1. “A Year With Obama – and US Foreign Relations Have Only Worsened
Who would have thought a year ago that most of the issues of conflict in America’s foreign relations would be made worse during the first year following Barack Obama’s election as U.S. president?
Even those disputes or differences that were appeased or quiet a year ago are now worse.”
http://original.antiwar.com/pfaff/2009/11/10/a-year-with-obama/
2. Why the US war efforts will fail:
“In recent history, very few counterinsurgency wars have ended in success. Guerrillas are often outgunned by a wealthier invading power, but they do have two powerful advantages. One is that they are fighting on their home turf, which they usually know much better than the invader. Guerrilla warfare at the strategic level is defensive, even though at the tactical level, raiding insurgents are many times on the offense. As a result of being on the strategic defense, the second advantage is that the attacking power will find it difficult to overcome the “foreign invader” label among the population of the invaded country. Thus, because winning the support of the local population is the most important – and difficult – objective in any counterinsurgency war, most such campaigns end in failure.
…
But isn’t there hope for Iraq and Afghanistan because opposition forces are divided and often unpopular? Not really. In Iraq, the United States was able to take advantage of al-Qaeda-in-Iraq’s brutal killing of civilians to divide the Sunni guerrilla movement and bribe the Awakening Councils to battle the group. The problem in Iraq is that as U.S. forces draw down, the now reduced guerrilla war could turn into a civil war among the Sunni, Shi’ite, and Kurdish ethno-sectarian groups. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is unquestionably brutal, but Afghans do regard the United States as a foreign occupier, are suspicious of the U.S. long-term military presence, do not support a surge in U.S. forces, do not think it will defeat the Taliban, and thus support negotiating with the insurgents. In short, the prognosis is not good in either case.”
http://original.antiwar.com/eland/2009/11/10/why-most-counterinsurgency-wars-fail/
3. “Department of meaningless gestures
Israel is going to get what it has long sought: permanent control of the West Bank (along with de facto control over Gaza). The Palestinian Authority is increasingly irrelevant and may soon collapse, General Keith Dayton’s mission to train reliable and professional Palestinian security forces will end, and Israel will once again have full responsibility for some 5.2 million Palestinian Arabs under its control. And the issue will gradually shift from the creation of a viable Palestinian state — which was the central idea behind the Oslo process and the subsequent “Road Map” — to a struggle for civil and political rights within an Israel that controls all of mandate Palestine. And on what basis could the United States oppose such a campaign, without explicitly betraying its own core values?”
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/11/10/department_of_meaningless_gestures
4. “Without War We Are Nothing. Apparently.
Well! It’s almost as though Kaplan thinks more wars are a good thing! Without them, after all, there is the terrifying prospect of lapsing into – gosh! – decadence.
…
But no, apparently a europe at peace is a symptom, or perhaps a proof, of weakness. Yet when considering the history of the twentieth century, a dissipation of patriotism – in the sense Kaplan employs the term, which is to say, a dissipation of the willingness to fight vast and costly wars unless they become a matter of utmost necessity – might be considered no bad thing either.
It may be that a national effort on the scale of that mounted between 1939 and 1945 is no longer be possible. But that’s a thesis that, happily, has remained untested since, again mercifully, there’s been no opportunity to try it on for size. Normally that too might be considered a Good Thing.
…
Kaplan’s argument is actually rather similar to one made in the Edwardian age. Then too we were told that civilisation had grown fat and soft and complacent*. Then too, a fair number of intellectuals suggested that a purging moment of barbarism, while undoubtedly unfortunate for the victims, might be a useful means of reinvigorating our dangerously decadent societies. Well, we saw where that led us, didn’t we?”
http://www.spectator.co.uk/alexmassie/5523216/without-war-we-are-nothing-apparently.thtml
5. “America’s Alliances Are Costly Relics
Over the past 60 years, the United States has accumulated a remarkable number of alliances. Today, nearly all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia and a range of other nations peer out at the world from behind America’s skirts. America’s allies bring a multitude of liabilities and few assets to the table, however, and it is unclear how today’s global archipelago of alliances serves American interests.
