Category Archives: Arsenal Pulse

Brief thoughts and mini-analyses on stories in the news.

Republicans splinter on $50 bill

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A couple weeks ago, I looked at a proposal by a southern Republican representative to replace Grant with Reagan on the $50. Students of (northern) history will recall that Grant is reviled in the South for a) winning the civil war, b) enforcing strong Reconstruction policies with martial law and c) wiping out the original KKK. Reagan, on the other hand, used dogwhistle campaign tactics to win the South in his presidential campaigns, emphasizing pro-segregation code words like “states’ rights.”

While Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) insists that this is a pro-Reagan move, not an anti-Grant one, and notes that he chose one Republican to replace another, I think it’s pretty obvious why most his 17 co-sponsors hail from the South.

Now Republicans outside the South are splitting over the proposal, despite their love of Ronald Reagan. Ohio Republicans are particularly annoyed because Grant was a native son:

State Representative Danny R. Bubp, a Republican from the [Ohio] district that includes Mr. Grant’s birthplace in Point Pleasant and childhood home in Brown County, is preparing a resolution that would oppose the currency change.

“The Union may not have won the Civil War had President Lincoln not had the wisdom to put Grant in charge,” Mr. Bubp said. “He was just the kind of guy who needed to be there at that time, and we should not diminish his place in history.”

 
Oh snap.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

Military coup in Niger

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It’s unclear what’s going on, but apparently there’s been a military coup d’état in the West African nation of Niger:

Soldiers in Niger assaulted the presidential palace in a coup attempt on Thursday while the government was meeting inside, according to officials and diplomats.

After a day of gunfire, explosions and nonstop military music on the radio in Niger’s capital, Niamey, the whereabouts of the president, Mamadou Tandja, remained unknown.

“There’s been a coup d’état,” said Boureima Soumana Sory Diallo, a high official at the state media regulatory agency under Mr. Tandja.

“I don’t know where he is,” Mr. Diallo said of the president. “They told us he has been taken by the soldiers.”

A spokesman for the American Embassy in Niamey, Robert Tate, said, “We’ve gotten several unconfirmed reports that he is in the custody of the insurgents.”

Late Thursday, a colonel who claimed to represent the coup leaders said on state media that they had decided to suspend the Constitution and dissolve the nation’s institutions, news agencies reported.

 
The president had allegedly been taking unpopular anti-democratic actions of late, so the military may claim to be protecting democracy. Food shortages due to US and regional sanctions had destabilized the government, along with opposition protests. It’s unclear how this development might affect the security of the country’s large uranium deposits, if at all.

We have to be careful here in analyzing the situation because as we saw with the 2009 Honduras coup, the pro-coup people tend to spin the situation to claim the democratically-elected leader was going to become a dictator without military intervention. I don’t know if there’s a possibility that some foreign powers might be backing this coup to gain control over the uranium mines, but there are often allegations of that sort of thing when military coups occur. I’ll look into it more.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

Torture him or he won’t talk!

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Oh, wait, never mind. Regarding the Christmas Day underwear bomber in civilian custody, “Official Says Terrorism Suspect Is Cooperating,” just like he was right after he was arrested.

As I said in a previous post, Republicans suddenly seem to think that civilian courts and regular interrogation for terrorists are somehow not good enough, even though we’ve been doing it that way effectively for decades. It’s absurd.

Glenn Greenwald shows just how absurd it really is:

To see how radical our establishment consensus in this area has become, just consider two facts. First, look at the Terrorism policies of what had previously been the most right-wing administration in America’s history: the Reagan administration. In this post yesterday, Larry Johnson does quite a good job of documenting how Terrorism by Islamic radicals had been a greater problem in the 1980s than it is now. There was the 1983 bombing of our Marine barracks in Lebanon, a 1982 and 1984 bombing of Jewish sites in Argentina, numerous plane hijackings, the blowing up of a Pan Am jet, the Achille Lauro seizure, and what the State Department called “a host of spectacular, publicity-grabbing events that ultimately ended in coldblooded murder” (many masterminded by Abu Nidal).

Despite that, read the official policy of the Reagan Administration when it came to treating Terrorists, as articulated by the top Reagan State Department official in charge of Terrorism policies, L. Paul Bremer, in a speech he entitled “Counter-Terrorism: Strategies and Tactics:”

Another important measure we have developed in our overall strategy is applying the rule of law to terrorists. Terrorists are criminals. They commit criminal actions like murder, kidnapping, and arson, and countries have laws to punish criminals. So a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are — criminals — and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law against them.

 
It was also Ronald Reagan who signed the Convention Against Torture in 1988 — after many years of countless, horrific Terrorist attacks — which not only declared that there are “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever” justifying torture, but also required all signatory countries to “ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law” and — and Reagan put it — “either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.” And, of course, even George W. Bush — at the height of 9/11-induced Terrorism hysteria — charged attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid with actual crimes and processed him through our civilian courts.

