Category Archives: Lands

America just launched its 500th drone strike

Micah Zenko writes: The most consistent and era-defining tactic of America’s post-9/11 counterterrorism strategies has been the targeted killing of suspected terrorists and militants outside of defined battlefields. As one senior Bush administration official explained in October 2001, “The president has given the [CIA] the green light to do whatever is necessary. Lethal operations that were unthinkable pre-September 11 are now underway.” Shortly thereafter, a former CIA official told the New Yorker, “There are five hundred guys out there you have to kill.” It is quaint to recall that such a position was considered extremist and even morally unthinkable. Today, these strikes are broadly popular with the public and totally uncontroversial in Washington, both within the executive branch and on Capitol Hill. Therefore, it is easy to forget that this tactic, envisioned to be rare and used exclusively for senior al-Qaeda leaders 13 years ago, has become a completely accepted and routine foreign policy activity.

Thus, just as you probably missed the 10th anniversary — November 3, 2012 — of what I labeled the Third War, it’s unlikely you will hear or read that the United States just launched its 500th non-battlefield targeted killing.

As of today, the United States has now conducted 500 targeted killings (approximately 98 percent of them with drones), which have killed an estimated 3,674 people, including 473 civilians. Fifty of these were authorized by President George W. Bush, 450 and counting by President Obama. Noticeably, these targeted killings have not diminished the size of the targeted groups according to the State Department’s own numbers. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt closes schools in Sinai towns as area inches toward open war

Reuters reports: Egypt has indefinitely shut schools in two border towns in northern Sinai as the army prepares to intensify a battle with Islamist militants that turned the daily trip to lessons into a “journey of death”.

Local people say children’s education has fallen victim while the military stages air strikes against jihadists, who are targeting soldiers and police, and have started beheading army informers.

“We are putting our lives at risk on a daily basis,” said Mohamed, a teacher who lives in the town of Sheikh Zuweid. “Sometimes there is fire between gunmen and the armed forces and sometimes stray bullets hit some of us.”

Militancy has surged in the Sinai Peninsula, which borders Israel, Gaza and the Suez Canal, since the army ousted an elected Islamist president last summer. At least 33 security personnel were killed last month and one Sinai-based group has pledged its loyalty to Islamic State, which has overrun large areas of Syria and Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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How ISIS corporatized terror

Businessweek reports: During a routine January 2007 patrol in Anbar province, in a town along the Euphrates called Tuzliyah al Gharbiyah, a unit of U.S. Marines stumbled on a cache of nine documents in a roadside ditch. They included financial records, payrolls, supply purchase records, administrative records, and other details of fund flows into and out of a single local cell in Anbar of a group then calling itself the “Islamic State of Iraq.” Not long after, Iraqi militiamen working with the U.S. stormed a home in a town farther down the Euphrates. They found a computer hard drive holding ledgers with 1,200 files detailing the finances and operations of provincial-level managers overseeing the cell and others like it across Anbar province.

Taken together, the Anbar records allowed for a forensic ­reconstruction of the back-office operations of a terrorist ­insurgency from its local level up to its divisional headquarters. The data were handed over to the National Defense ­Research ­Institute of Rand Corp., a U.S. ­Department of Defense-funded think tank based in Santa Monica, Calif. Seven researchers set out to ­determine what the ledgers, receipts, memos, and other records meant. What they concluded in a 2010 report, written for then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, should be ­familiar to students of business management: The group was ­decentralized, organized, and run on what’s called the “multidivisional-­hierarchy form” of management, or M-form for short.

It’s the structure that started taking root in the corporate world in the 1920s, thanks to Alfred Sloan’s decision to reorganize General Motors. After becoming GM’s president in 1923, Sloan began transforming the company by creating semiautonomous divisions ordered largely around geography, freeing him and other top leaders from daily decision-making so they could focus on strategy and overall performance. Divisions also were largely self-­financed. Scholars credit his model for the company’s extraordinary growth in the early 20th century. It contrasted sharply with what had been the dominant “unitary form” of management, where control is centralized. In a pioneering study, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Harvard business professor Alfred Chandler Jr. held up the success of GM and others as a triumph of the M-form structure of corporate management, as did Oliver Williamson, winner of the Nobel Prize for economics in 2009.

