We Have Met the Enemy Again and He Is Still Us

I remember when an American friend came to Yemen and I took her to Abyan, and I was … afraid AQAP would recognize her as an American and might do something bad to her [said Yemeni activist Farea Al-Muslimi]. So [we] covered her in a niqab, we even covered her hands, and she made a hole for her fingers so she could use her iPhone. … But, in Abyan, we heard a drone above our heads. … I told her, “I am not more afraid about your life from al-Qaida, I’m more afraid for your life from your own government. 

Drone victim: U.S. strikes boost al-Qaida recruitment, Wajahat Ali, Salon

Arrive With a Bang, Exit With a Whimper

Ryan Crocker, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, said the United States rushed into countries, relied primarily on military force and expected immediate change.

"Let's punch out their lights and realign their society," is how Crocker explained it. "And then when we find out the latter is more difficult than we expect, we say 'OK, let's go somewhere else.' That's what our enemies count on -- and our allies fear."

The U.S.'s Anemic Civilian Outreach Abroad, David Rohde, the Atlantic

Drone as Panopticon*

The data stream is still growing, thanks in part to new data-gathering technology such as Gorgon Stare, a drone-mounted sensor with nine cameras that can scan an entire city at once. And the number of drone combat air patrols (CAPs), defined as having one drone aloft on a mission 24/7, is currently at 61 and is scheduled to increase to 65 later this year.

Obama Drone War ‘Kill Chain’ Brings War’s Toll Home To U.S., David Wood, Huffington Post

*The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow a watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. (Wikipeida)

Death by Degrees

Joseph Holliday, a former Army intelligence officer who has studied the conflict for the Institute for the Study of War, in Washington, suggested that the regime was attempting to use the weapons in a way that would frighten the rebels but wouldn’t cross the red line. “Assad has been extremely calculating with the use of force, increasing the levels of violence gradually, so as not to set off alarm bells,” he said. “First it was artillery. Then it was bombing. Then it was Scuds. A year ago, he wasn’t killing a hundred people a day. He’s introducing chemical weapons gradually, so we get used to them.”

The Thin Red Line, Dexter Filkins, the New Yorker

Protecting Syrians Takes a Back Seat

Other meetings with Western and Arab intelligence services have shown a similar obsession with Al Nusra, the [Syrian rebel] commander said.

"All anyone wants is hard information about Al Nusra, it seems to be all they are really interested in. It's the most valuable commodity you can have when dealing with these intelligence agencies," he said.

America's hidden agenda in Syria's war, Phil Sands, the National

The “notion that slashing government spending boosts investor confidence does not stand up to scrutiny”

As the economist Paul Krugman and others have argued, this claim assumes that consumers anticipate and incorporate all government policy changes into their lifetime budget calculations. When the government signals that it plans to cut its expenditures dramatically, the argument goes, consumers realize that their future tax burdens will decrease. This leads them to spend more today than they would have done without the cuts, thereby ending the recession despite the collapse of the economy going on all around them. The assumption that this behavior will actually be exhibited by financially illiterate, real-world consumers who are terrified of losing their jobs in the midst of a policy-induced recession is heroic at best and foolish at worst.

The Austerity Delusion, Mark Blyth, Foreign Affairs

Iraq's War for Terrorists Sets up Branch Campus in Syria

Of especially grave concern is the movement into Syria of bomb makers and military tacticians. As Iraq’s jihad was for much of the past decade, Syria’s is now becoming the “destination jihad” du jour.

Iraq: Where Terrorists Go to School, Jessica Stern, the New York Times

Don't Give Them Any Ideas!

[Novelist John] Le Carré is not a hunter himself, but he nodded at the people he knew and mounted a casual and running defense of fox hunting, as if he were doing color commentary from the 18th hole at the Masters. It’s an ancient part of the rural culture, he said. It’s egalitarian in this area (some 300 miles west-southwest of London), not an upper-class diversion. … “At least they aren’t hunting that poor goddamn thing with drones.”

John le Carré Has Not Mellowed With Age, Dwight Garner, the New York Times

Self-fulfilling Prophecy

Islamist terrorists provoke the governments they oppose into responding in ways that seem to prove that these governments want to humiliate or harm Muslims. Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and “extraordinary rendition” have become for Muslim youth symbols of the United States’ belligerence and hypocrisy.

