Just Foreign Policy News
August 15, 2011
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I) Actions and Featured Articles
To Live Within Our Means, Let’s Leave Iraq Like We Promised
While Washington wallows in debt hysteria, the Pentagon tries to keep 10,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq indefinitely. Some Members of Congress have a different idea: let’s leave Iraq in December, when we promised to do so.
http://www.truth-out.org/live-within-our-means-lets-leave-iraq-we-promised/1313417013
*Take Action: Urge Your Rep. to Support the Lee Bill
Representative Barbara Lee has introduced legislation that would prevent the Pentagon from keeping thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq by cutting off funds for the war after December 31, 2011. Urge your Representative to co-sponsor the Lee bill.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/obamaextendsbushwar
Seyed Hossein Mousavian: Iran is Ready to Negotiate
Former Iranian nuclear negotiator Seyed Hossein Mousavian says France, not the U.S., is now the main obstacle to meaningful negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, because while under Obama the U.S. position has shifted to accepting Iran’s right to enrich uranium under conditions, France is now pushing the U.S. to discuss Iran’s right to enrich at the end of negotiations, rather than at the beginning.
http://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/2011/aug/15/hossein-mousavian-iran-ready-negotiate-if
David Unger and Carol Giacomo: The Pentagon Puzzle: What to Cut First
Cutting $400 billion in projected Pentagon spending over 10 years [as the White House says Congress has already agreed] would bring base annual Pentagon spending down to the level of 2009, the authors note. The article is accompanied by graphs showing the trajectory of U.S. military spending since 2001.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/pentagon-puzzle-what-to-cut.html
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II) Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) Washington is not so much withdrawing forces from the Persian Gulf as it is redeploying them against China, writes Stephen Glain in Salon. In late March, press reports detailed a major buildup of US forces in Asia. The Pentagon is forging ahead with a multi-year effort to transform Guam into its primary hub in the Pacific, an initiative so vast that John Pike of the Washington, D.C.-based GlobalSecurity.org has speculated that Washington wants to "run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015."
2) Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki said President Abbas will submit an application for full U.N. membership at the General Assembly next month, Reuters reports. Palestinian officials said a specific date would still have to be determined. The U.S. is expected to oppose the move in the Security Council. But separately, the Palestinians have signaled they will seek an upgrading of their status from observer entity to non-member state. This is expected to pass as it does not require Security Council approval.
3) In a series of reports, Pentagon experts and budget-cutters like Sen. Coburn have proposed Pentagon cuts of $1 trillion — almost exactly the sum of the $420 billion from the first round of cuts and the $600 billion that would be triggered by the failure of the bipartisan commission, writes James Traub in Foreign Policy. The similarity of these reports, despite their authors’ radically differing political views, implies it’s not so hard to find $1 trillion in cuts in the military. All propose a reduction in both civilian and military personnel; a redeployment of forces now stationed in Europe and Asia; cancellation or shrinkage of planned procurements for fighter aircraft, helicopters, aircraft carriers, and missile defense; and a downsizing of the nuclear weapons stockpile. Even after such cuts, the US would still be spending as much as it ever did during the Cold War. But Obama administration officials have been unwilling to propose anything deeper than the $420 billion cuts of round one, suggesting that Obama is to the right of conservative Republican Senators Coburn and Chambliss on cuts to military spending.
4) Unilateral drone attacks will not substantially reduce Al Qaeda’s capabilities, writes former director of national intelligence Dennis Blair in an op-ed in the New York Times. As the drone campaign wears on, hatred of America is increasing in Pakistan. In Pakistan, news media accounts of heavy civilian casualties are widely believed. Our dogged persistence with the drone campaign is eroding our influence and damaging our ability to work with Pakistan to achieve other important security objectives like eliminating Taliban sanctuaries, encouraging Indian-Pakistani dialogue, and making Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal more secure, Blair writes.
5) The CIA claim that it has a yearlong perfect record of no civilian deaths from its campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan is not credible, writes the New York Times in an editorial. The C.I.A. says that since May 2010 drones have killed more than 600 militants in Pakistan and not a single noncombatant. A new report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism at City University in London says it found "credible evidence" of at least 45 noncombatants killed during the period. The C.I.A. contends that a May 6 strike on a pickup truck along the Afghan border wiped out only the intended targets. But British and Pakistani journalists say the missiles hit a religious school, an adjoining restaurant and a house – killing six civilians.
6) The U.S. Army suffered a record 32 suicides in July, the most since it began releasing monthly figures in 2009, the Washington Post reports.
Japan
7) A U.S. veteran says the U.S. military buried Agent Orange on Okinawa, the Japan Times reports. Other U.S. veterans have made related allegations, the paper notes. The U.S. denies it ever had Agent Orange on Okinawa, and has rejected claims from U.S. Okinawa veterans as well as Japanese demands that the US come clean on the issue.
