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World to Washington: Don’t Back the Spy Chief in Egypt

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

So Omar Suleiman is now in the race for President of Egypt—and by popular demand?  He’s got signatures?  He’s got a crowd of boosters? He’s bending—oh so graciously!—to the people’s will?  Believe that and I’ll tell you another! Omar Suleiman was Hosni Mubarak’s chief of intelligence for 18 years. This guy knows all of the tricks of the trade, none nice or straightforward, as too many Egyptians all too painfully know.

American officialdom is also aware of Suleiman’s talents and proclivities.  He was there for the C.I.A.  when the U.S. wished to grill suspected terrorists in dark holes far from the prying eyes of the U.S. press or anyone else who might be a mite uncomfortable about condoning torture or using information so tainted.  This little favor was known by the once innocuous term “rendition.”

Why Suleiman?  Why Now?

All that being the case and in the absence of any inside information, I confess that, to me,  the Suleiman candidacy smells like a rat dressed in a badly tattered and besmirched stars-and-stripes.  Here’s one fear that might be agitating U.S. operatives: if Islamists control Egypt’s parliament and the presidency, they might take great pleasure in spilling those unpalatable beans.  Not as allegation.  Not as supposition.  As fact, demonstrable, undeniable.

Consider the timing of Suleiman’s candidacy.  It’s a last minute thing.  The presidential election is just around the corner.  The Muslim Brotherhood, contrary to well-publicized promises, though unsurprisingly in the world of realpolitik, has decided to field a candidate, a well-known rich businessman.  At this point, the odds on Amr Moussa, a secular candidate who might have out polled a very attractive Salafist candidate, plummet from possible to well nigh hopeless.  The main trouble is that Moussa is only marginally more attractive than a master spy.  Yes, he’s a former Arab league chief, but he was also one of Mubarak’s inner circle.  A former foreign minister, in fact, not the sort of bio to fire up young idealists or anyone else hoping for a non-Islamist change in the status quo ante Tahrir Square. 

SYRIA: WHY RUSSIA AND CHINA ARE APPLYING THE BRAKES

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

From any normal human point of view, the disinclination of Russia and China to enthusiastically join efforts to restrain Bashar Assad from his slaughter fest is incomprehensible.  So far as I can tell, not even the most horrified foreign leaders are eager to put boots on the ground or even to provide the degree of assistance that Libyan rebels received, but China and Russia are not ready for serious jaw-boning, either. Nor have they joined the chorus suggesting that Assad and his family might seek a cozy retirement site. If recently leaked emails are authentic, the Assads would settle for nothing less than world class luxury aka life among the global 1%.  Bribing the unjust with chateaux leaves a very bad taste in the mouth, but it’s a time honored way to dislodge tyrants with minimal loss of life.

Meanwhile, what a bonus for the enablers!  While supporting a brutal dictatorship, China and Russia  masquerade as global  good citizens upholding long understood principles of international law.

Yes, a state is allowed to protect itself from most civil unrest and to defend itself from external threat. But only up to a point, in each case. 

The Assad regime claims to be restoring peace and stability by neutralizing “armed gangs” beholden to outside forces. When restoring order requires the scale of destruction we’ve seen in Homs, including day-after-day blanket shelling of residential areas followed by the systematic house-to-house slaughter of survivors, it’s probably safe to say the regime  has lost its legitimacy.  At this point what’s labeled unrest more closely resembles revolution, To date, in Syria, nearly 10,000 people have been killed, and yet unarmed civilians continue to take to the streets in their thousands at the risk of being picked off by snipers stationed on roof tops. Individual soldiers and even whole units of the army have joined the rebels.  So have some high ranking officers and even a minister in the Assad government.  It seems a shame that many more people will have to die before Bashar finally admits that his day at the top is over.

Yes, external meddling in the internal affairs of a country is normally to be deplored and resisted.  The sovereignty argument has always made considerable sense because international neighbors, if bigger and stronger, tend to be greedy and aggressive. So it might be argued that China and Russia are taking the high road in respecting Syria’s sovereignty.  However, the genocides and other brutalities of the twentieth century have given rise to an important sovereignty-trumping principle. It is known as the “responsibility to protect,” which means that rulers do not have carte blanche in terrorizing their own citizens. When external interference prevents internal massacre, it is not judged to be a classic invasion of sovereignty. The Assad regime, it would seem, has set itself up for some meddling, to put it mildly.

Unfortunately for the rebels, Syria is not Libya.  Syria is a heavily populated country.  It is well institutionalized and the regime controls all subordinate centers of power, including a very large army officered  by members of the minority Alowite sect to which the Assads belong.  

