The House of Representatives voted 352-65 on Wednesday for a bill that threatens to ban the social media platform TikTok. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act would ban TikTok from app stores unless its Chinese parent company ByteDance gives up ownership within six months.
The vote moved America a little bit closer to the Chinese-style online censorship that TikTok's opponents decry. Whether they acknowledge it or not, TikTok's opponents are using the same arguments that Chinese and Iranian censors can—and do—use to justify cracking down on social media in their own countries.
Chinese authorities have long maintained a "Great Firewall" over the country's internet, driven by the idea that the success of American tech companies is a threat to their "cyber sovereignty." The Iranian government, too, has begun to embrace the idea of "internet sovereignty," banning foreign social media networks in favor of Iranian-controlled platforms.
American lawmakers have started to push the same notions. In a March 5 joint statement, Republican and Democratic members of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party claimed that foreign control of a social media platform is a threat to U.S. sovereignty.
"America's foremost adversary has no business controlling a dominant media platform in the United States," committee chairman Rep. Mike Gallagher (R–Wis.) said. Ranking Member Raja Krishnamoorthi (D–Ill.) added that the TikTok bill will protect Americans "from the digital surveillance and influence operations of regimes that could weaponize their personal data against them."
Foreign censors could rightfully make the same complaints about American social media. The U.S. government has infamously prodded tech companies to hand over user data, both overtly and covertly. The U.S. military and intelligence services even use advertising data to track potential targets.
It's true that TikTok's content moderation falls in line with the wishes of Chinese censors. But again, foreign critics can say the same about U.S.-based social media companies.
The Biden administration has used the specter of "disinformation" to push social media moderation in line with their policies. Meta has censored Middle Eastern content that opposes U.S. foreign policy, while Twitter has created loopholes for the U.S. military to run its own propaganda accounts.
Of course, American law (unlike Chinese or Iranian law) limits how much the government can censor social media. Last year, courts banned and then unbanned the Biden administration from pressuring social media moderators. But the decision ultimately lies in Washington; it's not like European or Latin American voters have any say over the U.S. Supreme Court.
Competition is the strongest force keeping the internet free. Whenever users find a topic banned on TikTok, they can escape to Twitter or Instagram to discuss the censored content. And when Twitter or Instagram enforce politically motivated censorship on a different topic, users can continue that discussion on TikTok.
Forcing TikTok under American control is a way to block that escape route. Instead of protecting Americans from Chinese censorship, it would bring Chinese-style censorship home.
The post TikTok's Opponents Want Chinese-style Censorship in America appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Iranians went to the polls on Friday—or didn't—for the first time since a women-led uprising against religious rule rocked the nation. Authorities reported a record-low turnout of 27 percent, even after they extended voting for an additional two hours, amidst widespread disillusionment and calls for an election boycott.
The country had suffered months of unrest following the death of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for not complying with the country's mandatory hijab rule in September 2022. Although the streets have calmed down, it was the most significant challenge to the Islamic Republic yet.
The Iranian government was clearly hoping that the parliamentary elections would be an opportunity to show that Iranians had renewed their trust in the system. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei recently argued that voting was an act of resistance against the Islamic Republic's enemies. Banners in public places stated that "strong turnout = strong Iran."
Instead, the election became an opportunity for Iranians to show that they were still fed up with the system. Jailed women's rights activist Narges Mohammadi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, called on Iranians to avoid the "sham elections" in order to show the "illegitimacy of the Islamic Republic."
Even many figures from within the Iranian system declared their intent to boycott. A group of 300 political figures, including former members of parliament, signed a petition stating that they would not participate in an "engineered" vote.
The news site Khabaronline cited a poll in the run-up to the election projecting a 36 percent turnout. Authorities ordered the article deleted. The final turnout number turned out to be ten percent lower than the offending poll.
Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has had a mix of democratic and theocratic institutions. Election turnout has rarely fallen below 50 percent and has sometimes reached as high as 70 percent. Iranian "leaders crave constantly high turnout as evidence of the people's love of the revolution, but…loathe the results that high turnout always brings," in the words of political scientist Shervin Malekzadeh.
Over the past few years, the government has dropped the pretense of caring. During protests in November 2019, authorities launched a crackdown that killed hundreds of people, then banned thousands of candidates from the February 2020 parliamentary election. A record low 42 percent of voters turned out that year, a result that the Iranian government blamed on coronavirus and "negative propaganda."
Even Hassan Rouhani, who was President of Iran during the November 2019 crackdown, has been banned from running for office. He joins a long list of elected Iranian leaders who have outlived their usefulness to the system, including former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was in office during the 2009 protest wave and crackdown.
Ahmadinejad and Rouhani have both refashioned themselves as dissidents.
"Something should have been done to make these elections more competitive. Instead, they limited people's opportunity to participate," Rouhani said in an August 2023 interview. "Those who are in favor of minority rule over the majority should know that they are threatening the future of the system and the revolution. It's not so easy to call this system an Islamic republic anymore."
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]]>A Russian defector is assassinated in Spain. The Chinese government offers bounties for dissidents who take refuge in foreign countries. The Canadian government fingers Indian officials for murdering a Sikh activist in British Columbia. What do these incidents have in common? They represent acts of "transnational repression," a form of authoritarianism that reaches across national frontiers and has becoming disturbingly common in recent years.
"More than 20 percent of the world's national governments have reached beyond their borders since 2014 to forcibly silence exiled political activists, journalists, former regime insiders, and members of ethnic or religious minorities," finds a Freedom House report released in February. "According to the new data, 25 countries' governments were responsible for 125 incidents of physical transnational repression in 2023 alone, including assassinations, abductions, assaults, detentions, and unlawful deportations."
Last year enjoyed the dubious distinction, the report adds, of featuring the first documented cases of transnational repression by Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, El Salvador, Myanmar, Sierra Leone, and Yemen. Well, it's only fair that every regime gets an opportunity to terrorize a critic or political opponent in another country, instead of leaving all the fun to the year's main culprits: Russia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Turkmenistan, and China.
Along those lines, recent weeks saw the assassination of Maksim Kuzminov, the Russian helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine in 2023 in protest of his country's invasion of that nation. Russian media reported that military intelligence issued a kill order for Kuzminov, which, it seems, was carried out.
"Kuzminov, who was reportedly living in Spain under a false identity, was found dead in the Spanish town of Villajoyosa, near Alicante, on Feb. 13. Police said attackers shot the former pilot six times before running him over with a car," reports Politico. "Sources in Spanish intelligence services…believe Moscow hired hitmen from outside Spain to carry out the assassination."
China's overseas efforts are broader and more overt in their efforts to target dissidents.
"Fox Hunt is a sweeping bid by General Secretary Xi to target Chinese nationals whom he sees as threats and who live outside China, across the world," FBI Director Christopher Wray charged in a 2020 speech. "Hundreds of the Fox Hunt victims that they target live right here in the United States, and many are American citizens or green card holders."
Chinese officials threaten dissidents' family members who remain in China, but also pressure those overseas through "police stations" covertly established in foreign countries and intended to convey the impression that the regime reaches everywhere. U.S. officials busted one such outpost in New York City last spring.
China's government has a fixation on veterans of Hong Kong's democracy movement, offering bounties of $1 million H.K. ($127,730 U.S.) in December for assistance with the capture of dissidents who sought overseas refuge.
India's government, for its part, stands accused by Canadian officials of orchestrating the June killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Accused of terrorism by India in pursuit of a Sikh homeland, Nijjar had a bounty on his head and was shot dead outside a temple in British Columbia.
Just months later, U.S. officials claimed to have thwarted a similar attempt on American soil against Sikh separatist leader Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.
Last year was a busy year for international thugs and assassins, it appears. But if we go back just a bit further, we find other incidents, such as the gruesome 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabian agents in Istanbul, or the botched but lethal attack the same year on Sergei Skripal in the U.K. by Russian agents using the Novichok nerve poison (one of the Putin regime's favorite calling cards). There is a frightening abundance of examples from which to choose.
"Between 2014 and 2023, Freedom House has recorded a total of 1,034 direct, physical incidents of transnational repression committed by 44 origin-country governments in 100 target countries," observes Freedom House. "The governments of China, Turkey, Tajikistan, Russia, and Egypt rank as the most prolific perpetrators of transnational repression overall since 2014. China's regime on its own accounts for 25 percent of all documented incidents of transnational repression."
Part of the problem, unmentioned by Freedom House, is that relatively free democratic governments can compound the problem with their own misbehavior. While Canada, the U.S., and their allies aren't known for poisoning overseas dissidents (at least, not as a matter of course that they want publicized), they do sometimes bend laws to target inconvenient people in other countries. The U.S. federal government, aided by its British allies, has tormented journalist Julian Assange for years with arrest and extradition efforts over what Amnesty International describes as "politically motivated charges" under the Espionage Act. His "crimes," points out the Freedom of the Press Foundation, are "things journalists at news outlets around the country do every day."
That sets a precedent on which authoritarian government can seize.
"National security laws of other countries, including the US and the UK, also have extraterritorial effect," sniffed China's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning when challenged on arrest warrants and bounties for Hong King dissidents residing in other countries. The scope of China's actions extend way beyond those of any western government in reach and severity, but she had a point.
"It's clear that governments are not being deterred from violating sovereignty and targeting dissidents living abroad," commented Freedom House's Yana Gorokhovskaia of events documented in the recent publication. "Democracies must ensure that the perpetrators of these brutal acts face real consequences. Otherwise, the use of transnational repression is likely to spread."
That's true. But if officials in relatively free countries are serious about deterring overtly authoritarian regimes from spying on, blackmailing, assaulting, kidnapping, and killing people who've taken refuge across national borders, they have to refrain from anything that even slightly resembles such behavior themselves. The end of transnational repression begins at home.
The post Report Finds Rise in Governments Targeting Dissidents Overseas appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A decade ago, the U.S. government had its dirty laundry aired by leakers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Now it's the Chinese and Iranian governments' turn. Millions of documents from a Chinese cybersecurity contractor and the Iranian court system revealing how both governments repress dissent abroad have been posted online over the past two weeks.
The techno-libertarian optimism of the early internet has given way to pessimism over the past decade, as governments around the world have developed new tools of surveillance and social control. But the latest leaks show that the internet is still a force that can turn against even the most tightly controlled police states.
After all, new repressive technologies create new paper trails for repression. And it doesn't take much for those files to become public.
On February 16, a trove of documents from Chinese cybersecurity company I-Soon was posted on GitHub, a public platform for programmers. They revealed that dozens of Chinese government agencies, from local police departments to the army, had hired I-Soon to gather information on opponents by hacking into social media platforms and foreign government databases.
The alleged targets included people from a range of regions suffering unrest: Hong Kongers, Tibetans, and Uyghurs. The United Nations has accused the Chinese government of subjecting Uyghurs to sterilization and forced labor in Xinjiang, where hundreds of thousands have been detained in "re-education camps," a process the U.S. government considers genocide.
Where foreigners saw a horror show, security contractors saw a lucrative yet difficult business opportunity. "Everyone thinks of Xinjiang like a nice big cake…but we have suffered too much there," an I-Soon employee complained in one internal email, according to The Guardian.
The Associated Press confirmed the leaks were real. Employees told the A.P. that Chinese police are investigating the identity of the leaker, and Google cybersecurity analyst John Hultquist speculated that the leak could have come from "a rival intelligence service, a dissatisfied insider, or even a rival contractor."
Inside the I-Soon offices, A.P. reporters saw Communist Party posters that read, "Safeguarding the Party and the country's secrets is every citizen's required duty."
Then, on February 20, over 3.2 million files from the Iranian court system were posted to a searchable online database by a group known as Ali's Justice, named for a Shiite Muslim saint. The files included secret orders and instructions on how to deal with some of Iran's most well-known dissidents.
Iranian prosecutors had issued a secret list of Iranian athletes living abroad who should be arrested if they ever returned to Iran, according to Iran International, an opposition TV station based outside the country. Other documents included discussions on the "management" of the family of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian woman who died in police custody after being arrested for "bad hijab" in September 2022, the BBC reported.
"The [Amini] family is still on top of the matter and they have no intention of backing down," a memo read. Iranian authorities have claimed that Amini died of a pre-existing medical condition rather than police mistreatment, and the memo predicted that it would be "very effective" if Amini's father were to "reflect" on her illnesses in a "brief interview."
State media did indeed quote Amini's father stating that his daughter had a pre-existing condition. But soon after, Amini's father publicly said that the government lied about her death. Her name quickly became the rallying cry of a nationwide uprising against religious rule.
The hacked documents also show a fair amount of paranoia and internal discord within the Iranian government, with officials accusing each other of espionage and corruption, according to the BBC and IranWire, an investigative news site based outside the country.
Like the I-Soon leaker, the exact identity of Ali's Justice is unclear. The group previously published security camera footage showing abuses inside Iranian prisoners in August 2021 and February 2022 and hacked into a TV station to broadcast anti-government messages in October 2022.
Over the past few years, Iran has suffered a spate of high-profile cyberattacks by the United States, Israel, and the Mojahedin-e Khalq, a guerrilla group with Saudi ties. In one case, a hack by Ali's Justice came within the same week as a hack by Mojahedin-e Khalq supporters. However, Ali's Justice has been careful not to tie itself to any of these foreign actors and describes itself as a group of concerned Iranian citizens.
Whether the leaks in China and Iran came out of a foreign intelligence operation, a bureaucratic struggle, or a rogue staffer with a conscience, they provide a valuable public service. (The same is true of WikiLeaks, which has been accused of taking information from Russian operatives.) Citizens around the world have gotten a glimpse into the tactics that powerful actors use to track and silence them. The surveillance has been turned against the surveillers.
The post China and Iran Have Their WikiLeaks Moment appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The drone attack that killed three Americans at a military outpost in Jordan on Sunday occurred amid confusion about the approaching craft, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
"The enemy drone approached its target at the same time a U.S. drone was also returning to base," the paper reported, leading to "some confusion over whether the incoming drone was friend or foe." It was not friendly and the attack left 40 American troop members wounded in addition to the three killed.
The three soldiers killed were Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, Specialist Kennedy Ladon Sanders, and Specialist Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, the Pentagon reported Monday.
The attack risks dragging the U.S. further into the chaos that's engulfed much of the Middle East in the months since Hamas' October attack on Israel. As Reason's Robby Soave detailed on Monday, some hawkish Republicans have unsurprisingly used Sunday's attack to call for greater bloodshed.
So far, the Biden administration seems to be resisting those calls.
"We do not seek another war. We do not seek to escalate," John Kirby, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, said Monday. "But we will absolutely do what is required to protect ourselves, to continue that mission, and to respond appropriately to these attacks."
Despite (or perhaps because of) those assurances, the continued presence of American troops in the region might unintentionally tilt toward escalation.
"The attacks underscore how much these residual U.S. deployments have entailed costs and risks far out of proportion to any positive gains they can achieve," argues Paul Pillar, a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Pillar writes that the ongoing presence of American troops in the Middle East creates the risk of escalation and is "a needless vulnerability that ought to be ended sooner rather than later."
Former President Donald Trump wants a huge tax increase on imports from China—which means, of course, that American individuals and businesses buying those goods will foot the bill.
"Privately, Trump has discussed with advisers the possibility of imposing a flat 60 percent tariff on all Chinese imports," The Washington Post reported on Sunday. That would be a significant escalation of Trump's first-term trade wars, which saw the average tariff on imports from China climb from about 3 percent to more than 12 percent (due to a variety of changes Trump imposed, including hiking tariffs on steel, aluminum, solar panels, and many industrial and consumer goods imported from China). Studies show that Americans paid roughly 93 percent of the tariff costs, despite Trump's repeated and ongoing claims that higher tariffs are a way of extracting payments from China.
Trump's plan for 60 percent tariffs on goods from China "would harm U.S. farmers, manufacturers, and consumers (especially those with low incomes); upend supply chains and impose significant costs as businesses deal with resulting fragmentation; and create a world in which the United States is increasingly left behind on the global stage," writes Erika York, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation. "It would be an abomination."
Previously, the former president floated the idea of imposing a new 10 percent tariff on all imports to the U.S., regardless of the country of origin. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Trump's chief rival for the GOP nomination, hit back against that idea during a Monday appearance on CNBC:
Donald Trump wants to tax every American with a 10% across-the-board tariff, costing families an average of $2,600 a year. They're already paying skyrocketing prices thanks to Biden and Trump's inflation. We can't afford this. pic.twitter.com/TQEj19tc1H
— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) January 29, 2024
It's definitely a bit weird to see Republican voters rushing to embrace a candidate who is vowing to hike their taxes, but that's where we are.
Elon Musk claims his company successfully implanted a device inside a human brain.
The first human received an implant from @Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well.
Initial results show promising neuron spike detection.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 29, 2024
Neuralink gained approval from the Food and Drug Administration to begin human trials last year. The company's website says it is recruiting candidates for a first clinical trial of a device that "is designed to interpret a person's neural activity, so they can operate a computer or smartphone by simply intending to move—no wires or physical movement are required."
Musk has a history of exaggeration and his claims about Neuralink should be treated skeptically until confirmed by doctors and others connected to the company's work. If true, however, this could be a very big deal, as Neuralink's tech has tremendous potential to allow individuals with physical disabilities to interact with the online world, and communicate more easily in the physical world as well.
