Monday 31 December 2018

Mattis and Our Bankrupt Iran Policy

By DANIEL LARISON  December 31, 2018, 9:32 AM

President Trump with Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Pompeo, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and National Security Advisor John BoltonCredit:NATO/Flickr

James Mattis’ tenure at the Pentagon ends today. Sina Azodi and Barbara Slavin consider what his departure could mean for the future of Iran policy:
The retired Marine general had policy differences with the president about Iran as well. While a supporter of containment, Mattis advocated remaining within the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). His departure tilts the balance in Trump’s national security team in favor of more hawkish individuals who have openly advocated regime change as the ultimate solution to US differences with the Islamic Republic.
When Mattis resigned, I warned that his successor would likely be more of a yes-man and less willing or able to restrain the president’s belligerent tendencies. That might seem like a strange thing to say until we remember that Mattis was responsible for curbing the president’s desire for a much larger military response against the Syrian government in the spring of this year, and according to some accounts he was a major obstacle to an attack on North Korea in 2017. Trump supporters have been quick to credit the president for de-escalation and limited intervention that happened because Mattis restrained him, and they have been equally swift in shifting blame for his escalations of other wars to the people around him. Mattis was unwilling to end our current pointless and illegal wars, but it is also true that he was responsible for keeping Trump from starting new ones.
Mattis shared the administration’s Iran obsession to an alarming degree, but as Azodi and Slavin point out his departure removes one of the only counterweights inside the administration to the much more rabid Persophobes in Bolton and Pompeo. It could also mean one less obstacle inside the administration to an attack on Iran that Bolton and Pompeo have wanted for many years. Azodi and Slavin continue:
Left atop Trump’s national security team is national security adviser, John Bolton, a so-called “offensive realist” who has long pushed for bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. Bolton also distrusts multilateral agreements and has close ties with the Mujahedin-e Khalq or MEK, an Iranian opposition group with a past history of assassinating American citizens.
The other survivor so far of Trump’s reality show administration is Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. A self-described “counterpuncher,” Pompeo, who replaced the more moderate and less Iran-phobic Rex Tillerson, has also suggested in the past that US should consider attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.
U.S. forces may be withdrawn from Syria in the coming year (or maybe they won’t be), but that doesn’t mean that war with Iran has become less likely.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/mattis-and-our-bankrupt-iran-policy/

The U.S. Is On the Side of Terrorists and War Criminals in Yemen

By DANIEL LARISON  December 31, 2018, 12:11 AM


The Washington Post reminds us how the Saudi coalition war on Yemen helps Al Qaeda:
Last year, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on a powerful Yemeni Islamist warlord, accusing him of being a “prominent military instructor” and fundraiser for al-Qaeda who had also at one point “served with” the Islamic State and financed its forces.
But Abu al-Abbas is not on the run. He is not even in hiding.
By his own admission, Abbas continues to receive millions of dollars in weapons and financial support for his fighters from one of Washington’s closest Middle East allies, the United Arab Emirates, undermining U.S. counterterrorism goals in Yemen.
The Saudi coalition’s cooperation with and support for members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has been an open secret for many years. Back in August, the Associated Press published one of the most detailed reports on the coalition’s practice of buying off and recruiting AQAP members as part of their war against the Houthis. Members of the coalition have been working with and supporting known terrorists for years, and they continue to do so even now. Meanwhile, U.S. officials keep justifying U.S. support for the coalition’s war on Yemen by claiming that Saudi and Emirati cooperation on counterterrorism is so very important. The war on Yemen has strengthened jihadist groups both directly and indirectly, and this is just one more example of that. The U.S. continues to support a war that not only benefits jihadists by sowing chaos, but it also backs the governments that directly finance and arm those same terrorists.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the Saudi coalition also includes the war criminals of Sudan. This is also not news, but it is good that it is getting more attention. Mark Perry previously reported on the coalition’s use of Sudanese Janjaweed militia in Yemen in a story for TAC earlier this year. Here is a New York Times report saying much the same thing over the weekend:
Almost all the Sudanese fighters appear to come from the battle-scarred and impoverished region of Darfur, where some 300,000 people were killed and 1.2 million displaced during a dozen years of conflict over diminishing arable land and other scarce resources.
Most belong to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, a tribal militia previously known as the Janjaweed. They were blamed for the systematic rape of women and girls, indiscriminate killing and other war crimes during Darfur’s conflict, and veterans involved in those horrors are now leading their deployment to Yemen — albeit in a more formal and structured campaign.
The Saudi coalition uses the foot soldiers of Sudanese genocide to aid in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Yemen, and they have been doing so for years. The U.S. continues to assist a coalition of governments that includes one that has already committed genocide and also includes several more that are in the process of committing the crime of mass starvation against the people of Yemen. There are many ugly chapters in the history of U.S. foreign policy, but our government’s ongoing support for this war is one of the most reprehensible and despicable.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-u-s-is-on-the-side-of-terrorists-and-war-criminals-in-yemen/