According to the Rand study, Islamic State of Iraq was set up along the lines of the best multinationals studied by Chandler and Williamson. (The researchers even cited the Nobel Prize winner’s work.) The Anbar provincial division offered ­influence, oversight, and some financing to smaller, semi­autonomous cells within the province, closely monitoring their books and their results. But it left day-to-day decisions to the local commanders. The cells carrying out the group’s daily functions were organized into units such as finance, intelligence, military, medical, media, logistics, and even a courier arm called the “mail” division. Bosses for each specialty at the headquarters for Anbar province monitored performance of their local ­divisions, sometimes relying on detailed reports from the field. But command ­decisions appear to have been left largely to the locals, Rand found.

The seized hard drive containing 1,200 files was especially valuable. It appeared to belong to the man who was akin to Islamic State of Iraq’s divisional auditor. The group maintained strict ­accounting procedures, and its financial functions were organized in the same semiautonomous model of the M-form structure. [Continue reading…]

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Between China and Keystone XL

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: On Tuesday evening, when Senate Democrats rejected efforts to force a vote approving the Keystone XL pipeline, they knew they were just delaying the inevitable. The measure was defeated by one vote, and several naysayers will no longer be around come January. The new, Republican-controlled Senate will take up the measure again — “This’ll be an early item on the agenda in the next Congress,” incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed on Tuesday night — and, the next time around, everyone knows, it will pass. In preparation for this eventuality, White House officials have begun hinting that President Barack Obama might be willing to trade approval of the pipeline for Republican acceptance of one of his favored policies.

If this is indeed the President’s plan, let’s hope he asks the right price. Otherwise, his claim to an environmental legacy will end up being what he traded away. As it happens, the Keystone vote came exactly one week after Obama and China’s President, Xi Jinping, announced that they had agreed on a plan to curb carbon emissions. Under the agreement, China, which is now the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitter on an annual basis, would cap its emissions by 2030. For its part, the United States, which is still the world’s greatest emitter on a cumulative basis, would reduce its emissions by twenty-eight per cent by 2025. (This is against a 2005 baseline — U.S. emissions have already fallen about ten per cent since that year, owing, in part, to a substitution of natural gas for coal in electricity production.) Obama called the agreement “historic,” and rightly so. It marks the first time that China has officially acknowledged that its rapidly rising emissions need to stop rising, and it also offers a significantly more ambitious goal for the U.S. than it has previously been willing to commit to. Grist called the deal “a game changer,” while Vox labelled it a “BFD.” Many commentators noted that the odds of getting a meaningful global agreement on climate change at a summit scheduled for next year in Paris — odds that had seemed close to zero — suddenly looked a good deal better. The U.S.-China deal, as a Guardian editorial put it, “transforms the prospects” for the summit.

President Obama deserves a great deal of credit for the agreement, as does Secretary of State John Kerry, who conducted the behind-the-scenes negotiations. But, as many commentators have also noted, the deal doesn’t get the U.S. or China remotely near where they need to be if the world is to avoid disaster — which both countries, along with pretty much every other state in the world, have defined as warming of more than two degrees Celsius. Chris Hope, a policy researcher at Cambridge University, ran the terms of the agreement through what’s known as an “integrated assessment model.” He also included in his analysis a recent commitment by the European Union to cut its emissions by forty per cent before 2030. He found that even if all of the pledges made so far are fulfilled, there will be “less than a 1% chance of keeping the rise in global mean temperatures” below two degrees Celsius: “Most likely the rise will be about 3.8° C.” [Continue reading…]

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UK police spied on reporters for years, documents show

The Associated Press reports: In January, freelance video journalist Jason Parkinson returned home from vacation to find a brown paper envelope in his mailbox. He opened it to find nine years of his life laid out in shocking detail.

Twelve pages of police intelligence logs noted which protests he covered, who he spoke to and what he wore — all the way down to the color of his boots. It was, he said, proof of something he’d long suspected: The police were watching him.

“Finally,” he thought as he leafed through documents over a strong black coffee, “we’ve got them.”