Scenes from Virginia: One of the arguments for building a new arena and luring Washington's basketball and hockey teams across the Potomac River is that the development will generate new economic activity and tax revenue in Virginia. But the proposed legislation authorizing the project would allow the stadium authority to keep all the tax revenue generated by the new development:
If I were a Virginia taxpayer I would be upset to learn that Alexander Ovechkin's personal income tax dollars weren't going to schools or transit but instead were paid directly to his boss!
— ◥◤Kriston Capps (@kristoncapps) January 28, 2024
So taxpayers will subsidize the arena's construction with money that could be used for actual public needs, and then the new tax revenue generated by the arena (which could also be used for public needs) will be kept by the corporate entity that owns the arena. Huh, can't imagine why there's so much local opposition to that arrangement.
The post Errors and Escalations appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman weigh in on the unfolding situation along the U.S.-Mexico border and reckon with the recent deaths of three U.S. soldiers in Jordan.
01:14—Border crossing disputes at U.S.-Mexico border
19:49—U.S. soldiers killed in Jordan
29:12—Weekly Listener Question
37:39—White House halts natural gas export terminals
44:22—New Hampshire primary post-game
47:22—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"The Twisted Logic of Greg Abbott's Border Policy," by Fiona Harrigan
"Death in Jordan," by Robby Soave
"Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Doubles Down on Dangerous Claim That Immigration Is 'Invasion,'" by Ilya Somin
"Massive Migrant Reduction," by Liz Wolfe
"The War on Terror Zombie Army Has Assembled," by Matthew Petti
"The Killing of 3 American Troops Was an Avoidable Tragedy," by Matthew Petti
"Does Biden Need Congressional Authorization for His Strikes Against the Houthis?" by Ilya Somin
"What Javier Milei Could Teach Democrats and Republicans About Capitalism," by Veronique de Rugy
"Free Markets Are the Best and Fastest Way to Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions," by Ronald Bailey
"Capitalism Makes You Cleaner," by Matt Welch
"Independents Hate the Trump-Biden Rematch," by Matt Welch
"Goodbye to Haley the Hawk," by Liz Wolfe
"New Hampshire Takes Us Closer to a Trump-Biden Rematch," by Christian Britschgi
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Politics Created the Border Crisis appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>American blood has been drawn in a Middle Eastern war for the first time in a while. Iraqi guerrillas allied with Iran killed three U.S. troops and wounded dozens more along the Jordanian-Syrian border on Sunday, using an explosive drone. President Joe Biden has promised to "all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner of our choosing." Members of Congress have called for a harsh response, with some Republicans demanding a full-on war against Iran.
The government of Jordan, clearly not keen on getting dragged into the conflict, has denied that the attack happened on its side of the border. Iran shrugged off responsibility for the bombing, insisting that the issue is entirely between the United States and "resistance groups in Iraq and Syria." The Iraqi fighters may have indeed been acting on their own accord. Iraqi commander Qais al-Khazali had complained about U.S. airstrikes on Iraq in a speech last November: "You are cautious when it comes to Iranian blood, but you pay no regard to Iraqi blood. Therefore, Iraqis should teach you a lesson for what you have done."
The immediate cause of the violence is the war in Gaza, which prompted Iraqi militias to break a truce they had with the U.S. military. But this particular attack was a long time coming. The target was Tower 22, an extension of al-Tanf, a base that the U.S. military maintains in Syria for murky and confusing purposes. Over the past few years, Israeli aircraft have used al-Tanf's airspace to strike Iran's forces, and Iranian forces have struck back at the base. It was only a matter of time before Americans were dragged into the proxy war, with tragic results.
U.S. Special Forces had first set up shop in al-Tanf during the war against the Islamic State. Their plan was to support the Revolutionary Commando Army, a friendly Syrian rebel group. That project failed embarrassingly. The Revolutionary Commando Army suffered a major defeat at the hands of the Islamic State in 2016, and one of its leaders ran off with American-made guns after he was accused of drug trafficking in 2020. Kurdish-led forces elsewhere in Syria became a much more reliable partner for the U.S. military.
Meanwhile, Russia—which is allied with the Iranian and Syrian governments—agreed to enforce a 55 kilometer "deconfliction zone" around al-Tanf. The zone also included Rukban, an unofficial refugee camp built by Syrians fleeing government persecution. (The Syrian government reportedly tortured two former Rukban residents to death in October 2022.) No country wanted to take responsibility for the camp, and it took almost a decade for the U.S. military to begin providing food aid to Rukban.
Washington, however, had a different purpose for al-Tanf in mind: countering Iran and its allies. The base's location near the Iraqi-Syrian border made it valuable real estate, especially for anyone intent on breaking up the "land bridge" between Iranian allies. It also allowed the U.S. military and Israeli intelligence to listen in on Iranian communications, according to Al-Monitor, a Washington-based magazine focused on the Middle East. So the Americans stayed.
"Control of [al-Tanf] neutralized a key border crossing point on the road between Baghdad and Damascus, which forced Iran and others to cross from Iraq into Syria at a more distant border crossing to the north," former Trump administration official John Bolton declared in his 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened. "Besides, why give away territory for nothing?"
More provocatively, Israeli forces began using al-Tanf's airspace to bomb Iranian and pro-Iranian forces in Syria. (Since American aircraft often fly the same route, Syrian "air defenses can't tell the difference until it's too late," a U.S. official told Al-Monitor.) The Israeli air campaign, known as "the war between the wars," was designed to prevent Iran from moving weapons into the region in anticipation of a future war. Israel dropped more than 2,000 bombs on Syria in 2018, through "near-daily" air raids, with the direct involvement of U.S. leaders.
"The Israeli strike plans were submitted through the U.S. military chain and reviewed at CENTCOM [U.S. Central Command], usually days in advance of the strike; the strike plans outlined the purpose of the mission, the number of warplanes that would carry out the attack, and when it would occur," wrote Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Gordon in his 2022 book, Degrade and Destroy: The Inside Story of the War Against the Islamic State. "They also spelled out the routes the Israeli planes would take and the coordinates of the target that would be struck. CENTCOM would examine the request, which would also be shared with the U.S. defense secretary, who would have the final say."
It seemed like a win-win arrangement. Israel had a safe route for its bombing runs, and the United States could weaken a foreign rival without getting directly involved. But there was a problem: Iran was not stupid, and it could see that the American troops were facilitating the raids on its own troops. In retaliation for a series of Israeli attacks in October 2021, the Iranian military bombed al-Tanf the following month. No Americans were harmed at the time, but it was an ominous sign of the dangers involved.
The U.S. mission also lacked a legal mandate. Although the president arguably had a congressional mandate to fight the Islamic State, there were no legal grounds whatsoever to help Israel bomb Iranian troops. Former Trump administration official David Schenker, in a 2021 article defending the base at al-Tanf, admitted that "U.S. military officials are often loath to publicly acknowledge [their Iran-related goals] given concerns about the legal justification for America's presence in Syria."
When former President Donald Trump sought to withdraw from Syria, officials fought to keep U.S. forces in al-Tanf. Ambassador James Jeffrey, a former U.S. special envoy for Syria, admitted to "playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had" in the country. Bolton successfully pushed to have the garrison at al-Tanf counted separately from other troop deployments. The game succeeded. U.S. forces stayed until Biden took office, and the new president preferred to keep them in Syria.
Other officials and experts continued to worry that al-Tanf could become a liability. Former U.S. Air Force colonel Daniel L. Magruder Jr. called al-Tanf "strategic baggage" in an article published by the Brookings Institute a few weeks after Biden was elected. He recommended withdrawing U.S. forces in exchange for a deal to allow the refugee safe passage. The colonel warned that Russia and Iran had "acted provocatively" against al-Tanf in the past. "Would the U.S. be able to control escalation if an American were killed?" he wondered.
Three years later, Magruder's question is sadly relevant. It remains to be seen how Biden will react to the killing of the three American troops, and whether that reaction deters further violence or escalates the situation even more. But Washington can't say it wasn't warned.
The post The Killing of 3 American Troops Was an Avoidable Tragedy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The U.S. and Iran are on a collision course—and that could mean war. Iranian-backed militants launched a drone strike on a military outpost in Jordan, resulting in the deaths of three U.S. service members stationed there. The attack was a response to continued U.S. support for Israel and its war effort against Hamas, an effort that has destroyed much of Gaza and resulted in 20,000 Palestinian casualties.
President Joe Biden vowed to respond to the attack. "Have no doubt: We will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner our choosing," he tweeted Sunday afternoon.
Hawkish Republicans are already calling for open war with Iran, with Sens. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) and John Cornyn (R–Tex.) urging Biden to hit Iran hard. Their remarks drew swift rebukes from others on the right, including Tucker Carlson, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Candace Owens.
Former Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) criticized the decision to keep U.S. troops "in harm's way" all over the world without a clear mission or congressional authorization. He has a point: Doing so has endangered these soldiers' safety and U.S. national security interests. Even if it is reasonable for the government to retaliate after an attack, the best policy would be to forestall this possibility by keeping the troops out of danger in the first place.
And while the Biden administration has stood firmly behind Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu—offering only mild, occasional criticism of Netanyahu's war aims—perhaps Biden should consider whether total and unqualified support, and financial assistance, to Israel is undermining our own security.
The bottom line: The Middle East is in crisis, and the U.S. is being dragged into a broader military conflict of dubious necessity.
Biden wants the border deal, and he wants it now. The president is practically begging Democrats and Republicans to agree to legislation that would give him the authority "to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed."
The Senate's version of the current deal requires a shutdown of the border the number of illegal crossings reaches a certain threshold. At that point, migrants would be sent back to their home countries, whether or not they plan to claim asylum.
Mexico would need to agree to take back these migrants. But an even steeper challenge could be getting House Republicans on board. Former President Trump has ordered Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to nix anything short of a "perfect" border deal. Trump probably believes that he benefits politically from unrest at the border—and he's right—so the GOP has very little incentive to actually agree to anything.
In any case, the Senate border plan is a mess, and springs from profoundly un-libertarian impulses: 4,999 migrant crossings is fine, but 5,000 is too many and should trigger a shutdown of the border and automatic deportations? Congress needs to make it easier for people to come to the U.S. legally and work here. Arbitrary caps make no sense.
Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pursuing the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination after all? In a recent interview on CNN, the independent candidate again addressed the possibility that he might join up with the Libertarian Party.
"That is something that we're looking at," Kennedy told CNN's Michael Smerconish. "We have a really good, relationship with the Libertarian Party. I'm going to be speaking at the California Libertarian Party convention."
Last summer, at a time when RFK Jr. was ostensibly still running against President Joe Biden for the Democratic Party's nomination, he met with Libertarian leadership about changing parties. Angela McArdle, chair of the Libertarian Party, was clearly excited about the possibility, telling me in an interview that she was thrilled to see his political thinking evolving in a more libertarian direction. "The lockdowns and mandates seem to have stirred an awakening within him, causing him to reconsider many of his other political stances," she said.
Nevertheless, RFK Jr. opted to run as an independent candidate. The October 7 attacks on Israel further strained matters, as RFK Jr.'s unqualified support for U.S. financial assistance to Israel irked many libertarians; the Libertarian Party's X account invited his "disenfranchised" anti-war supporters to jump ship.
One possible reason for Kennedy to consider seeking the party's endorsement is ballot access. Qualifying for the ballot in all 50 states is a difficult task for an independent; as the U.S.'s largest third party, the Libertarian Party already possesses access in most states.
In other RFK Jr. news, the candidate has claimed that former President Donald Trump's campaign floated the idea last year of offering him the vice presidency.
BREAKING: Robert Kennedy Jr. says that members of President Trump's team did ask him to be Trump's Vice President for his second administration.
"People from the team have reached out to me," Kennedy said.RFK Jr. also stated, "I'm flattered President Trump would offer (that) to… pic.twitter.com/uMJ6ePI71j
— Christian (@ChristianM_74) January 29, 2024
"I would not take that job," said Kennedy, according to NewsNation. "And I'm flattered that President Trump would offer it to me, but it's not something that I'm interested in."
Scenes from Washington, D.C.: The federal government has vowed to intervene in D.C.'s crime wave, saying it will assist with carjacking cases and other violent offenses.
"This surge in law enforcement resources will build on the Department's efforts to target the individuals and organizations that are driving violent crime in the nation's capital," said Attorney General Merrick Garland. "The Justice Department will not rest until every community in our country is safe from the scourge of violent crime."
????#BREAKING: Climate activist has attack and thrown soup at the famous Mona Lisa painting in the Louvre Museum, Paris pic.twitter.com/vu3FVa1555
— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) January 28, 2024
JOE BIDEN: "In beer brew here… Huh ish issah use to make the brew beer here.. Issh Weer-fining… Oooooh Earth Rider… Thanks for the Great Lakes!" pic.twitter.com/qfHeoIxEj1
— The First (@TheFirstonTV) January 25, 2024
The post Death in Jordan appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Iran directly attacks: On Monday, Iran took credit for hitting and destroying an Israeli spy base with missiles. This is significant because it's the first time since Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel that Iran has "publicly said it's attacked an Israeli target," though Iran has, of course, been working behind the scenes to back groups like Hezbollah, which has been exchanging fire with Israeli troops on the border between Israel and Lebanon, and the Houthis, which are now at the receiving end of U.S. and British strikes after the terrorist group targeted commercial ships in the Red Sea.
Iran's actions were "in response to the Israeli assassination of a number of commanders of the IRGC and the resistance front"—meaning Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis—reports Tasnim, an Iranian news agency.
Things are heating up in the Middle East more broadly. Overnight, Iran launched an airstrike on what it claims is a Sunni militant cluster operating in Pakistan. The government of Pakistan reports that at least two children were killed and called Iran's actions an "unprovoked violation of [Pakistan's] airspace."
And Yemeni Houthis struck an American ship, the Gibraltar Eagle, on Monday. "The Yemeni armed forces consider all American and British ships and warships participating in the aggression against our country as hostile targets," said Houthi spokesman Yahya Saree. The United States is weighing whether to re-designate the Houthis as a terrorist group following dozens of strikes on commercial ships in the Red Sea (and retribution for those attacks doled out by the U.S. and allies).
Analyzing the Iowa caucuses: Former President Donald Trump "showed striking weakness in suburban and urban areas," reports Politico. "So while the data show how Trump has managed to consolidate a majority of Republican support, it also reveals his relative vulnerability among suburban and highly educated voters—raising questions about how he will win over a voting bloc that has long viewed him with skepticism and helped fuel his 2020 loss."
Still, Trump improved on his 2016 Iowa caucus showing in a major way. (If you recall, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses eight years ago, with 27.6 percent of the vote compared to Trump's 24.3 percent.) "Several dozen precincts gave Trump less than 10 percent of their caucus vote eight years ago; this year, he won 35 percent of the vote in those areas," reports Politico.
Government shutdown? Yesterday, the Senate moved forward a stopgap bill, which would temporarily stave off a government shutdown. (We've heard this one before, haven't we?) "By a 68-to-13 vote, senators voted to take up the legislation, which would temporarily extend funding for some federal agencies until March 1 and for others through March 8," reports The New York Times. "It would keep spending levels flat while lawmakers and aides hammer out the details of a $1.66 trillion deal reached between Speaker Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican, and Democrats."
Some right-wing members of Congress have voiced opposition to the spending bill, particularly the fact that it does not stipulate securing the border, forcing Johnson to seek support from Democrats.
Scenes from New York: If you're a New York state taxpayer, you may get the honor of paying the legal fees of your former governor, Andrew Cuomo—yes, that Andrew Cuomo, the one who locked Granny in a nursing home with other COVID-positive olds at the start of the pandemic, ensuring the disease would spread like wildfire.
There's a New York law on the books that forces taxpayer funds to be used to reimburse public officials if they're prosecuted for a crime but not convicted. "The Albany County sheriff's office brought a misdemeanor charge of forcible touching against Cuomo in 2021, which was tossed after prosecutors concluded the complaint was defective," reports Politico. Therefore, "Cuomo received a $565,000 check from the state comptroller's office last week, thanks to the law."
The former "love gov" was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, which led to him stepping down in August 2021. He was also embroiled in a scandal related to the possible use of government funds to subsidize his memoir writing. Now that he's flush with cash again, he's weighing a mayoral run.
Chronic absenteeism nearly doubled after the pandemic school closures and has improved only slightly since. For many, school has now become optional.
For @propublica and @NewYorker, I dug into the core question: How do you rebuild a crucial social norm? https://t.co/DlM0DJ7pa5— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) January 8, 2024
Constitutional ban on Theater Kids running anything, at least until we can figure out what's going on. https://t.co/UxvwcUQ7EU
— Matt Welch (@MattWelch) January 16, 2024
I'm not a Nozickian, but one of Nozick's great insights was that simply examining how much more the rich have than others is insufficient—we also need to examine *how* they got rich. Creating wealth via positive-sum market activity is morally good https://t.co/bBr4FgJCPs
— Chris Freiman (@cafreiman) January 17, 2024
Trump is 100% gonna name Vivek Director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs pic.twitter.com/36wxo66M6I
— Armand Domalewski (@ArmandDoma) January 17, 2024
The post Israeli Spy Base appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman stare down the results of last night's Iowa caucuses, which saw former President Donald Trump notch a resounding win in his bid to return to the White House.