Syria Will Allow Iraq to Hit ISIS Targets in Syria Without Pre-Approval

Iraq PM suggests bigger role in fighting ISIS after US withdrawal


Jason Ditz 

Top Iraqi officials are being sent to Damascus to meet with the Assad government, according to Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi. This comes with Abdul Mahdi talking up the idea of Iraq escalating its role against ISIS after the US withdrawal from Syria. 

Syria seems to be responding quite favorably to this. Syrian state media reported on Sunday that President Assad has authorized the Iraqi military tocarry out attacks against ISIS targets inside Syria without any pre-approval or permission

This would be a substantial change for eastern Syria, as the Syrian government has never authorized US involvement at all, and the US has gone out of their way not to get Syrian approval for strikes. 

It also makes sense for Syria, however, to embrace the Shi’ite-dominated Iraqi government’s involvement in fighting ISIS, as it gives the appearance of bringing them into an anti-ISIS alliance that includes Lebanon’s Hezbollah and both Syria and Iran’s governments, along with Shi’ite militias from elsewhere around the world. 

https://news.antiwar.com/2018/12/30/syria-will-allow-iraq-to-hit-isis-targets-in-syria-without-pre-approval/

Top Republicans Claim Trump ‘Rethinking’ Syria Withdrawal Plans

Lindsey Graham says Trump promises to stay and destroy ISIS


Jason Ditz 


While the US has finished evacuating its first military warehouse in Syria as part of the pullout from the country, some of the top Republican senators condemning the idea are claiming that progress has been made in getting President Trump to scrap the idea.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says that Trump has promised him that US troops will “stay and finish the job” in Syria, and that the withdrawal would only happen after the destruction of ISIS. 

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) was a bit less upbeat, but claimed that senators had been successful in convincing President Trump to slow the pace of the withdrawal. He insisted leaving Syria is “morally wrong.”

This comes immediately following reports from commanders that there is no established timetable, and that the withdrawal could take “several months.”  This was already dialing back expectations, as early reports suggested the US could be trying to be out of Syria within 30 days.

Any change in plans is likely to impact US-Turkey relations, as Turkey is poised to start an offensive against Kurdish territory, and the US is expected to be gone from those areas when they get there. 

https://news.antiwar.com/2018/12/30/top-republicans-claim-trump-rethinking-syria-withdrawal-plans/

Yemen’s Houthis Begin Withdrawal From Hodeidah Port

Pullback begins as part of ceasefire agreement


Jason Ditz 


Yemen’s Shi’ite Houthi movement has begun its withdrawal from the vital aid port of Hodeidah over the weekend. UN officials have confirmed that these pullbacks began after the arrival of a UN monitor team.

These are the first confirmed withdrawals from Hodeidah and the surrounding area by either faction. Under a ceasefire deal negotiated at the Sweden peace talks, the two sides both committed to withdraw from the area.

Though the deal was expected to see pullbacks immediately, both sides showed little sign of movement, and issued a flurry of accusations of ceasefire violations against one another. Those accusations have continued, though fighting has dropped dramatically in Hodeidah Province since the ceasefire came into effect. 