Libya
8) The rebel uprising against Qaddafi is showing signs of sliding from a struggle to overthrow an autocrat into a murkier contest between factions and tribes, the New York Times reports. The infighting could erode support for the rebels among members of the NATO alliance, which faces a September deadline for renewing its air campaign amid growing unease about the war’s costs and direction, the Times says. In recent weeks, rebel fighters have lashed out at civilians because their tribes supported Colonel Qaddafi, looting mountain villages and emptying a civilian neighborhood.
Iran
9) Secretary of State Clinton should reject demands to remove the Mujahedeen Khalq from the list of foreign terrorist organizations, writes Elizabeth Rubin in the New York Times. The group is a totalitarian cult, she writes. A senior State Department official said, "they are so despised inside Iran that they have no traction." Iranian democracy activists say the group, if it had had the chance, could have become the Khmer Rouge of Iran. "They are considered traitors and killers of Iranian kids," said the official. "They are so unpopular that we think any gesture of support to them would disqualify and discredit us as being interested in democratic reform."
Afghanistan
10) After a decade of U.S. occupation, Afghanistan still has the second-highest death rate in the world, writes Anna Badkhen in Foreign Policy. One out of four children still dies before reaching age 5; one in eight women dies in childbirth.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) The Pentagon’s new China war plan
Despite budget woes, the military is preparing for a conflict with our biggest rival — and we should be worried
Stephen Glain, Salon, Saturday, Aug 13, 2011 13:01 Et
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2011/08/13/sino_us_stephen_glain
This summer, despite America’s continuing financial crisis, the Pentagon is effectively considering trading two military quagmires for the possibility of a third. Reducing its commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan as it refocuses on Asia, Washington is not so much withdrawing forces from the Persian Gulf as it is redeploying them for a prospective war with its largest creditor, China.
According to the defense trade press, Pentagon officials are seeking ways to adapt a concept known as AirSea Battle specifically for China, debunking rote claims from Washington that it has no plans to thwart its emerging Asian rival. A recent article in Inside the Pentagon reported that a small group of U.S. Navy officers known as the China Integration Team "is hard at work applying the lessons of [AirSea Battle] to a potential conflict with China."
AirSea Battle, developed in the early 1990s and most recently codified in a 2009 Navy-Air Force classified memo, is a vehicle for conforming U.S. military power to address asymmetrical threats in the Western Pacific and the Persian Gulf — code for China and Iran. (This alone raises a crucial point: If the U.S. has had nothing but trouble with asymmetrical warfare for the last 45 years, why should a war with China, or Iran for that matter, be any different?) It complements the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, a government white paper that precluded the rise of any "peer competitor" that might challenge U.S. dominance worldwide. The Planning Guidance is the Pentagon’s writ for control of what defense planners call "the global commons," a euphemism for the seaways, land bridges and air corridors that are the arteries of international commerce. For a foreign power to challenge this American dominion is to effectively declare war on the United States, and that is exactly what China appears to be doing in the South China Sea, a resource-rich and highly contested waterway in Southeast Asia.
It was in this spirit that Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Jim Amos, at a dinner hosted by the Center for a New American Security in late May, remarked that the wars in the Persian Gulf were denying Washington the resources it needed to cope with an increasingly assertive China. "We’d like to turn that around," he said. "I don’t think we’re there to [the extent] we need to be." In his candor, Amos became the latest U.S. military leader to speak about his service’s plans following the Afghanistan drawdown.
A U.S. mobilization in Asia is well underway, in faith with a spring 2001 Pentagon study called "Asia 2025," which identified China as a "persistent competitor of the United States," bent on "foreign military adventurism." Three years later, the U.S. government went public with a plan that called for a new chain of bases in Central Asia and the Middle East, in part to box in the People’s Republic. Similarly, the nuclear energy cooperation deal signed by the U.S. and India in 2008 was an obvious containment maneuver aimed at Beijing. In late March, press reports detailed a major buildup of American forces in Asia, including increased naval deployments and expansive cooperation with partner countries. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is forging ahead with a multi-year effort to transform Guam into its primary hub in the Pacific, an initiative so vast that John Pike of the Washington, D.C.-based GlobalSecurity.org has speculated that Washington wants to "run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015."