This brings us to the problem of minorities in Syria, most of whom, it's argued, continue to support the secular-minded  Assad regime.  Syrian Christians have no doubt noted that the Coptics in Egypt fared better under Mubarak than they seem to be doing now.  Alowites may fear the sort of retalitory maltreatment that Sunnis are presently suffering in Iraq.  The Asad regime may be brutal, but it is an equal opportunity oppressor, which is a grudging way of recognizing its relative tolerance for minorities.  The U.S. Constitution's  Bill of Rights protects minorities from the tyrrany of the majority.  As the aftermath of the Arab spring indicates, tolerance doesn't always come automatically with democracy.

Minorities' not unfounded fear of repression gives some altruistic cover to the Chinese and Russian tenderness toward the Assad regime, but other motives for their behavior are no doubt more persuasive.  Neither country is governed by figures who find it convenient to respect the will of the people.  Russia’s Vladimir Putin maintains his hold on power by manipulating elections, curbing the media, jailing opponents and breaking up demonstrations before they get too large and enthusiastic.  China tolerates absolutely no debate or street activity at all.  What’s more, both regimes rigorously suppress the political and cultural demands of their ethnic and religious minorities, especially those who happen to form majorities in ancestral territories with historic claims to independence.  Like Homs, Chechnya was ravaged to keep it Russian; brutality keeps it Russian.  Suppression of protest over cultural genocide in Tibet is so complete that an increasing number of monks have resorted to setting themslves aflame, although Tibetan Buddhism does not encourage such acts.  Meanwhile, Beijing floods Tibet with Han Chinese in order to reduce Tibetans to a minority in what was once their own country.  (The Soviets did the same in the Baltic states, which has led to many complications for the post-Communist governments in those countries.) 

Freedom of speech?  Freedom of assembly?  Freedom to chose one’s leadership in free and fair elections? Syrians want these freedoms.  If China and Russia acknowledge the validity of Syrians’ desires, how can they continue to deny them to the people within their own national boundaries?

The Koran Burning Episode: Negligence or Stupidity?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

In Afghanistan (and Pakistan) even locals can lose their lives for mishandling a Koran, which mostly they don’t do, although accusations of Koran abuse occur with some regularity.  The best way to carry out a land grab is to accuse a landowner of mishandling a Koran.  If you are lucky, the accused will get lynched and you can snatch the land with little futher ado.  If you aren’t lucky, the accused will end up with a long prison sentence, but the land might still end up as yours.

An American contact was annoyed with me recently.  I’d declared that anyone and everyone serving in the U.S. Army (or with any of the allied forces) should know that Afghans are pretty touchy about how Korans are treated.  Ordinary American soldiers aren’t going to know that, he said.  Even if they’re told, it won’t make any impression.  They won’t remember.

I don’t think American troops are stupid.  I don’t believe that they are incapable of learning respect for local custom.  It’s far more likely that their commanders and their commanders’ commanders haven’t done a very good job of providing the cultural sensitization that (we’re told) is routine.  Maybe sensitizing is on the syllabus, so to speak, but carried out so badly, so offhandedly, with so little sense of urgency, that anyone in the audience would fall asleep. Or maybe it’s done in an off-putting preachy way. Sermons do get boring.  How clearly are the troops taught that Koran handling is a life and death matter?  Your buddy could die.  Your vehicle could get blown up.  Etc

Like many observers, I was pretty outraged by this unnecessarily provocative act, but it may be that I’m even more puzzled by it.  Nowhere in my reading have I found any reference to clear cut, codified procedures for handling Korans, step by step procedures to be followed without fail.

What’s Syria to Russia?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Is, or is not, the Cold War over?  Certainly Russia’s veto in the UN Security Council last week that torpedoed the resolution calling for Assad to resign and Russia’s subsequent vote against the UN General Assembly resolution urging Assad to step down gives pause to wonder whether Russia’s leadership is indeed leading the country back to its pre-1991 days.

Or maybe the issue is whether the 70 year Communist regime foremost promulgated traditional Russian interests under the guise of leader of the Communist world and, in reality, nothing has changed over the past 20 years.   Czars, Commissars and Presidents – the official title doesn’t really matter and neither does the country’s form of government.  Long term Russian national strategic interests trump everything else. Or maybe it’s really the Kremlin’s fears of controlling its own population that’s the issue deep down at heart.