The arrival of UN monitors will likely add some confidence on both sides that this won’t be one of those abortive ceasefires where one side stands down and the other side launches a quick, decisive offensive in response. 

 The hope is that this demilitarization of Hodeidah will allow the port to remain open to food and other humanitarian aid shipments, preventing the massive famine that was feared when Saudi forces looked like they were going to occupy the area outright. 

https://news.antiwar.com/2018/12/30/yemens-houthis-begin-withdrawal-from-hodeidah-port/

Saudis Heavily Recruited Child Soldiers From Darfur for Yemen War

Kingdom offered $10,000 to families to send children to war


Jason Ditz 


While Saudi Arabia is already awash in allegations of war crimes against children in Yemen, there are always more reports emerging. Over the weekend, the focus is on the large number of child soldiers fighting for the Saudi-led coalition, and the Saudi kingdom’s efforts to recruit such children.

The offensive against the vital aid port of Hodeidah rested heavily on a large influx of Sudanese troops fighting for the Saudi-led coalition. Sudanese soldiers say that a lot of the fighters sent were children, however, with estimates of at least 20 percent under the age of 18, and as many as 40% in some units

This was possible because Saudi Arabia put a lot of money into recruitment in the desperately impoverished Darfur region, offering as much as $10,000 to families who agreed to enlist their children to go fight in Yemen. By all indications, many did. 

While Sudanese troops confirmed that this was common in Yemen, Saudi Arabia issued a statement of blanket denial, saying that they’d never recruited Sudanese children nor paid Sudan at all, and that Sudan was only in the war “in the interest of regional peace.”

https://news.antiwar.com/2018/12/30/saudis-heavily-recruited-child-soldiers-from-darfur-for-yemen-war/

Poll: Narrow Majority of Americans Back Trump’s Drawdowns in Syria, Afghanistan

Majority supports withdrawals despite negative media coverage


Jason Ditz 


In the weeks since the White House announced an upcoming withdrawal from Syria, media coverage and comments from lawmakers on the matter have been almost uniformly critical. In many cases, the coverage has been hysterically so, warning of an imminent second 9/11 over it. 

Yet this consistent narrative isn’t informing the public nearly so much as opinion-makers likely expected it to. A new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll showed a narrow majority of American voters remain in favor of the withdrawal of US troops from Syria and Afghanistan.

The polling figures showed 52% in favor of the Trump-announced drawdowns, and 48% against. The polls also showed a narrow 54-46% majority in favor of keeping troops “in places like Syria and Iraq,” though no Iraq drawdown is being contemplated at the moment.

After weeks of condemning the Syria pullout, media analysts are trying to downplay the significance of the poll showing a majority of voters supporting it, suggesting that there isn’t deep support for either position. 

In reality, the persistence of the majority support speaks volumes, after weeks of consistent media portrayals of it as a colossal mistake. While there may always be some ambivalence on the margins, for 52% to remain in favor of a pullout shows a lot of resilience.

https://news.antiwar.com/2018/12/30/poll-narrow-majority-of-americans-back-trumps-drawdowns-in-syria-afghanistan/

