Foreign Affairs
Related: About this forumThe Secret to Winning the Nobel Peace Prize Keep the U.S. Military Out
http://www.juancole.com/2015/10/secret-winning-military.htmlThe Secret to Winning the Nobel Peace Prize Keep the U.S. Military Out
By contributors | Oct. 21, 2015
By Rebecca Gordon | (Tomdispatch.com)
Introduction, by Tom Engelhardt
To this day, it remains difficult to take in the degree to which the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq destabilized the Greater Middle East from the Chinese border to Libya. Certainly, as the recent Republican and Democratic presidential debates suggest, Americans have some sense of what a disaster it was for the Bush administration to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to take out Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein. The gravity of the decision to occupy and garrison his country, while dismantling his party, his institutions of state, and much of the economy, not to speak of his military, can hardly be overemphasized. In the process, its clear that the U.S. punched a giant hole through the oil heartlands of the planet. The disintegrative effects of those moves have only compounded over the years. Despite the many other factors, demographic and economic, that lay behind the Arab Spring of 2011-2012, for instance, its hard to believe that it would have happened in the way it did, had the invasion of Iraq not occurred.
Though youll seldom find it mentioned in one place, in the ensuing years five countries in the region Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen all disintegrated as nation states. Three of them were the focus of direct American interventions, the fourth (Yemen) was turned into a hunting ground for American drones, and the fifth (Syria) suffered indirectly from the chaos and mayhem in neighboring Iraq. All of them are now embroiled in seemingly unceasing internecine struggles, wars, and upheavals. Meanwhile, the phenomenon that the Americans were ostensibly focused on crushing, terrorism, has exploded across the same lands, resulting among other things in the first modern terrorist state (though its adherents prefer to call it a caliphate).
Those two invasions also loosed another deeply destabilizing phenomenon: 24/7 counterinsurgency from the air and the manhunting drone that was so essential to it. At first, this was an American phenomenon as U.S. Air Force planes with their smart weaponry and CIA and Air Force drones, all hyped for their surgical precision, began cruising the skies of the Greater Middle East, terrorizing parts of the backlands of the region. In effect, they acted as agents of disintegration as well as recruitment posters for expanding terror outfits. The collateral damage they caused was considerable, even if it has, until recently, been largely ignored in our world. Hundreds, for instance, died in three of those disintegrating countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen) when at least eight wedding parties were obliterated by American air power, and yet few noticed. This may recently have changed when an American AC-130 gunship eviscerated a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, Afghanistan. Doctors, staff, and patients were killed, some burned in their beds, because American special operations analysts believed, according to the Associated Press, that a single Pakistani intelligence agent might be on the premises. (He evidently wasnt.) Soon after, the Intercept published a cache of secret U.S. documents from a new Edward Snowden on the American drone program in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen that offered a strong sense of the apparently incalculable civilian toll taken in the constant search for terror targets.
But heres the truly grim reality of the Greater Middle East today: what the Americans started didnt end with them. The skies of the region are now being cruised by French, British, Jordanian, United Arab Emirates, Kuwaiti, Qatari, Bahraini, Moroccan, Egyptian, Saudi, and Russian planes and drones, all emulating the Americans, all conducting counterinsurgency, all undoubtedly blasting away civilians. In Yemen, the Saudi air force, backed and supplied by Washington, recently took up the twenty-first-century American way of war in the most explicit fashion possible by knocking off two wedding parties and killing more than 150 celebrants.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)The US President Barack Obama made phone calls last week regarding Syria to the leaders of two key Middle East allies Turkish President Recep Erdogan and the UAE Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The White House readouts on the two conversations carefully avoided making any criticism of the Russian military operations in Syria.
Interestingly, the readout on the conversation with Erdogan, makes no reference to Russia (although the Turkish version reported the two leaders discussed what could be done about the Russian military activities in Syria.)
On the other hand, the readout on Sheikh Zayed also, while making an inter alia reference to the Russian operations, avoided any critical tone as such They [Obama and Sheikh Zayed] agreed that Russias military operations in Syria should focus on IS not moderate Syrian opposition groups and reaffirmed the importance of establishing the conditions necessary for a political transition in Syria.