01:45—Iowa caucuses results and recap
33:52—Weekly Listener Question
41:02—The U.S. attacks on Houthis in Yemen
47:13—The latest on the bipartisan spending deal drama in Congress
49:58—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Trump Romps Through Iowa Caucuses, Calls for GOP to 'Come Together,'" by Eric Boehm
"The Comeback Kid," by Liz Wolfe
"Vivek Ramaswamy Leaves the Field," by Jesse Walker
"Chris Christie Tried To Break Trump's Hold on the GOP. It Didn't Work." by Eric Boehm
"Most Iowans Don't Care About the Caucuses. You Shouldn't Either." by Adam Sullivan
"The Case Against Trump: Donald Trump Is an Enemy of Freedom," by Matt Welch
"Joe Biden's $11 Trillion Plan To Bankrupt America," by Nick Gillespie
"U.S. Attacks Houthis in Yemen," by Liz Wolfe
"The War on Terror Zombie Army Has Assembled," by Matthew Petti
"Storks Don't Take Orders From the State," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"Are Car Seat Laws Driving Down America's Birthrate?" by Christian Britschgi
"Does Biden Need Congressional Authorization for His Strikes Against the Houthis?" by Ilya Somin
"MLK's Contested Yet Universal Blueprint for Freedom," by Matt Welch
"The Beekeeper Is a Pulpy, Enjoyable Action Movie About a Rigged System," by Peter Suderman
"11 Trillion Reasons To Fear Joe Biden's Presidency" by Nick Gillespie
"RFK Jr.: The Reason Interview," by Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller
"Jeb Bush: What He Thinks of Trump, Biden, DeSantis, and 'Florida Man,'" by Nick Gillespie
"Vivek Ramaswamy: Why He's Running for President—and Against 'Woke Capitalism,'" by Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller
"Baby Bust!" by Kerry Howley
"Can Governments Increase Birthrates? Should They?" by Nick Gillespie
"Child-proofing the World," by Nick Gillespie
"'American Fiction': The Great Awokening," by Kurt Loder
"Sharks Stuffed With Money," by Nick Gillespie
The Reason Speakeasy with David Stockman, January 22, 2024
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post The Trump Train Rolls Through Iowa appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Joe Biden announced U.S. airstrikes on the Houthi movement, one of two competing factions claiming to be Yemen's government, on Thursday. The attacks came after Houthi drone and missile attacks on trade routes in the Red Sea, which Houthi leadership said was meant to pressure Israel to lift its siege on Gaza. Several members of Congress from both parties said that Biden had no constitutional authority to attack. Biden justified the strikes in terms of self-defense.
It was a new escalation, and it wasn't. The United States has been involved in Yemen for years, striking Al Qaeda and supporting a Saudi-led coalition against the Houthis. But Thursday was the first open combat between the U.S. military and Houthi forces, except for a limited incident in 2016. It was also the first airstrike in Yemen by anyone in nearly two years. Saudi Arabia had accepted a truce and peace talks in early 2022, partly because of U.S. pressure.
The Intercept also reported on Friday that special U.S. Air Force intelligence teams, whose job is to share targeting data, had been ordered to Israel. Although the Biden administration has claimed that it is only sharing intelligence with Israel for hostage rescue missions, the arrival of the targeting teams suggests that Washington is playing a much more active role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than ever before.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is asking the U.S. military to leave Iraq after a U.S. drone strike killed an Iraqi militia commander. (Behind the scenes, Biden administration officials seem confident that the notion of expelling Americans from Iraq is empty talk.) Although U.S. forces have been battling pro-Iran militias in Iraq for decades now, there had been a monthslong truce in place, which Iraqi militias decided to break after war erupted in Gaza.
All of the ghosts—or perhaps zombies—of U.S. foreign policy for the past 30 years seem to be assembling into one big war. Since the Obama administration, Washington has promised to pull U.S. forces out of the Middle East, while quietly dabbling in proxy wars all over the region. That arrangement turned out to be neither stable nor sustainable. Right under everyone's noses, and without permission from Congress, the United States has gone from proxy warfare back to direct combat in the Middle East.
The immediate cause of the crisis was unexpected: the mass Hamas-led killing and kidnapping of Israelis last October and the Israeli invasion of Gaza in response. But the underlying dynamics were there for everyone to see. American leaders believed that they could impose an unpopular order on the Middle East without putting in much effort and freeze the Middle East's conflicts on Washington's terms. And like an overconfident character in a horror movie, the Biden administration accidentally foreshadowed the bloody events to come.
"The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades now," National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said a week before the war. "Now challenges remain—Iran's nuclear weapons program, the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians—but the amount of time that I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11 is significantly reduced."
Those "challenges" have now combined into the worst Middle Eastern crisis in decades.
Sullivan had borrowed his playbook, the Abraham Accords, from the Trump administration. The idea was to unite Israel and the oil-rich Arab monarchies through their common enmity with Iran. Security ties would lead to economic cooperation and cultural normalization, while the Iranian government would collapse on its own under the pressure. U.S. military forces could underwrite the whole thing without getting involved directly.
The Iranian nuclear program indeed seemed to be the biggest threat. Although the CIA does not believe Iran is currently building an atomic weapon, its nuclear infrastructure could be used for that purpose. Former President Barack Obama had believed that, unless a U.S.-Iranian deal was struck, he would have to choose between bombing Iran or accepting an Iranian bomb. The Trump administration offered a different option: Exert pressure that "expands the space" for an uprising against the Iranian government. That seemed to work. Halfway into the Biden era, Iran faced its most intense unrest since the 1979 revolution.
One wrinkle remained: several million Palestinians, living under various degrees of Israeli control, with neither a country of their own nor legal status in any other country. The hopeful days of the "two-state solution," negotiations to create a State of Palestine living peacefully alongside the State of Israel, had gone by. A growing chunk of Palestinian society supported armed rebellion, and a growing chunk of Israeli society supported "population transfer," a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.
The Trump administration was unbothered. "The biggest threat that our allies and partners in the region face is not the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It's Iran. You've got to start there," Trump administration official Brian Hook said in August 2020. As was the Biden administration. Current Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in January 2021 that "it's hard to see near-term prospects for moving forward" on the issue.
Perhaps the United States alone could have solved the conflict; perhaps no one could have. Either way, Washington had tied itself to the outcome. Israel continued to receive U.S. military aid in greater amounts and with fewer conditions than any other country. And the Abraham Accords made Israel a key part of the entire Middle East's security architecture.
Meanwhile, Tehran was licking its wounds. Although the Islamic Republic of Iran is internationally isolated and domestically losing control, it has many cards left to play. Iranian leaders can still count on a large arsenal of missiles and drones and an array of pro-Iran guerrilla forces across the region. (The Houthis are one such group.) Saudi Arabia, once an advocate for bombing Iran, decided to cut its losses and accept a diplomatic deal with Iran last year.
The stage was set, then, for the October war to spread all over the region. The Abraham Accords were exposed as both fragile and unpopular in the Arab world, especially after Israeli leaders began to talk about expelling Palestinians from Gaza en masse. Iran had a golden opportunity to escalate on its terms. Hezbollah, the pro-Iran party in Lebanon, immediately began firing on Israeli territory. Biden sent two aircraft carriers to the region to deter any further escalation against Israel, while also talking Israel out of a preemptive war on Lebanon.
Iraqi militias broke their truce with Americans the following week. The U.S. bases originally set up to overthrow Saddam Hussein and repurposed for the war against the Islamic State were now redoubts against Iran's Iraqi supporters. Like the Obama and Trump administrations before it, the Biden administration cited the original Iraq War authorization to justify its newest battle.
Then the Houthis began to menace international commerce. Houthi spokesman Yahya Sare'e claimed that Israeli shipping was a "legitimate target" until the siege of Gaza was lifted. Echoing the logic of liberal American hawks, he claimed that Yemen had a responsibility to protect Palestinian civilians. But the Houthi attacks also struck non-Israeli ships and drove international shipping companies out of the Red Sea, which normally carries around 10 percent of global trade.
As it turned out, the problem wouldn't take care of itself. Despite the Abraham Accords, no Arab state except Bahrain was willing to intervene against the Houthis on behalf of Israeli shipping. (Saudi Arabia also seemed more concerned with maintaining its own truce.) Biden decided to cobble together his own fleet to fend off the Houthi assaults.
There is another small wrinkle: None of these fights have any mandate from the American people. Congress last authorized military action against Iraq in 2002. It has never passed a law allowing the president to threaten Lebanon out of shelling Israel, nor one allowing the Navy to bomb Yemen out of threatening cargo ships. The Biden administration has tried to keep its support for Israel, including a U.S. military base on Israeli soil, as secretive as possible.
For all the sound and fury about college campuses, there has been no real national conversation on U.S. involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or its regional spillover. Before the October attacks, Washington seemed confident that it could steer events from a distance. Now that U.S. forces are directly involved, American leaders are pretending that it was a sad inevitability, that their hands were forced.
Or perhaps they're not pretending. Earlier this week, Blinken was in Saudi Arabia, trying to convince reporters that the crown prince was still interested in joining the Abraham Accords. Like zombies, they shuffle off into the distance, not really understanding where they came from or where they're going. Unfortunately, they're dragging the rest of us behind them.
The post The War on Terror Zombie Army Has Assembled appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>U.S. and allies strike Yemen: Late yesterday, news broke that the U.S. and several allies, including Britain, carried out strikes at Houthi targets—airports, bases, and places where the militants store weapons—in Yemen.
For months, tensions in the Middle East have been held at bay, at least from the perspective of U.S. involvement. Now, no more.
For months, Yemeni Houthis—backed by Iran—have been targeting ships in the Red Sea, claiming that the ships are Israel-affiliated and that, out of support for Hamas, they will attack them. This has snarled global shipping and provoked smaller-scale military responses from the U.S.
Just two weeks ago, Houthis attacked the Maersk Hangzhou, and American carrier group helicopters responded to the crew's distress signal. Houthis and Americans exchanged fire, and U.S. forces sank three of the four Houthi boats, killing nearly a dozen people.
Houthis are not technically designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. because, in 2021, the Biden administration removed the classification due to concerns that the label would impede aid shipments to a country torn apart by civil war.
"These strikes are in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea—including the use of anti-ship ballistic missiles for the first time in history," said President Joe Biden in a statement. "More than 50 nations have been affected in 27 attacks on international commercial shipping. Crews from more than 20 countries have been threatened or taken hostage in acts of piracy. More than 2,000 ships have been forced to divert thousands of miles to avoid the Red Sea—which can cause weeks of delays in product shipping times. And on January 9, Houthis launched their largest attack to date—directly targeting American ships."
"It's not possible for us not to respond to these operations," a Houthi spokesman said yesterday. "We are more determined to target ships linked to Israel, and we will not back down from that," he added. Hamas called the strikes an "act of terrorism," saying that America and Britain may experience "repercussions on the security of the region."
Some members of Congress are appropriately raising concerns about how this was authorized:
The President needs to come to Congress before launching a strike against the Houthis in Yemen and involving us in another middle east conflict. That is Article I of the Constitution. I will stand up for that regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House.
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) January 11, 2024
Big picture: "Fighting piracy to protect international maritime trade is something the U.S. has been doing since its inception," writes Noah Smith at Noahpinion.
"But the truth is that the U.S. can't really afford this conflict. Its naval resources are stretched very thin by global deployment, fiscal austerity, and industrial weakness, at a time when a Chinese naval buildup threatens to outmatch and overwhelm the U.S. in its most crucial theater of operations. The problem is that the entire world has basically gotten used to the U.S. singlehandedly protecting the entire world's oceans over the last 75 years. So now, instead of stepping up as U.S. capabilities get stretched thin, they're free-riding and expecting America to do what it always did."
"For the past two decades, the U.S. has dismissed the Houthis as a nuisance," write Kenneth M. Pollack and Katherine Zimmerman in the Wall Street Journal. "Washington recoiled when the Saudis and Emiratis intervened in Yemen against them in 2015, and the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations have tried to end the fighting with minimal exertion regardless of the outcome. Americans have tended to see the civil war as a humanitarian catastrophe and a breeding ground for terrorists. Our position therefore has been that all that mattered was peace—not who won or on what terms."
But now, "Houthis have made significant gains in Yemen, allowing them to commit aggression beyond the country's borders" and, in their view, American military support for the Yemeni government "is the only way to ensure the Houthis won't consolidate their grip on the country and be able to project more power abroad." (It's a well-argued piece, but one that will frustrate many libertarians, especially since neither cost—financial nor human lives lost—is even mentioned.)
"So far, there have been no reports of the number of casualties caused by the US and British strikes," writes Antiwar's Dave DeCamp. "The US and its allies have a history of killing civilians in Yemen, as the UN estimated in 2021 that about 377,000 people were killed by the US-backed Saudi/UAE war against the Houthis that started in 2015. More than half died of starvation and disease caused by the blockade and the coalition's brutal bombing campaign."
Yesterday's strikes in Yemen "risk shattering a fragile truce between the Houthis and the Saudi-led coalition that's held since April 2022, although the Saudis have distanced themselves from the US anti-Houthi activity in the Red Sea."
Lawful undertakings? Not long ago, the United States seized the oil cargo—1 million barrels of crude oil, to be exact—on the ship Suez Rajan over a dispute involving sanctions and Iran's nuclear program. Yesterday, the Iranian Navy boarded and seized the ship off the coast of Oman. The crew—18 Filipinos and one Greek—has not been heard from since. "Iran's state-run television acknowledged the seizure late Thursday afternoon, hours after armed men boarded it, linking it to the earlier oil seizure," reports the Associated Press.
The navy's "seizure of the oil tanker does not constitute hijacking; rather, it is a lawful undertaking sanctioned by a court order and corresponds to the theft of Iran's very own oil," Iran's U.N. mission spokesman told The Associated Press. Uh, OK, whatever you say, Iran.
Scenes from New York: A public elementary school in Brooklyn was displaying a map with Israel erased and replaced by Palestine, reports The Free Press.
This was sent to the Washington Post newsroom last week. Seems to pretty clearly telegraph what is considered the 'correct' coverage of some rather hot-button issues where there is good-faith disagreement. This sort of thing makes it a lot harder to trust a publication's output. pic.twitter.com/uehvaBR56m
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) January 10, 2024
NEW: Young Biden staffers are bucking the old ways of being silent when your boss does something you don't agree with and instead are writing letters and protesting in public against Middle East policy. https://t.co/QT0P52sMKE
— Eugene Daniels (@EugeneDaniels2) January 10, 2024
One little idea I've been following for a while is ancestor worship via AI. Just as mass media created nationally-recognizable celebrities, AI means that people who lived at the right time and left a big enough corpus can undergo AI apotheosis. pic.twitter.com/SLxtUS3yAP
— Byrne Hobart (@ByrneHobart) January 10, 2024
"How can you support Social Security privatization? Do you really want to trust your retirement to the market?" pic.twitter.com/0Azbo50LwL
— Chris Freiman (@cafreiman) January 11, 2024
The post U.S. Attacks Houthis in Yemen appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Hell hath no fury like a Bill Ackman scorned: For those just tuning in, let me catch you up on the Harvard/antisemitism/plagiarism scandal that just won't end.
Back in December, three elite university presidents—including Harvard President Claudine Gay, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, and MIT President Sally Kornbluth—were trotted before Congress to give testimonies related to their handling of antisemitic speech and pro-Palestine activism on campus. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R–N.Y.) raked them all over the coals, declaring their answers unsatisfactory and insensitive and full of legalese, and Magill soon resigned.
Harvard initially stood by Gay, but then a mostly conservative collection of journalists and activists—as well as some big donors, like hedge fund manager Bill Ackman—publicized her extensive track record of plagiarism. Gay resigned, but not before calling everyone racist. (She is a black woman, and she claims that that's the real reason people tried to take her down.)
Now Business Insider has accused Ackman's wife—Neri Oxman, an entrepreneur and former MIT professor—of plagiarism herself. Oxman, they say, "stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars and technical documents in her academic writing." (As an aside: Oxman's work is interesting. "Her team at the MIT Media Lab coaxed silkworms to build sculptures," notes the article. Oxman "also made undulating structures out of natural materials like cellulose and chitin, the material found in shrimp cells.")
Now, Ackman has basically sworn revenge: "There has been no due process," wrote Ackman this morning on X. "Neri Oxman was given 90 minutes to respond to a 7,000-word plagiarism allegation before Business Insider published a piece saying she was a plagiarist." For the record, it's good to give sources sufficient time to respond, but that's not quite a due process issue.
"This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews," he declared, vowing to helpfully review the work of all Business Insider reporters and MIT faculty, after claiming that Insider's source is most likely inside MIT. (Side-by-side reviews for plagiarism are getting easier and faster to do in the era of artificial intelligence.)
Now Ackman's allegiance to his wife is being alternately memed and criticized:
when he says "I love you," but ackman said "would they accuse you of plagiarism, I would burn the institutions to the ground, and salt the earth where they once stood, let there be a thousand dark ages, and you, lordess of my castle laboratory, my dark queen for eternity"
— Mike Solana (@micsolana) January 7, 2024
This all started in early Oct. when Bill Ackman went ballistic and tried to ruin the lives of some 18 year old Harvard students, get them blacklisted over an Israel letter, and got upset university leaders didn't help with this project, so he escalated — v pathetic news cycle.
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 7, 2024
Truly Shakespearean if Bill Ackman's wife loses her academic career because her husband led a national charge against the very crime she committed many years ago.
— Joe Colangelo (@Itsjoeco) January 5, 2024
Bill Ackman is literally trying to claim that you can copy Wikipedia wholesale and claim it as your own because it's "open source"
If you ever had the misconception that billionaires were all brilliant, let his words disabuse you of the notion. https://t.co/Q5PlbvC1ay
— Whey Standard (@Whey_standard) January 8, 2024
On one hand, it's fair to collectively groan Why do we have another goddamn Harvard-related news cycle? On the other, we're in a weird moment for plagiarism and the related subject of intellectual property. If ChatGPT is the death knell for plenty of academic writing, maybe it's replacing something that had already mostly withered and died.