Parkinson’s documents, obtained through a public records request, are the basis of a lawsuit being filed by the National Union of Journalists against London’s Metropolitan Police and Britain’s Home Office. The lawsuit, announced late Thursday, along with a recent series of revelations about the seizure of reporters’ phone records, is pulling back the curtain on how British police have spent years tracking the movements of the country’s news media.

“This is another extremely worrying example of the police monitoring journalists who are undertaking their proper duties,” said Paul Lashmar, who heads the journalism department at Britain’s Brunel University. [Continue reading…]

Jason Parkinson writes: Now the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and our lawyers at Bhatt Murphy are bringing a judicial review in the high court. Our group of six NUJ members will challenge the collection and retention of this data. We want our files erased and we want a policy to protect all journalists and trade union activists from future state surveillance.

Around 2007, police interest in journalists increased. In those days, it was the infamous forward intelligence teams, or FIT squads. Many journalists faced stop-and-search, often under the Terrorism Act. Just trying to get to a protest we had been hired to cover was a job in itself.

After several years of complaints and launching campaign group I’m a Photographer Not a Terrorist, the NUJ launched an investigation into surveillance of its members, in particular police surveillance at the Kingsnorth climate camp and gave evidence to the joint committee on human rights on the scale of the problem. NUJ-funded films Collateral Damage and Hostile Reconnaissance exposed what was happening on the ground, including increased violence towards the press. [Continue reading…]

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Is Britain ready for an activist king?

Robert Booth writes: On 15 September, while President Obama was meeting with his advisers in the White House and deciding how to unleash the world’s most powerful military machine on the Islamic State in Iraq, his ambassador to Britain, Matthew Barzun, was spending the day in a field in Gloucestershire, learning about nitrogen-fixing plants and the dangers of sub-clinical mastitis in cows’ udders. The reason was simple: Barzun was visiting Prince Charles’s organic Home Farm. Wearing boxfresh Hunter wellies, Barzun picked his way around some cowpats to take a close look at a field of organic red clover. He snapped a photo on his smartphone.

For the past 34 years, the farm has been one of Charles’s chief passions. It has become the agricultural embodiment of his beliefs about everything from the natural world to the globalised economy. On winter weekends, he can be found – wearing his patched-up tweed farm coat – laying some of the farm’s hedges to keep alive one of his beloved traditional farming techniques. (Charles is such an enthusiast that he hosted the National Hedgelaying Championships here in 2005.) The farm closely reflects Charles’s likes and dislikes. In one field, there is a herd of Ayrshire cattle. Charles bought them after he declared that he didn’t want yet more common “black and whites”.

That morning, the ambassador was not the only influential figure invited for a private tour of the royal farm. Alongside Barzun was Professor Ian Boyd, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), George Ferguson, the elected mayor of Bristol, and Sir Alan Parker, the chairman of Brunswick, the public relations company that advises Tesco. They were accompanied by civil servants from Defra and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and shown round by the Prince’s friend, Patrick Holden, an organic agriculture campaigner, and Charles’s farm manager, David Wilson.

The day was organised by Holden’s Sustainable Food Trust, but the talking points faithfully echoed Charles’s view that industrialised agriculture is a big, dangerous experiment with our environment and a threat to the livelihoods of small farmers. Here was a branch of Prince Charles’s power network in action. Away from the public glare, issues that matter intensely to him were being discussed in front of some of the most powerful people in Britain. In an echo of his famous comment of 1986 that he talks to his plants – he joked more recently he actually “instructs them” – there was even a brief exchange on whether oak trees communicate with their relatives through the soil. Holden and Wilson raised a few eyebrows with some of their scientific claims, not least about the danger of antibiotics in meat. On the whole, though, the guests seemed receptive.

Over the past four decades, Charles has carved out a unique position for himself as an elite activist, tirelessly lobbying and campaigning to promote his concerns. From farming to architecture, medicine to the environment, his opinions, warnings and grumbles are always heard. He spreads his ideas through his writings and speeches, his charities and allies and, behind the scenes, in private meetings and correspondence with government ministers. His interventions matter. Peter Hain, the former cabinet minister who lobbied with Charles for NHS trials of complementary medicine, summed up his influence in this way: “He could get a hearing where all the noble, diligent lobbying of the various different associations in the complementary medicine field found it hard.” [Continue reading…]

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In Israel, only Jewish blood shocks anyone

Gideon Levy writes: There was a massacre in Jerusalem on Tuesday in which five Israelis were killed. There was a war in Gaza over the summer in which 2,200 Palestinians were killed, most of them civilians. A massacre shocks us; a war, less so. Massacres have culprits; wars don’t. Murder by ax is more appalling than murder by rifle, and far more horrendous than bombing helpless people trying to take shelter.

