Former child soldiers in the Congo

Former child soldiers in the Congo

Ask any policymaker in the White House or Congress, what’s more important than human rights? Their response: “Our government, of course.”

The Obama administration yesterday issued blanket waivers exempting three countries from a federal law banning U.S. military aid to countries that use child soldiers. Think Progress:

The Child Soldiers Prevention Act of 2008 (CPSA) is meant to bar the United States from providing military assistance to countries who have “governmental armed forces or government- supported armed groups, including paramilitaries, militias, or civil defense forces, that recruit and use child soldiers.” As per the Optional Protocol on the Convention of the Rights of the Child, “child soldiers” include children under 18 who have been forced into service, those under 15 who have volunteered to fight, and and those under 18 who have joined up with any force aside from an army. It also includes those who serve in a “support role such as a cook, porter, messenger, medic, guard, or sex slave.”

A national security interest waiver was built into the law, however, giving the President the authority to override the law should he deem it necessary to do so. That’s precisely what the Obama administration did on Monday, issuing blanket waivers to three countries known to use child soldiers: Yemen, Chad, and South Sudan. Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo received partial waivers as well; this means that they’ll be granted lethal aid only in support of the peacekeeping missions currently ongoing in the country.

This year, the State Department issued a list of ten countries that had been found to be using child soldiers: Burma (Myanmar), the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Of those, seven were due to receive military aid from the United States, an action which the CPSA barred — for the most part.

President Obama has refined the practice of issuing waivers to human rights laws to a high art. Last month, he issued a waiver to get around a federal ban on sending lethal aid to terrorist groups, giving him legal cover for sending weapons to Syrian rebels. With Egypt, Obama didn’t issue a waiver but vacillated and refused to comment on whether the military coup in July in fact was a military coup, thus evading a federal law prohibiting U.S. military aid to governments that are overthrown in military coups.

Michael J. Mazarr has written that “the very definition of grand strategy is holding ends and means in balance to promote the security and interests of the state.” Keep that in mind when you contemplate how Obama had the conscience to deliberately waive federal laws banning U.S. military aid to countries in which children are forced into warfare. Washington compromises rhetorical commitments to freedom and human rights “to promote the security and interests of the state.” In other words, to make the government bigger and more powerful.

Hey, anything for the government.

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In the coming weeks and months, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to “dedicate himself to derailing any prospect for a diplomatic breakthrough” between the United States and Iran. And the reasons have nothing at all to do with Iran’s nuclear program.

Instead, Israeli intransigence on the Iran issue is motivated by two factors: (1) maintaining regional military superiority and hegemony, and (2) distracting from the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

I mentioned this briefly in a post yesterday, but Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, devotes an entire piece in Foreign Policy to this very point. Here is the must-read excerpt:

At the moment, however, Netanyahu is signaling that there is no realistic deal that would be acceptable to Israel. For instance, a consensus exists among experts and Western officials that Iran’s right to enrich uranium — in a limited manner and under international supervision — for its civilian nuclear energy program will be a necessary part of any agreement. Netanyahu rejects this.

If Iran is willing to cut a deal that effectively provides a guarantee against a weaponization of its nuclear program, and that deal is acceptable to the president of the United States of America, why would Netanyahu not take yes for an answer?

The reason lies in Netanyahu’s broader view of Israel’s place in the region: The Israeli premier simply does not want an Islamic Republic of Iran that is a relatively independent and powerful actor. Israel has gotten used to a degree of regional hegemony and freedom of action — notably military action — that is almost unparalleled globally, especially for what is, after all, a rather small power. Israelis are understandably reluctant to give up any of that.

Israel’s leadership seeks to maintain the convenient reality of a neighboring region populated by only two types of regimes. The first type is regimes with a degree of dependence on the United States, which necessitates severe limitations on challenging Israel (including diplomatically). The second type is regimes that are considered beyond the pale by the United States and as many other global actors as possible, and therefore unable to do serious damage to Israeli interests.

…There are other reasons for Netanyahu to oppose any developments that would allow Iran to break free of its isolation and win acceptance as an important regional actor with which the West engages. The current standoff is an extremely useful way of distracting attention from the Palestinian issue, and a diplomatic breakthrough with Iran would likely shine more of a spotlight on Israel’s own nuclear weapons capacity. But the key point to understand in interpreting Netanyahu’s policy is this: While Obama has put aside changing the nature of the Islamic Republic’s political system, Israel’s leader is all about a commitment to regime change — or failing that, regime isolation — in Tehran. And he will pursue that goal even at the expense of a workable deal on the nuclear file.

The myth that Israeli, and by extension American, rhetoric against Iran is centered on an alleged threat of nuclear weapons proliferation and even use ought to be put to rest once and for all. That is merely a public sales campaign to drum up enough fear and hatred of Iran so that the above-mentioned strategic interests can be realized.

The only question that remains is whether President Obama has the cajones to stand up to Bibi and deliver a sensible deal with Iran over Israel’s objections.

Justifying massive military expenditures and a program of universal conscription isn’t easy in a time of peace, but the Swiss military has managed to keep it up even though they don’t face any conceivable military threats, and indeed haven’t faced any in decades.

But being the head of a conscript military with no enemies is kind of boring, so at least for the sake of wargames, they had to make one up.

So get this: France has split up into multiple warring statelets, and somehow the Duchy of Burgundy is independent for the first time since 1477 and falls on hard economic times. And they’re pretty sure it’s Switzerland’s fault, because banks.

