“Crossing The Line”: Doing Nothing Lowers The Threshold For Use Of Chemical Weapons Now And In The Future
Early in 1987, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi President, decided to clear out scores of Kurdish villages, in order to undermine separatist rebels. He asked Ali Hassan al-Majid, a general and a first cousin, to lead the project. In tape recordings later produced by Iraqi prosecutors, Majid told Baath Party colleagues that the novelty and the terror of chemical weapons would “threaten” the Kurds and “motivate them to surrender.” On April 16th of that year, Iraq became the first nation ever to drop gas bombs on its own citizens; the gassing campaign lasted two years and killed thousands of people. “I will kill them all with chemical weapons!” Majid told his colleagues. “Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them! The international community and those who listen to them!”
Two weeks ago, on August 21st, a poison-gas attack killed more than fourteen hundred civilians in the suburbs of Damascus, Syria’s capital. President Obama, in fashioning a response, has been burdened by the United States’ recent history with Iraq. The Administration of Ronald Reagan stood by as “Chemical Ali” waged his campaign against the Kurds. Fifteen years later, to justify an invasion of Iraq, the Administration of George W. Bush infamously claimed that Saddam Hussein still possessed chemical and biological arms. It soon became apparent that Saddam had abandoned them. That tragic war has rightly raised the standards of proof that Obama must meet to credibly propose military action in the Middle East, particularly if the casus belli concerns unconventional arms.
The Obama Administration, Britain, and France say there is little doubt that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is responsible for the recent slaughter, although they concede that the evidence is not airtight. The video imagery of the aftermath is indelible: unbloodied corpses, including toddlers’, in white shrouds; hospital patients choking and drooling. The chances that rebels were responsible seem slim to nonexistent. Yet last Thursday Britain’s Parliament, citing the West’s failures in Iraq, voted to reject an attack on Syria for now, because a majority did not judge the available evidence of Assad’s guilt to be definitive.
Last year, President Obama said that he would consider the use of chemical arms during Syria’s civil war a “red line” that, if crossed, would require American action. Last week, the President and his Secretary of State, John Kerry, sounded as though they had decided to strike against Assad. The dilemma they confront is a mercifully rare one. Since the First World War, there have been fewer than a dozen wars or acts of terrorism involving chemical arms. Before Syria, the last such attack occurred in 1995, when Aum Shinrikyo, a millenarian cult, released sarin gas into Tokyo’s subway because its leaders believed that mass killing would catalyze the apocalypse.
It is hard to grasp why any rational person would use chemical weapons, even amid the terrible exigencies of war. Gas weapons cannot be aimed in order to spare children or other noncombatants. They cause fear and prolonged suffering in victims, and cripple some survivors. They can contaminate the environment with poisons that last beyond a war’s end. And, because gases travel unpredictably on the wind, the weapons’ utility on a battlefield is limited.
Yet Saddam saw great value in chemical arms during the nineteen-eighties, and his twisted logic bears examination in the light of Syria’s deteriorating conflict. Saddam first used gas bombs to thwart Iran’s zealous swarms of “human wave” infantry. Chemical terror broke the will of young Iranian volunteers, a lesson that informed Majid’s subsequent Kurdish campaign. The Reagan Administration’s decision to tolerate Saddam’s depravities proved to be a colossal moral failure and strategic mistake; it encouraged Saddam’s aggression and internal repression, and it allowed Iraq to demonstrate to future dictators the tactical value of chemical warfare.
The consequences of similar passivity in Syria now are unknowable. After more than two years and a hundred thousand deaths, the war has descended into a miasma of kidnappings, executions, and indiscriminate attacks. It would not be surprising if Assad or his henchmen seized upon selective gassings as a way to break the opposition’s will, or to flush rebels from strategic neighborhoods. Obama has said that his aim in Syria is to prevent more gassings, not to overthrow Assad. Since the costs of even a limited Western military intervention in Syria might be very high, in diplomatic standing and in lives, it is reasonable to ask whether the cause of punishing and deterring the use of chemical weapons is worth the risks.
Assad’s forces have already killed tens of thousands of civilians with conventional weaponry. But chemical warfare is a step beyond. Since the Second World War, governments and armies have gradually forsworn weapons that do not distinguish between soldiers and civilians. These include nuclear, biological, and chemical arms, and also land mines and cluster munitions. The treaties that ban such arms are building blocks in a decades-long campaign by human-rights activists to insist that warfare be subordinated to international law, that soldiers attack only other soldiers, and that generals be held accountable for where they aim their weapons.