Terror is always Palestinian, even when hundreds of Palestinian civilians are killed. The name and face of Daniel Tragerman, the Israeli boy killed by mortar fire during Operation Protective Edge, were known throughout the world; even U.S. President Barack Obama knew his name. Can anyone name one child from Gaza among the hundreds killed?

A few hours after the attack in Jerusalem, journalist Emily Amrousi said at a conference in Eilat that the life of a single Jewish child was more important to her than the lives of thousands of Palestinian children. The audience’s response was clearly favorable; I think there was even some applause.

Afterward Amrousi tried to explain that she was referring to the way the Israeli media should cover events, which is only slightly less serious. This was during a discussion on the ridiculous question: “Is the Israeli media leftist?” Almost no one protested Amrousi’s remarks and the session continued as if nothing had happened. Amrousi’s words reflect Israel’s mood in 2014: Only Jewish blood elicits shock.

Israeli deaths touch Israeli hearts more than the deaths of others. That’s natural human solidarity. The bloody images from Jerusalem stunned every Israeli, probably every person.

But this is a society that sanctifies its dead to the point of death-worship, that wears thin the stories of the victims’ lives and deaths, whether it be in a synagogue attack or a Nepal avalanche. It’s a society preoccupied with endless commemorations in the land of monuments, services and anniversary ceremonies; a society that demands shock and condemnation after every attack, when it blames the entire world. [Continue reading…]

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Anger over Israel mayor’s ban on Israeli-Arab workers

Al Jazeera reports: An Israeli mayor’s decision to bar Israeli-Arab construction workers from jobs in local preschools over security concerns has triggered widespread condemnation with a rights group calling it racist.

Itamar Shimoni, the mayor of the southern city of Ashkelon, announced on Thursday that Israeli-Arab labourers renovating bomb shelters in local kindergartens would be barred from their jobs. He also ordered security stepped up at construction sites where Arab labourers are employed.

His decision came days after a spate of attacks by Palestinians, including a deadly attack on a Jerusalem synagogue that left five Israelis dead.

“Anyone who thinks this is illegal can take me to court,” Shimoni said. “At this time, I prefer to be taken to court and not, God forbid, to attend the funeral of one of the children from kindergartens,” Shimoni said.

The workers in Ashkelon are Arab citizens of Israel, in contrast to the Palestinian attackers from the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

Israel’s Justice Minister Tzipi Livni called the ban illegal and ordered the attorney general to take action.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also criticised the mayor’s decision. “We must not generalise about an entire public due to a small and violent minority. The vast majority of Israel’s Arab citizens are law abiding and whoever breaks the law – we will take determined and vigorous action against him.”

Shimoni’s decision highlighted the distrust sweeping the region in the aftermath of rising tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq, Turkey vow to work together against ISIS

The Associated Press reports: Iraq’s prime minister said on Thursday that his country and neighboring Turkey have agreed on closer security and intelligence cooperation in the face of the threat posed by the Islamic State group.

“We have a key agreement to exchange information and have full security cooperation,” Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told a news conference after talks with his visiting Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoglu. “The Turkish prime minister also wants us to have military cooperation in the face of terrorism and Daesh and we welcome that,” said al-Abadi, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group.

Davutoglu confirmed the two sides’ agreement on closer security cooperation.

“I can say that Daesh threatens both Iraq and Turkey, but we will cooperate and do everything we can to stand up to terrorism,” he said. “There is a new page in relations between Turkey and Iraq and that is why I hope that there will be close cooperation between our security and intelligence agencies to defeat terrorism.”

