Arsenal For Democracy

After ISIS attack: Rise of the Tunisian Army?

By Bill Humphrey March 20, 2015 - 6:34 pm March 20, 2015 Arsenal Analysis

After an ISIS terrorist attack in Tunisia’s capital left 23 dead, Tunisia’s new government announced the deployment of the Tunisian Army to protect major population centers. Reuters:

“After a meeting with the armed forces, the president has decided large cities will be secured by the army,” the president’s office said in a statement.

Middle East Monitor:

[…] the decision comes after a cabinet meeting with the three armies and the High Security Council attended by President Beji Caid Essebsi.

Essid stressed that the Tunisian authorities were working to prevent the re-occurrence of similar terrorist operations, noting “that any other terrorist operation will have very serious consequences for the country”.

The prime minister pointed out that the army and security agencies are equipped with everything they need to defend the country and cooperate with their allies. A deal to purchase eight US made Black Hawk helicopters is being concluded and the helicopters are expected to arrive in Tunisia during the second half of this year, Essid said.

It’s a very unusual move to deploy the Tunisian Army domestically, in contrast with peer nations across North Africa and the Middle East. Keeping the Army on the border or in the barracks was a core (self-preservation) principle of modern Tunisia’s founder, Habib Bourguiba, and has been maintained to present day. Badra Gaaloul wrote for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace about this atypical trend back in November 2011, less than a year into the Arab Spring:

The political and social prominence that the military has assumed over the last year [2011] is unprecedented in Tunisia’s history. Unlike Egypt or Algeria—where the military beds with both politician and businessman and seeks the protection of its own economic interests—the Tunisian counterpart lacks political experience, as former regimes have deliberately kept it far away from the political sphere. This strategy dates to 1962, when the military fell out of favor with the first post-independence president, Habib Bourguiba, after a Lazhar Chraiti’s attempted coup. After the imprisonment or execution of key officers, Bourguiba restricted the army’s power through institutional mechanisms; in 1968, he gave the paramilitary National Guard (technically a civilian force) oversight over the army—and this arrangement has generated a long-standing antagonism ever since.

Zein El Abidine Ben Ali followed Bourguiba’s footsteps. His crackdown on the military was the harshest in its history. Ben Ali (himself from a military background) focused on preemptively weakening the army and monopolizing power by marginalizing the military establishment: in 1991, he accused a group of officers of plotting a coup. The officers maintained that the charges against them were fabricated to discourage others from thinking about a rise to political power through the military. Officers accused of involvement or belonged to Islamist groups were imprisoned, placed under house arrest, or forced into early retirement. Between 1991 and 2011, the total number of personnel was reduced to about 40,000. Ben Ali reduced the ministry of defense’s budget, delayed promotions, and introduced a compulsory retirement for often the most competent officers. The military’s role was strictly defined as defending the country, contributing to economic development, dealing with natural disasters, and taking part in UN-led global peacekeeping efforts.

Although the Tunisian Army took center stage again very briefly during the late 2010 Tunisian Revolution that sparked the Arab Spring, the Army restricted its role to protecting voting sites from attacks and filling in for police until the latter returned to their jobs. The police and internal security forces were spooked by the initial uprising, which began as a protest against chronic abuses by police that have fostered a climate of mass resentment and terrorist sympathizing for many years in Tunisia.

It seems likely that the huge gap between public support for the non-meddlesome Tunisian Army and public hatred for the abusive police and security forces may have encouraged the decision to involve the Army more heavily in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Tunis. However, the longer the Army finds itself in the role of a police force and domestic counterterrorism force, the likelier it becomes that it loses credibility and support. Moreover, it may come to be seen as bearing shared responsibility with the Old Guard leadership of the new coalition government for any crackdown that is probably about to happen.

In Nigeria, White South African mercenaries fill a void

By Bill Humphrey March 20, 2015 - 9:00 am March 20, 2015 Arsenal Pulse

“Relics” of the feared and hated Apartheid-era “South African Defence Force” are secretly (and illegally) fighting Boko Haram for Nigeria, according to recent reporting by The New York Times:

Hundreds of mercenaries from South Africa and other countries are playing a decisive role in Nigeria’s military campaign against Boko Haram, operating attack helicopters and armored personnel carriers and fighting to retake towns and villages captured by the Islamist militant group, according to senior officials in the region.
[…]
A senior Western diplomat confirmed that the South Africans were playing “a major operational role,” particularly at night. Equipped with night-vision goggles, the mercenaries “are whacking them in the evening hours,” the diplomat said.