In short, not only has Russia’s international behavior remained the same for centuries but Syria is just the latest example of the bear baring its teeth to protect its own innards from predators from within – as much as its big power status without.  

Numerous explanations have circulated throughout the media as to Russia’s vociferous defense of Assad but the three reasons I find the most compelling were those identified by Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens and Rice University’s Baker Institute Director Edward Djerejian a week or so back.

 

These are: 1) traditional Russian righteous indignation against foreign “interference” in its internal affairs; 2) Russian moves to protect its large naval base at Targus, Syria and hence, its military presence in the eastern Mediterranean – which if the Assad regime were to fall might no longer be so permanent; and 3) Russia’s commercial interests in keeping Assad supplied with Russian military hardware regardless of how they are used or, in this case, misused. 

 I know that The New York Times’ David M. Herszenhorn reported from Moscow on February 19, 2012 that many analysts “say that the most concrete reason for Moscow to guard its relations with Damascus is “the long standing arms sales to Syria.”  On the face of it, the lucrative Russian military sales to the Syrians look impressive. “The value of Russian arms deals to Syria more than doubled during 2007-10 from $2.1 billion to $4.7 billion as compared with 2003 to 2006 according to a CRS report by veteran international security expert Richard F. Grimmett.

I don’t discount the role foreign weapons sales play to the Russian Federation’s military-industrial complex or the country’s coffers and I have great respect for Grimmett’s analytical abilities, but if the country had to write off nearly 75% of Syria’s unpaid bills in 2005, what makes the Russians any surer of recouping their costs – let alone making a profit on similar sales – this time around. 

State Joins the Drone Corps. Why?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

I was, to say the least, nonplussed about a New York Times front page story January 29, 2012 that described the State Department’s latest security protection toy: a fleet of drones to be deployed in Iraq to protect 11,000 American employees and 5,000 more security contractors when they make forays outside of the fortress embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone, consulates elsewhere in Iraq and, I suppose, other lesser properties that the US may have hung onto after the troop withdrawal in December. 

Yes I realize that the Pentagon and especially the CIA have been at the forefront of the drone game for several years and that the Obama administration has ramped up the production and use of these miniature unmanned birds of flight in warzones – both the weaponized kind that zoom in for the kill of suspected anti-American terrorists and the silent open eyes and ears kind that search out the location of potential two footed predators but are not themselves equipped with lethal weapons – the spy drones that is.  Not the predators.

But does the State Department need to acquire its very own drone fleet too?

Not only has this infuriated members of the Iraqi Government – it effectively extends State’s security perimeter well beyond the diplomatic enclaves it now occupies. State is never flush with funds after all. Wouldn’t it be better to shrink the size and rejigger the scope of the mission to conform better with the importance of the country in terms of overall American interests and perhaps devote the money to expanding the number of Consular and Public Diplomacy Officers in Iraq to meet and serve the Iraqi public one way or the other?

This reminds me of five year olds playing in a sandbox: if one government agency’s security office gets some new toy, the others think they have to have it too:  Despite the fact that their missions are not the same.  Why, for instance, can’t the Embassy rely on CIA or even Pentagon drones if necessary for security purposes?  It’s not as if these agencies work for different governments.  It’s also not as if the State Department is the only part of the US government to work in and out of our diplomatic establishments abroad.   

How many political officers are needed to dance on the head of a pin in Iraq?

What do Coalition Education Secretary and Labour MP Chris Bryant have in common?

By John C. Dyer, UK Correspondent

Nothing, you reply?

At first glance it might seem preposterous.  

Chris Bryant is a Labour MP, Shadow Minister for Borders and Immigration. Bryant was last seen in vigorous attack mode, seeking Home Secretary Theresa May’s head over a little experiment gone ‘orribly wrong (at least ‘orribly visible in the fishbowl).  Bryant is better known, however, for his battle with Rupert Murdoch, whose grubby fingered underlings exposed Bryant to unseemly and embarrassing (not to mention politically difficult) ridicule.  Bryant recently appraised Rupert Murdoch, an unflattering comparison to Sivio Berlusconi.  

Michael Gove is, on the other hand, a Conservative MP, current Coalition Education Secretary.  Gove’s very name makes die hard Labour supporters awaken in the night with cold sweats. He is the bane of public educators, dedicated to the overthrow of public education through private Academies (albeit to be fair to Mr. Gove, he would see it as their fulfillment and betterment).  His “reforms” are legion and legendary, opposed vigorously by Chris Bryant and Bryant’s Labour Party. So black and white is this it does not bear citation. Michael Gove is also a well known “Neo Conservative.”     Gove served Murdoch as an editor at The Times.  His appraisal of Murdoch now?  A great man.