The Turkish prime minister also rejected charges that his country facilitated the transit of militants through its territory to Syria. [Continue reading…]

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The regional conditions that are helping ISIS survive and grow

The Soufan Group’s 66-page Special Report on ISIS makes the following observations: From late 2011 The Islamic State has shown itself both tactically and strategically adept. After years of surviving as a persistently violent criminal/terrorist gang able to mount multiple synchronized attacks in-built up areas in Iraq but little more, it managed to break into the big time when the collapse of government in northern and eastern Syria allowed it to expand across the border. At the same time, the sectarian approach of the then Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki had made the Sunni minority in Iraq ready to support any group that appeared to have the potential to reverse its increasing marginalization. Sunni tribal support continues to be essential to the viability of The Islamic State.

The rapid expansion of The Islamic State on both sides of the Iraq/Syria border after 2011 pushed it along the continuum from terrorism to insurgency. Its underground cells became military divisions and its hit-and-run tactics became campaigns to conquer and hold territory. These changes required leaders with different skills, and it was fortunate for The Islamic State that many in its top echelons were ex-Ba’athists who had held senior positions under Saddam Hussein. Nonetheless, military leaders do not necessarily make good civilian administrators, and the challenge of governing territory is likely to prove the State’s undoing, unless it can temper the ruthless totalitarianism that appears to motivate its core fighters with a degree of tolerance and pragmatism that might reassure its unwilling subjects.

Despite the original secularism of its Ba’athist leaders, The Islamic State claims religious legitimacy for its actions. This is based on an extreme salafist/takfiri interpretation of Islam that essentially means that anyone who opposes its rule is by definition either an apostate (murtad) or an infidel (kafir). Although much of the Muslim Middle East is salafist, takfirism is widely considered a step too far, and the absolutism of The Islamic State has already attracted criticism, even from ideologues who support al Qaeda. Nonetheless, although The Islamic State is not exactly winning friends, various factors help it to survive, and will continue to do so for so long as they exist.

The first is the deep sectarian fault line that has been a major determinant of Middle East politics since the Iranian revolution of 1979, but of particular importance since the growth of Iranian regional influence following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Despite the menace of The Islamic State to the stability of the whole region, states on either side of the sectarian divide continue to see it as a lesser danger than the regional dominance of their rivals. Until this calculation changes, The Islamic State will not face major regional opposition.

The second is the complete lack of confidence in the Arab world of the ruled in the capacity of their rulers to treat them fairly. This extends beyond Iraq and Syria to the many countries of the Middle East and North Africa where the idea of government according to the teachings of the Quran is hugely appealing – at least until it comes up against the reality of The Islamic State. For so long as governance in so many countries fails to meet the expectations of the people, there will be a steady flow of hopeful recruits to the ranks of The Islamic State; and many others who lack the means or opportunity to travel may be tempted to follow its directives within their own countries. The consequent fear of terrorism, whether domestic or imported, is likely to lead to further repression and other
deficiencies in governance in all but the most confident and forward looking states.

The third is that the international coalition led by the United States of over 60 partners and nations who oppose the practices and objectives of The Islamic State, provides further evidence for many Muslims around the world that there is a Western-led onslaught on their religion and independence. The Islamic State itself is incandescent with rage that the West will not just leave it alone to establish the Utopia that it believes within its reach. It is hard at work persuading potential supporters that the non-Muslim world will do whatever it can to protect local rulers and so ensure that their discriminatory and irreligious polices remain in force. Not enough is being done on the ground to counter this narrative.

The fourth is that the little being done to counter the narrative of The Islamic State does not penetrate the information bubble created by its actual or potential supporters. The State devotes a great deal of time and effort to propagating a positive image of itself, reinforced by a strong ideology. Despite the many weaknesses of the literal approach to religious texts adopted by The Islamic State, including its apocalyptic vision of the imminent end of times, its message is stronger, clearer and more consistent than that of its opponents. It offers a complete break with what has gone before as opposed to its enemies who just offer more of the same. For all its violence, The Islamic State promises its recruits adventure and intense engagement with an exciting new venture. There are no competing voices offering anything comparable.

The fifth, also connected with the narrative promoted by The Islamic State, is the lack of attractive alternatives for local and foreign fighters who decide to join The Islamic State as a way to find identity, purpose, belonging or spiritual fulfillment. Thus both the pull and push factors that motivate foreign fighters remain unaddressed. Furthermore, the lack of a positive counter narrative that also exploits the negative aspects of the propaganda of The Islamic State, leaves those who are attracted by its message – but concerned about its activities – without a clear understanding that it is just not possible to engage with the State without also signing up to its worst aspects.

