nuclear war from the mess in Syria. However, like those final days before the Great War, one finds a lot of pieces in play inside a tinderbox.
Now, all together: What could possibly go wrong?
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced new plans to address the radicalization of young British Muslims, including measures to withdraw the passports of those believed to be at risk of joining jihadist groups abroad.
As part of a strategy to tackle extremism, parents will be able to ask the government to seize the passports of 16- and 17-year-olds thought to be considering travel to Syria and Iraq. British parents can already request the cancellation of passports of those under 16. Another measure will ensure that anyone with a conviction for a "terrorist crime or extremist activity" will automatically be barred from working with children or other people regarded as vulnerable.
Cameron's critics worry that the new measures may be seen as heavy-handed and exacerbate the sense of alienation and resentment among young British Muslims, which is itself a driver of radicalization.
Left unsaid is any tally of exactly how many 16- and 17-year-olds have traveled to join ISIS, the practicality of knowing where they are going since most would-be jihadis travel via a circuitous route, and the question of what happens to the 18-99-year-olds who want to join up. The vagueness of what constitutes a "terrorist crime or extremist activity" and who the hell are "other people regarded as vulnerable" is noted.
Doubling down, Cameron described the battle against terrorism as the struggle of his generation. He is also expected to restate the case for expanding Britain's laws on electronic surveillance, because why not throw that in while you're on a roll.
Apart from a natural desire to expand fascism, grow government power and try and tie himself to things like surviving WWII, an actual struggle of a generation, what might be driving Cameron (as well as his contemporaries in the U.S., who are frothing over similar ideas)?
Simply this: pointless, knee-jerk reactions and security theatre are a whole lot easier to sell to the average frightened citizen than the idea that their safety actually depends on foreign policies that do not inspire rage and hatred in very large numbers of people.
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
Shaker Aamer was just released, after 13 years in captivity, from Guantanamo, and returned to Britain. His wife lives there, and he has permanent residence there. He was never charged with anything by the United States, simply kept. Here is what was done to him over the course of his 13 years at Gitmo.
Bush denied, and Obama helped hide, the nasty stuff even existed, then used an ever-so-compliant media to call it all necessary for our security and very survival, then shaping dumb-cow public opinion with ersatz terms like enhanced interrogation to keep the word torture out of the discourse, then having the CIA destroy videos of the brutality, then imprisoning officials, such as John Kiriakou, who sought to expose it all, then refusing to hold hearings or conduct investigations, then employing black ops to try and derail even a cursory Senate report and finally allowing the torturers at the CIA themselves the final word on the watered-down public version of a Senate report on torture.
The Torture of Shaker Aamer by the United States
Yet, like a water leak that must find it's way out from inside the dark place within your walls, some things become known. Now, we can read a psychiatrist's report which includes, in detail, the torture enacted on just one prisoner of the United States, Shaker Aamer.
The once-U.S. ally Northern Alliance captured Aamer in Afghanistan and sold him to the United States as an al Qaeda member. Who knows at this point who Aamer was at that time, or what he did or did not do. If you think any of that matters, and perhaps justifies what was done to him, stop reading now. This article cannot reach you.
What was Done to One Human
In his own words, Aamer describes the casual way his Western jailers accepted his physical presence, and skinny confessions made under Afghan torture, as all the proof necessary to imprison him in U.S. custody from 2002 until 2015. The U.S. created a world of hell that only had an entrance, not caring to conceive of an exit. In no particular order (though the full report dispassionately chronicles every act by time and location), the United States of America did the following to Aamer:
— On more than one occasion an official of the United States threatened to rape Aamer's five year old daughter, with one interrogator describing in explicit sexual detail his plans to destroy the child;
— "Welcoming Parties" and "Goodbye Parties" as Aamer was transferred among U.S. facilities. Soldiers at these "parties" were encouraged and allowed to beat and kick detainees as their proclivities and desires dictated. Here's a video of what a beating under the eyes of American soldiers looks like.