The focus of the Harvard kerfuffle could have been the initial congressional testimony, and the speech double standards present on college campuses. Or it could've been the intellectual bankruptcy of DEI bureaucracy. Instead, it is becoming trench warfare over plagiarism, which seems like the dumbest possible way for this to all go.
Israel pummels Hezbollah: Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari says the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have struck Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon in retaliatory fire, killing at least seven fighters. The IDF claims that Hezbollah struck an Israeli military base on Saturday, most likely due to Israel's killing of a senior Hamas leader inside Lebanon last week.
Though war has been raging between Israel and Hamas since October 7, when Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel, killing 1,200 civilians—in some cases brutally raping and beheading the victims—many had hoped that other factions in the Middle East, particularly those backed by Iran, would not be drawn into the conflict. With the increased Israel-Hezbollah conflict, as well as Houthi activity snarling global shipping and provoking some U.S. military action, that's not looking likely.
Scenes from New York:
Surfer politics, spotted in Rockaway.
BREAKING: Billionaires and centimillionaires held $8.5 TRILLION in untaxed, unrealized capital gains in 2022.
Unrealized gains are the largest source of income for the ultra-rich—but they're completely UNTAXED under our tax code.
This is why we need a billionaire income tax ???? pic.twitter.com/0ewB3H05SQ
— Americans For Tax Fairness (@4TaxFairness) January 3, 2024
The post Hell Hath No Fury appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Haley ahead of DeSantis? A new poll of Republican county chairs finds that more of them are flocking to former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, over current Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. "Among Republican chairs committed to a candidate, Trump has 37 percent, Haley has 16 percent and DeSantis has 9 percent," reports Seth Masket for Politico. "The candidate who chairs are most vehemently against? Chris Christie."
Why care about county chairs? Masket explains that they "play a key role in shaping the race" since they're "highly attentive to the party's internal dynamics and are influential in local GOP circles; they offer the kind of endorsements that candidates are eager to collect."
At the same time, "they're also still close to the rank-and-file grassroots, and their shifts are likely to signal where the rest of the party is going," adds Masket.
This is despite some of Haley's recent gaffes and, uh, bolder proposals. "I had black friends growing up," she said in a CNN town hall last night after being asked about her recent comments on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, during which she failed to identify slavery as one of the causes of the Civil War. "Of course the Civil War was about slavery," she said later. And last night: "I was thinking past slavery, and talking about the lesson that we would learn going forward. I shouldn't have done that. I should have said slavery. But, in my mind, that's a given. Everybody associates the Civil War with slavery."
Fear not, now Haley is making waves with a bold new proposal for a federal jobs program:
We have to secure our schools the same way we secure our airports.
— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) January 5, 2024
Islamic State takes credit: Yesterday, I reported that two bombs exploded in Iran at a memorial for top military official Qassem Soleimani, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike four years ago. The explosion yesterday killed more than 100 people. Now, the Islamic State has taken credit for the "dual martyrdom operation" in which two suicide bombers "detonated explosive belts strapped to their bodies," per The New York Times.
Floridians try to get abortion up until 24 weeks: Voters in the Sunshine State are trying to undo abortion restrictions by putting a constitutional right to an abortion on the 2024 ballot.
Florida currently bans abortion after 15 weeks, and Governor Ron DeSantis has also signed into law a ban on abortions after six weeks, which has not yet taken effect.
This is apparently not good enough for many impassioned Floridians. The deadline for getting this issue on the ballot is February 1; the activist group Floridians Protecting Freedom has gathered 863,876 certified signatures, just shy of the 891,876 they need, but with a few more weeks to go, they say it's extremely likely they will get the issue added to the ballot, which would then require 60 percent voter approval to become law. Similar strategies proved successful this past year in Ohio, and the year before in Kansas.
Permitting abortion up until 24 weeks would make Florida far more progressive on this issue than pretty much every European nation, which tend to disallow abortion beyond the first trimester, or 12-13 weeks. Though most mainstream publications don't mention it, babies are the size of an ear of corn around 24 weeks. They can hear sounds outside the mother's body, they have tastebuds, and they can suck their thumbs.
My pro-life bias may be showing, admittedly, and many pro-choicers rebut that very few abortions happen after the first trimester (only 7 to 10 percent of abortions nationwide, though Guttmacher and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data differ in their estimates, which would conservatively total around 60,000, which…doesn't seem negligible to me), but my point is this: the U.S. pro-choice movement is an outlier in attempting to make abortion broadly permissive this late in pregnancy.
It remains to be seen whether Florida voters will be persuaded by the activists' efforts.
Scenes from New York: The "Fearless Girl" statue, by Kristen Visbal, was put on Wall Street in 2017 to promote female empowerment and gender diversity in corporate leadership. It sure is an interesting target for pro-Palestine protesters as Hamas is not exactly known for advocating for the rights of women.
Wall Street's 'Fearless Girl' dressed up in pro-Palestinian garb by Hamas supporter https://t.co/Ds2M4NdoH1 pic.twitter.com/I6VxiSfGrP
— New York Post (@nypost) January 4, 2024
Lotta stealth editing going on in that AP article. Here are the top two grafs in the old versus new versions. No editor's note or anything. pic.twitter.com/NskGzvlCFo
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) January 3, 2024
"Harm"? Gay remains a tenured faculty member at the world's most prestigious university and will continue to enjoy a $900K salary, per reports. Justice Jackson has a lifetime appointment to the nation's highest court. NHJ has earned millions of dollars as a public intellectual… https://t.co/q0ScsWV3Dm
— Rafael A. Mangual (@Rafa_Mangual) January 4, 2024
The post Haley Rising appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Mystery in Iran: Four years ago, the U.S. military killed Iran's former top military brass, Qassem Soleimani, via drone strike. At a ceremony held yesterday to honor him, 103 people were killed and 211 were wounded by the explosion of at least two bombs.
"While Iran was quick to blame Israel, European and American officials said they doubted that the Israelis conducted the strike," reported The New York Times. "Most of their actions against Iran have been highly targeted, from taking out the chief architect of Iran's nuclear program to blowing up specific nuclear and missile facilities." Experts on these types of attacks say the bombs look like they came from a terrorist group, but their provenance is still unclear.
Iran has, up until this point, not been explicitly involved in the fighting going on in the Middle East, though Iran does back Hezbollah, which has been firing at Israel from Lebanon, and the Yemeni Houthis, which have been attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea. Now, with a mystery attack on Iranian soil, it's possible involvement will become more direct and that the situation in the Middle East will heat up.
"We tell the criminal America and Zionist regime that you will pay a very high price for the crimes you have committed and will regret it," said Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a statement. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei refrained from blaming any country in particular, saying the blast was carried out by "malicious and criminal enemies."
Prisoner swap: In the Ukraine-Russia War, things have been heating up in the last week: Russia has launched some of the largest strikes yet, and Ukraine hit the Russian city of Belgorod just last week. Still, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy somehow agreed to a prisoner swap: "Kyiv said 230 Ukrainian prisoners of war were returned to Ukraine, while Moscow said more than 240 Russian military personnel were released in an exchange that was mediated in part by the United Arab Emirates," reported Axios.
Scenes from New York:
Who cares if silly tourists shop while walking the Brooklyn Bridge? (City officials, apparently.)
Guns from the hardware store, dope from vending machines, speaking without bureaucrats trying to muzzle us, travel without showing papers and getting groped by goons … We can dream. https://t.co/b9CQxCX7Jy
— J.D. Tuccille (@JD_Tuccille) January 3, 2024
"But what if we fire every academic who has ever plagiarized?"
Yes what if we fire the laziest cohort of a field that mainly produces p-hacked shovelware that no one reads. What then.
— nic ???? carter (@nic__carter) January 3, 2024
Holy shit did she just actually write something herself? pic.twitter.com/Bg3MfdtHHJ
— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) January 4, 2024
Nikki Haley renamed her husband pic.twitter.com/meUNigI54l
— Andrew Prokop (@awprokop) January 3, 2024
The post Iran Explosion appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>U.S. Navy sinks three Houthi boats: Starting in October, the Houthis—a group of Iran-backed Yemeni militants—staged a series of attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea. This past weekend, the situation got out of control: Houthis attacked a container ship, the Maersk Hangzhou, and U.S.S. Eisenhower carrier group helicopters responded to the distress call. Houthis started shooting, and the American helicopters responded, sinking three of the four Houthi boats and killing at least 10 people who were on board.
Iran claims it was not behind the attacks, but "ten days ago, the [Biden] administration declassified intelligence indicating that Iranian paramilitary groups were coordinating the Houthi attacks, providing targeting information about commercial shipping passing through the waterway and the Suez Canal."
Now the administration "must decide whether to strike Houthi missile and drone sites in Yemen, or wait to see whether the Houthis back off after the sinking of three of their fast boats and the deaths of their fighters," according to senior officials who spoke with The New York Times.
Yahya Saree, a Houthi spokesperson, said the Arab world ought to be "ready for all options in confronting the American escalation."
"The American enemy bears the consequences of this crime," said the Houthis, and no U.S. Navy actions can prevent the militants from "performing their religious, moral and humanitarian duty in support and aid of those who have been wronged in Palestine and Gaza."
"If attacks by Iran's proxies against U.S. forces continue, we will not hesitate to take further necessary measures to protect our people," said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin back in October. Now, the U.S. is weighing how to handle the growing threat posed by the Houthis—as well as how to ensure safe passage for ships that must traverse the Red Sea, which is an essential route for about 12 percent of global commerce.
Scenes from New York:
Many migrants entering from the southern border will now suffer a terrible fate—landing in New Jersey.
Over the weekend, more than a dozen buses originally supposed to end up in New York instead dropped migrants off in New Jersey. Officials in the state say this is a direct result of a new emergency order recently issued by New York City Mayor Eric Adams, which "requir[es] charter bus companies to provide 32 hours' advance notice of the arrival of migrants and restrict[s] the times of day when they can be dropped off," per The New York Times. The buses were sent by Texas officials intent on forcing other states to share in the burdens imposed by the migrant crisis and/or galvanize political will against letting more migrants in.
The migrants continued on to New York City from their Jersey bus depots. Adams' attempt to impose order is in response to an untenable situation in which buses are chaotically dropping migrants off at Port Authority without notice, and the fact that the city has handled 161,500 asylum seekers since spring 2022, nearly 70,000 of whom continue to be provided housing or other social services paid for by taxpayers.
Uber is incredible and its founders are rightfully billionaires https://t.co/wb2nNK9LIp
— Chris Freiman (@cafreiman) January 1, 2024
I don't understand why there is always an appeal to "fairness" when we discuss taking someone's lifetime of earned money and giving it to someone else they didn't want to give it to. https://t.co/Ld2EwM99YI
— fedaykin reepicheep (@dumbreepicheep) December 25, 2023
Once again I am asking our 4th Estate to explain how they are "from Texas" https://t.co/EMsW8U7Qct
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) January 1, 2024
The post Escalation in the Red Sea appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Iranian officials arrested rapper Toomaj Salehi less than two weeks after his release from prison on bail, where he was serving a six-year sentence on multiple charges stemming from his support for anti-hijab protests. Salehi has been charged with "spreading lies and violation of public opinion." After his release from prison, Salehi released a video message saying he had been tortured after his first arrest, when state media showed a video of him blindfolded and apologizing for his support of the protests.
The post Brickbat: Cover Your Head and Shut Your Mouth appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Get out the private jets, it's climate conference time! Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Foreign Secretary David Cameron, and King Charles III each took their own private jets—as did many other hypocrites world leaders—to attend the Cop28 climate conference in Dubai, where it is apparently an "open secret," per Politico, that "the top temperature goal is mostly gone."
"This government's approach to tackling climate change, as we have set out repeatedly, is not about banning or reducing people from flying," said a Sunak spokesman. "It is through investing in new technologies of the future, as evidenced by the flight just yesterday using sustainable aviation fuel."
Innovation is well and good, but the whole world-leaders-coming-in-on-private-planes thing looks a bit bad when the topic at hand is reversing climate change—and when the news is so dismal. "A short trip on a private jet will produce more carbon than the average person emits all year," noted one Green Party critic.
Methane agreement scorned: That's not the only bit of controversy that's come from this year's Cop28 summit. NBC reports that roughly "50 oil and gas companies worldwide have pledged to shore up leaky methane systems by 2030," which "could rapidly reduce emissions of the potent gas and forestall some climate change effects." Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the conference's president and the one who announced this agreement, is the United Arab Emirates' climate envoy and the CEO of ADNOC, an oil and gas company.
"Every piece of equipment, every component, can leak methane along the supply chain," scientist Arvind Ravikumar explained to NBC. He said roughly 10 percent of leaks in the supply chain create more than 50 percent of total methane emissions.
By asking oil and gas companies to fix something that's in their self-interest to fix anyway, the conference attracted criticism from climate activists. "Methane emissions and gas flaring are symptoms of a more than century-long legacy of wasteful, destructive practices that are routine in the oil and gas industry as it pursues massive profits without regard for the consequences," they wrote in response. "The only safe and effective way to 'clean up' fossil fuel pollution is to phase out fossil fuels."
Kamala Harris promises to throw money at the problem: Our own vice president just pledged $3 billion of U.S. taxpayers' hard-earned money to the Green Climate Fund. But Congress still has to approve this, and given the spending battles that have led to looming government shutdowns and an ousted speaker, it's unclear whether this money is Harris' to spend.
Middle East update: Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen fired at several commercial ships over the weekend, prompting a U.S. Navy destroyer to shoot down three drones, including one that was headed for the U.S.S. Carney warship. "The strikes marked an escalation in a series of maritime attacks in the Mideast linked to the Israel-Hamas war, as multiple vessels found themselves in the crosshairs of a single Houthi assault for the first time in the conflict," reports the Associated Press.
"A Houthi military spokesman, Yahya Sarea, said in a statement on Sunday that the militia had targeted two Israeli ships in the area of the Bab al-Mandeb strait off southern Yemen, but did not mention the American naval vessel," per The New York Times. The Houthi militants have said they will keep firing at Israeli ships in the Red and Arabian Seas until the Israeli war in the Gaza Strip is stopped.
Meanwhile in Gaza, the ceasefire has expired and Israel seems to be eyeing an expansion of its military campaign into the south. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) called for mass evacuations from Khan Younis, warning civilians that it is likely to strike there. With an estimated three-quarters of the population of the Gaza Strip displaced, it's unclear where evacuees ought to take refuge.
Scenes from New York:
Functional school system we've got here!
A 7th grade girl, bullied and beaten on video at NYC's Mark Twain gifted and talented middle school, is now escorted by a staffer acting as a bodyguard during school, and her parents pick her up every day to accompany her out of the building. The DOE offered the victim a "safety… https://t.co/P5Y0GsO8UW
— Susan Edelman (@SusanBEdelman) December 3, 2023
Oh boy do I have a good one for you. https://t.co/N7uaylLuaw
— Ajit Pai (@AjitPai) December 3, 2023
An announcement from me and @LizWolfeReason pic.twitter.com/cSKiPvPLlI
— Zach Weissmueller (@TheAbridgedZach) December 2, 2023
The post Private Jets to the Climate Conference appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On November 7, President Biden spoke of the "truly sacred obligation" Americans have to take care of our troops. He's right about that obligation, but his policy in Iraq and Syria is violating his most sacred duty as their commander in chief: to give his troops a clear, attainable mission and not to leave them as sitting ducks.
There's no other way to describe the role the 900 U.S. troops in Syria are playing, for example. With the collapse of the ISIS caliphate in 2018, then-President Donald Trump announced that "we have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there," adding that there would be a "full" and "rapid" withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country. His defense secretary, Jim Mattis, and his Middle East guru Brett McGurk—who is now Biden's Middle East guru—resigned in protest.
After the resignations, the Pentagon, National Security Adviser John Bolton, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Jordanian King Abdullah pressed Trump to leave troops in Syria, and he did. His Syria envoy then repeatedly lied to him about how many troops were in the country, and Trump somehow settled on the idea that "We're out of Syria, other than we kept the oil. I kept the oil." But we were not out of Syria, and we did not keep the oil. The troops were left in Syria with no domestic or international legal authorization.
Similarly, after the Iraqi government fought ferociously to stick to the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement with the United States rather than give U.S. forces immunity from prosecution, the Obama administration wound the U.S. presence down to roughly 5,000 troops in the country by the time it left office. A few thousand troops remain there now, officially under the pretense of combating ISIS, but in truth, they are there for the purpose of trying to limit Iran's influence. As a March Associated Press article somewhat archly put it: ISIS is "the much-stated reason for the continued U.S. troop presence…but a key reason is Iran."
And in that context, U.S. troops in Syria and Iraq find themselves under steady rocket fire from militias, mostly backed by Iran. The small numbers of U.S. forces are dotted across vast expanses, in some cases in remote areas, to disrupt Iranian influence and supply lines across the region. Just in the past three weeks, there have been at least 40 attacks on U.S. troops, with reports of traumatic brain and other injuries affecting 45 Americans.
So why does the Biden administration, which solemnly intones about sacred obligations to servicemembers, have these troops tied down as bait for regional militias? The entire region is furious at U.S. support for the Israeli campaign in Gaza. Biden and his administration know very well that as long as they back that war, U.S. forces deployed in remote areas might as well have targets on their backs. Why not bring them home?