[…] In addition to China, Vietnam, Brunei, Taiwan, Malaysia and the Philippines all have competing claims on several clusters of South China Sea islands. Rather than intervening with quiet diplomacy to untangle this incendiary thicket, the U.S. has starkly sided against Beijing. In March 2010, when a Chinese official was quoted by Japanese media as identifying the region as a "core interest" of Chinese sovereignty, the White House retaliated by declaring that freedom of maritime navigation is a U.S. "national interest." As it turns out, according to the China scholars Nong Hong and Wenran Jiang, writing in the July 1 edition of the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation’s China bulletin, the core interest to which the official referred was "the peaceful resolution" of the disputes in question. Despite this, the White House refuses to climb down. Two weeks ago, three U.S. Navy ships paid call on Vietnam, China’s ancient antagonist, for a weeklong joint exercise at a time of strained relations between Beijing and Hanoi, prompting a formal protest from the Chinese. In Manila last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pointedly assured her hosts that the U.S. would honor its mutual defense pact with the Philippines and sell it new weaponry on discounted terms.
[…]
2) Palestinians to seek U.N. statehood vote next month: foreign min
Ali Sawafta, Reuters, Sat Aug 13, 2011 1:48pm EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/13/us-palestinians-israel-unitednations-idUSTRE77C1MW20110813
Ramallah, West Bank – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will submit an application for full U.N. membership at the General Assembly next month, his foreign minister said on Saturday, without specifying exactly when the request would be made.
"I think that the president, when he gets to the United Nations and meets the secretary general, will present the application," Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki said in a briefing in Ramallah.
Malki’s statement narrowed down the timing of the application to September during Abbas’ visit to New York, but when asked give a specific date, Palestinian officials said it would still have to be determined.
This year’s 66th General Assembly meetings are set to open officially on September 13 with high-level meetings of world leaders expected to start on September 20.
With peace talks with Israel deadlocked for months, Abbas hopes to win U.N. endorsement for the Palestinian claim to statehood in all the Israeli-occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
But the United States, which has veto power in the U.N. Security Council, is expected to oppose any Abbas bid to seek a unilateral U.N. mandate for statehood in the absence of peace talks with Israel.
In a separate move, the Palestinians have signaled they will seek an upgrading of their status from observer entity to non-member state. This is expected to pass as it does not require Security Council approval.
[…]
3) Can Obama Be Just Like Ike?
If you want to cut the defense budget, ask a Republican (just not these Republicans).
James Traub, Foreign Policy, August 12, 2011
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/12/can_obama_be_just_like_ike
Cracks are beginning to surface in the longtime Republican consensus on defense spending. Although, as I wrote last week, most congressional Republicans are prepared to eviscerate the national government while preserving intact a colossal defense establishment, a growing number are not. This May the GOP-controlled House of Representatives cut $9 billion from a defense appropriations bill. And three of the most right-wing Republicans in the Senate signed on this year to the report of the bipartisan "Gang of Six," which recommended defense cuts of close to a $1 trillion over the next decade. One of those three, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, has made a detailed case for those cuts that includes significant reductions in weapons procurement and personnel.
The conjunction of this change in the political weather, the overwhelming imperative to reduce government spending, and the diminishing, if still potent, threat of global terrorism presents Barack Obama with a historic opportunity to reduce the defense budget to match America’s real national security needs. But so far, Obama, whose presidency feels less "transformational" by the day, shows no sign that he will seize that opportunity.
[…] Defense spending now absorbs roughly a quarter of the national budget, and over half of discretionary spending. The current debt-ceiling deal reached by Congress and the White House would essentially eliminate increases over the next two years in a broad category that includes defense as well as homeland security, diplomacy, and foreign aid, and would then limit growth thereafter to 2 percent. If Congress chooses to apportion future cuts equally between security and non-security accounts, reductions in the former would amount to $420 billion — the figure the Obama administration uses to demonstrate the depth of its commitment to reducing defense spending.
[…] If, however, the bipartisan congressional "supercommittee" tasked with finding an additional $1.5 trillion in cuts fails to reach agreement — as seems extremely likely — then the automatic cuts this would trigger would lop another $600 billion or so from the Pentagon. The White House has discussed this plan as if it were the sort of doomsday machine dreamed up by a James Bond villain. Jack Lew, director of the Office of Management and Budget, has explained that the cuts are meant to be so self-evidently "unpalatable" that the bipartisan commission will feel compelled to reach agreement. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has stated that such "hasty, ill-conceived" cuts would undermine U.S. national security.
Blunderbuss reductions do seem like a bad idea. But what about non-hasty, well-conceived cuts? In a series of recent reports, Pentagon experts and budget-cutters like Sen. Coburn have proposed cuts of $1 trillion — almost exactly the sum of the $420 billion from the first round of cuts and the $600 billion that would be triggered by the failure of the bipartisan commission. The striking similarity of the details of these reports, despite their authors’ radically differing political views, implies that it’s not so very hard to find deep reductions in so massive an enterprise as the Defense Department. All propose a reduction in both civilian and military personnel; a redeployment of forces now stationed in Europe and Asia; the cancellation or shrinkage of planned procurements for fighter aircraft, helicopters, aircraft carriers, and missile defense; reforms in military health care; and a downsizing of the nuclear weapons stockpile. Even after such cuts, the United States would still be spending as much as it ever did during the Cold War, when it was in perpetual conflict with the Soviet Union, which it deemed an existential threat to the West.