— Aamer was made to stand for days, not allowed to sleep for days, not allowed to use the toilet and made to shit and piss on himself for days, not fed or fed minimally for days, doused with freezing water for days, over and over again. For 13 years.
— Aamer was denied medical care as his interrogators controlled his access to doctors and made care for the wounds they inflicted dependent on Aamer's ongoing compliance and repeated "confessions."
— Aamer was often kept naked, and his faith exploited to humiliate him in culturally-specific ways. He witnessed a 17-year-old captive of America sodomized with a rifle, and was threatened with the same.
— At times the brutality took place for its own sake, disconnected from interrogations. At times it was the centerpiece of interrogation.
— The torture of Aamer continued at Gitmo, for as an occasional hunger striker he was brutally force-fed.
Torture Works
The obsessive debate in this country over the effectiveness of torture rings eternally false: torture does indeed work. Torture is invariably about shame and vengeance, humiliation, power, and control, not gathering information. Even when left alone (especially when left alone) the torture victim is punished to imagine what form the hurt will take and just how severe it will be, almost always in the process assuming responsibility for creating his own terror.
And there you have the take-away point, as briefers in Washington like to say. The real point of the torture was to torture. Over twelve years, even the thinnest rationale that Aamer was a dangerous terrorist, or had valuable information to disclose, could not exist and his abusers knew it. The only goal was to destroy Shaker Aamer.
The combination of raw brutality, the careful, educated use of medical doctors to fine-tune the pain, the skills of psychiatrists and cultural advisors to enhance the impact of what was done worked exactly as it was intended. According to the psychiatrist who examined Aamer in detail at Guantanamo, there is little left of the man. He suffers from a broad range of psychiatric and physical horrors. In that sense, by the calculus his torturers employ, the torture was indeed successful.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan failed at great cost, al Qaeda has been reborn in Africa and greater parts of the Middle East and the U.S. has willingly transformed itself into at best a bully abroad, and a police state at home. But no mind; the full force and credit of the United States of America destroyed Shaker Aamer as revenge for all the rest, bloody proof of all the good we failed to do.
Never Again, Always Again
Despite the horrors of World War II, the mantra– never again– becomes today a sad joke. The scale is different this time, what, 600? 6000? men destroyed by torture not six million, but not the intent. The desire to inflict purposeful suffering by government order, the belief that such inhuman actions are legal, even necessary, differs little from one set of fascists to more modern ones. Given the secrecy the Nazis enjoyed for years, how full would the American camps be today? Kill them all, and let God sort them out is never far from the lips.
Torture does not leave its victims, nor does it leave a nation that condones it. The ghosts don't disappear the way the flesh and bone can be made to go away.
The people who did this, whether the ones in the torture cell using their fists, or the ones in the White House ordering it with their pens, walk free among us. They'll never see justice done. There will be no Nuremberg Trials for America's evils, just a collapsing bunker in Berlin. But unlike Shaker Aamer, you are sentenced to live to see it forever in your nightmares.
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
When I was a kid, three presidents told us we had to fight in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, because if we didn't fight them over there, we'd have to fight them on the beaches of California. We believed. It was a lie.
I was a teenager during the Cold War, and several presidents told us we needed to create massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons, garrison the world, invade Cuba, fight in odd little places and use the CIA to overthrow democratically elected governments and replace them with dictators, or the Russians would destroy us. We believed. It was a lie.
When I was in college our president told us that we needed to fight in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua or the Sandinistas would come to the United States. He told us Managua was closer to Washington DC than LA was. He told us we needed to fight in Lebanon, Grenada and Libya to protect ourselves. We believed. It was a lie.
When I was a little older our president told us how evil Saddam Hussein was, how his soldiers bayoneted babies in Kuwait. He told us Saddam was a threat to America. He told us we needed to invade Panama to oust a dictator to protect America. We believed. It was a lie.