…
America’s alliances are no longer considered responses to security challenges. Instead, they have become ends in themselves. In an era of record-breaking budget deficits and serious economic problems at home, the billions of dollars Uncle Sam pays each year to baby-sit Europe and East Asia ought to be coming in for scrutiny, not perpetual affirmation.”
http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=4366298
6. If it’s happening in England, you can bet it’s happening here:
” Every phone call, email and internet click stored by ’state spying’ databases
Every phone call, text message, email and website visit will be stored for a year for monitoring by the state.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/6533107/Every-phone-call-email-and-internet-click-stored-by-state-spying-databases.html
7. “Military Spending is INCREASING Unemployment and REDUCING GDP
Moreover, as PhD economist Dean Baker pointed out yesterday, America’s massive military spending on unnecessary and unpopular wars actually lowers GDP and increases unemployment:
Defense spending means that the government is pulling away resources from the uses determined by the market and instead using them to buy weapons and supplies and to pay for soldiers and other military personnel. In standard economic models, defense spending is a direct drain on the economy, reducing efficiency, slowing growth and costing jobs.
…
The projected job loss from this increase in defense spending would be close to 2 million. In other words, the standard economic models that project job loss from efforts to stem global warming also project that the increase in defense spending since 2000 will cost the economy close to 2 million jobs in the long run.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/11/military-spending-is-increasing.html
8. “Newspaper punished for criticizing Iraqi leader
…
The Economist published a far more damning account of the Maliki government, detailing numerous government policies of torture, media attacks and other forms of censorship:
Human-rights violations are becoming more common. In private many Iraqis, especially educated ones, are asking if their country may go back to being a police state. Old habits from Saddam Hussein’s era are becoming familiar again. Torture is routine in government detention centres.
…
All of this underscores the painful folly of those who continue to justify American wars with the claim that we’re going to magnanimously spread freedom, democracy and human rights to the countries we invade, bomb and occupy. That so plainly isn’t our motive — or anyone else’s — for fighting wars, notwithstanding whatever good intentions individual soldiers may have. And even if it were our motive, trying to re-shape other countries and cultures with military invasions is a task that, while not impossible, is close to it (I discussed that topic at length in the Bill Moyers interview I did last week in the context of reports that we have Afghan “drug kingpin” Ahmed Karzai on our payroll).
In Iraq, here we are almost seven years after the invasion — hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives and more than 4,000 American lives later — and the primary remaining “justification” is that we’re bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq. Yet the government we helped install and which we empower is becoming increasingly tyrannical, oppressive and brutal. We at least ought to take that strongly into account as we hear government claims that we need to remain, and escalate, in Afghanistan for the good of the people there.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
9. “ What Will It Take to Break Our Trance?
We are rapidly returning to the uncivilized Law of the Jungle. We will soon live in a world where brute force rules. It is not only the disabled, widows, children and orphans who are vulnerable to the cruelties of this jungle. We all are. We have been brainwashed with incessant slogans like “Get the government off your back,” and “Keep more of your own money… oppose all tax increases.” Our dominant, false ideology tells us that every function of government must be privatized, so that governmental functions can be performed with business-like efficiency. (We are not told that the real reason for privatizing is to give capitalists yet another opportunity for making short term profit.) The very concept that we humans might work and cooperate together to protect ourselves from Jungle dangers and to meet our common needs is shunned as “socialism,” as if that were something evil. The capitalists have brainwashed themselves, and they have brainwashed us. They along with the rest of us hope and assume that the common good will somehow automatically take care of itself, if they think about the common good at all. Each capitalist must be concerned only with his own private profit and cannot be concerned with the common good lest some competitor captures his profit making opportunity. We are a nation of millions of brainwashed individualists, living, working, and acting under false perceptions of reality as if we were all “Manchurian Candidates.”