The sixth is that despite the international opposition to the discriminatory and repressive practices of the Syrian and, to a lesser extent, the Iraqi Governments, nothing convincing is being done to force a change. In this respect, The Islamic State appears more effective and better motivated than any actor on the other side. Unless political reform is able to draw away this soft support, The Islamic State will over time bring it closer by entwining the fortunes of the local population and tribal leaders with its own.

Finally, the cultural, educational and religious stagnation evident in so much of the Middle East and North Africa does not encourage any new way of thinking about the future beyond a desire to return to the past and start again.

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Inside ISIS’s oil empire: how captured oilfields fuel insurgency

The Guardian reports: Islamic State has consolidated its grip on oil supplies in Iraq and now presides over a sophisticated smuggling empire with illegal exports going to Turkey, Jordan and Iran, according to smugglers and Iraqi officials.

Six months after it grabbed vast swaths of territory, the radical militant group is earning millions of dollars a week from its Iraqi oil operations, the US says. Coalition air strikes against tankers and refineries controlled by Isis have merely dented – rather than halted – these exports, it adds.

The militants control around half a dozen oil-producing oilfields. They were quickly able to make them operational and then tapped into established trading networks across northern Iraq, where smuggling has been a fact of life for years. From early July until late October, most of this oil went to Iraqi Kurdistan. The self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate sold oil to Kurdish traders at a major discount. From Kurdistan, the oil was resold to Turkish and Iranian traders. These profits helped Isis pay its burgeoning wages bill: $500 (£320) a month for a fighter, and about $1,200 for a military commander. [Continue reading…]

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Video shows French ISIS fighters calling for attacks in France

The New York Times reports: A new propaganda video from the militant group Islamic State shows three French fighters calling on Muslims in France to carry out attacks in France or to join the group’s fight in Iraq and Syria, according to a jihadist monitoring organization.

The seven-minute film, released on Wednesday by Al Hayat Media Center, an affiliate of the Islamic State, also shows what appear to be French jihadist fighters burning their French passports. The video appears to be part of an intensifying propaganda effort by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, to use foreign fighters to recruit members and to encourage the spread of violence. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt prosecutor asks for death sentence for ousted President Morsi in espionage trial

The Associated Press reports: Egypt’s state news agency says prosecutors have asked for the death sentence for ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi and other Muslim Brotherhood leaders on trial on espionage charges.

Prosecutor Emad el-Sharawy said in closing remarks Wednesday that Morsi and his aides leaked state security documents to foreign intelligence agencies, naming Iran, while in office for one year. The military removed Morsi from office in July 2013 following mass protests against him accusing him and the Brotherhood of monopolizing power.

El-Sharawy said the defendants, who include Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie and 34 others, cooperated with militant groups, including Gaza’s Hamas, to destabilize Egypt. [Continue reading…]

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Nick Turse: When is a ‘base camp’ neither a base nor a camp?

Sometimes, to see the big picture you need to focus on the smallest part of it, as Nick Turse does in the latest of his dispatches on the U.S. military in Africa.  He takes a look at that military in Chad.  Yep, I said “in Chad.” At least 99% of Americans are undoubtedly unfamiliar with that landlocked African country and most of the remaining 1% have no idea that the U.S. military is already deeply involved in that (if you don’t happen to be Chadian) obscure land.

It’s easy enough to link the word “imperial” to the United States in a lazy fashion.  But if imperial has any meaning in the post-colonial twenty-first century, it certainly means that the (super)power in question has an active interest in attempting to control significant swathes of the planet.  In fact, there has never been a power, no matter how “great,” which has, in such a militarized way, tried to put its stamp of control on so much of Planet Earth.

