Tag Archives: Obama Administration

Kurds say US airstrikes have begun in Iraq tonight

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In an effort likely aimed at rescuing 50,000 starving Yazidi Kurd civilians trapped by ISIS on Mount Sinjar, Kurdish commanders say the U.S. has started airstrikes tonight on ISIS positions, in coordination with Kurdish peshmerga troops. The mountain, which is a Yazidi holy site near the Syrian border, is outside the normal zone of control of the Kurdish Regional Government and is virtually surrounded by the forces of Islamic State (of Syria & Iraq), following the recent Kurdish retreats.

From the New York Times:

An announcement on Kurdish television of what was described as an American intervention prompted street celebrations and horn-honking by residents of towns under siege by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Anwar Haji Osman, deputy minister of the pesh merga, the Kurdish military force, said in the televised statement that his forces had been in contact with the Americans and that the bombings had been carried out by fighter jets.

Kurdish officials said the bombings had initially targeted ISIS fighters who had seized two towns, Gwer and Mahmour, near the main Kurdish city of Erbil. A top Iraqi official in Baghdad close to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said that the Americans had consulted with the Iraqi government Thursday night about starting the campaign, the government had agreed and the bombing had begun.

 

Location of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. (Credit: Urutseg on Wikimedia)

Location of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. (Credit: Urutseg on Wikimedia)

The Pentagon is denying the reports of U.S. airstrikes there — though the Obama Administration has confirmed plans to drop food and supplies for the refugees — and tried to shift credit on to the Turkish military or Iraqi Air Force. While Turkey’s foreign minister did announce a food drop via helicopter, the government has denied conducting any airstrikes.

And although Iraq’s airforce has indeed been conducting airstrikes, they have already proven themselves far too incompetent to be responsible for the precision strikes near Sinjar. Iraqi airstrikes didn’t even make it past day 1 without indiscriminately obliterating big clusters of people who weren’t the intended target because the air force lacks the training — and desire — to be more careful or conscientious about their target selection. Killing 50 prisoners from your own side, while trying to liberate them by way of airstrikes, is not a smooth move.

The likeliest scenario is that this is a United States humanitarian intervention air campaign to try to rescue the Yazidis, a shrinking minority sect who have faced full-blown extermination campaigns by various factions more than 70 times in history. (Update, 8/8/14: The United States confirmed Friday morning that they had initiated airstrikes against ISIS missile launchers that were threatening Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish Regional Government. President Obama vowed to defend Erbil, a longtime U.S. ally city in northeastern Iraq, from any efforts by ISIS to move on it.)

In other news, the town of Qaraqosh also has fallen to ISIS and Christians are having to flee as the Kurdish Peshmerga troops fell back again. The town was one of the big centers of Iraq’s Christian populations. Earlier today, the UN claimed that the 50,000 trapped Yazidis were successfully and safely broken out, but US and most UK media outlets (following the lead of the US government) say they are still there. On another front, newly ISIS-aligned rebel forces in Syria struck at Lebanese military posts on the border, in retaliation for their failure to stop Hezbollah’s cross-border activities in support of the Syrian regime.

More Gitmo detainees slated for release, but stuck

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Another round of Guantanamo detainees cleared for release remains held by the U.S., even after deals were made with host countries to take them. In the past, the problem has been a lack of countries willing to resettle the released prisoners. I discussed that difficulty in depth when the last of the mistakenly captured Uighur detainees were freed at the end of 2013.

The U.S. will only release detainees to nations that can provide a safe place for them to live, so they often can’t be repatriated to their home countries (e.g. China or Saudi Arabia) due to hostile governments who want to punish them separately from the U.S. treatment. They also can’t be resettled in the U.S. because there is too much political opposition, even when their lawyers vouch for them being perfectly safe.

But the difficulties are usually overcome when the U.S. signs a deal to resettle the detainees somewhere safe in exchange for various goodies and benefits granted to the host country. That’s no longer the case, according to the new revelations, which indicated that Uruguay had completed a deal with the United States earlier this year to take more of the released prisoners, and then we didn’t let them go after all.