International laws and informal warnings of retaliation are designed to dissuade dictators and terrorists from using weapons of mass destruction under any circumstances. A failure to enforce such norms in Syria would likely lower the threshold for chemical use in this and future wars. Obama’s deliberateness about military action in Syria is understandable. The consequences of intervention may be difficult to control; the Syrian opposition is fractured and influenced by jihadi fighters. As Iraq has shown, the public requires transparency, accountability, and democratic deliberation when war crimes become a basis for more war.
In Iraq, starting in 2006, Chemical Ali went on trial for mass murder and other crimes against humanity. The proceedings were undeniably flawed. Yet they put Majid’s murderous arrogance on full display to his countrymen, and guaranteed that the record of his guilt can never be obscured. He was hanged in 2010. The prospect of even such rough justice for Syria’s chemical bombers looks elusive. Yet Obama’s original instincts were sound. There are red lines even in a war as devoid of clarity as Syria’s. The best available evidence is that on August 21st Bashar al-Assad’s forces crossed to the other side.
By: Steve Coll, The New Yorker, September 7, 2013
“It’s Always Morning In America”: Republicans, Before Talking About Reagan And Chemical Weapons, Don’t Forget Actual History
Reagan worship in Republican politics reaches unhealthy levels from time to time — “Ronaldus Magnus,” for example — though it’s generally the result of Reagan fans not remembering the 40th president nearly as well as they think they do.
A few years ago, for example, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia was the result of Reagan’s historic leadership. That didn’t make any sense at all — the Prague Spring happened in 1968.
Or take today’s example, from Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the former chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“It is against the norms of international standards and to let something like this go unanswered, I think will weaken our resolve. I — I know that President Reagan would have never let this happen. He would stand up to this. And President Obama — the only reason he is consulting with Congress, he wants to blame somebody for his lack of resolve. We have to think like President Reagan would do and he would say chemical use is unacceptable.”
Look, I realize the 1980s seems like a long time ago, and on Capitol Hill, memories are short. But if prominent members of Congress are going to talk about Reagan and the use of chemical weapons, at a bare minimum, they should have some rudimentary understanding of how Reagan approached the use of chemical weapons.
So long as saying unpleasant-but-true things about Reagan is still legal, let’s set the record straight.
The Reagan administration was, of course, quite ambitious when it came to foreign policy and national security. For example, Reagan invaded Grenada without telling Congress he intended to do so; he bombed Libya without congressional approval or consultation; and he illegally sold over 1,000 missiles to Iran to finance an illegal war in Nicaragua.
And as Heyes Brown explained, Reagan also did largely the opposite of what Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen said he did with regards to the use of chemical weapons.
For the majority of the 1980s, Iraq under Sadaam Hussein was locked in combat with the Islamic Republic of Iran in a war that killed more than 100,000 people on both sides. The United States explicitly backed the secular Hussein over the Ayatollah Khomeini’s government in Tehran, still smarting from the embassy hostage crisis that had only ended when Reagan took office. That backing not only included the shipment of tons of weapons to support Baghdad, but also looking the other way when Iraq unleashed its chemical weapons stockpiles — including sarin and mustard gas — against Iranian civilians and soldiers alike.
Recently declassified documents from that time indicate that not only did the U.S. government know that Hussein possessed these weapons, but “conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein’s military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin.” President Reagan also remained silent during the Al-Anfal campaign, in which Hussein used poison gas against the Kurdish population in Northern Iraq to put down a revolt against his rule. In what has later been called a genocide, more than 100,000 men, women, and children were killed, nearly 100 times more than the attack that took place outside of Damascus last month.
Indeed, after Saddam Hussein gassed his own people, Reagan dispatched … wait for it … Donald Rumsfeld to help solidify the relationship between the Reagan administration and the brutal, murderous Iraqi dictator. Rumsfeld gladly shook hands with Hussein after he used chemical weapons to kill Iraqi dissidents.
Perhaps someone can let Rep. Ros-Lehtinen know.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 5, 2013
“I See The Problem”: Martin Luther King vs. Today’s Conservatives
Yes, I know you hate the fact that the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is (1) being treated as a civic, rather than a factional, event and (2) that the speakers at the anniversary rally, and the accompanying news coverage, stressed liberal themes such as voting rights and health care.
