Bring Them Home, But Not For War

Three to four million people are estimated to converge in Washington, D.C. on January 20^th, 2009 to witness the momentous inauguration of Barak Hussein Obama as the 44^th US president. Inauguration tickets, which are provided to members of the Senate and House of Representatives for free, are being snatched like hot dogs at a Nathan’s international July Fourth eating contest. Entertainment and sports event brokers are selling them for thousands of dollars. The swearing-in will last less than five minutes; people are willing to make their way on foot through closed-off roads and blocked bridges, around security barricades, in temperatures forecasted in the 30’s Fahrenheit, and stand for hours around the National Mall platform, west of the capitol to hear the words: I Barack Hussein Obama Do Solemnly Swear… Preparations for the event are underway full-throttle. The inaugural platform on the west steps of the Capitol is being constructed and decorated; Aretha Franklin will be singing and Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Itzhak Perlman, pianist Gabriela Montero and clarinetist Anthony McGill will perform a piece newly composed by John Williams, who is famous for the soundtracks of “Star Wars” and Jaws;”  the streets of downtown DC are being beautified, and the National Mall will be open; it will have mounted big screen television sets for the millions of people that are going to crowd its standing-room-only areas.

For many, the swearing-in as president of an African-American is a true token of a democracy that is constantly evolving and reflective of a people that have embraced the miscellaneousness of their society.

To the Secret Service, upon whom the onus for the inauguration security falls, and the Department of Homeland Security officials, it is a nightmare that warrants operational planning, coordination and deconfliction, and asset mobilization akin to preparing for a war.

And with the help of Northern Command (NorthCom), a war is what Mark Sullivan, Director of the US Secret Service, and Judge Michael Chertoff, Director of the Department of Homeland Security, have been preparing for. NorthCom is a unified combatant command that was activated on October 1, 2002.  In a post 9/11 environment, the Bush administration gave it broad responsibility to respond to catastrophic emergencies and to protect and defend, in conjunction with local, state, and federal civilian authorities, US states, Hawaii and Puerto Rico excluded. For the upcoming inauguration, it is mobilizing 11,500 troops to provide direct support to the Secret Service and Homeland Security’s efforts to defend the D.C. area against any possible civil disturbance or terrorist attack on the president-elect and the president, government officials and installations, and the attendees.

According to US Air Force General Victor E. Renuart Jr., Commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, the customary tight air defenses over D.C. will see an increase in the number of patrols; the military contingent will include Army and Air Force engineer units, medical units, chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear explosive (CBRNE) attack experts and the Marine Corps Chemical, Biological Initial Reaction Force, a Navy weather team, and members of the Defense Logistics Agency and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency; over 4,000 troops will provide security at the National mall and around Washington; their mission will be limited to crowd management (a politically correct, civilian oriented appellation for riot control.)

The security element of Northern Command will be 3^rd Infantry Division, 1^st Brigade Combat Team of Fort Stewart, which was put under its command on October 1^st, 2008. 3ID, 1BCT recently returned from Iraq where it had conducted combat missions for a cumulative time of 35 months since the beginning of the war. This is not the first time a military unit is being used domestically; in 2005, in response to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of Louisiana and Mississippi, the DoD deployed active-duty military units to support rescue missions; in May of 1992, an ad hoc Joint Task Force comprised of California Army National Guards, 7^th Infantry Division from Fort Ord, and 1^st Marine Force from Camp Pendleton, effectively controlled Los Angeles and suppressed the riots caused by the Rodney King verdict.

In a departure from its standard operating procedures (SOP), the Department of Defense is dedicating 3ID, 1BCT to NorthCom for one year. Chief of NorthCom future operations, Army Col. Louis Vogler, stated that each year a new military brigade will be ordered to directly support NorthCom in the conduct of what the DoD refers to as operations other than War (OOTW). These units will be known as CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF. They will conduct specialized domestic operations and will train on the domestic use of newly fielded lethal and non-lethal modular packages designed specifically for a war zone and tested in Iraq.

Civil liberties advocates are concerned that the public is blind to the gravity of the matter. They argue that such close collaboration between the military and law enforcement agencies could be damaging to the constitutional principles upon which our democracy was founded. They contend that the DoD’s Delphic doctrine on the use of active-duty combat elements in domestic missions may lead to the violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus and the 1807 Insurrection acts which restrict the use of the military for law enforcement missions. Rep. Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat and the House Armed Services Committee Chairman, stated that the security measure is viable because “It means you’re training America’s Army to meet all possible contingencies.” The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is preparing to challenge the Bush administration’s new domestic security measures on the appropriateness of assigning a combat military unit focused on counterinsurgency to face-off US citizens in a possible demonstration; the situation could have devastating consequences; ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act Request with the Department of Justice and the Pentagon recently asking for records relating to the domestic assignment of active military forces to the Northern Command.