The answer may lie in a 2019 report Congress funded to examine U.S. policy in Syria. The authors, which included scholars who now serve as Biden's deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East and his acting deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, argued that the United States has "key national security interests at stake" in Syria, and called on the government to "defend the rules-based international order" in that country and to "maintain pressure" on Iran, "lest [it] build up its strategic capabilities."
Biden's Middle East team—the authors of the Syria report who now run Middle East policy for him, and McGurk, who is the leader of Biden's Middle East policy—view the region as divided between Iran and its partners and everyone else, and believe the U.S. role is to back the everyone-else coalition against Iran. In this view, these small deployments, though militarily insignificant, are an annoyance to Iran, and therefore virtuous. As a senior defense official said while gloating about the militia attacks' lack of success, "Iran's objective for a long time has been to force a withdrawal of the US military from the region. What I would note is, we're still there."
We are still there. But every day there are more rocket attacks on our forces, who have been forgotten about and taken for granted for too long. We appear to have been playing down their injuries, just as Trump played down the injuries suffered in Iran's retaliation for the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Thank God the only death so far has been from a contractor's heart attack during a false alarm.
The militias firing at our forces in Iraq and Syria haven't been the A-Team, and no U.S. troops have died yet. But this Veterans' Day, President Biden ought to take a moment and ask himself whether the mission he has given them is worthy of the risks they are being asked to run—and the risks of escalation that mission poses to so many more servicemembers. The greatest duty a commander in chief has is to give his troops a lawful mission, clearly defined, with the escalatory potential clearly bounded. Biden has failed these troops miserably in that regard. He should bring them home.
The post Why Are American Troops Still in Iraq and Syria? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After two debates full of promises to bomb Mexico, the Republican presidential candidates turned their eyes toward a more traditional target for saber rattling: Iran.
Sen. Tim Scott (R–S.C.) staked out the most aggressive position against Iran, seemingly calling for direct American airstrikes against Iranian military units that have been involved in the recent strikes against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria.
To stop the attacks on U.S. troops, "you've got to strike in Iran if you want to make a difference," Scott said. "You cannot just continue to have strikes in Syria on warehouses. You actually have to cut off the head of the snake, and the head of the snake is Iran and not simply their proxies."
"My foreign policy is simple," he concluded. "You cannot negotiate with evil, you have to destroy it."
In subsequent responses, other candidates—except for businessman Vivek Ramaswamy—were asked if they would support military action against Iran as well.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley came the closest to joining Scott in calling for strikes. "This is Iran giving them the green light, telling them what to do," she said, referring to the various Middle Eastern militia groups with ties to Iran that have been behind the strikes on U.S. troops and several rocket attacks aimed at Israel.
"We need to go and take out the infrastructure that they are using to make those strikes so they can never do it again," she said. "You punch them once and you punch them hard, and they will back off."
Perhaps the most diplomatic response came from former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who said he would "continue to isolate Iran so their only friends in the world are the…evil foursome of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea," possibly invoking the infamous "Axis of Evil" from the George W. Bush presidency.
None of the candidates grappled with the most relevant question regarding the Iranian-backed militia strikes on American troops in Iraq and Syria: Why are American troops on the ground in Iraq and Syria in the first place? Surely, a better way to protect those American lives would be to remove them from a place where they are at risk—and where they might draw America into a broader war with Iran.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis got the closest to raising that point, though his answer was more than a bit muddled.
"I am not going to put our troops in harm's way unless you're willing to defend them with everything you have," he said, seemingly gesturing toward an argument for getting those troops out of harm's way in the first place. (Later, DeSantis would strike a stronger position in vowing not to send American troops to Ukraine—but followed that up with a vow to send troops to America's border with Mexico.)
Then, DeSantis pivoted to a more hawkish perspective. "I would say: 'you harm a hair on the head of an American service member and you are going to have hell to pay,'" he said. "We are not just going to sit there and let our service members be sitting ducks….We have to be strong, and we have to defend the people who defend us."
The leading candidate in the Republican field is, of course, former President Donald Trump, who was not part of Wednesday's debate. But while in office, Trump's foreign policy toward Iran was noteworthy for his relative restraint—so much so that notorious Iran hawk John Bolton fumed for years about how Trump thwarted his plans to start another Middle Eastern war.
It's a stretch to say that Trump's skepticism about America's foreign policy misadventures explains his lead in the polls. Still, other candidates looking to stand out in the Republican field ought to remember that GOP primary voters have favored foreign policy restraint, not dangerous threats to start new foreign wars.
The post Republicans Pivot to Bombing Iran in Third Debate appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>An Iranian court has sentenced two journalists to more than a decade in prison for their coverage of the death Mahsa Amini. Amini died last year in the custody of the morality police after being arrested for violating the nation's Islamic dress code. Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi received sentences of 13 and 12 years in prison, respectively, after being convicted of collaboration with the U.S. government and acting against national security, among other charges.
The post Brickbat: The Crime of Reporting appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As the world remains transfixed on the Hamas vs. Israel war in the Hamas-governed Gaza Strip, there is a subplot almost certain to swell in significance to Americans: In addition to the now-27 confirmed U.S.-citizen deaths attributed to the shockingly barbaric Hamas raid into Israel October 7, there are multiple American hostages among the estimated 14 U.S. passport–holders unaccounted for in the Palestinian-run territory.
"I have no higher priority than the safety of Americans being held hostage around the world," President Joe Biden said Tuesday. "We're working on every aspect of the hostage crisis in Israel, including deploying experts to advise and assist with recovery efforts," the president added Wednesday. "Folks, there's a lot we're doing—a lot we're doing. I have not given up hope on bringing these folks home. But the idea that I'm going to stand here before you and tell you what I'm doing is bizarre."
International hostage crises have bedeviled most of the past 10 American presidencies, contributing heavily to Jimmy Carter's 1980 electoral defeat and miring the second term of Ronald Reagan in near-constant scandal. And they were part of the run-up to this story, too, from both the American and Israeli sides.
On Thursday, according to a Washington Post report that cited three House Democratic aides, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told Democratic members of Congress in a private meeting that the U.S. and Qatari governments have agreed to refreeze $6 billion in oil revenue that Iran had previously been given access to spend on humanitarian concerns in exchange for the return of five Iranian-American hostages held in the Islamic Republic (in addition to the release of five Iranians who'd been serving time in America for violating U.S. sanctions). That deal, which awaits official confirmation, came amid re-intensified criticism that Biden's money-for-hostages scheme emboldened and helped indirectly finance the same Iranian government that has long been the chief backer of Hamas in Gaza, as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon.
"When you negotiate and give $6 billion, you create a market for hostages, and the response to that has been Iran and Hamas working together without much of a question," Sen. Tim Scott (R–S.C.), the seventh-ranked GOP presidential primary contender and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a CBS interview Wednesday. "When there's weakness in the White House, there's blood in the streets."
There are American military advisers on the ground in Israel, as well as special forces trained in hostage extraction a short flight away, and an entire U.S. Navy carrier strike group positioned in the Eastern Mediterranean. But that overwhelming firepower is playing second fiddle to an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that has been pulverizing Hamas in Gaza from the air since Saturday, killing over 1,400, according to officials there. (An initial Israeli death count was 1,300.) "We are not contemplating U.S. boots on the ground for any sort of rescue mission," Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer said on MSNBC Thursday.
A Washington Post visual-evidence analysis Thursday afternoon concluded that Hamas fighters "took at least 106 people captive during the incursion," of which 64 have since been spotted in Gaza (49 of them civilian), 26 have been seen in unknown locations, and 16 have only been seen in Israel. "The actual number of people taken hostage and soldiers taken prisoner in Gaza by Palestinian fighters is almost certainly higher," the newspaper cautioned. The prisoners are presumed to be held separately and secretly in the vast warren of tunnels underneath the coastal community.
Hamas, which has estimated its abductions in the "tens," is demanding the release of 5,200 Palestinians in Israeli detention and has warned that it will kill a hostage after every unannounced IDF bombing of a civilian target. Israel, which puts the number of hostages at around 150, says (in the words of Energy Minister Israel Katz Thursday), "Not a single electricity switch will be flipped on, not a single faucet will be turned on, and not a single fuel truck will enter until the Israeli hostages are returned home."
Israel has in the past made spectacularly disproportionate prisoner exchanges with Hamas, most notably the 1 for 1,027 swap in 2011 to retrieve soldier Gilad Shalit after five years of confinement. Shalit's abduction, coming as it did just nine months after Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza (uprooting 8,000 Jewish settlers in the process), was a profoundly dispiriting episode to Israelis who had hoped that an independent Gaza could live in semi-peaceful coexistence with its former occupier. The size of that ransom is unthinkable now.
The sheer scale and savagery of the deaths already incurred inside Israel, including Americans and other foreign nationals, is likely to mute fixation on the hostages somewhat in the short term. But there is little doubt that the Biden White House in the hours and days before the IDF ground invasion has been engaged in intense and ongoing conversations about U.S. civilians with Israel and with Hamas' go-to intermediaries: NATO ally Turkey, and the strong non-NATO U.S. ally of Qatar (where many senior Hamas officials reside).
As Armin Rosen pointed out in a perceptive Tablet piece Monday, "When Americans are held hostage, an entire policy infrastructure springs into action—one that includes the State Department special envoy for hostage affairs, the FBI, the military, family engagement coordinators, and the intelligence community."
"Hamas will use the hostages in two ways: as human shields and as a source of leverage over Washington," predicted Michael Doran, a former senior National Security Council director, in a quote for Tablet. "As human shields they will prevent Israel from destroying critical infrastructure. As a source of leverage, Hamas will convince Washington to compel Israel to make concessions—on the terms of a cease-fire, the release of prisoners, relaxing economic restrictions on Gaza, delivering payments from abroad, etc. Hamas will parade American hostages before the cameras to beg Washington to bring a halt to Israeli military operations so that the hostages can gain their freedom."
At every stop since Saturday's massacres, Americans and Israelis have compared Hamas to the radical Islamists of ISIS. Therein lies cause for even more sobriety when it comes to hostages. The ISIS-videotaped 2014 beheadings of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff (the latter of whom was an Israeli dual national) was the single news event that most penetrated American consciousness in at least the previous five years, changing the course of both U.S. foreign policy (to escalate the war against the caliphate) and the White House's approach to freeing hostages abroad.
It is not hard at this moment to imagine the worst, which propagandists on all sides of the Israel-Hamas conflict understand all too well. But we may be on the verge of seeing U.S. citizens—not just the "handful" or more currently held hostage, but potentially some of the estimated 500 to 600 Americans residing in Gaza—paraded on video under unspeakable conditions, in the middle of a hot war.
As Politico put it Thursday, "The Biden administration has convened a series of meetings across a number of agencies on the fate of the hostages, who are deemed to be in great physical peril—as well as a potential political problem for a president seeking reelection."
The post Another Hostage Crisis Bedevils an American President appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has announced plans to expand sanctions against Iran in Florida, following reports that the nation aided in Hamas' devastating attacks on Israeli civilians this weekend.
"As a state and a nation, we must stand with Israel following the heinous attacks over the weekend," said Governor Ron DeSantis on Tuesday. "With Iran helping plot the barbaric attack against Israel, I want to make it abundantly clear: Florida supports the State of Israel against the Iranian terror state."
Since early May, Florida has banned Iranian citizens, as well as citizens from six other nations, including China, Russia, and North Korea, from buying land in much of the state. Under this legislation, Florida government organizations were also prohibited from contracting many businesses located in these "countries of concern."
According to DeSantis, this newest set of proposed sanctions is in direct reaction to reports that the Iranian regime helped plan Hamas' deadly terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. While the extent of Iran's involvement in the planning of Hamas violence this weekend has not yet been fully confirmed, it has long been acknowledged that the Iranian government provides significant cash and weapons aid to the terrorist organization.
According to a one-pager on the proposed legislation, Florida's state and local governments would be prohibited from doing business with any part of the Iranian "financial, construction, manufacturing, textile, technology, mining, metals, shipping, shipbuilding, and port sectors." The additional sanctions would not be removed until "both the President and United States Congress…certify that Iran has stopped supporting international terrorism and acquiring weapons of mass destruction," and the federal government lifts all sanctions against Iran.
"These will be by far the strongest Iran sanctions that any state has enacted of all 50 states throughout this county," DeSantis said during his announcement of the proposal on Tuesday.
While expansive, it's unclear how this set of proposed sanctions, if passed, would act as much more than a symbolic gesture—like most political sanctions, it's unlikely they will actually affect the decisions of the foreign government they're targeting.
"While political sanctions are justifiable in principle, they're tough to justify in practice," University of Richmond philosophy professor Jessica Flanigan and William & Mary professor Christopher Freiman wrote in Reason in March 2022. "For one, public officials are not generally reliable in determining whether and how to effectively impose sanctions against unjust regimes. According to a recent analysis of political sanctions, they're generally unlikely to achieve major policy changes, regime change, or military impairment."
The post Ron DeSantis Announces Intentions to Sanction Iran in Florida appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Canada and India are at odds over the Canadian government's claims that Indian agents assassinated Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist leader, in British Columbia. The crime has damaged relations between the two countries, and it may be part of a growing and very troubling trend. If the hit really was state sponsored, it's one of a wave of such acts taken by governments against critics and dissidents who seek refuge on foreign soil.
"Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is accusing the government of India of involvement in the fatal shooting of a Canadian Sikh leader — a claim that will have seismic effects on an already shaky bilateral relationship," the CBC reported September 18. "Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar was brazenly shot dead outside a Sikh temple in Surrey, B.C. on June 18."
Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who moved to Canada from India in 1997, was long of interest to the Indian government. A supporter of a separate state for Sikhs, Nijjar was accused of terrorism by Indian officials who offered a cash bounty for information leading to his arrest. They may not have stopped there; Canadian Security Intelligence Service officers apparently warned Nijjar that his life was in danger and the U.S. Ambassador to Canada says the Five Eyes intelligence alliance of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand supported Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's claim that Nijjar was targeted by Indian agents.
If he was targeted in his country of refuge by a government he'd offended, Hardeep Singh Nijjar is far from an isolated case.
"All over the world, individuals brave enough to speak out against repression are being targeted by autocrats who reach across borders to silence their voices," Freedom House warned this year. "Tactics of transnational repression—including assassinations, unlawful deportations, detentions, renditions, physical and digital threats, and coercion by proxy—are used by governments to stamp out dissent among diasporas and exiles living beyond their borders."
The Washington, D.C.-based organization claims to have "information on 854 direct, physical incidents of transnational repression committed by 38 governments in 91 countries around the world since 2014."
This isn't an entirely new phenomenon. Critics of Russia's government, in its old communist version and its current generically authoritarian flavor, have long had a habit of running afoul of poison, radioactive substances, open windows, and other lethal mishaps—often outside Moscow's jurisdiction.
"Russia was responsible for the killing of Alexander Litvinenko, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has found," the BBC reported in 2021. "Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who became a British citizen, was fatally poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 in London in 2006."
But the practice of reaching beyond borders to target dissidents has become more common in recent years, with the Chinese government a major offender.
"The Chinese Communist regime, often with the aid of other governments, is systematically hunting down its political and religious exiles, no matter where in the world they seek refuge," Nate Schenkkan and Sarah Cook reported in 2021 for The Diplomat.
"Fox Hunt is a sweeping bid by General Secretary Xi [Jinping] to target Chinese nationals whom he sees as threats and who live outside China, across the world," FBI Director Christopher Wray charged in a 2020 speech. "We're talking about political rivals, dissidents, and critics seeking to expose China's extensive human rights violations. Hundreds of the Fox Hunt victims that they target live right here in the United States, and many are American citizens or green card holders."
In April of this year, authorities arrested two men accused of helping establish a secret Chinese "police station" in New York's Chinatown. "The PRC, through its repressive security apparatus, established a secret physical presence in New York City to monitor and intimidate dissidents and those critical of its government," according to U.S. Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen.
Likewise, the Saudi government is implicated in the infamous 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey. "American officials listened to a recording obtained by Turkish intelligence that not only captured Mr. Khashoggi's struggle against Saudi agents and his killing, but also the sounds of the saw being used on his body," reported The New York Times.
Turkey's government, it should be noted, cooperates with Beijing to silence Muslim Uyghur refugees who fled to Turkey, and it has sought assistance in muzzling its own dissidents. "Uzbekistani security services helped abduct a man from his apartment in Tashkent and return him to Turkey," notes Freedom House.
This is where matters get more disturbing. While increasingly illiberal, Turkey still has elections and (eroding) domestic debate. The same can be said of India, which is drifting in an autocratic direction but is not (yet) explicitly authoritarian. If India's elected government is responsible for Nijjar's assassination, that means transnational repression isn't just a vice of central-casting dictators.
Even countries usually considered free are guilty. Journalist Julian Assange was seized by the U.K. at the behest of the United States on what Amnesty International describes as "politically motivated charges." Then-Bolivian President Evo Morales's plane was forced to land in Austria in 2013 by European governments cooperating with the U.S. on suspicion that whistleblower Edward Snowden was aboard.
Freedom House rightfully complains, "because so many democratic countries have adopted policies that harden their borders and discourage asylum seekers, people who advocate for human rights or defend democratic principles in harsh environments are often forced to remain in parts of the world where autocrats make the rules." On the assumption that some countries are true safe harbors for peaceful dissenters, the organization wants free countries to be more welcoming and protective to refugees.