Well, as the guy being guillotined said, I think I see your problem. Since MLK is now officially a hero, you’d like him to be a civic hero rather than a hero of the faction opposed to yours. But while he was alive, and for some time after his death, your faction hated him, and everything he stood for, and tried to defame him. No prominent conservative or libertarian politician, writer, or thinker supported the civil rights movement he led.
The factional split was not identical to the partisan split. There were (mostly Southern) Democratic racists who opposed the civil rights movement; they were known as Dixiecrats or “conservative Democrats,” and their heirs followed Strom Thurmond into the Republican Party, which they now dominate. There were also Republican supporters of civil rights; they were called “liberal Republicans” (I voted for a few of them) and your faction now calls people like them RINOs and has successfully purged them from the Republican Party.
Your faction was, adamantly and unanimously, on the wrong side of history, as spectacularly as the small share of progressives who supported the Soviet dictatorship. Even today, I have failed to find a single libertarian or conservative prepared to speak out against gutting the Voting Rights Act.
Martin Luther King died while on a campaign to support a public-sector labor union. You’re entitled to say that he was a bad man and a Communist, as your faction did while he was alive, and that his assassination was the natural result of his use of civil disobedience, which is what Ronald Reagan said at the time. You’re entitled to say that he was a great man but that his thoughts are no longer applicable to the current political situation. But what you’re not entitled to do is to pretend that, if he were alive today, MLK would not be fighting against you and everything you stand for. He would.
By: Mark Kleiman, Washington Monthly Ten Miles Square, August 28, 2013
“What Neocon Revival?”: The Illusion Of GOP Ideological Diversity
It’s a bit startling to see the New York Times‘ David Brooks pen a column headlined “The Neocon Revival,” which speaks confidently about “neoconservatism” as an internally consistent perspective on public life that once dominated the conservative movement and the Republican Party (and apparently should again!). In 2004, the self-same David Brooks contributed an essay to a book entitled The Neocon Reader that suggested the very label was more or less an anti-Semitic slur (“If you ever read a sentence that starts with ‘Neocons believe,’ there is a 99.44 per cent chance everything else in that sentence will be untrue.”).
If Brooks is now giving us all permission to talk about neoconservatism without raising a presumption of ethnic or partisan poison, I’d argue that his brief manifesto is curiously detached from both the historical and contemporary realities of conservatism and of the Republican Party. Brooks is right that “neoconservatism” (a term actually popularized by democratic socialist Michael Harrington to refer to thinkers and doers who were largely still on the ideological Left and/or affiliated with the Democratic Party) was originally “about” domestic as much as international policy. Its most recent identification with George W. Bush’s foreign policies, or with post-Bush advocates of an aggressive internationalism and often of Islamophobia, is hardly an accident, but also isn’t the whole story.
Having said that, Brooks commits an act of grand larceny in claiming for neoconservatism the legacy of Ronald Reagan, not to mention that of Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, with whom he shoehorns RR in an unlikely triptych. At least that seems to be what he is doing; the column constantly shifts from politicians to writers ranging from Irving Kristol to Richard John Neuhaus and even George Will in defining the kind of conservatism Brooks identifies with “neoconservatism” and with the successful GOP of the 1980s, which happily accepted the modern welfare state and simply wanted to harness it to conservative social goals and to national greatness.
Reading this piece, you might well forget about Ronald Reagan’s deep roots in conservative rejection of the New Deal and Great Society (he opposed both Medicare and the Civil Rights Act), or his administration’s efforts (not ultimately very successful) to use the budget process and executive powers to unravel the social safety net. You might also skip over, as Brooks does, the conservatism of the 1990s (which is interesting insofar as Brooks cut his teeth at The Weekly Standard–itself often associated with “neoconservatism”–which proclaimed itself the tribune of a “Republican Revolution” that would roll back liberalism’s accomplishments in every direction). And only someone with a wildly exaggerated idea of “compassionate conservatism” would conclude that the George W. Bush era of the GOP was characterized by happy acceptance of the welfare state.