During the annual National Homeland Defense and Security Symposium in Colorado Springs, General Renuart Jr. admitted Northern Command has regularly assisted with law enforcement activities in the past. ACLU is trying to ascertain whether the assistance provided by NothCom  was within constitutional limits. “It seems to be an incremental approach where the military is being used for narrow missions, but then more and more types of narrow missions until they all combine into one overarching mission,” said Mile German, National Security Counsel for ACLU’s legislative office in Washington, D.C.

The White House maintains the administration’s aggressive counterterrorism efforts have prevented more bloodshed at home. Bush’s homeland security advisor Kenneth L. Wainstein highlighted the USA Patriot Act, intelligence and homeland security reorganizations, and the removal of legal barriers to cooperation between intelligence and law enforcement agents as important steps to stymieing terrorist plans to attack the US.

The military’s involvement in the suppression of civil dissent is outlined in a master military contingency action plan known as the United States Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2. The Plan is code named “Operation Garden Plot” and gives the military total authority to crack down on any civil disturbance by a resistance group, religious organization, or other persons considered to be non-conformist. Annex A, section B of Operation Garden Plot defines civil “Disruptive Elements” as tax protesters, militia groups, religious cults, and general anti-government dissenters; it allows for the use of deadly force against any extremist or dissident perpetrating any and all forms of civil disorder. The plan was initially uncovered by journalist Ron Ridenhour who summarized his findings in “Garden Plot and the New Action Army.” In conjunction with the US Civil Disturbance Plan, the military has conducted, on numerous occasions, readiness exercises known as Rex 84 to test its ability to detain and relocate at the state and national levels large numbers of American citizens in case of major demonstrations and strikes that would affect continuity and functionality of government and/or resource mobilization. Under the Bush administration’s policies, such detentions could be indefinite and enmeshed in judicial folderol. In anticipation of judicial obstacles in the event of a major civil disobedience quelling, the Center for Law and Military Operations (CLAMO) published in August 2001 – prior to 9/11 – the legal rationale for domestic military operations in a doctrine titled: “Domestic Operational Law Handbook for Judge Advocates.” According to its author, the document offers a “greater understanding of the legal issues” involved in “domestic support operations.”  

Although the government constantly stated that there are no eminent security threats during the upcoming presidential inauguration, thousands of anti-Bush protesters are scheduled to demonstrate. The potential of an attack against Barak Obama from extreme right activists is anticipated. Other demonstrators, disenfranchised with the current economic situation and the government “’slap on the wrist” approach against the supercilious Wall Street financial firms will use the inaugural event to voice their discontent. The dedication to domestic operations in support of law enforcement of an active-duty military combat unit that has regarded the civilian population in Iraq and Afghanistan as enemy is a potential threat to US civil liberties. The threat is compounded when such use is subsumed in an implemented Operation Garden Plot.

Needless to say, the election of Barak Hussein Obama to the Presidency of one of the greatest democracies in the world might have inhibited tyrannical elements within the government that have found in the Bush administration the right environment to bud. The dismantlement of such undemocratic systems that have germinated within the government needs to be one of The Obama administration’s priorities. Failure to do so would be, to quote Malcolm X, a serious case of “chickens coming home to roost.”

A. T. B. Copyright © 2008

From The Shoe Bomber To The Shoe Thrower: Bush’s Foreign Policy 101

 

When Muntadar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi reporter for the Cairo-based network Al Baghdadia Television, during a press conference in Baghdad, hurled his shoes at George W. Bush, he nicely wrapped up the war in Iraq for the departing president, as if he were saying: you are as contemptible as Saddam Hussein. We all remember the images broadcast around the world from Al Ferdaous Circle in Baghdad in April of 2003, when the statue of Saddam was toppled by the US Marines and a euphoric Iraqi crowd trampled it and slapped its face with shoes as it was being dragged around the place; Bush hailed it as an irrevocable sign the Iraqi people supported his invasion. Today, the Iraqi people, democratic by Bush’s standards, send an irrevocable message to Bush that they despise him. Understandable, from a society that bears gaping wounds inflicted by five years of a raging war that left thousands of its children dead, thousands more displaced because of sectarianism, and the reminder hopelessly mired in misery and shackled by fear.