But you won’t hear this from the Obama administration, whose officials have been unwilling to propose anything deeper than the (notional) $420 billion cuts of round one. A White House official told me that Obama thinks that he has already made pretty much all the cuts in discretionary spending he’s prepared to accept. So does this mean that the Obama administration is to the right of Coburn and Chambliss on defense spending? When I posed the question in this form, the official went silent, and finally said, "Let me get back to you on that. This is incredibly sensitive." When he got back to me later that day, he disputed my use of "left" and "right" and pointed out that "as commander in chief, the president has very unique responsibilities and a very unique perspective." The answer, in short, was yes.
[…] Obama might still believe that he can’t afford to reverse the course of defense spending as his predecessors have.
But he might be wrong. "He really does have political leeway," says Gordon Adams, a former national security expert in the Office of Management and Budget during Bill Clinton’s administration and now a leading member of the trillion-dollar-cut club. "But he may not believe that he does."
If the bipartisan commission collapses in disarray and the 2012 presidential campaign becomes a referendum on America’s fiscal future — it can scarcely be otherwise — I hope Obama will find the courage to stand up to the Pentagon and its numberless minions and defenders. He may, as Adams suggests, find more profit in doing so than he expects.
4) Drones Alone Are Not The Answer
Dennis C. Blair, New York Times, August 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/drones-alone-are-not-the-answer.html
[Blair, a retired admiral, was director of national intelligence from 2009 to 2010.]
Mechanicsburg, Pa. – Over the past two years, America has narrowed its goals in Afghanistan and Pakistan to a single-minded focus on eliminating Al Qaeda. Public support for a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan has waned. American officials dealing with Pakistan now spend most of their time haggling over our military and intelligence activities, when they should instead be pursuing the sort of comprehensive social, diplomatic and economic reforms that Pakistan desperately needs and that would advance America’s long-term interests.
In Pakistan, no issue is more controversial than American drone attacks in Pakistani territory along the Afghan border. The Obama administration contends that using drones to kill 10 or 20 more Qaeda leaders would eliminate the organization. This is wishful thinking.
Drone strikes are no longer the most effective strategy for eliminating Al Qaeda’s ability to attack us. Past American drone attacks did help reduce the Qaeda leadership in Pakistan to a fearful, hunted cadre that did not have the time or space to plan, train and coordinate major terrorist acts against the United States.
But the important question today is whether continued unilateral drone attacks will substantially reduce Al Qaeda’s capabilities. They will not.
Instead, we must work with Pakistan’s government as an equal partner to achieve our common goals while ensuring that the country does not remain a refuge for Taliban fighters.
Qaeda officials who are killed by drones will be replaced. The group’s structure will survive and it will still be able to inspire, finance and train individuals and teams to kill Americans. Drone strikes hinder Qaeda fighters while they move and hide, but they can endure the attacks and continue to function.
Moreover, as the drone campaign wears on, hatred of America is increasing in Pakistan. American officials may praise the precision of the drone attacks. But in Pakistan, news media accounts of heavy civilian casualties are widely believed. Our reliance on high-tech strikes that pose no risk to our soldiers is bitterly resented in a country that cannot duplicate such feats of warfare without cost to its own troops.
Our dogged persistence with the drone campaign is eroding our influence and damaging our ability to work with Pakistan to achieve other important security objectives like eliminating Taliban sanctuaries, encouraging Indian-Pakistani dialogue, and making Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal more secure.
Reducing Al Qaeda to a fringe group of scattered individuals without an organizational structure will only succeed if Pakistan asserts control over its full territory and brings government services to the regions bordering Afghanistan.
Washington should support a new security campaign that includes jointly controlled drone strikes and combines the capabilities of both countries. Together, the American and Pakistani governments can fashion a plan that meets the objectives of both without committing to broader joint campaigns that would not be politically viable at the moment.
[…] Pakistani participation in the targeting of drone strikes would remove a major source of anti-American resentment.
If we are ever to reduce Al Qaeda from a threat to a nuisance, it will be by working with Pakistan, not by continuing unilateral drone attacks.
5) The C.I.A. And Drone Strikes
Editorial, New York Times, August 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/the-cia-and-drone-strikes.html
Perfection is rare in life; in war, rarer still. Yet the Central Intelligence Agency says it has a yearlong perfect record of no civilian deaths from its campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan. We find that hard to believe. So do many Pakistanis, journalists and independent experts, including those who support the drone program. Lacking proof, the claim fuels skepticism about American intentions and harms United States-Pakistani relations.
