Category: Civil War

Why Are We Supplying Arms to Bahrain?

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If anything, the crackdown on dissent in Bahrain is worse than in Syria, because of the overtones of ethnic cleansing against the Shia (At least the Syrians oppress everyone equally), and we are arming them:

Despite Bahrain’s bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, the U.S. has continued to provide weapons and maintenance to the small Mideast nation.

Defense Department documents released to ProPublica give the fullest picture yet of the arms sales: The list includes ammunition, combat vehicle parts, communications equipment, Blackhawk helicopters, and an unidentified missile system. (Read the documents.)

The documents, which were provided in response to a Freedom of Information Act request and cover a yearlong period ending in February 2012, still leave many questions unanswered. It’s not clear whether in each case the arms listed have been delivered. And some entries that only cite the names of weapons may in fact refer to maintenance or spare parts.

For all the evil that the rulers in Syria have done, they have not arrested doctors for treating protestors that came into their emergency rooms, and they haven’t demolished mosques of other sects, as the the Al Khalifa monarchy has done in Bahrain.

Both regimes should be replaced by something that better serves the needs of their citizens, but we are letting the House of Saud dictate our priorities, and surprisingly, they oppose a secular regime run largely by non-Sunnis, and they support a Sunni monarchy like themselves.

The real problem here is that the Arab monarchies will eventually fall, either violently in the manner of the Romanoffs of Russia, or peacefully, in the manner of the House of Windsor in the UK, and the more that we prop them up, the bigger the backlash when they fall.

Iran’s transition from US ally to foe, which derived directly from our unqualified support of a despot, would not suit our interests, nor the interests of the people in that part of the world.

My rule of thumb here is that if the House of Saud is for it, I’m against it.

Gee, We’re Caught Lying About Syria

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It turns out that the allegation that Russians were selling attack helos to Syria made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were false.

Syria has owned the copters in question for years:

When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton accused Russia on Tuesday of shipping attack helicopters to Syria that would “escalate the conflict quite dramatically,” it was the Obama administration’s sharpest criticism yet of Russia’s support for the Syrian government.

What Mrs. Clinton did not say, however, was whether the aircraft were new shipments or, as administration officials say is more likely, helicopters that Syria had sent to Russia a few months ago for routine repairs and refurbishing, and which were now about to be returned.

“She put a little spin on it to put the Russians in a difficult position,” said one senior Defense Department official.

This is called lying like a rug.

We are going to bomb Syria.  This is exactly the same sort of crap what we saw with build up Iraq, Libya, etc.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

The Word for April in Pashtun is “Tet”

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Charlie Pierce is right, There Is No Mission in Afghanistan Anymore. There Isn’t Anything. There Is Only Abject Failure. And That Alone:

The attacks, they said, were “orchestrated.” Or, if the people reporting them were being particularly precise, the attacks were “carefully orchestrated.” The order of the adverbs is the order of battle. In Kabul on Sunday, Taliban fighters attacked the Afghan parliament building, and several embassies, and a NATO base. There also were attacks in the provinces. Those people old enough to remember the Tet Offensive can be excused if they mention the obvious parallels. Whatever its historical ambiguity as a military operation, Tet was a mind-quake in the United States. It forced the country to face squarely the sheer mendacity of its own government’s statements about the war as a war. It redefined for the United States what “winning” in Vietnam meant and it redefined it as an impossibility. In Afgantsy, his admirably lucid history of the Russian catastrophe in Afghanistan, Rodric Braithwaite quotes an old aphorism of which the guerrilla fighters in that country were fond: The foreigners have the watches, but the locals have the time.


But the fact is that, in terms of the domestic reaction it provoked, Tet was closer to a beginning than it was to an end. The war would grind on for seven more years, two years longer than the Americans chose to stay with it. The domestic antiwar movement was just building toward a crescendo that few people could imagine; the shootings at Kent State were still two years away. Lyndon Johnson was still president, and the presumptive nominee of his party. Nixon was still something of an underdog. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. — they were still alive. The Vietnam War was just beginning to reach all corners of American society like a dark, living thing with a thousand faces.