US ‘slowing things down’ on troop withdrawal from Syria – top senator


US ‘slowing things down’ on troop withdrawal from Syria – top senator
The US troop withdrawal from Syria needs a “pause” in order to protect the Kurds, the potential interests of Israel, and to prevent Iran from scoring a big win in Syria, a top GOP senator has said.
The withdrawal of the US military from the country is currently in a “pause situation,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R- SC) told reporters on Monday after having lunch with President Trump at the White House.
“We talked about Syria. He told me some things I didn’t know that made me feel a lot better about where we’re headed in Syria,” said Graham, who is an outspoken critic of Trump's decision to pull troops out of Syria.
I think we’re slowing things down in a smart way.
Earlier this month, Trump announced his decision to withdraw the US contingent – believed to be some 2,000-strong – from Syria, yet again claiming victory over the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terrorist group in the country. Graham believes the group was not actually defeated and the president promised to destroy it again.
“He promised to destroy ISIS. He’s going to keep that promise. We’re not there yet,” said the senator.
Apart from that, Trump is “worried” about the “potential dangers to Israel,” and will work with Ankara to ensure that “we don’t have a war between the Turks and our allies the Kurds,” Graham revealed.
ALSO ON RT.COMPentagon mulls allowing Kurdish militias to keep weapons after US withdrawal from Syria – report
“We still have some differences but I will tell you that the president is thinking long and hard about Syria – how to withdraw our forces but at the same time achieve our national security interests, which are to make sure ISIS is destroyed, they never come back. That our allies – the Kurds – are protected and that Iran doesn’t become the big winner of our leaving,” she said.
Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw from Syria has drawn bipartisan ire, as well as triggering a warmongering meltdown in the media. Graham himself has demanded hearings on the Syria move, as well as on Trump’s decision to scale down the US military presence in Afghanistan.