“The next morning the Nigerian Army rolls in and claims success,” the diplomat added. The mercenaries “are doing the heavy lifting,” said the diplomat, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

Another diplomat, also unauthorized to speak publicly on the matter, said he believed the mercenary force was composed of fighters from other countries as well, but mainly South Africa.
[…]
Photographs showing white soldiers atop armored vehicles on what appears to be a major road in Maiduguri have been posted in recent days on Nigerian Twitter feeds. A correspondent for The New York Times in Maiduguri identified the location as the Baga Road. The correspondent has seen the South African mercenaries jogging around Maiduguri’s airport, now closed, where they are encamped.

Meanwhile, a steady stream of optimistic propaganda reports from the Nigerian military (and from President Goodluck Jonathan) has taken credit for victory after victory in the campaign against Boko Haram in the country’s northeast, ahead of the postponed elections. This once again undermines the already shaky credibility, on multiple levels, of Nigeria’s armed forces.

An extensive report from South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies speculates that many of the ex-SADF mercenaries are likely veterans of the brutal counterinsurgency campaign that Apartheid South Africa waged in Angola and in South African-occupied South West Africa (now Namibia).

[…] the sort of operations that the ex-SADF soldiers would be conducting against Boko Haram would be very similar to some of the operations they had conducted against the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), namely ‘very high mobility operations by small forces, heavy in firepower and in protected vehicles, and based on the prompt and quick exploitation of intelligence; backed up by air assault or even parachute insertion of stopper groups.’

The contract with SADF veterans — prohibited by South African law from undertaking military operations for hire abroad — also raises more questions about the repeated attempts by Nigerian officials to bring or transfer huge amounts of money into South Africa last fall (example) for undisclosed “purchases” relating to the war against Boko Haram.

Elsewhere, the military of neighboring Chad also continues to conduct quasi-authorized (but mostly unilateral) operations against Boko Haram on Nigerian soil.

Ensign of the South African Defence Force 1981-1994 (via Wikimedia)

March 18, 2015 – Arsenal For Democracy 120

By Bill Humphrey March 18, 2015 - 8:00 am March 26, 2015 Radio Show

Topic: How the Shareholder Revolution is hurting America’s businesses and workers. People: Bill, Nate. Produced: March 16th, 2015.

Discussion Points:

– What happens to companies that borrow money to make shareholder payouts?
– Why aren’t American companies investing in the future as much as they used to?
– Why should American companies tie wages to increases in profits and productivity instead of focusing on dividends and stock buybacks?

Note for listeners: We’re testing a half-hour version of the show over the next few weeks. Let us know whether you prefer this format or the longer format.

Episode 120 (27 min):
AFD 120

Oped | Victors’ Bonus: What Israel Could Learn From Athens

By Bill Humphrey March 17, 2015 - 9:21 pm March 17, 2015 Arsenal Essay, Arsenal Research

The following essay and original research first appeared in The Globalist.

On Tuesday, more than a dozen Israeli political parties are expected to win seats in the country’s snap parliamentary elections that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called after his coalition broke up last year.

These parties will vie for a total of 120 proportionally elected seats in the Knesset. Israel’s threshold to win seats has this year been raised to 3.25% of the vote (translating to 3-4 seats).

As a result of this fractious system, no single Israeli party or joint list has ever won a majority (61 seats) in an election.

No clear winners in Israeli elections

In the past five elections, the party or list that ended up forming the coalition won an average of just 30.2 seats out of 120 – i.e., only a quarter of the seats – with 11-14 other lists also winning seats.

To form a government thus requires coalition building among quite a few parties, usually with very different (if not diametrically opposed) policy views. No wonder that, under those circumstances, coalitions do not last very long.

The public has previously shown a desire for a stronger executive mandate. Israel briefly adopted direct elections for Prime Minister in the 1990s. To exclude unserious candidates, only major parties could nominate someone. In each of the three times Prime Ministers were directly elected, only two candidates competed.

This modification unfortunately did not fix the problem because the Prime Minister could win an outright majority of the vote but still lack a majority of legislators to support his cabinet or agenda.

Since then, other than tinkering with the electoral threshold very slightly, Israel has not tried to deal with the leadership and policy instability problem inherent in its system.