The next president told us we had to fight terrorists in Somalia, as well as bomb Iraq, to protect ourselves. We believed. It was a lie.
The one after him told us that because a group of Saudis from a group loosely tied to Afghanistan attacked us on 9/11, we needed to occupy that country and destroy the Taliban, who had not attacked us, for our own safety. The Taliban are still there. But we believed. It was a lie.
After that we were told that Saddam Hussein threatened every one of us with weapons of mass destruction, that the smoking gun would be a mushroom cloud, that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda. We believed. It was a lie.
In 2011 the president and his secretary of state told us we needed regime change in Libya, to protect us from an evil dictator. We believed. It was a lie.
In August 2014 the same president told us we needed to intervene again in Iraq, on a humanitarian mission to save the Yazidis. No boots on the ground, a simple act of humanness that only the United States could conduct, and then leave. We believed. It was a lie.
Now we are told by that same president that Americans will again fight on the ground in Iraq, and Syria, and that Americans have and will die. He says that this is necessary to protect us, because if we do not defeat Islamic State over there, they will come here, to what we now call without shame or irony The Homeland.
We want to believe, Mr. President. We want to know it is not a lie.
So please address us, explain why what you are doing in Iraq is different than everything listed above. Tell us why we should believe you — this time — because history says you lie.
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
In a rush to solve a problem that does not exist with a solution that won't solve the problem anyway, owners of recreational drones in the United States will soon have to register them, the government said on October 19.
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) head Michael Huerta told a joint news conference they were setting up a task force to move ahead with the registration plans. "We do feel the level of urgency here is sufficient to move as quickly as we possibly can," Foxx said. The task force, set to include representatives from the drone and aviation industries, has been asked to file its recommendations by November 20. Foxx said he hoped to have new "rules in place by the middle part of December."
The measure will all in likelihood apply to existing owners, he said, as well as the hundreds of thousands who are expected to acquire a new drone this holiday season. Certain types of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), as drones are officially known, could be exempt including "toys" and other small devices.
I have been unable to find any example of an American killed by a recreational drone; Google turns up a few minor injuries, though to be fair the search results are jammed with examples of U.S. military drones killing people overseas, so I may have missed one.
Guns, which are not required to be registered with the Federal government, killed 12,564 American in 2014.
Yes, yes, bad things could happen with drones. They could happen with pigeons and snowballs.
But the dumbest part of the new registration rules is that will not stop dumb/dangerous drone things from happening. Simply registering a drone means nothing except the government has a name attached to a particular device. I guess that might make it easier to arrest someone after the fact, except of course drones will be stolen, bought unregistered on a black market, traded at drone shows, and existing drones will never be registered and all the stuff that happens with guns. Plus some kind of new bureaucracy will need to be set up to record all those millions of expected drone registrants.
And to keep things interesting, if drones can be considered a "weapon," aren't they then protected under the Second Amendment? Also, if it is up to the states to regulate gun sales, driver's licenses and all the rest, why are drones going to be registered at the federal level?
Meanwhile, there are lots of old-timey model airplanes which fly by remote control, and they have been around since the 1950s. Will those need to be registered as well?
Wait — so that means registering guns won't really help either? Yeah, maybe. But the real point here is that the government is quick to act (stupidly, but they did act) on a problem that seems less of a threat, while taking no action on a problem that is a terrible, documented, ongoing threat.
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This. Is. Hilarious.
Honestly, I can't stop laughing. I gotta wipe the tears out of my eyes, seriously. I feel like I need to start including the line "This is real. It is not from the Onion" as a standard disclaimer.
But They Promised
So it seems the U.S. has told Iraq's leaders they must choose between American support against Islamic State and Russian support. Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Iraqis "promised" they would not request any Russian airstrikes or support for the fight against IS.