Tale of a Number-One Cold-Blooded Bastard

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Anyone who has ever questioned the Iraq War and Dick Cheney as a vice president expropriating power as second banana to a shallow man ill-equipped to lead anything has to see the Adam McKay film Vice. It’s nothing short of incredible. The filmmaker has created a hybrid genre that’s part narrative, part essay; most important, it’s extremely entertaining with just the right elements of satire, horror and tragedy. While it’s clearly driven by a disdain for its protagonist, it’s not reductive and presents a fully human, three-dimensional dramatic character. McKay’s point seems to be, this is serious stuff for all Americans and we ought to give it a lot more thought than we did as it was unfolding. Especially now, when we have a president with unquestioned, in-your-face authoritarian instincts.
McKay began as a Saturday Night Live writer and went on to make films like Anchorman with Will Ferrell, with whom he made at least five films. As McKay did in The Big Short – the first serious film he directed without Will Ferrell – in this internet, i-phone age of interactive, touch-screen communication, he likes to use bold and ironic graphics to advance his tale. Perhaps his most creative touch is the use of visual metaphors – quick images of predatory animals, a drawing by Goya from his Disasters of War series, a precarious, wobbling stack of teacups and saucers, a still of golfers playing with a backdrop of a raging California forest fire – popped in the middle of a playing-out scene like modifying literary metaphors. It feels unorthodox, but it seems to hark back to the basic Eisenstein montage theory of juxtaposing images to establish complex emotions quickly. It certainly does that, creating a rich stew of images for the brain to chew on.
McKay wrote the screenplay, which begins in Cheney’s youthful, wild days of drunken rowdiness where he’s a man headed off the rails. His wife Lynne reads him the riot act: Straighten up or it’s goodbye, Dick. She tells him she didn’t sign on to be the wife of an asshole like her abusive father, who the film virtually indicts for the drowning death of Lynne’s mother. Thanks to wife Lynne, Dick turns to the pursuit of Power, which as they say, made all the difference. There is a wonderful scene later in the film where — in bed and played like late-in-a-marriage foreplay — the two erotically recite an exchange between Shakespeare’s MacBeth and his famously ambitious Lady. It’s both funny and very serious.
At the center of the film is the idea of an authoritarian presidency, based on the early arguments of a young, pre-Supreme Court Antonin Scalia and others who read clauses in the US Constitution as justifying the notion — something we’ve heard echoed lately under President Trump — that whatever the president does is legal. The nondescript, bland Cheney is the walking manifestation of this idea. As we watch him insinuate himself into every nook and cranny that might advance his power, his Lady MacBeth is always behind him tending to their beloved girls and egging him on breathlessly. This is the pattern from the moment he gets his first windowless office in the White House under Richard Nixon to the September 11th moment when, on his own volition, he assumes presidential decision-making power. At his side throughout – that is, until Cheney cold-bloodedly throws him over the side when the Iraq War goes south – is Donald Rumsfeld, played as another power-hungry bastard, this one always cheerful, always laughing.
The acting in the film complements the screenplay wonderfully. First off, Christian Bale as Cheney is a tour-de-force of make-up and acting chops to marvel at. Without making it at all a caricature, he has the Cheney B-western-bad-guy sneer down. His Dick Cheney is never cartoonish or less than a full human being worthy of respect for that simple fact. Some viewers have apparently found this distasteful, that he should be more of a two-dimensional monster to fit the hate-filled vitriol many of us sometimes like to indulge in – myself included. That would be agitprop, while this film aims for art. To me, the Cheney character’s humanity makes the film one that will likely last, a film we’ll be watching 30 years from now to marvel at the period. Rumsfeld is played by Steve Carell as Cheney’s power-hungry mentor turned subordinate, a man who doesn’t seem to take anything seriously except the machinations necessary to advance his own power. Amy Adams cuts to the bone as Lynne Cheney, the Lady MacBeth in a tragedy in which the play’s protagonist does not die at the end. Because in this tragedy, it’s the moral compass of the nation itself that suffers the tragic fall. The film features a large cast asked to play a wide range of real political figures from the Nixon to the Obama years; they all work as a clockwork-like ensemble in McKay’s frenetic mix.
Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush is an important minor character in the drama itself; but crucial to the tragedy, Bush the son is also a minor character in the  real-life story being told of Power in the highest reaches of the American government. Rockwell’s Bush is a lightweight, who, due to his own incapacity, allows the power-hungry Cheney to rule from behind him in his shadow. How a vice president – usually, as Lynne Cheney frets, a silly, powerless nothing of a job not worthy of her husband – becomes the virtual president in key foreign policy areas like the Iraq War is detailed by McKay in an incredibly lucid fashion that makes perfect sense, knowing what we know. After the 2000 election fiasco, his boss clueless, Cheney hits the ground running, placing himself cynically and furtively into power centers across Washington DC where he proceeds to manipulate national fears and insecurities.
And he does it all for us.
Toward the end of the film, in one of McKay’s gutsy breaks with narrative tradition, he has Cheney, in a scene where he’s being interviewed by Martha Radditz, turn to the camera and, talking to us the audience, defend himself for all the terrible things we the audience have, by then he’s sure, damned him for. At this point, he has a new heart that serves him just fine as a replacement for the old one that conked out. The point he makes to us is that he doesn’t give a shit what we think. From what I’ve seen of Dick Cheney lately, it feels very true to the real man. He’s an amoral survivor. And he’s convinced himself for his own advantage that, whether we appreciate it or not, he did it all for us.
The new heart becomes one of McKay’s longer, ruminating metaphors. The camera lingers long in the operating room on the abyss-like, dark cavity of Cheney’s open chest as it awaits the new heart — as the next shot holds in a close-up on the old, worn-out Cheney heart resting off to the side on a table, soon, we anticipate, to be tossed out as biological waste. The question hovers over the scene: What exactly does it mean to replace the blood pumping organ traditionally associated by poets with feeling and humanity? In Cheney’s case, it seems to mean nothing other than extended his life and power.
McKay opens his film with a disclaimer that provokes audience laughter due to the use of an obscene popular adjective; I was even moved to clap. In essence, the filmmaker says he tried his best to keep the story true to the facts, but that some creative liberty was necessary. Why? Because many of the facts were hidden, given his protagonist is such a dishonest, secrecy-obsessed individual. McKay had no choice but to fill in with educated imagination. I’ve long been of the school this posture is exactly what’s required in the “post-truth” times we live in, a time when information is ever more controlled and locked away from democratic public access by institutions with greater and greater power over our lives. Creative imagination becomes a tool to leap institutional barriers and to burrow into the devious hearts of cold-blooded bastards like Dick Cheney . . . no matter whose actual beating heart resides inside his chest and pumps blood to his self-proclaimed “dark side” mind.
Art often takes a misleading, sometimes cryptic, view of intense, fraught current events. Consider examples like the wonderfully dark and absurd film M.A.S.H. about a combat hospital during the Korean War – addressing elliptically an audience caught up in the on-going and controversial Vietnam War. The Chilean novelist Ariel Dorfman wrote a novel called Widows about a cruel, bloody authoritarian regime in Greece; while it was obvious to anyone who got it that the novel was about his beloved nation of Chile under the cold-blooded Pinochet regime. There are many examples of this. McKay’s serio-comic film on Dick Cheney feels a little like this. Donald Trump’s image as a young real estate tycoon flashes on the screen once very quickly as one of McKay’s many fleeting visual metaphors. But the disturbing notion of authoritarianism blossoming at the pinnacle of power in a presumably democratic nation permeates this narrative/essay film. I’m sure I was not the only viewer thinking a lot about a President Donald Trump in the White House.
If Dick Cheney and Donald Trump had their way, films like Vice would never be made. Let’s hope in the future real democracy makes a comeback from the sorry excuse for it we have today and some brilliant filmmaker now in eighth grade somewhere will make a rollicking good tragic-satire on the Trump ascendancy and its ridiculous, short reign.
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JOHN GRANT is a member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent, uncompromised, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper. 
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/28/tale-of-a-number-one-cold-blooded-bastard/