Mind Over Martyr, Jessica Stern, Foreign Affairs (PDF of entire article)

Putting Jihadists on the Couch

Self-awareness is not a characteristic of most terrorists. And to be effective those fighting them have to try to understand them better than they understand themselves.

The Terrorist Tipping Point: What Pushed the Tsarnaev Brothers to Violence?, Christopher Dickey, the Daily Beast

Nuclear Weapons No Shortcut to National Security

While the United States would like to be able to rely more on its European allies, many experts doubt that even the strongest among them, Britain and France, could carry out their part of another Libya operation now, and certainly not in a few years. Both are struggling to maintain their own nuclear deterrents as well as mobile, modern armed forces. The situation in Britain is so bad that American officials are quietly urging it to drop its expensive nuclear deterrent.

“Either they can be a nuclear power and nothing else or a real military partner,” a senior American official said.

Shrinking Europe Military Spending Stirs Concern, Steven Erlanger, the New York Times

The best way to honor the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing is by preventing its re-occurrence.

Along with those killed in the Boston Marathon bombing, the numbers tossed around of how many will lose limbs are in the dozens. It's tragic enough when veterans return from foreign wars with limbs missing. But, as Iraqis, Afghans, not to mention Cambodians, know, limbs lost on one's home soil only add insult to injury.

If the Boston Marathon bombing is the result of an attack by a nation's own citizens, it reflects poorly on that nation's security and its civil society. If it's the result of an attack by foreign extremists, we're enraged by the harm that comes to innocents and humiliated that our security has been breached. If 9/11 has any small favor to thank goodness for, it's that the lethality of its component incidents left us without many walking wounded to inflame the wound and rub our face in the security failures.

Should the Boston Marathon bombing be the work of foreign extremists, much as I personally am enraged by thought of their supporters celebrating, we need to be on guard against hate crimes and refrain from profiling. Nor should we surrender to the fear that engulfed us after 9/11 and enact yet more layers of security and measures that further limit civil liberties. Whereas those responses are on the back end -- the reactive and defensive -- we need to respond with the leading edge: foreign policy.

Should the suspects prove to be from the Middle East, retaliatory drone strikes or JSOC attacks will only add fuel to the fire. Meanwhile, the immediate aftermath of a tragedy is no time to interject commentary that even hints at blaming the victim. But our first line of defense is acknowledging that U.S. policies -- such as stationing forces on Arab soil, failing to pressure Israel to halt their oppression of Palestinians, invading Iraq invasion, and unleashing drone attacks on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen -- stoke fires and create enemies.

Ultimately, our best defense is not a good offense: it's keeping the number of people we need to defend ourselves against to a minimum.

Mental Illness a Prerequisite to Run for Public Office

It’s unbelievable what people would do to be in power. I know: It happens everywhere. I can’t believe that normal people in their right mind would run for elected position. There has to be something wrong in their value system to go through what they have to go through. What I saw here was much worse: so much humiliation to run for office.
--  Vihar Krastev

Escape From Ignorance and Chalga, John Feffer, Focal Points 

No End to Atonement in Sight

Germany apparently remains eternally wounded, dependent upon the healing power of remembrance. Germans must live with their trauma and occasionally reopen the wound to prevent it from festering. … "History or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising," Günter Grass concluded in his 2002 novel "Crabwalk."

'Our Mothers, Our Fathers': Next-Generation WWII Atonement, Roman Leick, Spiegel Online

From Marijuana and Heroin in Vietnam to Anti-psychotic Drugs in Afghanistan

… there has been a giant, 682 percent increase in the number of psychoactive drugs — antipsychotics, sedatives, stimulants and mood stabilizers — prescribed to our troops between 2005 and 2011. … The data suggest that military doctors may prescribe psychoactive drugs for off-label use as sedatives, possibly so as to enable soldiers to function better in stressful combat situations. 

Wars on Drugs, Richard A. Friedman, The New York Times

Iron Lady Surpasses Hitchens's Record for Most Disrespectful Obituaries of a Brit

… when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman. … It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. They're happy to share big windfall bonuses with their cronies, they'll stick up for deposed dictator chums when they're down on their luck, they'll find opportunities in business for people they care about. I hope I'm not being reductive but it seems Thatcher's time in power was solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had least for the advancement of those who had most.