But democratic countries are only refuges if they're not actively assisting other regimes in acts of transnational repression or engaging in the practice themselves. As it is, while peaceful dissidents and critics of all sorts are certainly better off in more-open societies than under explicitly authoritarian regimes, their safety is relative. How much protection they enjoy is subject not only to the competency of local authorities, but also to how well-disposed they are to specific asylum-seekers.
Canada's government may be doing its best to bring Hardeep Singh Nijjar's assassins to account. But government officials are always jealous of their power, and no place is truly safe for those who cross thin-skinned officials.
The post India's Alleged Assassination of a Dissident in Canada Highlights Repression Across Borders appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When the celebrated Iranian artist Khosrow Hassanzadeh died of methanol poisoning this month, everyone but his country's most ardent theocrats recognized that prohibition was the problem. Yet when the Biden administration unveiled its plan to address the "emerging threat" of fentanyl mixed with the animal tranquilizer xylazine last week, it claimed prohibition was the solution.
In reality, these two hazards are manifestations of the same familiar phenomenon. When governments try to stop people from consuming politically disfavored intoxicants, they make consumption of those substances more dangerous by creating a black market in which purity and potency are highly variable and unpredictable.
The danger to which Hassanzadeh succumbed is caused by bootleggers' sloppy distilling practices and reliance on industrial alcohol that is unsafe for human consumption. Hassanzadeh thought he was drinking aragh, a traditional Iranian spirit distilled from raisins, which he obtained from a supplier he mistakenly trusted.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Iran saw a sharp increase in methanol-related deaths and injuries, including permanent blindness, thanks to a combination of folk beliefs about the preventive properties of alcohol and an ethanol shortage caused by the sudden demand for hand sanitizer. In recent months, Iranian authorities have noted another surge in such casualties.
While the proximate cause of the more recent trend is unclear, the root cause is obvious: Iran's ban on alcohol consumption by Muslims forces drinkers to rely on illicit sources that sell iffy and possibly poisonous liquor. In a legal market, people who buy distilled spirits do not have to worry about methanol contamination.
"Khosrow was taken from us because of the lack of social freedoms," Nasser Teymourpour, a fellow artist, observed on Twitter after his friend's death. "You took Khosrow from us."
Although drug warriors are keen to overlook the fact, the same analysis applies to Americans who die after consuming black-market drugs of unknown provenance and composition. The alarm about xylazine in fentanyl, which compounds the danger of fatal respiratory depression and may increase the risk of serious and persistent skin infections, is just the latest illustration of this predictable peril.
Before the federal government was warning us about xylazine in fentanyl, it was warning us about fentanyl in heroin. Both dangers are caused by laws that make drug use a potentially deadly crapshoot.
Fentanyl is much more potent than heroin, so it is easier to smuggle, and can be produced much more cheaply and inconspicuously since it does not require opium poppies. Xylazine has similar advantages: It is an inexpensive synthetic drug that can be produced without crops. And unlike fentanyl, it is not classified as a controlled substance, so it is easier to obtain.
The emergence of fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute made potency even harder to predict. The consequences can be seen in record numbers of drug-related deaths.
The government aggravated that situation by restricting the supply of legally produced, reliably dosed opioids, which drove nonmedical users toward more dangerous substitutes and left bona fide patients to suffer from unrelieved pain. Despite this recent experience with the perverse effects of prohibition, the Biden administration is confident that it can lick the xylazine menace by stepping up efforts to "reduce and disrupt the illicit supply chain and go after traffickers."
Whether it is vitamin E acetate in black-market THC vapes, MDMA mixed with butylone, levamisole in cocaine, or fentanyl pressed into ersatz pain pills, prohibition reliably makes drug use more hazardous. Sometimes that effect is intentional.
During Prohibition, the federal government required that industrial alcohol be mixed with methanol to discourage diversion. While critics called the resulting deaths "legalized murder," Anti-Saloon League leader Wayne Wheeler argued that "the person who drinks this industrial alcohol is a deliberate suicide," even while conceding that it would cost "many lives" to "root out a bad habit."
Iran's rulers seem to have a similar attitude. Joe Biden, a longtime drug warrior who now claims to embrace "harm reduction," should reject that lethal logic.
© Copyright 2023 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
The post Methanol-Tainted Liquor and Xylazine-Tainted Fentanyl Illustrate the Same Prohibitionist Peril appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"What we want is a nonslave society, a society without masters," the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey told me late last year at the annual Liberty Forum conference of the Atlas Network, a group founded in 1981 by British businessman Antony Fisher. The Atlas Network supports nonprofits around the globe that fight against authoritarianism and push for free markets, the rule of law, and self-determination. McCloskey was one of a half-dozen participants I spoke with, and she was explaining the end goal of classical liberalism.
Strolling through the conference, which was held in a midtown Manhattan hotel, was like attending a great music festival. People from dozens of different countries and organizations were strategizing and planning on how best to defeat new threats to freedom while keeping and expanding the political, economic, and cultural gains we've made over the past decades.
These are uncertain times—many human rights activists agree that "tyranny is on the rise"—and the vibe at the conference was a mix of deep anxiety and upbeat commitment to empowering individuals in developing and advanced countries alike.
What follows are short conversations I had with McCloskey—whose acclaimed body of work documents the role of property rights, markets, and pluralism in lifting living standards (and whose interview begins at the 0:17:05 mark)—and five other people, including:
I talked with each of them about what they do and whether they're optimistic about the future.
Today's sponsors:
The post Deirdre McCloskey: 'What We Want Is a Nonslave Society' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Twenty years after the disastrous American invasion of Iraq, one of the war's chief architects says the Bush administration's biggest error was not making the conflict an even bloodier, costlier catastrophe.
Writing in National Review, former Bush and Trump adviser John Bolton defends the decision to topple Saddam Hussein's regime and expresses regret for only one aspect of the decadeslong debacle: that America didn't use the opportunity to destabilize Iran too. Having already invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, Bolton writes, the Bush administration should have tried to go three-for-three and "seek regime change in between, in Iran, before Tehran's own WMD programs neared success."
"Unfortunately," he concludes, "as was the case after expelling Saddam from Kuwait in 1991, the United States stopped too soon."
It takes a special kind of hubris and a serious shortage of respect for the lives of other human beings to sit here, in the year 2023, and argue that the real problem with America's post-9/11 wars is that they didn't go far enough. The war in Iraq was a humanitarian and strategic disaster for the United States. It was "one of the most grievous errors in superpower history," as Brian Doherty wrote in the March issue of Reason. "Mendacious in its beginnings, incompetent in its aftermath, and downright criminal in the death and civilizational wreckage it caused, the Iraq War was a catastrophe America has not yet properly reckoned with."
If Bolton has his way, we never will.
Still, the idea that Iraq could have been used to launch a regime-change effort in Iran is possibly only the second most unhinged argument in Bolton's National Review column. He also hand-waves away any responsibility that America ought to bear for the violence and disorder in post-invasion Iraq.
The failure of the United States to prop up a functional and democratic government in Baghdad, Bolton argues, "is separable, conceptually and functionally, from the invasion decision. The subsequent history, for good or ill, cannot detract from the logic, fundamental necessity, and success of overthrowing Saddam, a threat to American national security since he invaded Kuwait in 1990."
This is a telling argument—one that reveals how Bolton has failed to learn even the most basic of lessons from the past 20 years, and one that ought to disqualify him from advising future administrations. Of course, it matters what comes after the decision to invade. Of course, any policy can be made to look like a success if you only focus on the positives—as Bolton does, praising the rapid victory of the U.S. military—while ignoring everything else.
Even if the promise of a successful, prosperous, democratic post-Saddam Iraq hadn't been comprehensively tied up in the arguments for launching the war in the first place, no one should want to live in a world where great powers can violate national sovereignty with impunity, then decline to take responsibility for the mess they've made. This is a toddler's view of reality.
One might suspect that Bolton imagines a world where actions should not have consequences because he's been living in exactly that type of world for the past two decades. Somehow, he's retained his Washington status as a foreign policy expert, media commentator, and presidential advisor despite having been so horrifically wrong about Iraq.
But the rest of America—particularly younger generations—is unlikely to be fooled again. "After watching the failures of America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, young Americans appear to be less supportive of military solutions for international challenges, especially compared to older generations," notes a 2021 report by the Eurasia Group Foundation, a geopolitics-focused think tank.
Writing at Responsible Statecraft—a publication of the Quincy Institute for Public Policy, a noninterventionist think tank—Blaise Malley points to a 2019 poll from the Center for American Progress that found members of Gen Z to be more likely than any other generation to agree with the statement that "The wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan were a waste of time, lives, and taxpayer money, and they did nothing to make us safer at home."
Good. But Bolton's ongoing influence in Republican politics means he (or someone like him) could easily end up inside the next GOP presidential administration, where he could once again push the country toward armed conflict with Iran—as he reportedly did during a brief stint in the Trump administration—or toward more regime-change efforts like the coups he's admitted he helped plot.
And that's the real reason why Bolton's National Review essay matters: because it reveals that he's refused to learn anything from the past 20 years and failed to gain an ounce of humility regarding America's ability to affect regime change with impunity—and to deal with what comes after the bombs stop falling.
Bolton's selective historical analysis and wish casting for even more war put him wildly out of touch with most Americans who lived through the past 20 years. Unfortunately, he's still dangerous—and still very, very wrong.
The post John Bolton Is Still Wrong About Iraq appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Two decades ago, the war in Iraq began. The regime change mission was "accomplished" in a matter of weeks. Then, after that initial steroid high wore off, the limits of American military might started to show.
The U.S. occupation produced one tragic debacle after another. Public judgment of the war's proponents moved from "convincing" to "mistaken" to "deceptive" to "deplorable." Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died, and millions more endured needless suffering. Baghdad did not emerge as a shining city on a hill. Once enthusiastic about the invasion, the American people first stopped delighting in the project and then, unless forced to attention by some discrete new horror like the rise of the Islamic State (IS) group, stopped looking at all.
When did the war in Iraq end? Or are we right to speak of it entirely in the past tense? This ought to be easy to answer, on the 20th anniversary of the invasion no less, but the situation is nebulous at best. It makes the questions worth asking, and it poses a real—if difficult to measure and easily ignored—risk to American security, too.
Fixing an end date for this war is messy in part because we have so many options on hand. Former President George W. Bush said "major combat operations" were done in May 2003, but that didn't exactly hold up.
By a slightly more plausible account, the war's been over for a dozen years. Then-President Barack Obama announced he was "responsibly ending the war in Iraq" in 2009, shortly after he came to office, in part on the strength of his condemnation of Bush's decision to invade. The combat mission officially concluded for a second time two years later, in 2011, with around 700 U.S. troops remaining behind in an advise-and-assist role, along with several thousand U.S. contractors.
But once IS started grabbing land in Iraq and neighboring Syria in 2014, committing anachronistic atrocities along the way, the Obama administration went back in. This second round never included a U.S. ground presence anywhere near the scale of the 160,000 American soldiers (plus nearly as many contractors) deployed during the 2007 surge. But U.S. forces again numbered in the thousands and continued to do so until the Iraqi government in 2020 asked then-President Donald Trump to make another exit plan.
The Trump administration dismissed that request, so it wasn't until the end of 2021 that President Joe Biden announced the third end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq. This time, about 2,500 U.S. soldiers stayed behind to advise and assist—indefinitely.
This month, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made a visit to Baghdad to discuss those 2,500. "We focus on the mission, which is the defeat of ISIS, and we are here not for any other purpose," he said, reiterating the Biden administration's position (which some Iraqi parliamentarians contend is a lie) that these troops won't do any actual fighting. But Austin also said "any attacks against our forces could undermine that mission," alluding to dozens of attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria by Iran-linked militias. Those attacks have slowed but do still happen, at least as recently as January.
The Iran connection is important here because IS is transparently not the only reason for the ongoing U.S. military presence in Iraq, whatever Austin claims. In 2019, Trump revealed he wanted to stay in Iraq long-term to "be able to watch Iran." "This is what a lot of people don't understand," he said. "We're going to keep watching, and we're going to keep seeing, and if there's trouble—if somebody is looking to do nuclear weapons or other things—we're going to know it before they do."
Biden hasn't been as unreserved as Trump in his comments on the strategy here, but countering Iran is widely understood to be a U.S. objective in keeping a toe in Iraq. Austin's trip was also meant as a show of support for the Iraqi prime minister's "push back against Iranian influence in the country, former officials and experts" told Reuters, with an unnamed senior U.S. defense official adding that "Iraqi leaders share our interest in Iraq not becoming a playground for conflict between the United States and Iran."
Avoiding a third round of the war in Iraq, with Iran taking the place IS and Saddam Hussein held in prior iterations, is indeed in both U.S. and Iraqi interests. But it's far from clear that this indefinite American force presence is a good way to achieve that goal.
Keeping thousands of U.S. soldiers in rocket range of Iran-linked militias props open a door to the very reescalation we want to avoid. There's no vital U.S. interest served by this indefinite advise-and-assist mission—our national security would not be materially affected if it ended tomorrow—but it does give these militias, the last bits of IS, and any other regional actors who want to have a go at America a convenient local target for their wrath and a perpetual billboard for recruitment.
The extent of that risk is difficult to gauge, and, hopefully, the potential reescalation will never happen. But this time a decade ago we were a year and a quarter out from the "end" of the war in Iraq, with a residual advise-and-assist force in place—and a year and a quarter away from the war's rebeginning. And now we're a year and a quarter out from another end of the war in Iraq, with a residual advise-and-assist force in place. It's not unreasonable to ask: Is it over?
The post Two Decades Later, the War in Iraq Is Over—Right? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When then-President Barack Obama decided that the United States would not provide lethal weaponry as part of a $53 billion aid package to Ukraine in 2014, Ron DeSantis was quick to criticize the decision.
DeSantis, then a member of Congress representing Florida's 6th district, told conservative talk radio host Bill Bennett in 2015 that it was a mistake for Obama to refuse to provide arms to Ukraine after Russia's annexation of Crimea the previous year.
"I think that when someone like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin sees Obama being indecisive, I think that whets his appetite to create more trouble in the area," DeSantis said at the time, according to a CNN report published last month. "And I think if we were to arm the Ukrainians, I think that would send a strong signal to him that he shouldn't be going any further."
Three years later, when President Donald Trump decided that the United States would provide weapons to Ukraine, DeSantis told Fox News that it illustrated the difference between the two presidents.
"[Obama] did nothing when Russia invaded Crimea, made incursions into Ukraine," DeSantis told Jeanine Pirro in 2018. In contrast, he said, Trump's actions were a way to be "strong against Russia" and prevent future conflicts.
In response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year, the Biden administration has wholeheartedly adopted the approach that DeSantis used to advocate. The U.S. has provided $113 billion in aid to Ukraine since the war began, much of it in the form of deadly weapons that have helped slow and even reverse some of the Russian military's early gains in the conflict. The administration's rationale for feeding money and arms to Ukraine has been a fear that Russia could threaten nearby NATO countries if Putin's expansionist ambitions aren't halted in the Donbas.
In short, it's been nearly the exact same argument that DeSantis made in 2015 after the annexation of Crimea: Arm the Ukrainians to "send a strong signal to [Putin] that he shouldn't be going any further."
Now, however, DeSantis is criticizing that approach.
During an appearance on Fox News last month, DeSantis slammed Biden's recent promise that America would continue to support Ukraine's fight indefinitely, DeSantis called that a "blank check" approach to the conflict. He also specifically downplayed the threat that Russia supposedly presents to the rest of Europe.
"The fear of Russia going into NATO countries and all that…has not even come close to happening," DeSantis said, adding that the conflict has exposed Russia to be "a third-rate military power."
Judging from his history of talking about conflicts in Ukraine, DeSantis' foreign policy seems to be defined by a simple rule. Whatever Democrats do is wrong, but whatever Republicans do is right.
As Flordia's governor, DeSantis has excelled at that kind of zero-sum political game, positioning himself as the culture-warring conservative hero who is single-handedly saving the state from liberal ideologies and "woke" culture, making Florida a refuge for those fleeing Democratic-run states like New York and California. That might work on the state level, and it might work as a tactic for domestic political wins, but can it be effectively translated into a principle for guiding foreign policy?
As I detailed in this month's Reason cover story, DeSantis' politics have evolved considerably from his time as a member of Congress, where he served three terms between 2013 and 2018. The gap between that earlier version of DeSantis and the boisterous character that the governor has recently embraced will be something that other Republican presidential hopefuls will likely try to exploit if DeSantis decides he wants to seek the White House in 2024.
So what should Americans expect if DeSantis ends up not only as the general of the GOP's culture war, but as America's commander-in-chief, with the power to commit the world's largest military to a real war?
Daniel Larison, a noninterventionist foreign policy analyst and author of the Eunomia Substack, sees DeSantis' recent comments about Ukraine as an attempt to triangulate between Biden's position and where some Republican voters stand.
"His position is very much shaped by domestic politics. If DeSantis comes out and opposes a Ukraine aid package, that would be a clearer signal that he is really staking out a different position," Larison tells Reason. "He doesn't want to take the political risk of coming out in favor of cutting off military assistance (and his record in Congress suggests that he has no problem with providing that assistance), but he doesn't want to be seen as endorsing Biden's policy without qualifications, either."
In fairness to DeSantis, the governor of an American state does not need to have much in the way of a coherent vision for foreign policy. But DeSantis is widely viewed as a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024—and, in situations like the appearance on Fox News last month, he is actively choosing to wade into these issues as a possible prelude to a presidential run.