Stop Wasting Money on the Pentagon

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In this season of (hoped for) peace and goodwill, it’s worth looking for things our divided country can agree on. And since all of us want to be able to trust government to spend wisely, we might find common cause in a surprising place: the Pentagon budget.
When you think of politicians railing against the Pentagon (if you can think of any) it might be someone on the left, like Senator Bernie Sanders. That’s why I was gratified to see Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley take on the Pentagon budget in a recent op-ed in The New York Times.
It’s a relatively rare occurrence for a politician of any persuasion to criticize the Pentagon — but especially for a conservative Republican like Grassley. (That said, the late Senator John McCain, when he was in the right mood, could do it with the best of them. And it’s not Grassley’s first rodeo, either.)
The Pentagon deserves the criticism. Nearly 30 years ago, Congress asked the Pentagon to complete an audit that could show military leaders knew where our money was going. This year, the Pentagon finally delivered a result: After waiting nearly 30 years, the Pentagon failed its first-ever audit.
Even more disturbing is that Pentagon leaders aren’t the least bit disturbed about this. Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, the number two official at the Pentagon, told reporters, “We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it.”
There’s every reason for Pentagon leaders from Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis on down to be ashamed of this result.
Every other major government agency has completed and passed an audit during that time, often many times. If the Pentagon doesn’t know where its money is going, how can they assure us it’s being put to good use? With a Pentagon budget of $647 billion this year — not even counting war costs — the potential for waste and fraud is sky-high.
We know about a lot of examples of waste — Grassley cited a $14,000 toilet seat as a picture-perfect example — but there are no doubt countless more that we don’t know about. This is nobody’s idea of good management.
Grassley suggests that Pentagon leaders need to step up and earn the trust we give them. But if they haven’t done it in 30 years, what’s going to change now?
Pentagon leaders haven’t seen any consequences from their disregard for our nation’s budget. If there’s one thing that could get Pentagon leadership’s attention, it would be requiring them to pass an audit before they get one more dollar from public coffers.
Instead, the opposite seems to be happening. Congress keeps rewarding the Pentagon with ever-bigger budgets. The U.S. military budget is more than $200 billion higher than it was 30 years ago.
And it continues. Less than a week after calling our current Pentagon budget “crazy,” President Trump agreed with military leaders that we need an even larger military budget. And just one day before the failed audit was announced, a committee tasked by Congress announced that the nation needs an almost $1 trillion military budget by 2024.
If we keep going this way, we’re going to waste precious resources that could be used any number of other ways: creating jobs, fighting the opioid epidemic, building a health care system that works for all of us, fixing our crumbling roads and bridges, etc.
Until they can show they know what they’re doing, the Pentagon should be cut off from further increases so we can focus resources elsewhere.
So, if most of the news seems too dicey to talk about over stale Christmas cookies, try the Pentagon’s failed audit. You might be surprised who you’ll agree with.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/28/stop-wasting-money-on-the-pentagon/