Where Athens does provide inspiration

One possible place to seek electoral reform inspiration for Israel might be Greece – the birthplace of democracy and a country with a similar population size – despite its own serious current political challenges.

Similarly to Israel, 250 members of Greece’s parliament are elected through a system that ensures fair geographic representation along with the proportional will of the national electorate, using a 3% threshold.

However, there is one big innovation to clarify the executive mandate. As of the 2008 revisions to Greek election laws, the top-finishing party is given a victory bonus of 50 extra seats – bringing the total to 300 seats in parliament – to help the winner get closer to a governing majority.

This represents a bonus equal to 20% of the proportionally elected seats. (An earlier law gave the winner 40 seats.)

It’s not a perfect setup, of course. A party earning relatively low percentage of the vote share can gain an extra 20% of the seats even if it falls well short of capturing the confidence of a majority of voters and even if another party were to capture just 1% less of the electorate than the winner.

However, it substantially boosts the chances of quickly forming a government and allowing that government to push through its major agenda items, rather than floundering along with the status quo due to internal gridlock.

Meanwhile, it still allows for diverse, multi-party elections — but constructively counteracts the growth of fringe, single-issue, or personality-centric parties that take up seats or weaken serious parties without actually contributing to the government or the opposition in any substantive way.

Israel’s political system, even more so than Greece, would benefit from being cleared of such parties. Politicians would have more incentive to remain inside a major party, rather than splintering, as often happens.

Applying Athens in Jerusalem

If a comparable bonus were applied in Israel, it could mean 120 seats would be elected proportionally with 24 additional seats awarded to the winning list. (The Knesset would expand to 144 members in this scenario, and 73 seats would be a majority.)
Read more

Before Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu to Congress on Iraq

By Bill Humphrey March 16, 2015 - 3:54 pm March 16, 2015 Arsenal Analysis

The following was originally published in The Globalist.

On March 3, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress to speak on what he believes to be the threat of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. It is a theme he has hit often in his career, going back at least as far as the early 1990s.

His concern about Iran – and accompanying determination that Israel and the United States should strike preemptively – was only put on hold briefly around 2002 and early 2003, when he turned his attention instead to Iraq.

Missing the mark

In September 2002, ahead of the U.S. Congress’s October 2002 authorization for the use of military force in Iraq, the then-former Prime Minister offered testimony to members of the U.S. House and Senate at a hearing on Iraq’s purported nuclear weapons program capabilities.

Benjamin Netanyahu testifying to Congress on Iraq in September 2002.

In addition to providing an extremely incorrect account of the program itself, as it turns out, Mr. Netanyahu’s forecasts of the implications of the war he was calling upon the United States to wage were also badly misguided.

In his own words, transcribed from C-SPAN clips, here is why Mr. Netanyahu believed the United States should invade Iraq back in 2002 and what would happen as a result:

And today the United States must destroy the same regime, because a nuclear-armed Saddam will put the security of our entire world at risk. And make no mistake about it: if and when Saddam has nuclear weapons, the terror network will have nuclear weapons.

Two decades ago, it was possible to thwart Saddam’s nuclear ambitions by bombing a single installation. Today, nothing less than dismantling his regime will do…

The first victory in Afghanistan makes the second victory in Iraq that much easier. The second victory in Iraq will make the third victory that much easier too, but it may change the nature of achieving that victory. It may be possible to have implosions taking place – I don’t guarantee it, Mr. Tierney, but I think it makes it more likely and therefore I think the choice of Iraq is a good choice. It’s the right choice.”

As it turned out, the conflict in Iraq – a war of choice as he himself characterized it – was not easy. And the only regional effect it had was to increase transnational religious terrorism and provide opportunities to boost the stature, influence, and military strength of Iran and its proxies. It also likely hardened Iranian interest in nuclear deterrence.

The 2003 Iraq War was bad for Israel’s long-term security. A war with Iran would be far worse. The Israeli Prime Minister has been very loud on military affairs in the Middle East, but he has also been very wrong more often than not.

The United States government would be wise to disregard his counsel on Iran now, for the sake of all countries involved – including Israel.

Myanmar-China tensions heat up after fatal air raid

By Bill Humphrey March 15, 2015 - 5:45 pm March 15, 2015 Arsenal Analysis

The military-dominated transitional regime in Myanmar (Burma) is fending off sharp criticism from China after its fighter-bombers allegedly accidentally crossed into China and dropped bombs on farmland, killing four Chinese citizens.