How much clearer evidence can there be of how warped and extremist we’ve become on these matters? The express policies of the right-wing Ronald Reagan — “applying the rule of law to terrorists”; delegitimizing Terrorists by treating them as “criminals”; and compelling the criminal prosecution of those who authorize torture — are now considered on the Leftist fringe. Merely advocating what Reagan explicitly adopted as his policy — “to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law against” Terrorists — is now the exclusive province of civil liberties extremists.

And there you have it, folks, Ronald Reagan was a radical leftist president endangering Americans, according to the Republicans in Washington.

This post was originally published on Starboard Broadside.

Party-switching has consequences

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U.S. Rep. Parker Griffith (R-AL-05), who switched parties two weeks ago after serving just under a year as a conservative Democrat in the House, is facing consequences. His consultants immediately bailed, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has asked for their $1 million back from the 2008 cycle, and today almost all of his Congressional staff resigned in protest, just in time for a the 2010 session of Congress to begin.

Oh and Republican activists don’t like him and plan to do anything to keep him from surviving the primary this year. Smart decision there, Congressman.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

New plans for Yemen

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Britain has announced new joint plans with the US and Yemen and a UN proposal, all of which would go toward managing threats originating in Yemen, Somalia, and the Indian Ocean:

The British government said Sunday that Prime Minister Gordon Brown and U.S. President Barack Obama had agreed to fund a counterterrorism police unit in Yemen to tackle the rising terrorist threat from the country.

Brown’s Downing Street Office said the United Kingdom and the United States had also agreed to increase support for Yemen’s coast guard operation. Pirates operating in the waters between Somalia and Yemen have seized four ships in the last week.

Downing Street said Brown and Obama will push the U.N. Security Council to create a larger peacekeeping force for Somalia.

The British government unveiled its plans in the wake of the thwarted Christmas Day bombing of a passenger plane bound for Detroit.

 
While Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is facing a tough election in May, has been pushing heavily in the past week for more international efforts to combat these threats, a US official made it sound like the administration might have been taken by surprise to some degree by the announcement late tonight (morning there). The US has agreed to a British-led conference on addressing radicalism in Yemen.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

House Dem switches parties

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Maybe’s it’s not surprising, but it’s still interesting that Rep. Parker Griffith (AL-05) switched to the Republican Party today from the Democrats. It’s interesting because he was only elected in 2008, so he’s no long-timer who’s been abandoned by the party. What is most annoying is that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) spent over $1 million in the 2008 cycle to elect this traitor who didn’t deliver much of anything in his first year in office for Democrats and will now deliver even less before probably going down in defeat in the Republican primary this year. They have formally requested that he repay the money, though obviously the time and energy spent there in 2008 is lost.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

Have we accomplished anything in Afghanistan?

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Proponents of the second escalation of US troops in Afghanistan still insist there’s something tangible we’re fighting there for and that we’re protecting. With every passing day, I find this harder and harder to believe. Recently, for example, I argued that with no viable state funding source, the US could be underwriting the Afghan Army for years and years with no end in sight — unless we just stop. This raises the question of why we should keep doing it right now.

Some surge supporters have specifically cited women’s rights as a reason for the US not to leave Afghanistan now. Well, welcome to 2009 because that argument stopped being legitimate a few years back since the US-backed Afghan government has been doing its damnedest to roll back any ephemeral gains that women made after the fall of the Taliban government in 2001. Most blatantly has been the approval of a bill legalizing marital rape, but it’s just been one drop in the bucket. From Meteor Blades for DailyKos last week:

After the fall of the Taliban everyone wanted to come and work for women’s rights, they were proud to say they were here to help Afghan women. Slowly, slowly this disappeared. Maybe the international community saw that we had two or three women in the cabinet, and thought, it’s ok, now they have their rights. But we have lost everything, from those cabinet positions to the donor attention. Women are not a priority for our own government or the international community. We’ve been forgotten.

   —Shinkai Karokhail, member of parliament, Kabul, June 4, 2009

 
The international Human Rights Watch has published a devastating 96-page report on the situation for women in Afghanistan. “We Have the Promises of the World”: Women’s Rights in Afghanistan explores the reality of everyday life for Afghan women, somewhat improved since the Taliban was forced out of the government, but still rife with intimidation, forced marriage of young girls, rape, including gang rape, and murder, including assassination of high-level women activists. Police and courts and other government machinery is still quite hostile to women, and not just in back-country areas or those where the Taliban has made a resurgence.

 
There’s a lot more in his piece on the HRW report and none of it looks good. Yes, it will almost certainly worsen if we leave, but this is a no-win situation. I don’t advocate simply abandoning the women of Afghanistan, but we’re not doing much to help them as it is right now. And the folks at Human Rights Watch don’t expect the US to focus enough attention on women under the new strategy. That means we’re betraying the women even without leaving, as we’ve been doing to the Afghan people at large ever since the invasion. But I don’t think anyone can legitimately make the argument anymore that we shouldn’t leave because we would be abandoning the women of Afghanistan. No, it’s too late to say that. We’ve already abandoned them.

So, have we accomplished anything positive and enduring in Afghanistan since 2001? Because we can cross women’s rights off the list.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.