Dunford told reporters he had laid out a choice when he met with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. "I said it would make it very difficult for us to be able to provide the kind of support you need if the Russians were here conducting operations as well," Dunford said. "We can't conduct operations if the Russians were operating in Iraq right now."
He said there was "angst" in the U.S. when reports surfaced that al-Abadi had said he would welcome Russian airstrikes in Iraq. The U.S., Dunford said, "can't have a relationship right now with Russia in the context of Iraq."
And Now, We Laugh
We begin laughing in that the U.S. does not seem to have any problems with the Iranians (who are also active in Syria, supporting Assad) working out in Iraq. The Iranians overtly have special forces, leadership and trainers on the ground there, have sent in armor and by many accounts supplied limited numbers of ground troops. But that seems to be OK.
The hilarity continues because the U.S. sort of started off welcoming the Russians into the fight against IS in Syria, at least until the U.S. realized it had been played by Putin, and that the Russians in fact did not share American goals (who would have thought it?) and instead supported Assad. I mean, Russia has been Assad's only supporter, ally, and benefactor for decades, and the Russians maintained their only remaining overseas military base in Syria since forever, so it made perfect sense for the U.S. to believe they would not side with Assad, right?
It is even funnier when you realize the U.S. has no real goals or business left in Iraq, except now to have hissy fits to make sure that it is Iran that retains defacto control there instead of the Russians.
And of course, since the Iraqis "promised" not to take Russian help, well, that makes it a done deal, right?
Plus if the Russians did step in, what would the U.S. really do? Pack everything up in Iraq and just come home? Leave the Russians to guard the American Embassy? Hah, as if the U.S. would just leave Iraq.
But the true amusement is that if the Iraqis want the Russians to help — maybe as "volunteers" — there is not a damn thing the U.S. can do about that, other than move aside, as is happening in Syria.
Seriously, this is what's left of American foreign policy?
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The United States does not formally acknowledge the existence of Delta Force, and rarely mentions the names of any of its members, even after they leave the service.
Unlike the SEALs, who seem to be prolific writers, Delta operators keep to themselves. Most of the unit's actions abroad are never mentioned publicly, and when an operator is killed in combat, often the death goes unmentioned in the press, or attributed sometime later to a training accident.
So the very public attention given at the highest levels in Washington to the combat death of Master Sergeant Joshua Wheeler was more than a little significant.
Wheeler was not only acknowledged as having fought with Delta, but his photo was widely published. That in itself is usually a no-no, for fear of linking him to others and outing active duty Delta. His place of death, on the ground, deep inside Iraq, on a strike mission, was explicit, with only a little b.s. thrown in about how Delta was present to provide security for the Kurdish raiding forces seeking to free some hostages. Well, well, nobody in their right mind believes America's finest special forces are sent out to provide security for a bunch of gussied up militiamen.
That all within the context that the president of the United States has made it explicit that his war against Islamic State would not involve any American "boots on the ground." Well, Sergeant Wheeler most definitely was an example of boots on the ground. There were an awful lot of reasons to have said nothing about Wheeler, and instead much has been said.
So why all the public attention to Wheeler's death, and why now?
One reason stands out: we, the public, are being readied for a larger U.S. combat role in Iraq and Syria, one big enough that it will be hard to keep hidden.
The circumstances of Wheeler's death are picture perfect for such a plan. He was a revered hero simply by the nature of the unit he served with. He was fighting with about the only competent and pro-American force left in the Middle East, the Kurds. He was fighting the most evil enemy of America (for now), Islamic State. He was on a successful rescue mission; hostages were freed, prisoners released, some IS bad guys dispatched. And the whole thing was conveniently videotaped — a videotaped special forces raid. How often do you see that? You don't.
The whole could not be more palatable to an American public perhaps just a little bit weary of war in the Middle East.