It has, for instance, garrisoned the Greater Middle East from the Chinese border in Central Asia to the Balkans in an unprecedented fashion.  For decades, it considered the Pacific Ocean an “American lake” and garrisoned islands across it in a similarly unprecedented fashion.  Between 1945 and 1973, it fought two wars in Asia, at the cost of millions of lives, leading to a still-unresolved stalemate in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam; from 1980 to the present, it has fought a barely interrupted war in Afghanistan and since 1990, three wars in Iraq.  It has also conducted air strikes in countries ranging from Pakistan and Yemen to Syria and Somalia, intervened disastrously in Lebanon and Libya, among other places, and come to the edge of war (while launching a “cyberwar”) in Iran.  And that doesn’t even exhaust the list of conflicts.

In recent months, the U.S. has “pivoted” (the term of the moment) back to Iraq even as it has been quietly bolstering its already impressive military strength in a “pivot” to Asia.  At the same time, with a remarkable lack of publicity or media attention, it has begun pivoting into Africa.  Americans know next to nothing about this (unless they’ve been reading the last two years of reporting on the subject by Nick Turse at this site) and yet the U.S. military is now in one fashion or another involved with 49 of the 54 countries on that continent.

If you need evidence that Washington’s intentions are indeed imperial and that the White House and the Pentagon consider just about every patch of land on the planet to be the business of this country, and fertile soil for that military, then spend a little time “in” Chad today.  Once you’ve absorbed just how involved our military already is there, you can multiply those efforts across Africa, across the Middle East where they only intensify, and across Asia where they are also ramping up, and you’ll begin to take in a heavily garrisoned planet of war on which the U.S. remains (however haplessly) the unipolar power.  And tell me that, when you’ve considered the small picture and the big one, we’re not talking about imperial Washington. Tom Engelhardt 

The outpost that doesn’t exist in the country you can’t locate
A base camp, an authoritarian regime, and the future of U.S. blowback in Africa
By Nick Turse

Admit it. You don’t know where Chad is. You know it’s in Africa, of course. But beyond that? Maybe with a map of the continent and by some process of elimination you could come close. But you’d probably pick Sudan or maybe the Central African Republic. Here’s a tip. In the future, choose that vast, arid swath of land just below Libya.

Who does know where Chad is?  That answer is simpler: the U.S. military.  Recent contracting documents indicate that it’s building something there.  Not a huge facility, not a mini-American town, but a small camp.

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The despair behind Palestinian silence

Amira Hass writes: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the synagogue attack. His condemnation was honest and genuine, for both moral and pragmatic reasons. In besieged, destroyed Gaza, spokesmen for several Palestinian organizations congratulated the martyrs and voiced support and understanding for their deed. But among the broader public, the main reaction was silence.

When PLO and Fatah representatives are making the rounds of European capitals to encourage votes in favor of recognizing a Palestinian state, most people understand that such an attack could undermine the Palestinian cause, if only for a few weeks. Killing Jewish worshippers in a synagogue looks bad when Palestinian human rights groups are pushing Abbas to join the International Criminal Court so Israeli officials can be indicted for war crimes and violating international law.

Palestinians believe that all means, including armed struggle, are legitimate to fight the occupation. But in private conversations, even those who support killing Israelis seem embarrassed by an attack on civilians at prayer.

So why are those who oppose murdering civilians at prayer keeping silent now? Because they share the despair and anger that pushed the Abu Jamals to attack Jews in a synagogue. Like the Abu Jamals, they feel themselves under assault: The Israeli nation is constantly attacking them with all the tools at its disposal.

The Har Nof neighborhood, where the attack took place, is built on the lands of the former Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. Those who are keeping silent now see the murder as a response to an Israeli policy toward the Palestinians that has been one long chain of attacks, dispossessions and expulsions since 1948.

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Israel’s philosophy of vengeance

If demolishing the homes of dead Palestinians where their living relatives remain is supposed to be a deterrent, Israel must be a nation led by fools.

Odai Abed Abu Jamal and Ghassan Muhammad Abu Jamal could have been in little doubt about the price their families would pay and yet were not deterred from carrying out yesterday’s attack in Jerusalem.

But there must be very few Israelis who really believe that house demolitions are meant to deter anything — this is the ancient balance of justice in which one crime can be avenged by committing another.

Even though nominally it involves a form of punishment, since those getting punished are guilty of no crime, the demolition practice treats Palestinians as a collective entity that is not constituted from autonomous individuals responsible for their own actions. To be blunt, it treats Palestinians as sub-human and turns the exercise of justice into something more akin to the culling of a population whose strength must periodically be reduced.