The Obama administration has vastly expanded the shadow war against terrorists, using the military and the C.I.A. to track down and kill them in a dozen countries. Pakistan – home base to Taliban and Al Qaeda militants – is the leading edge of robotic warfare.
According to The Times’s Scott Shane, the C.I.A. says that since May 2010 drones have killed more than 600 militants in Pakistan and not a single noncombatant. Since 2001, the totals are almost as striking: 2,000 militants, and 50 noncombatants.
A new report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism at City University in London tells a different story. It says that most of the 1,842 people killed in more than 230 strikes ordered by President Obama in Pakistan since 2008 were militants, but at least 218 may have been civilians. And while "civilian casualties do seem to have declined in the past year," the bureau still found "credible evidence" of at least 45 noncombatants killed.
It is almost as if there were parallel realities. The C.I.A. contends that a May 6 strike on a pickup truck along the Afghan border wiped out only the intended targets: nine militants and their bomb-making materials. But British and Pakistani journalists say the missiles hit a religious school, an adjoining restaurant and a house – killing 12 militants and six civilians.
[…]
6) Army Suicides At Record High In July
Greg Jaffe, Washington Post, August 12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/army-suicides-set-record-in-july/2011/08/12/gIQAfbGlBJ_story.html
The U.S. Army suffered a record 32 suicides in July, the most since it began releasing monthly figures in 2009.
The high number of deaths represents a setback for the Army, which has put a heavy focus on reducing suicides in recent years. The number includes 22 active-duty soldiers and 10 reservists. The previous record was 31, from June 2010.
[…]
Japan
7) Agent Orange buried on Okinawa, vet says
Ex-serviceman claims U.S. used, dumped Vietnam War defoliant
Jon Mitchell, Japan Times, August 13, 2011
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110813a1.html
In the late 1960s, the U.S. military buried dozens of barrels of the toxic defoliant Agent Orange in an area around the town of Chatan on Okinawa Island, an American veteran has told The Japan Times.
The former serviceman’s claim comes only days after Foreign Minister Takeaki Matsumoto said that he would ask the U.S. Department of Defense to come clean on its use of the chemical on the island during its 27-year occupation of Okinawa between 1945 and 1972. The U.S. government has repeatedly maintained that it has no records pertaining to the use of Agent Orange in Okinawa.
The veteran’s allegation is likely to cause considerable concern in Okinawa, as Agent Orange contains highly carcinogenic dioxin that can remain in the soil and water for decades. The area where the veteran claims the barrels were buried is near a popular tourist and housing area.
The 61-year-old veteran, who asked to remain anonymous, was stationed between 1968 and 1970 in Okinawa, where he drove a forklift in a U.S. Army supply depot. During that time, he helped load supplies – including Agent Orange – onto trucks for transport to the port of Naha, from where they were shipped to Vietnam.
The veteran said that in 1969, one of the supply ships became stranded on a reef offshore and he had to take part in the subsequent salvage operation.
"They brought in men from all over the island to Naha port. We spent two or three days offloading the boat on the rocks. There were a lot of broken containers full of drums of Agent Orange. The 55-gallon (208-liter) barrels had orange stripes around them. Some of them were split open and we all got poured on," he said.
Following the removal of the damaged barrels, the veteran claims he then witnessed the army bury them in a large pit. "They dug a long trench. It must have been over 150 feet (46 meters) long. They had pairs of cranes and they lifted up the containers. Then they shook out all of the barrels into the trench. After that, they covered them over with earth."
Two other former service members interviewed by The Japan Times – soldier Michael Jones and longshoreman James Spencer – backed up the veteran’s claim that Naha’s port was used as a hub to transport thousands of barrels of herbicide. Spencer also said he witnessed the 1969 salvage operation to unload the containers from the listing ship, though he was unable to confirm the contents of the containers.
[…] Since his exposure to the defoliant’s dioxin during the salvage operation, the veteran has suffered serious illnesses, including strokes and chloracne. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) – which handles compensation for ailing service members – pays the former soldier more than $1,000 a month in medical fees related to Agent Orange exposure.
But the VA claims he was exposed to dioxin during the six-month period that he was stationed in Vietnam.
Under the Agent Orange Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 1991, all American veterans who spent time in Vietnam are assumed to have come into contact with the defoliant – making them eligible for health benefits and compensation.
But due to the Pentagon’s repeated denials that Agent Orange was ever stored in Okinawa, it does not pay these benefits to U.S. veterans who claim dioxin-exposure on the island.
[…] Over the past six months, The Japan Times has gathered firsthand testimony from a dozen U.S. veterans who claim to have stored, sprayed and transported Agent Orange on nine U.S. military installations on Okinawa – including the Kadena air base and Futenma air station – between the mid-1960s and 1975.