But the oddest thing about Brooks’ column is its headline, to which he should have objected violently if he did not suggest it himself. If “neocons,” defined as people who look fondly on TR and FDR as well as that sunny welfare state advocate Ronald Reagan, are enjoying some sort of “revival,” where is it? Brooks himself says “[t]he Republican Party is drifting back to a place where it appears hostile to the basic pillars of the welfare state: to food stamps, for example.” It’s pretty hilarious to call that a “drift,” or to attribute it to some long-lost pre-Reagan impulse. The Reagan administration tried to dump the food stamp program on the states as a way station to its elimination, even as it sought to “cap” federal responsibility for Medicaid, much as Paul Ryan is trying to do today. Beyond that, who among major Republican politicians is resisting this supposed “drift,” and where is the “revival” of a tradition opposing it?
In this as in other respects, Brooks resembles other “conservative reformers” (notably his New York Times colleague Ross Douthat) who regularly lay out policy prescriptions that would get them tarred and feathered in any gathering of rank-and-file Republicans, but then more or less loyally follow the party line anyway, creating the illusion of ideological diversity. Douthat and Reihen Salam wrote an interesting book in 2009 prescribing the same sort of welfare-state-accomodation strategy that Brooks seems to be endorsing. It became associated by rhetorical osmosis with Tim Pawlenty, because they used his motto of “Sam’s Club Republicanism.” T-Paw promptly ran for president in 2012 and staked his candidacy to a failed effort to become an electable right-wing alternative to Mitt Romney. Was he a “Sam’s Club Republican” happily arguing for a more family-friendly welfare state? Probably not on the day that he signed onto the vicious “Cut, Cap, Balance” pledge that represents a death sentence for the New Deal and Great Society.
The trouble is that the conservative movement and Republican Party that Brooks and Douthat like to talk about has never existed in living memory, and isn’t likely to exist in the foreseeable future. Perhaps they have other reasons for affiliating with a political movement that so routinely ignores their advice (in Douthat’s case, I suspect his RTL self-identification is the crucial factor).
With respect to the column at hand, the very slim case for a “neocon revival” now depends on politicians like Chris Christie and Marco Rubio who are almost certainly about to spend the next couple of years snuggling up to the Tea Folk and disagreeing with Rand Paul or Ted Cruz mainly on the foreign policy grounds Brooks tells us don’t actually define neoconservatism. But by 2016, I’m reasonably sure David will have found in Christie or Rubio or someone else the flickering flame of an ideology that he mistakenly remembers as Ronald Reagan’s and mistakenly projects as the wave of the future.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 3, 2013
“Speaking In The Abstract”: How The Right Talks About Race, Even When They’re Not Talking About Race
In 1982, Republican operative Lee Atwater gave an interview to Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University, in which he explained how the so-called “Southern Strategy” of focusing on race had become much more subtle by the 1980s.
Atwater, who apologized to Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis for the “naked cruelty” of his tactics before his early death in 1991, put it like this:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Some conservatives questioned whether the controversial words credited to Atwater were ever truly spoken by the man who helped George H.W. Bush win the presidency using tactics like the so-called “Willie Horton” ad. After the racially charged 2012 campaign — in which the Romney campaign used racial dogwhistles including insinuating that the president was trying to “take the work out of welfare” — James Carter IV, the son of the former president and the researcher who unearthed the “47 Percent” tape, convinced Lamis’ widow to release the audio above.
Atwater was in his own way echoing what President Lyndon B. Johnson once told his press secretary, Bill Moyers.
”I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” the president said. “If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll even empty his pockets for you.”
In this summer of the George Zimmerman trial, Detroit going bankrupt and Republicans demanding huge cuts to food stamps, it’s clear that these old narratives are still embedded in our politics. And in the post-birther era, race is no longer, as Atwater said in 1982, “on the back burner.”
While the right wants to focus on black culture and “black-on-black” crime, they refuse to acknowledge that “white-on-white” crime is statistically nearly as common and happens much more often, as white people, who are the vast majority of the population, commit the vast majority of violent crimes in this country.
Negative aspersions on so-called “food stamps,” like Ronald Reagan’s old “welfare queens,” often carry a racial connotation. But government assistance in this country is actually used by ethnic groups pretty much in proportion to their share of the population:
African-Americans, who make up 22 percent of the poor, receive 14 percent of government benefits, close to their 12 percent population share.
White non-Hispanics, who make up 42 percent of the poor, receive 69 percent of government benefits – again, much closer to their 64 percent population share.
But these statistics fade into the background as Trayvon Martin instantly becomes a thug when he puts up his hood in the rain.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, July 28, 2013
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