Now hear this: in an "exclusive," meaning the entire story was handed intact to a single reporter to jot down and print, The Hill reports "top leaders at the Pentagon are considering a range of options to bolster the military campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), including embedding some U.S. troops with Iraqi forces… A second option sent to Pentagon leaders would embed U.S. forces with Iraqis closer to the battlefield, at the level of a brigade or a battalion. Some of the options sent to Pentagon leaders would entail high risk for U.S. troops in Iraq and require more personnel."
Timing? Couldn't be better. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine General Joseph Dunford (himself just back from Iraq) will discuss the options when they testify today, October 27, in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee. They will no doubt raise Wheeler's name.
I don't like to traffic in conspiracy theories, but if you can put these pieces together in another way without having to use the word "coincidence" a couple of times, I'd be interesting in what you have to say. Otherwise, hang on, the United States is doubling down in the quagmire of Iraq. Again.
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America's presidential candidates go on TV and brag about killing a man with their own hands (one guy) and froth over the idea of starting even more wars (all the others.) In Canada, they get a supermodel as their new king, who speaks French, looks like a young Matthew McConaughey, and who tells America to shove its stupid wars up its overweight *ss.
Canada's prime minister-elect, Justin Trudeau, pictured looking fabulous, said Tuesday he told Barack Obama that Canadian fighter jets would withdraw from fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Western nations only go to war when coerced by the United States in joining some coalition. No other nation on the planet makes war as often and as unsuccessfully as the United States. No other nation makes war its business.
So you can imagine the huge hassle it is for Canada to have to suck up to its war-loving, gluten-free neighbor to the south, tossing in a few planes or troops whenever America has another hissy fit and has to invade somewhere. Canada famously refused to be sucked into the 2003 Iraq invasion, for example (though did play in Afghanistan.)
Quick question: what about Mexico? They also share a border and NAFTA with America, plus America graciously buys up 99 percent of its dope crop, and thus has the same need to suck up, but they also always seem to duck these war calls. Hmmm.
Anyway, Trudeau said "while Canada remains a strong member of the coalition against ISIL," he made clear to Obama "the commitments I have made around ending the combat mission."
It was not immediately clear if Trudeau added "you warmongering bastard" and/or said he'd nail Michelle with his old man's "moves like Jagger" at the next state dinner.
Oh Canada!
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Sure, 99 percent of us have problems: Can we feed our kids? Will we lose our home to predatory lending? How can we access decent healthcare? That sort of thing.
But rich people have problems, too. Luckily, a group of brave psychiatric professionals, dubbed "wealth therapists," have emerged to come to their aid.
The UK Guardian (America's best newspaper) profiled Clay Cockrell, a former Wall Street worker turned therapist, who spends his days helping New York's wealthiest people.
So what issues are America's One Percent struggling with? Cockrell tells us there is guilt over being rich in the first place, which makes the rich feel that they have to hide the fact that they are rich. And then there is the isolation – being in the One Percent, it turns out, can be lonely.
And the problem is growing. According to Oxfam, the richest One Percent have seen their share of global wealth increase from only 44 percent in 2009 to 48 percent in 2014. It will break 51 percent by next year.
The wealth therapists also say things have only gotten worse for their clients since the debate over income inequality that has been spurred on by movements like Occupy Wall Street.
"The Occupy Wall Street movement singled out the One Percent and painted them globally as something negative," said Jamie Traeger-Muney, another wealth psychologist. "I am not necessarily comparing it to what people of color have to go through, but it really is making value judgments about a particular group of people as a whole."
Traeger-Muney specializes in the unique issues inheritors face. "You can come up with lot of words and sayings about inheritors, and not one of them is positive: spoiled brat, born with a silver spoon in their mouth, trust fund babies, all these things," she said, adding "I am shocked by things that people say. If you substitute in the word Jewish or black, you would never say something like that."
Hyper-wealthy, we all feel your pain. Thus, today, we are all part of the One Percent. #WealthyLivesMatter (say the wealthy.)
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