Among those who have come forward are Joe Sipala, a 61-year-old former U.S. Air Force mechanic, who says he sprayed the defoliant regularly to kill weeds around the perimeter of the Awase Transmitter Site, and Scott Parton, a marine at Camp Schwab who alleges that he saw dozens of barrels of Agent Orange on the base in 1971. Both men’s allegations are supported by photographs of barrels of the defoliant on Okinawa. They are currently suffering serious illnesses – including type-2 diabetes and prostate disorders – related to their contact with the defoliant, and Sipala’s children show signs of deformities consistent with exposure to dioxin. However, the VA is continuing to reject the men’s claims due to the Department of Defense’s denials that the defoliant was ever present on Okinawa.
[…] Okinawans expressed concern over the issue. A retired teacher whose school was located near one of the nine bases where Agent Orange had been sprayed recently explained how several of her students had died of leukemia – one of the diseases listed by the U.S. government as caused by exposure to dioxin.
[…]
Libya
8) Tribal Rifts Threaten To Undermine Libya Uprising
David D. Kirkpatrick and C. J. Chivers, New York Times, August 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/world/africa/14libya.html
Tripoli, Libya – Saddled with infighting and undermined by the occasionally ruthless and undisciplined behavior of its fighters, the six-month-old rebel uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is showing signs of sliding from a struggle to overthrow an autocrat into a murkier contest between factions and tribes.
The increase in discord and factionalism is undermining the effort to overthrow Colonel Qaddafi, and it comes immediately after recognition of the rebel government by the Western powers, including the United States, potentially giving the rebels access to billions of dollars in frozen Libyan assets, and the chance to purchase more modern weaponry.
The infighting could also erode support for the rebels among members of the NATO alliance, which faces a September deadline for renewing its air campaign amid growing unease about the war’s costs and direction. That air support has been a factor in every significant rebel military goal, including fighting on Saturday in which rebel forces were challenging pro-Qaddafi forces in or near three critical towns: Brega, an oil port in the east, Zawiya, on the outskirts of Tripoli, and Gharyan, an important gateway to southern Libya. There were also clashes a few miles from the main border crossing into neighboring Tunisia, residents told Reuters.
While the rebels have sought to maintain a clean image and to portray themselves as fighting to establish a secular democracy, several recent acts of revenge have cast their ranks in a less favorable light. They have also raised the possibility that any rebel victory over Colonel Qaddafi could disintegrate into the sort of tribal tensions that have plagued Libya for centuries.
In recent weeks, rebel fighters in Libya’s western mountains and around the coastal city of Misurata have lashed out at civilians because their tribes supported Colonel Qaddafi, looting mountain villages and emptying a civilian neighborhood. In the rebels’ provisional capital, Benghazi, renegade fighters assassinated their top military commander, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, apparently in revenge for his previous role as Colonel Qaddafi’s security chief.
In response, the chief of General Younes’s powerful tribe threatened to retaliate against those responsible, setting off a crisis in the rebels’ governing council, whose members were dismissed en masse last week.
The rebels’ Western backers have become alarmed at the growing rift between supporters of a group of rebels who have coalesced into a relatively unified army and the others who effectively remain a civilian band of militia fighters.
In the short term, the retaliation can serve to fortify Colonel Qaddafi’s power by reinforcing the fear that a rebel victory would bring reprisals against the many who participated in the colonel’s political machine and enjoyed his patronage. More broadly, the moral clarity of six months ago, when Colonel Qaddafi’s forces were bearing down on Benghazi and he was threatening to wipe out anyone who dared oppose him there, has been muddied.
[…] Many supporters of the rebels now speak of exacting their own revenge against Colonel Qaddafi’s clan.
Outside Tripoli, the Qaddafi stronghold, about 500 civilian refugees from the rebel advance have gathered in a makeshift camp that formerly housed Chinese construction workers. "If you love Qaddafi in Yafran, they will kill you," said Abdel Kareem Omar, 25, a dental student from a village of the Mashaashia tribe near that rebel city in the western mountains. "The rebels stole our furniture, our food, our animals and burned our homes," he said, vowing that he, too, would take up arms. "To protect my people," he said.
In a recent conversation with two journalists, one man in the western mountains said his neighbors often spoke of capturing Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi alive, so they could chop off his fingers. And low-level rebel leaders talk openly of forbidding Colonel Qaddafi’s supporters from returning to their homes in rebel-held ground.
Bands of rebel fighters hunted people suspected of being Qaddafi loyalists around Benghazi for months before the killing of General Younes. And on the front lines, rebels in the coastal city of Misurata have vowed to take revenge on the black-skinned Libyans from Tawergha, accusing them of committing atrocities and driving them out of their neighborhood.