Treat a population as suitable to be culled and it’s hardly surprising that once in a while a few of its members will adopt the same debased mentality.

Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man writes: “Do not discriminate between blood and blood,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday night, calling for international condemnation of a murderous attack inside a synagogue that morning. Moments later, he announced the steps he plans to take in response to the senseless bloodletting.

“This evening I ordered the demolition of the homes of the terrorists who perpetrated the massacre and the hastening of the demolition of the homes of the terrorists who perpetrated the earlier attacks,” Netanyahu told the nation, asking it to allow the state to settle scores on its behalf.

Five months earlier, Netanyahu made a similar statement after the horrific murder of Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir. “We don’t distinguish between [Palestinian] terror and [Jewish] terror, and will deal severely with both,” the prime minister said, vowing to bring the full force of the law down upon the murderers, who he said, “have no place in Israeli society.”

Of course, Netanyahu — like his predecessors — does discriminate between blood and blood, and he does distinguish between Jewish terror and Palestinian terror.

The prime minister did not order the police or army to demolish family homes of the suspects in the Abu Khdeir murder. Then again, they, and their families who live in said homes, are Jewish. [Continue reading…]

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New Kurdish offensive targets ISIS in Iraq

The Associated Press reports: Kurdish peshmerga forces launched a new offensive Wednesday targeting Islamic State group extremists in Iraq, even as a suicide bomber killed at least five people in the Kurds’ regional capital.

The operation came as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said details haven’t been finalized for a deal that would have his country to train rebels to battle the Islamic State in Syria, where the militants also hold territory. That will be a major topic for retired Marine Gen. John Allen, the U.S. envoy for the international coalition to counter Islamic State group, during planned talks Wednesday in Ankara.

The new peshmerga offensive targeted areas in Diyala and Kirkuk provinces seized by the extremists in their August offensive that saw them capture a third of Iraq, said Jaber Yawer, a spokesman for Kurdish forces.

In Diyala, peshmerga forces worked in coordination with Iraqi security forces to retake the towns of Saadiya and Jalula, Yawer said. In Kirkuk, Kurdish forces backed by U.S.-led airstrikes launched attacks to retake territory near the town of Kharbaroot, located 35 kilometers (22 miles) west of the city of Kirkuk. [Continue reading…]

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New report reveals the strategy behind ISIS’s brutality

Zack Beauchamp reports: Scattered reports from inside ISIS-controlled territory have painted an awful picture of life under the militant group’s rule. But a brand-new UN report, compiled from interviews with 300 people who have lived or currently are living in ISIS-controlled Syria, gives us a systematic look at the militant group’s reign.

And it is horrifying.

This isn’t just because the behavior documented is terrible, though it is. It’s that the UN report documents a strategy, not just random brutality or religious fanaticism. ISIS’s ultraviolence is designed to cement its rule by terrifying the population into submission. And it might be working.

Consider this testimony from an anonymous father living in Deir ez Zor, in the eastern part of the country. Walking with his son, he saw two men strung up on a cross. “Both victims’ hands were tied to each side of the improvised cross,” the man reports. “I went to read the placards. On the first one it read, ‘This is the fate of those who fight against us.'”

He somehow had to explain this to his child. “I realized that my 7-year-old son was next to me, still holding my hand and watching this horrifying scene. He later asked me, ‘Why were they there? Why was their blood on the heads and bodies?’ I had to lie to him and say they were waiting for ambulances to come and rescue them.” [Continue reading…]

The Guardian adds: The size and breadth of the Isis arsenal provides the group with durable mobility, range and a limited defense against low-flying aircraft. Even if the US-led bombing campaign continues to destroy the group’s vehicles and heavier weapons, the UN report states, it “cannot mitigate the effect of the significant volume of light weapons” Isis possesses.

Those weapons “are sufficient to allow [Isis] to continue fighting at current levels for six months to two years”, the UN report finds, making Isis not only the world’s best-funded terrorist group but among its best armed.

Isis, along with its former rival turned occasional tactical ally the Nusra Front, are sufficiently armed to threaten the region “even without territory”, the report concludes. [Continue reading…]

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