Conceivably, Sheikh Zayed briefed Obama about his conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin two weeks ago in Sochi. Moscow has been paying great attention to build trust and mutual confidence in Russias relations with the UAE in particular and a critical mass is indeed appearing in the relationship, enabling them to meaningfully engage on the regional issues such as Islamic State, Libya and so on. No doubt, Moscow sees this as a parallel track while a sustained dialogue is being developed with Saudi Arabia.
http://atimes.com/2015/10/diplomatic-leg-work-on-syria-gathers-momentum/
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Surely no statesman in modern times
has been as revered and then as reviled as Henry Kissinger. So begins Niall Fergusons commissioned biography. But reverence and revulsion for Kissinger have never been sequential. Instead, for sixty years, Henry Kissinger has been a paragon of of Americas bipartisan ruling class, whose evolving identity he has reflected. Ordinary people, however, sensed that he cared less for them than for his own career and ideas, and that he has served America badly. In 1976, as Democratic and Republican Party elites were celebrating Secretary of State Kissingers 1972 deals with the Soviet Union, his 1973 Paris Peace Accords after which Americas naval bases in Vietnam became Soviet bases, and were looking none too closely at the substance of the newly established relationship with China, the insurgent faction of the Democratic Party that nominated Jimmy Carter made rejection of Kissinger the winning issue of that years presidential campaign. Meanwhile Ronald Reagan was doing the same thing on behalf of the Republican rank and file, and continued to do it through his landslide victory in 1980.
Kissinger is the only person, ever, who both of Americas political parties reviled at the same time, and whose rejection helped elect two presidents in a row. For two generations, no one had greater influence on US foreign policy than Kissinger. Americas ins and outs have regarded him so differently because their views of America and of its role in the world are so different.
Although Niall Fergusons massive, detail-filled biography contains a surfeit of material by which the inquisitive reader may draw his own conclusions, its introduction heralds an explicit attempt to counter mostly critical biographies from right and left as well as the general publics negative perceptions. This first volume, with young Henry on the cover looking innocent to the point of dreaminess, argues that we should regard whatever personal features of his that one might find distasteful as consequent to his idealism, defined in terms of Immanuel Kants conflation of a secularized golden rule with the imperative to craft a federation of free states to maintain perpetual peace. Yet the book makes no attempt to show how this translates to Kissingers behavior. It also treats his character evasively. For example, it asks the reader to accept that his own cynical explanation for his not so secretswinging single life (power is the greatest aphrodisiac) was in jest, as were his other cynical explanations for his actions. Nevertheless, Ferguson gives chapter and verse on Kissingers un-endearing habit of tyrannizing subordinates while ingratiating and manipulating superiors.
The book does treat at some length the nexus between Kissingers personal character and his actions in public life, namely his relationship with Fritz Kraemer, who Walter Isaacson described as Henrys guide, mentor, father confessor and keeper of his conscience. In 1943, Private Henry Kissinger had been assigned to the 84th Infantry division. Kraemer, also a German immigrant but already an accomplished scholar who was working for its commanding General, noticed Kissingers intelligence, befriended him, steered him into Military Intelligence, and later to Harvard. All the while, through the 1950s, and then decreasingly until Kissinger became Nixons National Security Adviser, Kraemer fed his proteges mind and did his best to inspire in him his own nobility of spirit and devotion to righteousness over power and fame. Kraemers letters to Kissinger, some which Ferguson reproduces, show his increasing concern and then disappointment with Kissingers reversal of Kraemers priorities. Ferguson does not mention that Kissinger turned his back on Kraemer, or that he delivered an apologetic, tearful eulogy when Kraemer was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
http://atimes.com/2015/10/book-review-kissinger-revered-and-reviled/
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Henry Kissingers luminous career was punctuated by one great disappointment, namely his failure to foresee the collapse of the Soviet system and the downfall of the foreign-policy system to which he devoted his life. Thats on par with the old joke: Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Kissinger was more hedgehog than fox: The fox knows many things, said Archilochus, but the hedgehog knows one important thing. Kissinger knew one important thing, which had the sole defect of being wrong. Like the Bourbons, Dr. Kissinger has learned nothing and forgotten nothing, as he showed in an Oct. 16 essay for the Wall Street Journal entitled, A Path Out of the Middle East Collapse. Kissinger bewails disintegration of the American role in stabilizing the Middle East order and wishes to restore it.
As Angelo Codevilla argued on this site in his review of a new Kissinger biography, the great man took as dogmatic truth that the Cold War was unwinnable, and thus the goal of war can no longer be military victory, but rather to achieve certain political conditions that are fully understood by the other side, and that to this end, the U.S would present (the enemy) at every point with an opportunity for a settlement.'
Ronald Reagan, by contrast, told the first meeting of his national security team, Heres my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose. He and his advisorsRichard Allen, William Clark, William J. Casey, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and then-younger men like Angelo Codevilla, Herbert Meyer and Norman Baileysaw a sea-change when it stared them in the face.
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To most of the world, and emphatically to Russia and China, ISIS looks like Americas Frankenstein monster. Many Russians are convinced that Washington helped create ISIS in order to destabilize Russia. Paranoid Russian may be a pleonasm, but the Russians do have enemies. It is hard to persuade our competitors that America fostered the emergence of ISIS out of pure stupidity rather than with malice aforethought. They will never believe we are that dumb.
http://atimes.com/2015/10/balance-of-power-the-board-game/