They deny that the aircraft, which were engaged in purported counterinsurgency operations near the 2,000-kilometer border, ever entered China. Myanmar’s Air Force is relatively old and decrepit after years of global isolation and sanctions — Chinese, Soviet, and Yugoslavian equipment from about the 1950s to the 1980s — but they maintain that GPS put them on their own side of the border.

Beijing asserted that this is actually just the latest territorial violation in a pattern they have been tolerating for some time.

China has threatened to take “decisive” measures if there is a repeat of a deadly attack by Myanmar forces on its territory, allegations that officials in Yangon deny.

Speaking at his annual news conference on Sunday, Li Keqiang, the Chinese premier said that the government had the ability and responsibility to “firmly defend” the stability of the border.

In a similar statement issued late on Saturday, Fan Changlong, who is a deputy head of the powerful Central Military Commission, said Myanmar air force aircraft had crossed the border “many times” recently.

The government of Myanmar recently emerged from the shadows under new leadership and is supposed to be undertaking a transition from direct military rule to democracy after decades of poverty, misery, and incompetence. However, most observers have questioned whether or not the new government is actually moving forward on the transition or is just a new paint job on the old system. There are also fears that the military might re-take direct power.

burma-map The counterinsurgency campaign has targeted ethnically Chinese citizens in the remote frontier region and pushed tens of thousands of refugees across into China, both developments that can’t be welcome to the leadership in Beijing and has probably raised hackles even before the deadly air raid incident. The alleged rebels in Burma are mostly ex-Communists associated previously with a Chinese-backed insurgency before the Myanmar junta’s creation in the 1988 coup.

China hasn’t been directly involved in a war in about thirty-five years and hasn’t even been involved in a proxy war in almost that long. However, it has reacted very strongly in rhetorical terms to the air raid and these other alleged violations. I still think the chances of China going to war with Myanmar are relatively slim still, but I wouldn’t count it out altogether.

Launching a war against an extremely inferior neighboring military without any friends on the world stage right now would probably be a pretty quick and effective way of re-consolidating the Chinese armed forces under civilian leadership. The former is in the midst of deep anti-corruption purges by the latter, which have rocked the senior military brass and probably unsettled the military as a whole. Rallying everyone to the flag to fight a quick retaliatory war against an unpopular and virtually helpless quasi-military regime would be a decent booster for the Communist Party leadership.

However, the ensuing problems of what might replace the Myanmar regime (or could be installed in its place) might be enough of a disincentive to persuade China just to rattle the sabres very loudly without actually using them. I also think going to war over this would be relatively out of character for China as it has defined itself in the post-1980 era (as a “non-interventionist”), and it seems more like something some other regime or country would do somewhere else in the world.

UKIP really just leaning in on the open racism now

By Bill Humphrey March 14, 2015 - 5:31 pm March 14, 2015 Arsenal Pulse

Remember the good old days of 2014, when Nigel Farage pretended UKIP wasn’t a racist party and insisted everyone should pretend along with him? Those days are over, per this very exhaustive column by an anti-discrimination campaigner, charting the slide over the past two years from running on British “sovereignty” (whatever that means) toward openly racist political campaigns:

When asked by a Channel 4 documentary if there should be a law against discrimination on the grounds of race or colour in a ‘Ukip Britain’, the Ukip leader replied emphatically: “No.” Despite some attempts at backtracking, he has maintained he would axe many of our race discrimination laws.

Then it just devolves from there.

I’d also observe however that Farage’s positions highlighted in the piece — anti-immigrant, race-baiting, opposing discrimination protection laws — are actually the same as those of mainstream Republican leadership thought here in the United States.

And UKIP, which this time around still aren’t expected to capture more than a handful of seats, is having a similar effect on the Conservative Party in Britain as the embedded Republican far-right has in the United States: dragging even the theoretically sane and non-bigoted people toward oblivion in an effort to stave off electoral demise and irrelevancy. It’s simply more noticeable in countries like the United Kingdom or the rest of the European Union when it’s a separate party articulating everything openly and proudly … and winning significant vote share and even seats.

I’m honestly not sure whether it’s more dangerous to have the crazy faction hiding inside the mainstream party or out in the open as a separate party in the legislative body. It’s actually probably easier to sideline and dismiss them when they operate as a separate party than when they’re skulking around the major center-right party’s inner workings.