So what could Chris Bryant and Michael Gove possibly have in common? Outside the fact they presumably put their pants on the same way in the morning, although maybe we shouldn’t assume.    The answer is, the Henry M. Jackson Society.   And a little more as will unfold.

The Henry M. Jackson society is an astro turf “Think Tank” with an agenda.  That isn’t greatly editorialized. It calls itself a think tank and it has an expressed agenda.  I dub it “astro turf” because it looks like a pressure group, acts like a pressure group, is funded like a pressure group, and has assiduously cultivated rich and powerful people with agenda and connections, like a pressure group. But it calls itself a think tank and is organized as a charity. How benign. Rather like Atlantic Bridge, but more on that in a moment.

The Henry M. Jackson society was formulated in 2005, named after US Senator Henry M. Jackson. No, not for his public welfare agenda, but for his “hawkish” interventionist agenda. Again, not editorializing.  It is well documented and the Society says so itself. 

The Henry M. Jackson Society promotes trans Atlantic cooperation in the intervention into the affairs of other nations, particularly in the Middle East, allegedly to spread liberal democracy.  This agenda can be seen directly in the Society’s own activities. 

The Military Way With Development: It Doesn't Work Very Well

By Patricia Lee Sharpe.

Drip, drip, drip, and whoooosh: that’s the sound of our hard-earned personal income, once taxed, going down the drain in the Pentagon.  And now I know why the military gets away with it.

America the Fearful

First off, there’s the fear factor.  Too many Americans have been terrorized by military fear-mongering into granting whatever the Pentagon asks for.  As for “our” representatives, they have a different fear.  They’ll support the iffiest military project, lest campaign donations dwinde to a dribble that won’t be enough to get them re-elected in our increasingly plutocratic star-and-serf system.

Here’s some context: the U.S. spends nearly as much money on its military-related functions as the rest of the world altogether and nearly half of all U.S. discretionary funding is allocated for the use of the Pentagon, yet all those trillions are still not enough, we’re told.  No, we sheep are not yet 100% safe from free-wheeling, copy cat terrorists, let alone the occasional malefactor dispatched by organizations like Al Qaeda.  So the dictum is: give up your Social Security, give up your Medicare, give up your carefully-inspected food, give up your well-tested medical devices, and fork it all over to the national security apparatus.   

Playing expertly on those fears, Leon Panetta, Obama’s new Secretary of Defense, accompanied for intimidation purposes by the usual be-medaled general, in this case the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin E. Dempsey, was in Congress this week, doing his best to protect the humongous Pentagon budget from cuts that may go beyond the present $450 billion over the next ten years.  The specter of a $1.2 trillion lopping looms.  To put all those zeros (count ‘em: eleven)  in perspective, that’s the cost of three or four military aircraft.  Seems entirely doable at a time when ordinary people have been losing their jobs and homes, doesn’t it?  Not to the military.

An Audit for the Pentagon, at Last

Meanwhile, Panetta also let a very interesting, very relevant and potentially damaging cat out of the bag: the military doesn’t know how it spends all its money—or whether the funds have achieved their nobly intended goals, which (in practice) may come down to box-checking or  promotion-seeding (see Van Buren below). Evidently, while other executive departments are being hounded to stop waste, fraud and abuse right down to the last paperclip, the Pentagon has escaped thorough scrutiny.  Panetta, clearly on the defensive, has promised to expedite “a full audit” of the Pentagon budget—and (wow! what speed!) to have it done by 2014, not the previously anticipated 2017.  Says Panetta: “ I have also directed increased emphasis on accountability and a full review of the Department’s financial controls....”  Who’d have thunk the Pentagon wasn’t already paying attention to such basics?  Even I had more faith, and I’ve got pretty cynical in recent years.

The FederalTimes reports that “many lawmakers have latched onto the Pentagon’s inability to pass an audit as a [relatively painless] way to make the Department more efficient in light of upcoming budget cuts.  However,” the report continues, “most defense analysts agree that efficiencies alone will not generate the kind of budget savings needed.” 

Indeed!  But easier said than done, as Americans have discovered, whenever attempts to cut military programs or eliminate military bases have been advanced.  Can you say pork?  Have you ever heard, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”  Today, if you listen closely enough, you’ll discover that many of the stingiest no-more-taxes Tea Party freshmen have already learned these little tricks.