 

After 9/11, Bush pledged to wage a war against terrorism. As a political strategy, it was a folly; a government can not wage an open war against a concept as elusive as terrorism. The governments of the European Union, which have been battling internal and international terrorism for decades, advised the American administration the issue is to be approached as a criminal act and should be left to law enforcement agencies to deal with.

 

Led by the testosterone over-charged Texan George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, a masculine Condoleezza Rice with balls bigger than a squirrel’s, and others, the American government’s plan of action, predictably, resembled the script of a “B” Western movie in which, subsequent to an Indian stealing a horse from a ranch, a posse gallops to the nearest Indian village kills its inhabitants, children and all, and ransacks their tepees leaving behind a landscape of burning ruins.

 

Bush’s attack on the Taliban was based on a grave underestimation of their combat stamina; his baseless invasion of Iraq was planned on uncorroborated intelligence that some would argue was deliberately falsified to give credence to and garner support for the operation; his ordered covert and clandestine actions in Somalia and elsewhere in the Arab world, resulted in a metastasis of terrorism that is proving to be strategically deleterious to many a government.

 

To the international community, Bush’s message was simple: We would like to see you as democratic, peaceful-seeking, and prosperous peoples as we are. I remember in March of 2005, as sectarian violence spiraled out of control in Iraq and the Taliban resurged with more gusto in Afghanistan, Bush stood before a military crowd at the National Defense University at Fort McNair and unusually volubly stated: “It should be clear that the advance of democracy leads to peace because governments that respect the rights of their people also respect the rights of their neighbors. It should be clear the best antidote to radicalism and terror is the tolerance kindled in free societies … We are also determined to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

 

From this perspective, it is then easy to see the reason behind the boisterous drive of the Bush administration. The Taliban and the Saddam regimes were indeed radical, undemocratic, and disrespectful of their citizens and neighbors. But so are all the other Arab countries. With tacit support from the bush administration, the Arab governments straddled the war on terror like nuns on bicycles joyously riding through the cobbled streets of a provincial town; they are unbridled in their oppression against their own people much like the Bush administration felt no compunction in bolstering its executive powers and redefining democracy to allow for the effective outsourcing of tyranny. While Bush and other officials from his administration glowingly spoke of justice, their undemocratic policies and initiatives encouraged human rights abuses by precipitating the kidnapping of Moslems and Arabs from around the world, their rendering to Arab countries such as Morocco, Egypt, and Jordan to be torturously interrogated, and their detention unindicted indefinitely. The Bush administration’s chauvinism created a golden opportunity for undemocratic countries to surface their repressive methods as legitimate defense mechanisms against an opposition that allegedly threatens the established governance, even if that opposition stands in fact for a popular outcry against an unwieldy, insensitive, and unapproachable system which efficiently deflects all accountability and scrutiny from the policymakers and often absolves the unchallenged, unpopular leadership, a leadership that associates itself with patriotism and regards dissent as unpatriotic.

 

If not fighting terrorism and spreading democracy, what, then, is the true motivation behind the Bush administration’s foreign policy?

 

The creation of an international weapons market and the saturation of that market with US made weaponry. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are showcases for US military hardware.

 

According to a recently published report from The New American Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute, profits from US arms trade reached $32 billion in 2007, surpassing the revenues reported for 2001, when Bush took over the presidency, by three folds. The US arms trade market expanded from 123 states and territories to 174. The report stated that more than half of the developing countries the US supplies with weapons are undemocratic and/or engage in flagrant human rights abuses. The top 13 countries are: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Egypt, Colombia, Jordan, Bahrain, Oman, Morocco, Yemen and Tunisia. Sales to these countries totaled over $16.2 billion in 2006 and 2007. Moreover, 20 of the 27 nations engaged in major armed conflict have been receiving weapons from the US. William D. Hartung, the lead author of the report, concluded: “The United States cannot demand respect for human rights and arm human rights abusers at the same time.”

 

Exactly Mr. Muntadar Al-Zaidi’s point.

 

And who is Mr. Al-Zaidi? A messenger from the Iraqi and the Arab streets who on a daily basis feels the gnawing effect of Bush ‘string of failed initiatives. A man whose hatred for Bush could not be detected by the Iraqi security officials and Secret Service personnel who screened him before entering the press conference. A man who if he had time to reach out and grab the next guy’s shoes to through at Bush, he would have done so. The Shoe Thrower and a couple of notches above Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber.