Whoever heads up the Republican ticket next year will have the task of reorganizing Republican foreign policy after Trump pivoted the party away from its Bush-era, neoconservative streak that called for spreading democracy around the globe (at the point of a gun, if need be). DeSantis has excelled within the new Republican focus on domestic policy and culture warring, but he'll have to do more than criticize Biden to build a cohesive foreign policy.
Perhaps there is room for DeSantis to find that middle ground that Larison describes. He could criticize the "blank check" approach of the Biden administration while maintaining that Obama's refusal to provide any weaponry was also incorrect. But how much is the right amount, and how would he know what to do in a similar situation?
So far, DeSantis is having a hard time articulating that answer. In a Times of London profile published last week, DeSantis sparred with David Charter, the paper's U.S. editor, over the Ukraine question.
"I ask about Ukraine and he says that 'there's a critique of Biden, and I think I'm sympathetic to it in the sense that, is our policy just do whatever Zelensky wants? Or do we have a concrete idea of what we're trying to achieve exactly?'" Charter wrote. "When I ask him how it should be handled differently, he refers to Biden being 'weak on the world stage' and failing at deterrence, but as that is not answering how it should be handled now, I ask again. DeSantis does not have anything to add: 'Perhaps you should cover some other ground? I think I've said enough.'"
Outside of the Ukraine issue, DeSantis seems to hold fairly typical Republican views on foreign policy. "DeSantis has signaled his pro-Israel views, an understandable disdain for the communist and far-left dictatorships of Latin America, and a hawkish view of China," summed up Dalibor Rohac, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, in November. But there are still some big gaps to be filled in, including "his views of trade, an area where Trump's protectionist instincts have continued to dominate U.S. policy under Biden," wrote Rohac.
For Bonnie Kristian, a Reason contributor and fellow at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank, DeSantis has "a standard Republican record." He's been "critical of Pentagon waste but uninterested in reducing military spending, even to balance the budget; skeptical of unchecked foreign aid; reflexively supportive of Israel; willing to subvert civil liberties in the name of fighting terror; critical of U.S. military intervention in Syria under the Obama administration but supportive of it in the Trump years; and prone to framing relations with unreformed Soviet bloc nations—Cuba, North Korea, and especially China—in absolutist, ideological terms," Kristian wrote in The New York Times in January.
And while the Ukraine war is the most acute and pressing foreign policy issue facing the country right now, Kristian notes that DeSantis seems to be a more serious Iran hawk than Trump ever was. "He talks about [Iran] in very absolutist terms, saying that the United States and Iran have no interests in common," she said during an appearance on Larison's Crashing The War Party podcast last week. "It seems plausible that he would be moving back towards not just this dysfunctional, no-active-diplomacy relationship that we have with them right now, but potentially thinking about military intervention there again."
Indeed, the biggest red flag in DeSantis' foreign policy background might be the praise he's sung for John Bolton, an unapologetic architect of the Bush administration's catastrophic foreign policies after 9/11 who also served, briefly, in the Trump administration as a foreign policy advisor. Bolton has spent literally decades trying to maneuver the United States into a direct war with Iran—after leaving the Trump administration, Bolton wrote that Trump's biggest mistake was not going to war after Iran shot down an unmanned American drone in 2019. Bolton is an ultra-hawk who advocated for the calamitous intervention in Libya during the Obama years, tried to convince President George W. Bush to attack Cuba over nonexistent biological weapons, and cheered the prospect of a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran.
What does DeSantis think of Bolton? In that same 2018 Fox News interview where DeSantis praised Trump for being tough on Russia, he called Bolton (then a White House advisor) "a very strong voice, very clear thinker."
"I think that importantly, he knows how bureaucracy works and so he is going to be instrumental in getting the bureaucrats to actually enforce President Trump's policies which they haven't been, you know, as willing to do as they were under Obama," DeSantis said. "So, I think it was a really good choice and I do think that you will see positive results in terms you have the execution of the Trump foreign policy."
DeSantis' praise for Bolton might not extend to support for Bolton's maximalist position on Iran or American interventionism, but it does seem to illustrate, once again, that DeSantis defaults to uncritically supporting fellow Republicans—even when those same Republicans have been disastrously wrong in the past.
If DeSantis ends up as the GOP's presidential nominee next year, he might have a freer hand than any prominent Republican politician in a generation to redefine the party's foreign policy approach. In the wake of the disastrous Bush wars, the chaotic Trump years, and Biden's "blank check" in the Ukraine conflict, there is an opportunity for a leader to compose a foreign policy that recognizes the costs, risks, and limits of America's global military presence.
To present a cohesive foreign policy vision, DeSantis must meaningfully move beyond his reflexive partisanship and successfully grapple with his own uncomfortably hawkish record—something he might have to do now that the Republican electorate has soured on pointless foreign wars. He should clarify the confusion surrounding his views on arming Ukraine. And he should publically pledge to never, ever hire John Bolton as an advisor.
The post Ron DeSantis Is Clumsily Backing Away From His Past as a Russia Hawk appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yet another Minnesota college is embroiled in a controversy after a group of Muslim students expressed outrage over "offensive" art. Last month, Macalester College—a liberal arts college just two miles from Hamline University, where a similar controversy involving an adjunct art history professor erupted in December—briefly shut down an exhibit from an Iranian-American artist over student claims that some of the work displayed caused "harm."
While the school later reinstated the art exhibit, it wasn't without caveats. Now, pages of construction paper are posted on the glass gallery doors to block the work from view, along with a "content warning." The incident is yet another example of university administrators caving into unreasonable student demands and setting a troubling precedent that paves the way for further censorship.
On January 27, an exhibition by Iranian-American artist Taravat Talepasand opened in Macalester College's Law Warschaw gallery. According to a statement that accompanies the exhibit, the work "explores the cultural taboos that reflect on gender and political authority." It includes works like a sculpture reading "Woman, Life, Freedom" in English and Farsi, a watercolor of a man beheading two women, and a painting depicting a teddy bear and a Ken doll, called Mohammed Meets Jesus.
However, a handful of works sparked student outrage. Two drawings, Blasphemy X and Blasphemy IX portray women wearing niqabs pulling up their robes to reveal lingerie. A series of porcelain sculptures portray women who are entirely veiled, save for comically exaggerated breasts.
The exhibition "just feels a bit targeting because there's not that many Muslim students here," one student, who circulated a petition denouncing the work, told the Sahan Journal. "At a predominantly white institution, when I'm looking at who's attending the school, who's walking into this exhibit, without understanding and nuance, then it's quite harmful."
"The decision to display and continue to display this exhibition despite the harm it perpetuates is a deeply problematic issue," the petition reads. "It is targeting and harming an already small community that exists on this campus." The petition has so far only gained 80 signatures, but it seems this was more than enough to get administrators to act.
The school temporarily closed the exhibition, erecting black curtains to obscure the art. Later, administrators sent a campus-wide email announcing that while they would be reopening the exhibit due to "the value and importance of artistic expression," there would be several changes. The school has now placed several sheets of construction paper over the glass doors leading to the gallery to "prevent unintentional or non-consensual viewing of certain works," and posted a content warning.
"Unfortunately, as the Taravat exhibition was installed, we did not take the steps needed to demonstrate cultural sensitivity and awareness of the possible impact of the art. For this and for the harm it caused, we apologize," administrators wrote in the email.
Talepasand told the Sahan Journal that while, at first, she didn't object to the brief closure after hearing about the student outrage, "Nobody told me about the black curtain veiling all the windows. That's a whole other level of censorship." Talepasand also took issue with the phrasing of the content warning, which states that the exhibit "contains images of sexuality and violence that may be upsetting or unacceptable for some viewers." She called this a "violation."
This case is possibly the "first time a college has employed the curious phrase 'non-consensual viewing of certain works,'" wrote Sarah McLaughlin, director of the targeted advocacy program at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment nonprofit. "It's, frankly, a rather sinister way to define controversial imagery: not just as something that could offend or upset, but as something that violates an accidental viewer's consent. It's a comically bad lesson to teach students."
While it's good news that Macalester chose to reopen the gallery, school administrators never should have caved to student outrage and closed it in the first place. Further, the use of content warnings and visually blocking the art still sends the message that if art offends students' religious sensibilities, Macalester administrators are happy to hide it away.
"My artwork is unapologetic," Talepasand told the Sahan Journal. "I'm making work that's finding the similarities, not just differences, between East and West and how, in a lot of ways, they parallel. Sometimes it can be very political. Sometimes it can be very controversial."
The post After Muslim Students Complained That an Art Exhibit Was 'Harmful,' Macalester College Shut It Down appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Riot cops dance with young people in the streets, waving the flag together and setting off smoke grenades in the national colors. It seems like the ending to a badly written dystopian movie, or perhaps a copy of Kendall Jenner's infamously tone-deaf Pepsi commercial.
Instead, it was a real scene on Iranian television, after the national team's victory over Wales last week. Iranian authorities have tried to use the World Cup to stoke nationalist pride and project an image of unity amid an ongoing uprising.
Activists debated whether to claim the national team or shun it. The government has used the latter position to portray its opponents as unpatriotic scolds. To make matters even more charged, Iran's Group B opponents include two historic enemies, England and America.
The team itself does not seem too thrilled about its political role. Iranian players showed their support for protesters during their game against England, and authorities arrested former national team member Voria Ghafouri soon after, likely as a warning to the current players.
After losing to America on Tuesday night, the team will not advance to the next round of the World Cup. Protesters reportedly took to the streets in response.
Iran has been rocked by an uprising for the past two months. Protests began in response to the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in police custody, then became a general airing of grievances against theocratic rule. Police have fired lethal weapons at protesters and reportedly subjected prisoners to torture and sexual abuse.
More than 300 people have been killed, 14,000 arrested, and six sentenced to death in connection to the unrest, according to the United Nations Human Rights Office.
Along with the repression, Iranian authorities have signaled their openness to reform and have even tried to co-opt the protesters' demands. After decades of enforcing intrusive social rules—Amini was arrested for "bad hijab"—the Islamic Republic is suddenly beating the drum of national unity between secular and religious citizens.
The World Cup was an opportunity to promote that kind of unity. Leaked audio shows that Iranian officials coordinated with World Cup host country Qatar to manage the image of Iranian crowds. Ever sensitive of its own human rights record, Qatar has tried to keep the soccer tournament as apolitical as possible.
For example, Qatari authorities kicked out a fan for wearing a jersey with Amini's name on it and prevented spectators from bringing any Iranian flag other than the Islamic Republic's version.
Under the previous monarchy, the Iranian flag had a lion-and-sun emblem in the middle. After the 1979 revolution, the new Islamist government replaced the emblem with a tulip made of religious calligraphy. Iranians abroad often fly the monarchist flag or a simple red, white, and green tricolor as a symbol of opposition to the Islamic Republic.
Opposition activists debated how to deal with the soccer propaganda. Some had already been calling for a boycott of Iranian sports, as part of a broader campaign to take away the Islamic Republic's international legitimacy. After all, the national team met with President Ebrahim Raisi before heading off to Qatar.
Retired players Ali Karimi and Ali Daei announced that they would boycott the World Cup. Karimi, who now lives in the United Arab Emirates, has become a kind of spokesman for the protest movement. Iranian agents have reportedly tried to kidnap him in order to shut him up.
Others, like electronic freedom activist Amir Rashidi, British-Iranian comedian Omid Djalili, and former prisoner Jason Rezaian, publicly argued that the team could help draw attention to the Iranian people's demands.
Iranian players had worn black and refused to celebrate their goals. Star player Sardar Azmoun even wrote on Instagram that his career is worth "sacrificing for one strand of Iranian women's hair. Shame on you who kill people so easily. Long live Iranian women."
The team ended up using the World Cup to draw attention to the uprising.
Team captain Ehsan Hajsafi began a press conference "in the name of the Lord of Rainbows," a reference to the case of Kian Pirfalak, a 9-year-old child shot dead at an Iranian police checkpoint several days before.
In widely televised images, Iranian players took a knee before their first match against England, then refused to sing the national anthem.
Iran ended up losing that match 6–2. Kayhan, a newspaper close to the Iranian government, called it six goals for "England, Israel, the Saudi royal family, and unpatriotic sellouts," referring to Iran's geopolitical rivals.
Iran International, a Persian-language news channel with ties to Saudi Arabia, claimed that the Iranian people were celebrating "Iran's worst defeat in World Cup history." The Israeli foreign minister reposted Kayhan's headline with the caption, "We didn't go to the World Cup, but we scored six goals. Congratulations to us."
Iranian authorities arrested Iranian-Kurdish athlete Voria Ghafouri, a former player on the national team, for "incitement." (Amini was Kurdish, and the heaviest unrest has taken place in Kurdistan.) In private, they threatened the national team's family members, an anonymous source told CNN.
The players apparently got the message. At the next match against Wales, they sang the national anthem. Iran won 2–0.
Then came the gloating from pro-government media. Kayhan bragged that the Israelis, the Saudis, and the sellouts scored nothing. The heavily armored police who had been watching over public squares began to celebrate. State news agencies filmed them dancing with soccer fans and even celebrated photos of women without hijabs in the crowds.
In other words, the Iranian government painted itself as the side of wholesome fun, opposed by treasonous killjoys.
Ironically, the Islamic Republic had previously tried to keep female soccer fans out of stadiums in order to prevent gender mixing. The restrictions were only lifted in 2019, after soccer fan Sahar "Blue Girl" Khodayari snuck into a game disguised as a man, then died by suicide when she was threatened with jail time.
The latest games coincided with a lull in unrest. Mark Pyruz, a researcher who tracks the situation in Iran, noted that turnout at demonstrations and riots last week was only a fraction of the previous week's crowds. He speculated that public attention on the World Cup, as well as heavy repression in Kurdish areas, could have put a lid on protests.
Some activists who had called for a boycott downplayed the significance of the celebrations of the victory over Wales.
Voice of America presenter Masih Alinejad tweeted a video of police clapping for the team.
"Only our jailers, interrogators and murderers are celebrating the victory of Islamic Republic's football team in the World Cup," she wrote in the caption. "Iranians are in mourning for more than 500 protesters including 50 children were killed by these security forces in the ongoing uprising."
Others showed a bit of regret about the opposition's approach to soccer.
"It was us who pushed the team into the arms of the Islamic Republic, which made us more divided than ever," wrote former BBC producer Panah Farhadbahman after the victory over Wales. "Now that Iran and 'not the Islamic Republic' is on the verge of advancing to the World Cup knockout stage for the first time in history, we missed a golden opportunity."
He speculated that Iranians could have turned their "joy and rebellion into global scenes of protest against the Iranian Republic," but "now it is the forces of repression who laugh in our faces."
The match with America has become another venue for political posturing. In an infographic about the Group B rankings, the U.S. Soccer Federation used a version of the Iranian flag without the tulip. The Iranian government lashed out, calling for America to be expelled from the World Cup.
During that game, Azmoun again stayed silent during the anthem, although other players sang along.
After the United States won, videos emerged of Iranian protesters celebrating the national team's loss in the streets, especially in Kurdish areas. Police attacked the cars of people who were celebrating the loss, according to actor Mohammad Naderi, and reports have emerged that police shot a citizen dead during the demonstrations on Tuesday night.*
The tone of pro-boycott activists again turned triumphant.
"The moral fate of the Islamic Republic's football team—formerly the national team—shows there are only two choices with no middle ground: the people or the government!" wrote Iranian-Finnish activist Kambiz Ghafouri. "Playing moderate means collaborating with the government. People who play at moderation are destined to be finished off."
*UPDATE: On Wednesday night, Iranian national team member Saeed Ezatolahi announced on Instagram that the man killed during the Tuesday demonstrations — Mehran Samak—was a childhood friend and little league soccer teammate. Before he died, Samak had posted a plea on Instagram, asking Iranians to stick together and keep their minds on the protests, regardless of what happened during the World Cup match.
"After last night's bitter defeat, the news of your passing has set my heart on fire. Even now, writing this Instagram story, I still haven't slept. But old friend, you must know that day-by-day, the world is getting emptied of humanity," Ezatolahi wrote. "There's a lot to say, but be sure that the day the masks fall and their truth is revealed, that day they will have to answer to the hearts of your family and the pain of your mother."
The post Iran Attempted To Use the World Cup To Stoke Nationalist Pride appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Tuesday's World Cup match between the United States and Iran isn't the first time the two geopolitical adversaries will meet at the world's most-watched sporting event.
But it might be even more politically charged than the first, and the stakes on the field—the only thing that will actually reach a resolution on Tuesday—are undeniably higher.
When the U.S. and Iran collided at the 1998 World Cup in France, it was a big deal. That was less than two decades removed from the Iranian hostage crisis and the overthrow of the American-backed Shah. Diplomatic relations between the two countries were nonexistent, and the U.S. had imposed a trade embargo on Iran in 1995. The match included a carefully choreographed pre-game handshake between two teams—Iran's government refused to allow its players to walk towards the U.S., so the Americans walked to the Iranian side of the field.
As Reason's Fiona Harrigan has written, these high-profile sporting events can highlight the difference between how governments and regular people interact. The 1998 Iran-U.S. game was a prime example of the ideals that underpin international sporting events like the Olympics and the World Cup—that meeting on the soccer pitch can help ease tensions and remind everyone involved that national pride is most enjoyable when the risk of bloodshed is minimal.
Also, both national teams were pretty bad in 1998 and neither was expected to advance out of a group that included traditional powers Germany and Yugoslavia. Iran won the match, 2–1, but both teams were eliminated in the first round anyway.