The reason for the delay – now, at least – seems to be the backlash from the Obama’s Administration’s unscheduled deal trading five Taliban detainees, who were not cleared for release, to Qatar, for the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a U.S. prisoner of war held by the Taliban. The action, which did not involve detainees deemed harmless, was taken without notifying Congress beforehand as expected.

This backlash has also complicated things further by the vengeful and shortsighted decision of House Republicans to insert a provision into a major military spending bill that would make everyone at Guantanamo Bay a permanent prisoner forever with no ability for the President to transfer any of them, anywhere, at any time. It remains to be seen if that provision will become law, although it seems unlikely. But it demonstrates an extreme misplacing of priorities to hold people indefinitely without charge, including those the government has decided should not have been detained to begin with.

May 27, 2014 – Arsenal For Democracy 85

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Topics are net neutrality, Idaho, US political reform, Afghanistan withdrawal. People: Bill and Sarah.
AFD-logo-470

Discussion Points:

– Why does net neutrality matter?
– Should the Democratic Party in states like Idaho and Texas focus on candidate recruitment or party building? Should Congress have smaller House districts?
– What will happen to Afghanistan after the U.S. pulls troops out by 2016?

Part 1 – Net Neutrality:
Part 1 – Net Neutrality – AFD 85
Part 2 – US Political Reform:
Part 2 – US Political Reform – AFD 85
Part 3 – Afghanistan:
Part 2 – Afghanistan – AFD 85

To get one file for the whole episode, we recommend using one of the subscribe links at the bottom of the post.

Related links

– AFD: The loss of net neutrality will change everything (here’s why)
– NYT: FCC: New Net Neutrality Rules
– NYT Editorial: Creating a Two-Speed Internet
– Mother Jones: The Idaho GOP Gubernatorial Debate Was Total Chaos
– Reuters: Obama plans to end U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan by 2016
– AFD: France announces indefinite Sahel deployment

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iTunes Store Link: “Arsenal for Democracy by Bill Humphrey”

And don’t forget to check out The Digitized Ramblings of an 8-Bit Animal, the video blog of our announcer, Justin.

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Why Brunei? How a tiny, anti-gay monarchy became a U.S. ally.

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brunei-map-ciaSecretary of State John Kerry and the Obama Administration are now (justifiably, I’d say, at this point) taking huge heat for trying to cement a major alliance with the podunk Southeast Asian absolute monarchy of Brunei.

President Obama himself had been scheduled to travel to Brunei last fall during the trip to Indonesia, which the government shutdown canceled. Last year, he called the Sultan “a key leader in the Southeast Asia region and also widely respected around the world.”

Outrage has been stirred up with the long-planned launch in April by the government of a phased rollout for an elaborate new penal code with extreme religious conservatism based in hardline Sharia Law interpretations. In particular, U.S. LGBT activists in California are furious over the draconian anti-gay provisions and have been organizing boycotts against local Brunei state investments.

But the anti-gay problem is just the tip of the horrible, no good, very bad legal iceberg for the monarchy with fewer residents than Boston. At least a fifth of the country’s population is non-Muslim, which is now punishable with death by flogging. Interfaith marriages are now adultery, punishable with death by stoning. Breaking the laws of Brunei while outside the country (i.e. in neighboring Malaysia, also located on the island of Borneo) is also to be punishable under Brunei rules.

So why has the U.S. State Department been trying so enthusiastically to secure a partnership with the Sultanate of Brunei and its ironically named Abode of Peace?

Because it’s got a ton of natural gas and oil relative to its size (35th biggest oil exporter and 26th biggest gas exporter in the world), it’s an original member of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement, it’s strategically located on the South China Sea coast, it’s been a counterterrorism partner since 2001 … and I guess they weren’t expecting it to go way off the deep end suddenly like this.

But really, I think the warning signs should have been there. Generous oil-funded social welfare policies aside, Brunei has not been cool people for quite some time now. Their human rights abuses, near total lack of civil rights, and obvious authoritarianism were pretty well known before now. The former British protectorate and past regional sea empire has been ruled by one dynasty with a pretty ironclad fist for six centuries.

Some of the pretend constitution’s provisions have been ignored for so long by the monarchy that the country hadn’t even gained independence (1984) at the time they were suspended formally, in the 1960s. The safe money would have been on further regression, not a dramatic improvement, for all the signs the world has been picking up from Brunei in the past decade.