The Need for Anecdotes

Still, it might help those who are really, not just cosmetically, trying to put an end to the malallocations of business as usual, if we had a trustworthy accounting of exactly where the Pentagon-designated money goes (including the security stuff that’s being turned against us)—and whether this billion or those millions actually achieved anything but ribbon-cutting publicity (also see Van Buren).  Until we have this complete and systematic audit, we’re left with various outrage-producing but isolated examples and anecdotes of a sort that are easily criticized as “atypical” or “merely subjective.”

Peter Van Buren’s “We Meant Well” – Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

A few weeks ago an active duty 23 year veteran of the Foreign Service named Peter Van Buren who served on two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Iraq between 2008-9 published a book that described his experiences and put forth his views about the impact those teams had on Iraqis in the central region where he worked.

The book’s title:  We meant well: how I helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people in essence says it all.  For those of us old enough to remember Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 which chronicled the absurdities of US military life during World War II or read Lawrence Durrell’s Stiff Upper Lip and Esprit de Corps – hilarious and more innocuous tales based on Durrell’s work as press attaché at the British Embassy in Belgrade at the end of that same war - Van Buren’s We Meant Well should be seen in a similar vein. 

It too is hilarious, horrifying and heart-wrenching – although Durrell’s books are less about the horror and more about the idiocies of life in a British diplomatic Balkan backwater in a politically torn and desparately poor country struggling to recuperate from a war and occupation not of its making.  

We Meant Well is well written and biting satire.

It is brutally honest - although names have been changed to protect the innocent and not so innocent. Its goal is not to curry favor or plump for yet another trip into the war zone embedded with the troops or a lucrative short term contract to bring American values, chicken-cultivation, or plumbing to Iraq.

Rather it was written as a wake up call with the hope that Americans will start to understand the ways their hard earned taxpayer dollars have been all too cavalierly tossed around on projects of questionable utility in post-invasion Iraq. Projects that were designed and implemented by Americans too often ill-equipped for the job and assigned to well protected fortresses constructed by the US military for its own troops sent there for a grand total of six months to one year at a time and governed by the metrics they have been required to employ. 

According to Van Buren, these metrics, such as they are, necessitated the spending of as much money as possible (tell that to our welfare recipients, State Department and USAID officers assigned to non-war zones or non-priority countries, or the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators) in as short a time as possible.

It’s like Vietnam CORDS all over again:  a war fought not as a single war but as eight different ones each a year’s duration.  This is about as far from post World War II Western Europe as one can get when and where US troops really were greeted with flowers and showered with kisses.

The inevitable rebuttal

 A stinging rebuttal of Van Buren’s book appeared in the October 5  FP Flashpoints by Stephen Donnelly, a former contractor who had been assigned as a senior civilian urban planning officer. Donnelly claims that he and his PRT accomplished so much more during the same time period as that of the hapless State Department employee Van Buren.  Maybe so or not.  It would certainly be nice to think so.

But face it, Donnelly who tells us his specialty is urban planning (FP describes him as a certified planning consultant who lives in Maryland), was based in Salah ad-Din north of Baghdad near Tikrit.  Van Buren was in the south.

The good news is that Donnelly was hired for his expertise. It’s people like Donnelly who possess the requisite credentials who should be working in Iraq - if any American advisors should be there at all. It’s unfortunate, however, that he also didn’t speak Arabic so he could have heard for himself what the Iraqis were saying to his face and behind his back.

Had this been Vietnam, Donnelly would likely have been a USAID employee assigned to CORDS at less than half the price to the American government. Maybe he would have received language training to boot.  Nevertheless, he was not a diplomat like Van Buren who was trained to adjudicate visa requests (and sniff out fraud on the part of applicants) as well as help Americans abroad in distress.

Donnelly was also not a member of the US military skilled at fighting wars but also ducks out of water in the area of civil reconstruction.   I still remember when the US military sneered at taking on police duty in the Balkans during the Clinton Administration – arguing that they didn’t do peacekeeping.    

Van Buren's stories of public diplomacy funds wasted and PSYOPs gone wrong

Let me not regurgitate either of Van Buren’s or Donnelly’s stories however – or actually mostly Van Buren’s stories because - Donnelly’s emotionally charged rebuttal is, as an article not a book, shorter on specifics.  Nevertheless, far better to read Van Buren’s book and Donnelly’s response yourself. 

I do know, however, that Van Buren’s tales of public diplomacy wasted and PSYOPs gone wrong fit like the tightest of gloves with the reports I’ve read and heard elsewhere ever since US foreign policy in the Middle East went awry beginning in March 2003.