In the mountains in western Libya, local men have ransacked and burned homes in at least five villages or cities where residents had supported Colonel Qaddafi or his troops. Many of the victims were members of the pro-Qaddafi Mashaashia tribe, which the rebels openly loathe.
The fear holding together the pro-Qaddafi side is palpable. Asked in an unguarded moment about his plans, Musa Ibrahim, a member of Colonel Qaddafi’s tribe and a spokesman for his government, blurted out, "If I am alive, you mean?"
[…] "In a dictatorship that lasts 42 years, it is almost inevitable that almost everyone to some extent needed to participate in the ‘revolution’ – how else could you raise a family, have a job, etc.?" Diederik Vandewalle, a Libya expert at Dartmouth College wrote in an e-mail. "That in a sense is the real tragedy of the way the Qaddafi system implicated everyone. And so it leaves virtually everyone open to retribution."
Members of the tribes close to Colonel Qaddafi – like his own tribe, the Qaddafa, or the larger Maghraha, and small tribes associated with them – may face the greatest danger from "tribal revenge," George Joffe, a Libya expert at the University of Cambridge, wrote in another e-mail. "And, of course, the longer this struggle continues, the more likely and bitter that will become."
Iran
9) An Iranian Cult and Its American Friends
Elizabeth Rubin, New York Times, August 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/an-iranian-cult-and-its-american-friends.html
[Rubin is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, where her article "The Cult of Rajavi" appeared in July 2003.]
A few weeks ago I received an e-mail from an acquaintance with the subject line: Have you seen the video everyone is talking about? I clicked play, and there was Howard Dean, on March 19 in Berlin, at his most impassioned, extolling the virtues of a woman named Maryam Rajavi and insisting that America should recognize her as the president of Iran.
Ms. Rajavi and her husband, Massoud, are the leaders of a militant Iranian opposition group called the Mujahedeen Khalq, or Warriors of God. The group’s forces have been based for the last 25 years in Iraq, where I visited them shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.
Mr. Dean’s speech stunned me. But then came Rudolph W. Giuliani saying virtually the same thing. At a conference in Paris last December, an emotional Mr. Giuliani told Ms. Rajavi, "These are the most important yearnings of the human soul that you support, and for your organization to be described as a terrorist organization is just simply a disgrace." I thought I was watching The Onion News Network. Did Mr. Giuliani know whom he was talking about?
Evidently not. In fact, an unlikely chorus of the group’s backers – some of whom have received speaking fees, others of whom are inspired by their conviction that the Iranian government must fall at any cost – have gathered around Mujahedeen Khalq at conferences in capitals across the globe.
This group of luminaries includes two former chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff, Gens. Hugh H. Shelton and Peter Pace; Wesley K. Clark, the former NATO commander; Gen. James L. Jones, who was President Obama’s national security adviser; Louis J. Freeh, the former F.B.I. director; the former intelligence officials Dennis C. Blair and Michael V. Hayden; the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson; the former attorney general Michael B. Mukasey, and Lee H. Hamilton, a former congressman who was co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission.
Indeed, the Rajavis and Mujahedeen Khalq are spending millions in an attempt to persuade the Obama administration, and in particular Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to take them off the national list of terrorist groups, where the group was listed in 1997. Delisting the group would enable it to lobby Congress for support in the same way that the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 allowed the Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi to do.
Mrs. Clinton should ignore their P.R. campaign. Mujahedeen Khalq is not only irrelevant to the cause of Iran’s democratic activists, but a totalitarian cult that will come back to haunt us.
When I arrived at Camp Ashraf, the base of the group’s operations, in April 2003, I thought I’d entered a fictional world of female worker bees. Everywhere I saw women dressed exactly alike, in khaki uniforms and mud-colored head scarves, driving back and forth in white pickup trucks, staring ahead in a daze as if they were working at a factory in Maoist China. I met dozens of young women buried in the mouths of tanks, busily tinkering with the engines. One by one, the girls bounded up to me and my two minders to recite their transformations from human beings to acolytes of Ms. Rajavi. One said she had been suicidal in Iran until she found Ms. Rajavi on the Internet.
At Camp Ashraf, 40 miles north of Baghdad, near the Iranian border, 3,400 members of the militant group reside in total isolation on a 14-square-mile tract of harsh desert land. Access to the Internet, phones and information about the outside world is prohibited. Posters of Ms. Rajavi and her smiling green eyes abound. Meanwhile, she lives in luxury in France; her husband has remained in hiding since the United States occupied Iraq in 2003.
During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the group served as Mr. Hussein’s own private militia opposing the theocratic government in Tehran. For two decades, he gave the group money, weapons, jeeps and military bases along the border with Iran. In return, the Rajavis pledged their fealty.
In 1991, when Mr. Hussein crushed a Shiite uprising in the south and attempted to carry out a genocide against the Kurds in the north, the Rajavis and their army joined his forces in mowing down fleeing Kurds.