Russell Brand on Margaret Thatcher: 'I always felt sorry for her children', Russell Brand, The Guardian

Giving the C.I.A. Its Head in Pakistan

[American ambassador to Pakistan Cameron] Munter was reporting daily back to Washington about the negative impact of the armed-drone campaign and about how the C.I.A. seemed to be conducting a war in a vacuum, oblivious to the ramifications that the drone strikes were having on American relations with Pakistan’s government.

How a Single Spy Helped Turn Pakistan Against the United States, Mark Mazzetti, The New York Times

Emphasis, as always, added.

War: Not Just Hell, But the Tenth Circle Thereof

War is obscene. I mean that in every sense of the word. Some veterans will tell you that you can't know war if you haven't served in one, if you haven't seen combat. These are often the same guys who won't tell you the truths that they know about war and who never think to blame themselves in any way for our collective ignorance. 

Who Did You Rape in the War, Daddy?, Nick Turse, The Nation 

Thank Goodness for Small Favors

The very fact that our policy of regime change is aimed at the same rulers our principal enemy wishes to overthrow should give logical pause. … Yet for all the clarity of this logical fallacy in the American democracy project, it has not stopped President Obama from helping to overthrow Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya, or from calling for the ouster of Bashar al-Assad in Syria -- even though the fall of the former and the uprising against the latter have given al Qaeda new "active fronts" (to use the jihadis' own term) in which to operate. … So far, it hasn't. But at least there are some limits to the American pursuit of folly; there is no call in Washington for overthrow of the regime in Riyadh. For this we should at least be thankful.

The Illogic of Iraq, John Arquilla, Foreign Policy

Transparency About Drones May Only Serve to Legitimate Them

So, moving [drone] operations to the Pentagon may modestly improve transparency and compliance with the law but -- ironically for drone critics -- it may also entrench targeted-killing policy for the long term.

For one thing, the U.S. government will now be better able to defend publicly its practices at home and abroad. The CIA is institutionally oriented toward extreme secrecy rather than public relations, and the covert status of CIA strikes makes it difficult for officials to explain and justify them. The more secretive the U.S. government is about its targeting policies, the less effectively it can participate in the broader debates about the law, ethics, and strategy of counterterrorism. … Under a military-only policy, the United States would also be better positioned to correct lingering misperceptions about targeted killings and to take remedial action when it makes a mistake.

Moreover, clearer legal limits and the perception of stricter oversight will make drone policy more legitimate in the public's eyes.

Going Clear, Matthew Waxman, Foreign Policy

Two-Score Years Hence

Furthermore, since launching an ICBM from Iran towards the United States or Europe requires going somewhat against the rotation of Earth the challenge is greater. As pointed out by missile and space security expert Dr. David Wright, an ICBM capable of reaching targets in the United States would need to have a range longer than 11,000 km. Drawing upon the experience of France in making solid-fuel ICBMs, Dr. Wright estimates it may take 40 years for Iran to develop a similar ICBM – assuming it has the intention to kick off such an effort. [Author's emphasis.] A liquid fueled rocket could be developed sooner, but there is little evidence in terms of rocket testing that Iran has kicked off such an effort.

… The central conundrum of midcourse missile defense remains that while it creates incentives for adversaries and competitors of the United States to increase their missile stockpiles, it offers no credible combat capability to protect the United States or its allies from this increased weaponry.

Q&A Session on Recent Developments in U.S. and NATO Missile Defense with Dr. Yousaf Butt and Dr. George Lewis, Charles Blair, FAS Strategic Security Blog

At This Point, the Only Defense Against Missile Defense May Be Black Humor

Now for the really fun part: Let's say one of these interceptors does manage to hit an incoming North Korean missile. While the folks at Greely are celebrating with a little Harlem Shake, what's happening with the other interceptors we shot off? If you said "They are lighting up the early-warning radars as they streak into the heart of Mother Russia," you win a prize! I am sure there is no chance that will spark an accidental nuclear war, the firing-missiles-into-Russia-on-purpose thing. There is no way the Russians could miss a North Korean missile launch or get an itchy trigger finger when they see missiles converging on their country. [Double emphasis -- bold and italic -- added.]

Billion Dollar Baby, Jeffrey Lewis, Foreign Policy