That being said, Charlie explains that this is in some ways worse than Tet, because we’ve already lived through Tet, and apparrently have learned nothing:

And that is the biggest reason why what happened in Kabul this weekend is not Tet: because, when Tet happened, we didn’t have Tet to remember and to learn from. Afghanistan was supposed to be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam, and it did rather work out that way. But it turned out that Afghanistan was a worse Vietnam than Vietnam ever was, and we wandered over there just in time to make Russia’s Vietnam our own. We have done what we came for. Osama bin Laden is as dead as Lord Kitchener; the al Qaeda network, at least in Afghanistan, is in a shambles. We do not have the power to enforce a stable government on a country that so manifestly resists the notion, especially when it comes from foreigners. What in hell are we doing over there anymore.

I think that Pierce is a bit optimistic: I think that the American establishment and the Pentagon learned the wrong lesson from Vietnam.

You see, they asked the question, “Why did we lose the war,” and in their infinite wisdom, they concluded that it was because the “lost” the American public, so the answer to the Vietnam debacle was to create an all volunteer force, so middle America’s sons would not be subject to conscription, and to ramp up restrictions and manipulate the media, embedded reporters and the like.

But we didn’t lose the war. We were beaten.

That question, “How were we beaten,” places the onus on that same American establishment and Pentagon, as opposed to scapegoating the public and the media, which is why they don’t ask that question.

Eric Holder Argues that Assassination is Legal

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Jeebus. It’s now OK to murder an American citizen because the President says so:

Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday explained why it’s legal to murder people — not to execute prisoners convicted of capital crimes, not to shoot someone in self-defense, not to fight on a battlefield in a war that is somehow legalized, but to target and kill an individual sitting on his sofa, with no charges, no arrest, no trial, no approval from a court, no approval from a legislature, no approval from we the people, and in fact no sharing of information with any institutions that are not the president.

…………

By “government” Holder means the president, whether President Obama or President Romney or President Santorum or any man or woman who later becomes president, and nobody else. That one person alone is to decide what is appropriate and lawful and feasible. If the Vice President thinks it is feasible to capture somene, too bad for him. He should have gotten a better job if he wanted to be a decider. If the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court thinks preaching against the United States is not a capital offense, tough tamales. He shouldn’t dress in his bathrobe if he wants to be taken seriously. If the United States Congress objects that the president’s “surgical strikes” tend to kill too many random men, women, and children, well they know what they can do: Run for president! If the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings has objections, well — Isn’t that SPECIAL? And the American people? They can shut up or vote for a racist buffoon from the bad party.

…………

But you see, this is all OK, because Barack Obama is a good guy, so no countervailing government structures, or for that matter any public access to information needs to be allowed:

A consensus has emerged during the presidency of Barack Obama. His administration is increasingly regarded as the worst on issues related to freedom of information and transparency.

Today, Josh Gerstein of POLITICO has a story that gives voice to this emerging consensus, which more and more open government advocates hold despite the fact that the Obama Administration maintains it is committed to “openness.”

Gerstein’s story features a quote from a Washington-based lawyer “who’s been filing” Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests since 1978. The lawyer, Katherine Mayer, says, “Obama is the sixth administration that’s been in office since I’ve been doing Freedom of Information Act work. … It’s kind of shocking to me to say this, but of the six, this administration is the worst on FOIA issues. The worst. There’s just no question about it.”

Think about this for a second: This is all predicated on the idea that the Executive is a good guy who won’t abuse power, and so there is no need for checks and balances.

This is why I call Barack Obama the worst constitutional law professor ever.

In the Latest Episode of “The Forever War”………

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Obama has signed of on building an archipelago of secret drone bases in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula:

The Obama administration is assembling a constellation of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of a newly aggressive campaign to attack al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen, U.S. officials said.

One of the installations is being established in Ethi­o­pia, a U.S. ally in the fight against al-Shabab, the Somali militant group that controls much of that country. Another base is in the Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, where a small fleet of “hunter-killer” drones resumed operations this month after an experimental mission demonstrated that the unmanned aircraft could effectively patrol Somalia from there.

The U.S. military also has flown drones over Somalia and Yemen from bases in Djibouti, a tiny African nation at the junction of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. In addition, the CIA is building a secret airstrip in the Arabian Peninsula so it can deploy armed drones over Yemen.

The rapid expansion of the undeclared drone wars is a reflection of the growing alarm with which U.S. officials view the activities of al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Somalia, even as al-Qaeda’s core leadership in Pakistan has been weakened by U.S. counterterrorism operations.