Ms. Rajavi told her disciples, "Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards." Many followers escaped in disgust.
[…] Mr. Hamilton and Generals Jones and Clark have been paid speakers’ fees by front groups for Mujahedeen Khalq and have spoken in support of the group in public conferences. They claimed ignorance of how the group treated its members.
"I don’t know a lot about the group," Mr. Hamilton told me over the phone last week. But in 1994, when he was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mr. Hamilton received a report describing the group as a violent cult with a distinct ideology synthesizing Marxism and messianic Shiism.
At a February conference in Paris, Mr. Dean praised the group’s extraordinary "bill of rights." And General Jones said to Ms. Rajavi: "It is time for those of us from the United States who have come to know and admire you and your colleagues and your goals to do what is required to recognize the legitimacy of your movement and your ideals." When I asked General Jones last week if he knew that some considered the group a totalitarian cult, he replied, "This is the first time I’ve heard anything about this."
He said he’d checked with military and F.B.I. officials. "I wanted to make sure we weren’t supporting a group that was doing nefarious things that I don’t know about," he said. "Nobody brought it up, so I didn’t know what questions to ask."
In fact, a 2004 F.B.I. report on the group detailed a joint investigation by the American and German police, which revealed that the group’s cell in Cologne, Germany, had used money from a complex fraud scheme to buy military equipment. The group used children with multiple identities to claim multiple benefit checks from the German government. Evidence also showed that the group had obtained money in Los Angeles to purchase GPS units to increase the accuracy of planned mortar attacks on Tehran.
It is possible that such plots do not bother General Jones and other supporters of the group. But Iraq will no longer tolerate its presence. Its government wants the Mujahedeen Khalq out of the country by the end of the year. In April, Iraqi forces attacked Camp Ashraf. General Jones and other supporters of the group were outraged.
They are right that we should have compassion for those trapped inside the camp. A 2009 RAND Corporation study found that up to 70 percent of the group’s members there might have been held against their will. If the group’s American cheerleaders cared for those at the camp half as much as they did for the Rajavis, they would be insisting on private Red Cross visits with each man and woman at Camp Ashraf.
American officials who support the group like to quote the saying, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." By this logic, the group’s opposition to the Tehran theocracy justifies American backing. But there is another saying to consider: "The means are the ends."
By using the Mujahedeen Khalq to provoke Tehran, we will end up damaging our integrity and reputation, and weaken the legitimate democracy movement within Iran.
As a senior State Department official told me, "They are the best financed and organized, but they are so despised inside Iran that they have no traction." Iranian democracy activists say the group, if it had had the chance, could have become the Khmer Rouge of Iran.
"They are considered traitors and killers of Iranian kids," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the Mujahedeen Khalq’s status on the terrorist list is under review. "They are so unpopular that we think any gesture of support to them would disqualify and discredit us as being interested in democratic reform."
If the group is taken off the terrorist list, it will be able to freely lobby the American government under the guise of an Iranian democracy movement.
[…] Afghanistan
10) In A Sick Country
Afghanistan is dying — not because of the Taliban or the allied forces, but from minor ailments that are slowly killing off a population with no medical services to speak of.
Anna Badkhen, Foreign Policy, August 12, 2011
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/12/in_a_sick_country
Oqa, Afghanistan – "Fatma Ghul. Ghul Jamal. Najia. Nuria." Abdul Khuddus recites the names of his dead children, starting with the youngest, who died last January at 4 months old. He pauses to squint at the unforgiving wasteland that girdles his tiny village: bristly with translucent dead thorns, scaly with miniature drifts of gray dust. "The other one was born dead," he says. "We did not name her."
Who knows why the baby was stillborn, why the others wasted away? There was no doctor on hand to ask for help, or for a postmortem. There has never been a doctor on hand in Oqa.
Oraz Ghul and Abdul Khuddus got married 10 years ago, around the time the United States toppled the Taliban regime and ushered in donations of billions of international aid dollars. Some of this money, allocated by the World Bank to the Afghan Finance Ministry, is supposed to make its way to the Ministry of Public Health, then to its provincial departments, and eventually fund free health care for villagers like Oraz Ghul and her children. But it does not, because of staggering corruption in Kabul, because of payment arrears and indifferent bureaucracy in the provinces, because of a byzantine process of procurement of pharmaceuticals. "We have very old procedures," says Asad Sharifi, a health-care official in Balkh province. "We have very corrupt procedures." As a result, as the U.S.-led NATO troops are contemplating a withdrawal after a decade of occupation, Afghanistan still has the second-highest death rate in the world. One out of four children still dies before reaching age 5; one in eight women dies in childbirth. Life expectancy is 44 years for men and 45 years for women.
[…]
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