One of those signs? According to the Boston Globe, it should have been the 2013 global human rights report from… drumroll please… the U.S. State Department:

…the State Department’s 2013 global human rights report criticized Brunei for its restrictions on religious freedom; exploitation of foreign workers; and limitations of the freedom of the press, assembly, and association as “the most prevalent human rights problems.”

It went on to mention the adoption of the new legal code based on religious Sharia law but noted that “the effect of the law will not be clear until it is implemented, which was scheduled to begin in phases starting in April 2014.”

 
Nobody could have predicted…

But it seems that finishing a free trade deal with such a pivotal player was too much to pass up. It’s interesting that nearly 600 years after Brunei rose to power by controlling water trade and coastal ports in the dense commercial shipping zone not far from the Spice Islands, it’s leveraging the exact same strategic economic power to do whatever it wants. I guess it’s true what they say!

Feds announce first list of colleges under investigation for harassment/violence mishandling

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Today, for the first time ever, the Feds have released a complete list of schools under investigation for their (mis)handling of sexual violence and harassment complaints.

Previously the Department of Education’s policy was to wait until someone asked about a specific school to confirm or deny whether there was any investigation, which obviously isn’t very efficient or transparent. The change is part of the ongoing push by the Obama Administration to combat sexual violence against women in college.

A complete list of the 55 schools nationwide currently under investigation, organized by state, is at the bottom of this post.

The Massachusetts schools under investigation (for our many Bay State readers) are: Amherst College, B.U., Emerson, Harvard (undergrad & law school), & UMass Amherst.

While I should note that these investigations may find the complaints without merit, I would also stress much more strongly that, in light of the notorious track record so many schools (including some of those Massachusetts schools I just mentioned) and the sheer volume of inquiries schools launch every year, it is probably far more likely that this is the tip of the problem iceberg rather than some false witch-hunt, for basically all the schools on this list.

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US widens Uganda military op, despite anti-gay law

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uganda-flagDespite President Obama’s strong condemnation of the recent anti-gay law in Uganda, the United States has decided anyway to once again substantially ramp up its military assistance to the country — including sending 150 more troops — in their efforts to track down and neutralize the Uganda-originated regional threat of the LRA rebel organization, which has fled to (and destabilized) other nearby countries.

From the New York Times yesterday:

President Obama is sending more troops and military aircraft to Uganda as part of a long-running effort to hunt down Joseph Kony, the fugitive rebel commander who is believed to have been hiding in the jungles of central Africa for years, a Defense Department official said on Sunday.

The president is sending several CV-22 Osprey aircraft, along with 150 Air Force Special Operations forces and other airmen, to join the American troops already in the region to help the Ugandan government find Mr. Kony.

The escalation, first reported on Sunday by The Washington Post, does not change the nature of the United States’ military presence on the ground in central Africa. American forces will continue to advise and assist their counterparts in the African Union’s military task force tracking Mr. Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army across Uganda, Central African Republic, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Americans are forbidden to fight the L.R.A. themselves except in self-defense.

 
This continues a lengthening partnership started by President George W. Bush and significantly increased several times by President Obama. Here’s an excerpt from a previous post I wrote on the subject back in April 2010, after an 18-month military campaign across the region that cut the LRA’s size in half:

Uganda’s government, armed and assisted by the United States with “millions of dollars of military support, namely, trucks, fuel and contracted airplanes,” is hunting down the transnational Lord’s Resistance Army […]

 
You’ll notice it’s essentially the same as the beginning of this post, except the mission was somewhat smaller before, and that was four years ago.

One wonders how much of the purported accomplishments of these missions is greatly exaggerated. In that time, the LRA has doubtless kidnapped many fresh child soldiers to re-bolster his ranks. Kony himself remains nowhere to be found, with only rumors of his location pinpointed by the swathes of genocidal rampages that follow in his path as he throws matches into post-colonial tinderboxes of ethnic and religious tensions. He’s bad. But is this the right approach to end the threat?