This is completely nuts, the Pentagon is going to bankrupt us by placing a constellation of bases around the world that:

  • We cannot afford.
  • Creates terrorists by placing a foreign military presence in other sovereign nations.

This sh%$ simply has to stop.

It Looks Like Gaddafi is Out

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Or will be in a matter of hours.

I was listening to NPR, and they were hoping that the rebels would not go medieval on former Gaddafi loyalists, but that is a pipe dream.

They have no credibility, because they were installed largely as the result of direct military action by NATO, which requires the widespread application of violence against any potential opposition.

Additionally, because they are effectively clients of big oil and finance NATO, they will have to aggressively implement “free market reforms”, which means the end of their publicly financed healthcare and education systems, as well as signing sweetheart deals with big oil, which will not be supported by the general populace.

It’s good that Gaddafi is gone, but because he was removed through what was essentially a colonial intervention, the new regime will for the foreseeable future be a colonial administration, which may in the long run prove worse for the average Libyan.

And the Clusterf%$3 in Libya Goes Into High Gear

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Normally, this would not start happening until after a successful foreign backed revolution, but with a stalemate on the ground, I guess it’s time that the various factions of the Libyan rebels have decided to start killing each other to determine who gets the spoils.

The first head on a stake is that of their chief of staff Gen. Abdul Fatah Younis:

The chief of staff for rebel forces fighting to overthrow Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi was attacked and killed Thursday, according to the rebels’ leadership council.

In a terse announcement that left many questions unanswered, the president of the council said Gen. Abdul Fatah Younis and two other commanders were killed as they returned from the eastern front near Port Brega to Benghazi, the de facto rebel capital.

Reading haltingly from a brief communique, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, president of the Transitional National Council, said pro-Kadafi gunmen had infiltrated rebel-held areas, but he did not specifically blame them for the killings. Abdul Jalil refused to take questions from reporters.

In response, the council has ordered all militias to stand down, and to integrate into the formal security forces.

This was foreseeable. This is a group with no real leader, and no credibility beyond the support that it receives from NATO, so it was inevitable that we would see this.

Of course, this means that NATO will feel compelled to escalate in order to show their credibility, so I expect to see British and French troops on the ground as “advisers” in the not too distant future.

It’s kind of like Vietnam writ small.

On the 150th Anniversary of the Start of the Civil War……

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Here is a good survey of the lies that southerners tell about the war.

In addition to the normal lies, like it not being about slavery, it also reveals that the in almost all the states in question, a majority of the population did not want secession.

Instead, the process was manipulated by the slave holders to get the desired results.

The closer you look at it, the more the myth of the noble lost cause looks like a slimy con game played by the richest people in the south on the average person in the south.

The Ongoing Libyan Clusterf%$#

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First, it appears that since the US has dropped its lead position, NATO does not have enough attack aircraft, and now the British are talking about sending in trainers and advisers to help the rebels:

Britain is to urge Arab countries to train the disorganised Libyan rebels, and so strengthen their position on the battlefield before negotiations on a ceasefire, senior British defence sources have indicated.

The sources said they were also looking at hiring private security companies, some of which draw on former SAS members, to aid the rebels. These private soldiers could be paid by Arab countries to train the unstructured rebel army.

So, we are talking about a major escalation of involvement, one, by the way, which is not called for in the UN Security Council resolution, including the use of mercenaries.

This is not going to end well.

Meanwhile, In the Humitarian Disaster Not Involving Oil…

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I am referring, of course, to The Republic of Côte d’Ivoire, where forces supporting the guy who won the election, Alassane Ouattara, have taken the capital, Yamoussoukro:

Rebel forces in Ivory Coast have taken control of the official capital, as power seems to be slipping away from the president, Laurent Gbagbo.

Residents and military sources said troops loyal to Gbagbo’s rival, Alassane Ouattara, had entered Yamoussoukro, meeting little resistance as security forces fled. The port city of San Pedro also fell.

This has been going on for how many months now, (Hint: it’s been 5) and hot a hint of anyone wanting to intervene, because, of course, they don’t have oil.

So you have two African leaders, both without much in the way of support, who are oppressing their opponents and the general population, but the one that is a mid-level oil producer gets the full NATO bombing treatment, while the world’s leading exporter of cocoa gets some minor finger wagging in the general assembly of the United Nations.