 

While lobbing his shoes at Bush like a major league baseball pitcher, Al-Zaidi yelled: “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.”

 

Making light of the incident, Bush stated:” “I don’t know what the guy’s cause is…”

We all do. ‘Cause he hates you, Mr. President. You can’t make people love you when all you sowed in their backyards are death and destruction.

 

Bush’s war against terrorism and advocacy of Democracy amounts to nothing more than a sales pitch. His deeply flawed foreign policies undermine democracies, inhibit peace, and encourage human rights abuses. His pseudo-philanthropic US funded anti-AIDS program in Africa, championed by his wife Laura Bush, for instance, is nothing more than an attention-grabber to set the stage for AFRICOM, the US arms sales representative for Africa, to pitch the real deal. It is a strategic race between the US and China to acquire African nations as clients. The US is engaged in similar races in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Europe.

 

Here is a cultural/security suggestion Mr. President, hold your future press conferences in Moslem countries in mosques; shoes are not allowed past the entrance.

 

A. T. B. Copyright © 2008

 

The White House Swab

 

The phone rang and danced on the nightstand like a crazed MDMA addict in a rave party. It sounded like a sawmill steam whistle blowing inside my head. It shook me awake. The alarm clock showed four in the morning.

“Hello!” I answered grudgingly.

“Mabrouk! Mabrouk! Congratulations!” the jubilant voice of my mother said.

“What?”

“Congratulations! Barack won. Barack will bring the “baraka.””

Flustered and still half asleep I said: “thank you.”

“Did you vote yesterday?”

I did.

My father jumped on the phone. “Things are going to get better now.”

“You think?”

“Yes! Of course. He is a Moslem. Thank God the older one did not win.”

I could hear my mother in the background saying: “God answered the prayers of Moslems. The next US president’s name is M’barak.”

Many other friends from around the world called and sent ME SMS messages throughout the day cheering and conveying their hopes things will soon change for the better. I felt as though Obama and I share a kinship in wretchedness. 

 

The Bush administration’s many failures are leaving nothing but smoldering ruin across the national and international landscapes. Its blunders will go on raging inside people’s minds for a long time to come. The US stands isolated and vilified. The election of Obama is a desperate and necessary attempt by Americans to restore their dignity and grace. He will most certainly make adjustments; his administration will be an aggregate of diverse American political philosophies; he will rescind some of bush’s directives such as those pertaining to interrogation and detainees; he will enact drastic measures to restore confidence in a tattered American economy; he will reshape the military and refocus its priorities; he will advocate diplomacy over hasty and deleterious military action.

 

The Obama administration will engage on all these fronts focusing on nothing else but US interests. Not Africa; not the Arabs; not the Moslems. The Obama millions of Africans, Arabs, and Moslems anxiously prayed for on the edge of their seats while on his campaign trail is different than the one who will be sworn in as president. The change of course started when he received his first intelligence briefing. Other briefings would enlighten him with information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economy, Gitmo detainees and a myriad of other issues he was unaware of. As a candidate, Obama did not have the required “need to know” to be privy to that information; as a President Elect with the adequate clearance, that information is too sensitive to share with the public. As a scholar, his decisions will be based on lucubration, but will be shaped by this newly acquired and highly restricted perspective. Suddenly, Talking to the Iranian government whose hegemonic aspirations in the Middle East are not a concern to Israel alone, but to all the neighboring Arab countries as well and whose support to terrorist elements is undeniable, is not such a viable option. Suddenly, Islamic extremism is indeed an immediate terrorist threat that will only cower before forceful and unrelenting policies. Suddenly, the economy has been in a recession for the past year and cutting taxes may not seem such a bright idea. Already his economic plan is changing; so will his perspective on many foreign issues. I have no doubt he will redefine US foreign policy, but I do not anticipate a dramatic policy change. I can say with certitude there will never be an Obama condemnation of Israeli human rights and political transgressions against the Palestinians. US support to African and Arab despots will carry on. It is imperative to maintain a power dynamic that advances and sustains US interests in the world.

 

I was hardly surprised when Benjamin Emanuel, the father of Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel (who is Jewish), talking about his son stated in an interview to the daily Ma’ariv:

“Obviously, he will influence the president to be pro-Israel. Why wouldn’t he? What is he, an Arab? He’s not going to clean the floors of the White House.”

Mr. Rahm Emanuel quickly picked up the phone and apologized to the American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee for his father’s disparaging comments. No apology was necessary to the Arabs of the world; they matter as much to the Obama administration as they did to the Bush one.

 

A. T. B. Copyright © 2008