Observers have previously tied specific U.S.-supported operations against Kony to his revenge-based slaughters of totally random, uninvolved villages in the region. These attacks are meant to “punish” Uganda and the United States for its actions. For example:

In December 2008 [under George W. Bush], Africom, the American military command for Africa, helped plan an attack on Mr. Kony’s camp in Congo. But Mr. Kony, having apparently been tipped off, escaped before the Ugandan helicopter gunships even took off. His army is believed to have killed hundreds of nearby villagers in revenge, leaving behind scorched huts.

 
And I thought we were going to pull back on this aid, in light of the anti-gay law — not increase it. Just last month President Obama was threatening to pull the plug:

Obama suggested that the Ugandan president — a key regional ally for both the United States and the European Union — risks damaging his country’s ties with Washington if he signs the bill into law.

“As we have conveyed to President Museveni, enacting this legislation will complicate our valued relationship with Uganda,” Obama said.

 
Guess that was a bluff? I find it all very distasteful.

Helpful reminder from The Globalist Research Center (where I work) as to whom this military assistance is going — beyond even the gay persecution concerns:

With the ousting of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in the Arab Spring revolts of 2011, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni is now Africa’s fifth-longest-serving national leader. Mubarak and Gaddafi had been in office for 29 and 42 years, respectively, at the time of their ouster.

Sworn in as president on January 29, 1986, Museveni has held the post for almost 28 years so far. He was once hailed by Western governments as a champion of equality and democracy — and rewarded with generous aid as a result. However, Museveni’s long tenure has led to an erosion of Ugandan democracy.

 
Will Central Africa’s problems really be solved by bringing more troops and helicopter gunships to a dictator who has held office for nearly three decades?

The Fiscal Cliff Deal (and What It Means for Boehner)

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So the House of Representatives passed the New Year’s Fiscal Cliff Deal that the Senate passed in the middle of the night by a large margin, a few weeks after Speaker John Boehner’s unilateral “Plan B” proposal failed abysmally because neither the House Democrats nor his own Republican Majority were interested. So instead of the conservative Republicans getting a pretty good deal, they had to sit and watch in impotent rage as Speaker Boehner, 81 other Republicans, and nearly all the House Democrats held and passed a vote on a pretty damn great deal for the Democratic White House.

Here’s the quick summary of what Democrats got:
It’s a pretty good deal (for us). No changes to entitlement benefits (i.e. Social Security or Medicare), income taxes go back up to Clinton levels for the super-wealthy (individuals making over $400k/yr, couples making over $450k/yr), everyone else’s income taxes remain at the Bush Tax Cuts levels, unemployment insurance benefits are extended after expiring a few days back, all scheduled “sequester” spending cuts are delayed for 2 more months, milk prices are stabilized, and there’s some delay on a Medicare payment restructuring plan with regards to doctor compensation (but I don’t know much about that). The payroll taxes will roll back up to at least 2008 levels (which helps Social Security’s solvency), which was theoretically always supposed to happen eventually, since the cuts were a short-term stimulus. Democrats only conceded about $200 billion over ten years in potential revenues on the marginal incomes between $200k/$250k and $400k/$450k, which is not that big a problem in the grand scheme. I guess this means there’s a new tax bracket, which is fine by me. There’s also no resolution on the next debt ceiling raise that will need to happen in a few months, but that wouldn’t have been likely in an 11th Hour (or 13th Hour?) deal anyway, and it wasn’t urgent.

About those Spending Cuts:
If this were still going to be the ultra-obstructionist, big-Republican-majority 112th Congress we’ve had since January 2011, it would be a big problem that the spending cuts were delayed by 2 months, because it would just manufacture another artificial crisis/showdown in two months. But the 113th Congress is sworn in on Thursday of this week, and that means a new calculus, even if the Republicans still control the House. I think the 2 month postponement only helps the Democrats, not the Republicans. It’s now more on our turf to decide. Tuesday was the last opportunity for House Republicans to use their big 2010-won majority to shape cuts, and they blew it. Their majority isn’t as big once the 113th Congress is sworn in on Thursday. If Boehner and the remaining GOP moderates keep caving, Pelosi, Reid, and the White House will be calling the shots on things like spending cuts.