So a totally fictional militant faction, the Brigade Libre Dijonnais (BLD), based in the totally fictional future statelet of Saonia, which is named after the Saone river but is itself based on the borders of an ancient duchy, invades Switzerland outright, with an eye on robbing banks.

Swiss officials defended the wargame, saying that maintaining the nation’s military credibility required preparing for the “threats of the 21st century.” In practice, it seems the wargame centers more on the threats of the mid-15th century.

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According to government officials speaking to the New York Times, traditional mainstream newspaper reporting of a single incident last month caused more damage to national security than everything Edward Snowden leaked.

As the nation’s spy agencies assess the fallout from disclosures about their surveillance programs, some government analysts and senior officials have made a startling finding: the impact of a leaked terrorist plot by Al Qaeda in August has caused more immediate damage to American counterterrorism efforts than the thousands of classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.

Since news reports in early August revealed that the United States intercepted messages between Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden as the head of Al Qaeda, and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, discussing an imminent terrorist attack, analysts have detected a sharp drop in the terrorists’ use of a major communications channel that the authorities were monitoring. Since August, senior American officials have been scrambling to find new ways to surveil the electronic messages and conversations of Al Qaeda’s leaders and operatives.

“The switches weren’t turned off, but there has been a real decrease in quality” of communications, said one United States official, who like others quoted spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence programs.

Why is this important? While I’m not all that interested in isolated official estimates of what information hurts national security, this is notable because of how the two instances were treated. Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Bart Gellman, the Guardian and nearly everyone who was associated with those NSA leaks were denounced as traitors, depicted as dangerous outsiders, and were targeted viciously for their disclosures.

McClatchy, the New York Times, and the Daily Beast reported heavily on this intercepted al-Qaeda communication, reporting that U.S. officials now say harmed national security to a far greater degree, and yet they weren’t universally denounced, scrutinized, and called traitors.

Why the bias? At their core, the two sets of disclosures were essentially the same. Both involved government officials of some sort with privileged access to classified information and dishing it out to established journalists at reputable publications.

Snowden did it to push for accountability and put pressure on government surveillance and overreach. And he didn’t do it anonymously. The al-Qaeda intercept, on the other hand, was arguably (although this is speculative) leaked to counter the narrative Snowden’s leaks had induced and rectify the public’s confidence in surveillance. Those are the differences, and it may make clear why they were treated so differently in the media. Snowden’s leaks were meant to undermine government and keep it accountable. The other leaks were aimed to bolster government and propagandize its worth.

Given the divisive political climate up on Capitol Hill right now, one might think the greatest liability to the Obama administration for its positive reaction to Iran’s diplomatic overtures would be Republicans who prefer sanctions and war over détente. But one would be wrong. The real pressure to rebuff Iran’s extended hand comes from America’s closest allies in the Middle East: Israel and Saudi Arabia.

“Israel and a number of allied Persian Gulf states are voicing concern about the pace of rapprochement,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “arguing that Iran will use the diplomatic cover to advance its nuclear work.”

The article goes on to report that Obama is scheduled to have what is sure to be a fretful meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today at the White House. And administration officials have listened to strong opposition to easing tensions with Iran from the Arab Gulf states.

Note the misleading reason given in the lede that Israel and the Persian Gulf states are concerned about Iran “advanc[ing] its nuclear work.” No, they are not. As the U.S. intelligence community has repeatedly established, Iran is not developing nuclear weapons and, according to the IAEA, none of Iran’s enriched uranium has been diverted to uninspected facilities for possible military use.

If Israel were truly concerned about the possibility of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, it would have responded affirmatively to the successive proposals to impose a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the region, instead of opposing it each and every time. Truthfully, Israel needs Iran as a foreign bogeyman to keep attention away from the Israeli-Palestinian issue. As former CIA Middle East analyst Paul Pillar has written, “the Iran issue” provides a “distraction” from international “attention to the Palestinians’ lack of popular sovereignty.”

And the Persian Gulf states aren’t worried about an Iranian bomb so much as they are concerned that, absent U.S. pressure to keep Iran down, Iran’s geo-political role in the region would expand at the expense of their own.

The Wall Street Journal acknowledges this in its buried lede half-way through the article: ”U.S. officials acknowledge that the Persian Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, also are concerned about the U.S. rapprochement with Iran. The Arab states are concerned that Iran could use improved ties with Washington to advance its efforts to dominate the Mideast.”

This is purely realpolitik for the GCC states. The same has been true for Syria, where Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and others have pressured the U.S. towards undermining and even toppling the Assad regime. This was made starkly clear in an email exchange among employees at the intelligence contractor Stratfor, released by WikiLeaks, in which one analyst writes about “the Saudis trying to put a hole in the
Iranian plan to its radical/Shia arc of influence stretching from Iran to Lebanon.”

Riyadh can’t do much in Lebanon and has lost Iraq. The uprising in Syria provides for the Saudis an opportunity to undermine the arc if they can topple the regime in Damascus. This would be a huge blow for the Iranians, which is why they have been trying to support the Syrian regime. For Iran, which is still waiting to finalize its hold over Iraq and thus complete the arc, the loss of Syria would be huge. For a quarter of century the Iranians sought Iraq but couldn’t get it and now when they are almost there they staring into the abyss of loosing Syria and with it Lebanon.

The U.S. was on the brink of war with Syria earlier this month because of these types of pressures. Our supposed allies in the Middle East would like the same fate for Tehran.

Here’s an idea: Let’s stop outsourcing our own “national interests” to nefarious “allied” regimes in the Middle East.

This interview with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif on ABC’s This Week is well worth watching, despite the horrible Stephanopoulos.