A little bit of oil we spend blood and treasure on, but a lot of chocolate, that ain’t worth nothing.

Talk about screwed up priorities.

The Obama Doctrine…

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Courtesy of Dan Nexon:

Humanitarian-intervention-against-militarily-weak-fossil-fuel-producing-countries-in-strategically-important-regions-that-are-also-located-near-many-large-NATO-military-bases-and-are-run-by-dictators-who-kind-of-piss-us-off-and-have-no-powerful-allies Doctrine

And he is right: This is not the stuff of grand strategy.

Now It’s A-10s and AC-130s

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So now we are now engaging in direct close air support in direct support of the rebel forces, which means that, win or lose, the rebels will have very little legitimacy, and so will be dependent upon support of the west, probably the British and French, in any future government.

This ain’t a bug, it’s a feature, because it makes for a low cost semi-colonial relationship with the oil rich nation in the future:

The U.S. military dramatically stepped up its assault on Libyan government ground forces over the weekend, launching its first missions with AC-130 flying gunships and A-10 attack aircraft designed to strike enemy ground troops and supply convoys.

The use of the aircraft, during days of heavy fighting in which the momentum seemed to swing in favor of the rebels, demonstrated how allied military forces have been drawn deeper into the chaotic fight in Libya. A mission that initially seemed to revolve around establishing a no-fly zone has become focused on halting advances by government ground forces in and around key coastal cities.

The AC-130s, which fly low and slow over the battlefield and are typically more vulnerable to enemy fire than fast-moving fighter jets, were deployed only after a week of sustained coalition attacks on Libyan government air defenses and radar sites. These aircraft, armed with heavy machine guns and cannons that rake the ground, allow strikes on dug-in Libyan ground forces and convoys in closer proximity to civilians.

Let’s be clear here: Dug in forces are not a threat to non-combatant civilians. They are an impediment to the rebel army, and going after them puts the lie to the idea that this is about “protecting civilians,” as called for in the Security Council resolution.

I agree with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov who is saying that this is taking sides in a civil war, and while the removal of Qaddafi may be a noble goal, it is not the one that was authorized.

We are back down the same rabbit hole that forced us to invade Iraq.

The survival of the current regime in Libya has now become an unacceptable outcome, notwithstanding the protests of Obama and other world leaders, just like the survival of Saddam Hussein’s regime became unacceptable to Bush, Jr. in 2003.

We elected George W. Bush with better diction.

Obama’s Speech on Libya

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I might have been inclined to watch it live, but my kids, along with the rest of our shul’s youth choir, was singing at a retirement home, and so I didn’t, and I really can’t stand to listen to him, and it appears that the US has gotten sucked into a neocolonial adventure by the French and the British, a sort of reverse Suez, if you will, so I do not think that there is a good sane explanation here to involve us in a civil war.

Maybe I’ll read some analyses over the next few days.

So, There’s a No-Fly Zone in Libya

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The UN Security Council just passed it.

So it’s war, by any other name.

I think that this is a bad idea, and whatever emerges at the other end, and my money is still on Qaddafi, the opposition will now lack legitimacy, as will a successor government.

Kevin Drum has an interesting take on this, which is that administration ambivalence on this actually led to the widespread support necessary for the Security Council resolution.

I’m not sure, but I feel that this won’t end well.

When one backs a revolution, one expects some say over the outcome, and looking at the history of that, (*cough* reinstating the Pshaw of Iran, which lead to the current theocracy *cough*) it never ends well.

Unsurprising News

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The UN has internal maps of Afghanistan that show us losing the war:

Internal United Nations maps show a marked deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan during this year’s fighting season, countering the Obama administration’s optimistic assessments of military progress since the surge of additional American forces began a year ago.

The Wall Street Journal was able to view two confidential “residual risk accessibility” maps, one compiled by the U.N. at the annual fighting season’s start in March 2010 and another at its tail end in October. The maps, used by U.N. personnel to gauge the dangers of travel and running programs, divide the country’s districts into four categories: very high risk, high risk, medium risk and low risk.

In the October map, just as in March’s, nearly all of southern Afghanistan—the focus of the coalition’s military offensives—remained painted the red of “very high risk,” with no noted improvements. At the same time, the green belt of “low risk” districts in northern, central and western Afghanistan shriveled.

A shocker here, neh?

We are being lied to by the administration and Pentagon.