Granted, that’s obviously a big if. So let’s examine whether or not that is likely to happen. The 113th Congress will start with a Republican majority with only a 23 seat edge. I think that’s probably in the neighborhood of the size of the northeast/northern Republicans and the small cadre of people who still back Boehner to the hilt. They won’t vote with the Democrats on a lot of stuff, but they’ll vote with them on quite a few national-scale priorities if Boehner asks them to. Boehner won’t get voted out as speaker, but he has clearly lost all control of his caucus. Previously he could control his caucus to some extent, so he could be obstructionist and fight the White House and still get things. But now he can’t deliver Republican majorities for anyone’s bills. His only power play now — to demonstrate any level of control over the situation and to leave any kind of mark in his tenure as speaker — is to show that he can get some things, or rather any things, through. (Because at the end of the day, he’s still not one of the Burn Everything Down tea party Republicans, and he probably thinks of himself as a statesman.) Those things will from now on be designed by the White House and by the Senate Democratic Leadership, and they will only pass with Democratic help in the House. If the filibuster gets reformed, the Senate Democrats will have an even easier time passing legislation to send to the House. So Boehner will have to choose between trying and repeatedly failing to pass conservative legislation because neither the House Democrats nor the House Republican Conservatives will vote for it or trying to persuade House Democrats to vote with him and two dozen Republicans on centrist policies. And some Republicans will agree to do this either because they are actually moderates or because they realize that they are more likely to retain the Republican majority in 2014 by being able to claim some amount of credit and cooperation on accomplishing some stuff than by preventing anything from getting passed for two years. A lot of the few remaining folks in the Boehner loyalist cadre were veterans of the Gingrich Majority of the 1990s that almost collapsed in the 1998 & 2000 elections due to inability to pass almost anything and get it signed into law. The Republicans already got dinged badly in the 2012 House elections (and would probably have lost their majority were it not for favorable redistricting by the state legislators elected in the 2010 Republican wave) because Americans saw them as uncooperative bordering on saboteurs. Right direction or wrong direction, Americans nearly always prefer action in some direction over action in no direction.

About that Debt Ceiling:
The debt ceiling, untouched in this middle-of-the-night deal, is going to need to be raised again in, I guess, March or thereabouts. I’m not totally sure of the timeline but it’s not all that important here. It’ll be after the spending cuts postponement is up in 2 months. But it’s another point where the 2011 Republicans would have seized the opportunity to create a crisis and force a showdown right up to the brink of disaster. They did that in 2011. But the Republican majority and Speaker Boehner in particular won’t have that kind of leverage anymore.

I think the world-ending showdowns from 2011 and 2012 are probably over for the next two years or will be far, far less frequent. Once again, Boehner’s majority will be a lot smaller starting Thursday (only a 23 seat edge) in the 113th Congress, and he no longer has influence over most of that majority. He and some of his supporters would really prefer not to bring down the government and economy, even if the conservative wing is claiming to be just fine with that outcome. Since he’s never going to reach a deal that could win a Republican majority and Senate and White House passage, and will in fact embarrass himself every time he tries (as happened with the “Plan B” proposal), he no longer has an incentive to futz around trying to get such a deal — and the White House knows that. No leverage for him, now. Likelier scenario is that he bangs his chest a bit and then puts together a deal with the Senate Majority and White House that the House Minority Democrats will back. And then he, his merry band of two or three dozen Republicans who aren’t complete maniacs on the debt ceiling, and the House Democrats will cobble together a slim majority and pass a deal. The White House, I believe, has already said that they will exercise the Amendment 14 Section 4 option (a unilateral raise) if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling. They don’t want to do that — it’s still an open question has to whether or not the Courts would accept it and no one really wants to find out the hard way — but they will do it if they have to. So he can negotiate or not negotiate, but the debt ceiling will be raised either way, so it’s in his interest to negotiate the best deal he can get, given that this White House would prefer a deal to that extreme option.

One final unavoidable caveat to all of this:
Never underestimate the power of the current crop of Republicans to cut off their noses to spite their faces. All of what I’m saying could be woefully over-optimistic and naive. They’ve shown on more than a few occasions that they will go to all kinds of unprecedented extremes unseen in the modern era even when it hurts them. They’re a bit fundamentalist in that regard. I’m arguing on a questionable assumption that at least a couple dozen of them (including speaker Boehner) are still acting on a rational self-interest basis. And you know what happens when you assume…