Times have changed. That 1998 game happened before 9/11 and the U.S.' subsequent decision to invade and occupy two of Iran's neighbors. It was before President George W. Bush labeled Iran part of the "Axis of Evil." It was before Iranian efforts to build a nuclear bomb, and before America made and then abandoned a deal to temper Tehran's nuclear aspirations. It was before Iran and U.S.-ally Saudi Arabia launched an awful proxy war in Yemen, with America feeding weapons into the conflict. It was before Iran was helping Russia with its invasion of Ukraine. It was before American-made social media platforms helped regular Iranians expose how the country's government abuses women's rights and limits free speech, and before those same platforms were used to organize protests against the Iranian regime. It was before 24/7 news and the internet turned all of this into an ongoing spectacle.
Take, for example, what happened during Monday's pre-game press conference, when American captain Tyler Adams was asked by a member of Iran's media team about America's history of racial segregation. That would hardly have been worth mentioning in pre-game coverage in 1998. In 2022, it turned into a viral moment—in no small part because of how Adams deftly responded (the politicians on both sides could learn from this).
Today, in a press conference ahead of USMNT vs. Iran, an Iranian reporter questioned Tyler Adams' support of the Iranian people, and then asked the team's captain if he's comfortable representing the U.S., given the way the country has treated Black people. ????️???????? pic.twitter.com/xjr0fGTWCi
— Men in Blazers (@MenInBlazers) November 28, 2022
Or consider the social media virtue signaling that the U.S. team's official Twitter account engaged in on Sunday, displaying Iran's flag without the Islamic Republic seal in the middle. That was a sign of support for protesters in Iran, some of whom have used the seal-less red, white, and green flag (which the country used before its 1979 revolution) as an emblem. Iranian officials were so outraged by the tweet that they asked FIFA to remove America from the World Cup.
So, yes, this is a bigger deal than the 1998 match. And that's before you even consider what's actually at stake on Tuesday. An American victory means the U.S. will progress to the next round of the World Cup, while Iran will be eliminated. If Iran wins or holds America to a tie, the Islamic Republic will advance at the Americans' expense. There is no scenario in which both teams play another game at the Qatar World Cup.
The heightened stakes make the game more exciting—and, frankly, more nerve-wracking—for the millions of us who will skip out on work this afternoon to watch it (sorry, KMW!).
But the game can also provide a bit of context for the real-world conflict between Iran and America. Unlike on the field in Doha, the multifaceted and complex real-world conflicts between the two countries won't have a tidy resolution, and shouldn't be governed by zero-sum thinking. Geopolitics isn't a game, after all, even if it is frequently mistaken for one.
Probably the most enduring image from the 1998 Iran-U.S. match is the Iranian players gifting white roses to the Americans before the game—a literal peace offering between countries that had no formal diplomatic relations.
It is unlikely that today's match will include a similar exercise. Unfortunately, that's not because relations between the two countries have improved in the past 24 years.
The soccer teams have gotten better since 1998. Now, it's time for American and Iranian leaders to follow suit.
The post Today's Iran-U.S. World Cup Match Is Even More Politically Fraught Than Famous 1998 Meeting appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>These are difficult times for the mad mullahs of Tehran. There they were last month, quietly going about their business of oppressing the Iranian people, which they've been doing for the past 43 years, when a big kerfuffle broke out over the death of a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini. She had been in the custody of the government morality police when she died, arrested for wearing her hijab headscarf in a manner that was deemed to be not quite right. Witnesses said she was severely beaten; the government denied this, but Amini's father was nevertheless prevented from viewing his dead daughter's body.
Protests, largely led by women, broke out immediately and quickly spread nationwide; soon they were a subject of international celebration. Domestically, more than 200 Iranians were said to have been killed, either shot or clubbed to death by security police. Forty days later, presumably to the regime's alarm, the demonstrations were going even stronger, and there was open speculation that the end might finally be at hand for the hated theocracy.
This was pretty bad PR, especially for a government that was already widely despised. Now, to make things just a little bit worse, a new movie called Holy Spider is being released in the West. It's already won a best actress award for one of its stars, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, at this year's Cannes Film Festival, and it deserves a look. Raking over the smoldering embers of a 20-year-old serial-killer case, it's a powerful film, brash and bracing in the manner of a classic B-movie.
The story is set in the "holy city" of Mashhad, in northeastern Iran. There a construction worker named Saeed Hanaei launches a personal jihad against prostitution—specifically, the desperate hookers who line up along the sides of major roads, beckoning to passing autos (or, in the case of Hanaei, motorbikes). The killer has an unvarying technique for dispatching these women: luring them onto his bike with a flash of money or opium, then taking them home to the small apartment he shares with his wife and small children (carefully waiting until the family is absent). Sometimes he has preliminary sex with his victims before strangling them, often with their own hijabs. Afterward, he dumps their bodies wherever, in a tomato field or next to a road. In real life, Hanaei admitted that over the course of 11 months, from 2000 through 2001, he killed 16 women in this way. (Police believed there were more.)
After his arrest, this fervid soldier of God was taken up as a hero by his fellow dwellers in the religious-lunatic community. After all, had he not sought to purify society? Many in the military also approved of his activities, and police may have lent him a hand as well—they were said to have offered one victim's father money if he would publicly forgive his daughter's murderer. With so much popular support, Hanaei hoped to escape punishment. Surprisingly, though, he was found guilty and hanged, in a big, gym-like room in Mashhad prison, in 2002.
Holy Spider is raw and unsentimental, reminiscent in some ways of the gruesome 1986 true crime movie Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (although it's nowhere near as bloody). Director and cowriter Ali Abbasi has bolstered the story with one invented character, a female investigative journalist named Rahimi (played with bracing bluntness by Ebrahimi), and this was a useful idea—Rahimi's unflagging alertness makes us feel the everyday dangers of life in a brutally misogynistic society. And Abbasi draws an effectively low-key performance from theater veteran Mehdi Bajestani, who plays Hanaei as a man who seems dim, but is quietly very dangerous.
The director doesn't shy away from depicting the murders as sudden, shocking assaults (some might find them hard to watch). But he also brings a subtle chill to scenes in which we see Hanaei's teenage son, Ali (Mesbah Taleb), appearing to begin his own journey down his dead father's path. There's also a shivery conversation between Rahimi and another journalist—one who's actually been contacted by the killer. He says he asked the man—Hanaei—how long he intended to keep killing prostitutes. "As long as it takes," he said.
The post Review: <em>Holy Spider</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On October 14, Iranian authorities had put up a photomontage on Vali Asr Street—Tehran's equivalent of Times Square—featuring female artists, athletes, politicians, and academics. The caption read "women of my homeland, Iran." Under normal circumstances, the billboard might have been a cringey piece of patriotic kitsch.
The timing made it a public relations fiasco. The art installation seemed like an attempt to co-opt recent women's rights protests, which the government was in the process of violently suppressing. (At least 200 people have died in the crackdown, including many teenagers.) Several of the celebrities demanded that their pictures be removed.
In a tearful video, actress Fatemeh Motamed-Arya declared her solidarity with 22-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini and 16-year-old Sarina Esmaeilzadeh—both killed by police. Observers even noted that one of the women featured on the poster, photojournalist Nooshin Jafari, was currently in jail for her political views.
Within a day, authorities took all the photos off the billboard. Mehrdad Moazzami, spokesman for the billboard's designers, made a foot-in-mouth statement about the controversy. The installation was supposed to "present a handful of successful women from our homeland," he claimed, "since everyone is talking about women these days."
The Islamic Republic has long tried to portray itself as the hand that giveth and the hand that taketh away. On one hand, police and paramilitaries ruthlessly crack down on street protests, and arrest political figures who step out of line. On the other hand, authorities emphasize their inclusiveness and openness to reform.
The state makes changes, but it portrays them as a magnanimous gesture from a position of strength—or perhaps even a correction the system wanted to make all along—rather than a concession in the face of pressure.
But the strategy can backfire. Like the meme of an older Steve Buscemi dressed as an undercover teenager greeting his "fellow kids," the Vali Asr billboard came off as tone-deaf and out of touch. If people feel that Iran's powerholders are pandering to the opposition without satisfying its fundamental demands, they will be roused to greater anger.
Iran is far from the only state that behaves this way. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman abolished many of Saudi Arabia's infamous restrictions on women, while jailing and torturing the feminists who had demanded those changes. Burma's military dictatorship took a similar attitude when it introduced political reforms known as "disciplined democracy" in 2011.
"I could tell even from these early meetings that [military leaders'] instinct was never to show any weakness," wrote former diplomat Thant Myint-U in The Hidden History of Burma. "Change was possible, even desirable, but it could never seem to have come under pressure."
Iran once looked to be on the verge of a political opening. After winning competitive elections in 2013 and 2015, a Reformist government promised to ease up on some of the Islamic Republic's most unpopular social restrictions, such as Internet censorship and religious dress codes for women.
But after a series of increasingly bold protests and a near-war with the United States, the Iranian deep state charged in the opposite direction. It violently suppressed unrest in November 2019, blatantly rigged the 2021 elections, and stepped up enforcement of dress codes.
Amini, a Kurdish woman, had been arrested for her clothing when she died in police custody last month. Her death kicked off widespread civil disobedience against the dress code, and street protests calling for the end of religious rule altogether. And so resumed the game of carrots and sticks.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared on October 3rd that women "who don't have complete hijab are among the serious supporters of the Islamic Republic," and praised Kurds' contributions to the Iranian nation, even as he blamed foreign agitators for the protests, a green light for a heavy-handed police response.
Around the time of Khamenei's speech, video emerged of an all-woman riot police unit confronting demonstrators. Their uniforms were somewhat less modest than the clothing the government tries to promote; some observers claimed that those officers would be arrested for immodesty if they were average citizens.
Earlier this week, Iranian rock climber Elnaz Rekabi competed in South Korea without her mandatory headscarf. She then disappeared into the Iranian embassy, and issued an apology that appeared to be under duress, leading to reports that she was about to be imprisoned.
But then something strange happened. Rekabi was given a hero's welcome in Tehran, and officials hinted that she may go on to represent Iran at the Olympics, while insisting that her scarfless performance had been a big misunderstanding. Rekabi even appeared in a photo op with the minister of sports—wearing a baseball cap instead of a headscarf.
In its own peculiar way, the Islamic Republic is acknowledging that the authorities have gone too far, and the system has to make a course correction. But that may not be enough. After a month of tear gas and beatings and gunfire, Iranians may not be convinced to move on so easily.
UPDATE: BBC Persian, citing an anonymous source, is reporting as of October 21 that Rekabi was quietly taken to house arrest.
The post Iran Tries To Coopt and Crush Feminists at the Same Time appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Protests resulting from the death of a young woman, almost certainly at the hands of police, have Iranian reformers hopeful that this time, the Islamic regime will fall and clear the way for something better.
Anybody with memories of the Arab Spring of 2011 and the limited gains—and often, outright chaos—that resulted knows to keep expectations in check. Still, there are reasons for hope in the current protests, and Iran's history of greater cultural breathing room before the Islamic regime took power raises the possibility that something better could result.
"Current protests in Iran point to prospects for new revolution," the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the France- and Albania-based main opposition group to the Islamic regime, optimistically announced just days after the latest round of protests broke out in mid-September. "The profound injustice of Mahsa Amini's death may have been all that was needed to spark another uprising in pursuit of regime change."
Protests have continued and spread since then, even as the body count rises. The arrest of 22-year-old Amini for failing to wear a hijab, and her subsequent death almost certainly at the hands of the morality police, really does seem to have tapped a deep well of discontent that starts with the treatment of women and encompasses the full range of the regime's illiberalism and brutality.
"The current protests in Iran sound the death knell of the Islamic Republic," Iranian-American journalist and activist Masih Alinejad insisted this week in Foreign Affairs. "With women leading the way, Iran's transformation from theocracy to a democracy will be remarkable."
Well, that's hopefully true. But experience tells us that even the most passionate and widespread protests aren't guaranteed to end well. In 2011, Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, killed himself in response to repeated harassment by police. Protests against corruption and authoritarianism erupted and spread to other countries in a phenomenon dubbed "the Arab Spring." Regimes toppled, but not always for the better, and some places just descended into violence.
"Ten years after the mass popular uprising known as the Arab Spring began in January of 2011, optimism can be hard to find," the Harvard Gazette concluded in a 2021 piece drawing on the university's scholars and analysts. "Despite the participation of thousands of people—particularly young people—in protests against the autocratic rulers of Middle Eastern countries, little seems to have changed."
In the wake of the 1979 revolution that replaced the autocratic shah with a theocratic Islamic regime, Iran has also experienced waves of protest that achieved little. As recently as the winter of 2019-2020, thousands of people took to the streets in demonstrations that frightened the government without ending its control. But those protests were broader than the ones that came before, and the latest wave may achieve critical mass, having spread to industrial workers with separate but related concerns.
"Protests have spread widely and morphed from calls to abolish mandatory veiling to the ouster of the Islamic Republic leadership," The Wall Street Journal reported last week. Whatever is happening is picking up momentum that goes far beyond the death that set it off.
"Having studied history, having lived through the 1979 revolution, this time feels different," comments Iranian-American scholar Reza Aslan. "There is a fearlessness that we are seeing on the streets, particularly by young women, by teenage women, who simply have had enough."
Women have particular reason to seek change in Iran, since their own mothers and grandmothers tell them of times when things were better, and they had more liberty to do as they pleased.
"Before the revolution, Iranian women had some of the most liberal laws in the Middle East," Kamin Mohammadi wrote in The Guardian of life before the 1979 Islamist revolution. "They could wear what they liked, they could work and even rise to be judges, they had equal rights to divorce and the custody of children, and they had been voting since 1963."
That's not to say that women were treated entirely equally to men, but their circumstances were improving before the revolution reversed many of their gains. Under the current regime, "married women can't even leave the country without their husband's permission," notes Human Rights Watch in its assessment of the sad status on women in the country. That said, the organization adds, "across the board, Iran's human rights situation is dire. It's hard to say what tops the list of abuses, but there are severe restrictions on free speech in Iran."
The old monarchy was deeply authoritarian, but it actually offered expanding breathing room for those who didn't challenge its power.
"The Shah's crucial decade from 1965 to 1975 was also critical for the regime's cultural politics. Iran in this period was a discordant combination of cultural freedoms and political despotism—of increasing censorship against the opposition but increasing freedoms for everyone else," Abbas Milani wrote in his 2012 book, The Shah. "It is far from hyperbole to claim that during the sixties and seventies, Iran was one of the most liberal societies in the Muslim world in terms of cultural and religious tolerance, and in the state's aversion to interfere in the private lives of its citizens—so long as they did not politically oppose the Shah."
Ultimately, the Iranian people ejected the Shah in a popular uprising in 1979. But in doing so, they replaced the authoritarian monarchy with a totalitarian Islamist regime that reaches into all areas of life. From enjoying a relative degree of cultural freedom, they transitioned to a government capable of employing morality police that arrest and kill people for how they dress.
With the history of the 1979 revolution in mind, and of the later Arab Spring, the questions now are: First, will the protests currently engulfing Iran result in change; and, second, will that change result in increased liberty, or will it make things worse? Observers have every reason to be both wary and hopeful.
The death of Mahsa Amini has unleashed a vast amount of discontent in Iran. We don't know where that unleashed rage will take that country. But, despite the danger of the moment, the Iranian people have an opportunity to reclaim what freedom they once had, and to stake out much more.
The post Can the Iran Protests Do Better Than Uprisings of the Past? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Iranian climber Elnaz Rekabi has returned to Tehran, after competing in an international competition without a hijab and subsequently apologizing. Rekabi returned to Iran today and was greeted by a cheering crowd.
Last weekend, Rekabi represented Iran at the IFSC Climbing Asian Championships in Seoul. In video of the competition, Rekabi can be seen climbing sans hijab—which goes against Iran's rules for women athletes.
People became concerned for Rekabi after reports that friends had not been able to reach her and that her passport and phone were confiscated as she got on a plane back to Tehran.
Rekabi subsequently posted an apology on her Instagram page, saying that the absence of a hijab was unintentional. "Due to bad timing, and the unanticipated call for me to climb the wall, my head covering inadvertently came off," her post said.
"The claim of an error on her Instagram account may suggest the regime is trying to avoid putting her in jail after the video of her without her hijab went viral," suggests the Guardian.
"State media later broadcast an interview with Ms Rekabi, in which she repeated the explanation she had given in an Instagram post for climbing with her hair uncovered," notes the BBC. "I was suddenly and unexpectedly called on to compete while I was at the women's locker room," said Rekabi. "I was busy wearing my shoes and fixing my equipment and forgot to wear my hijab, which I should have worn."
This is how Iranians are welcoming #ElnazRekabi at 3:45 am in Tehran.
Khamenei once announced that for Iranian female athletes hijab is more important than medals.
By refusing forced hijab #Elnaz humiliated Khamenei. #OpIran#مهسا_امینی #پرواز۷۵۲ #الناز_ركابى pic.twitter.com/M3XZiEEO1t— Anonymous (@AnymousIran) October 19, 2022
The controversy comes amid ongoing protests against restrictions on women and the Iranian regime more broadly. Since September, Iranians have been taking to the streets.
The protests were initially spurred by the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman arrested for not wearing a hijab correctly.
A main focus all along has been on women's rights, with many Iranian women removing their headscarves in protest. But protesters have also moved beyond this, decrying Iranian dictatorship more generally.
Defiant Kurdish women have removed their hijabs, walk in streets of Bukan city, defying regime's mandatory hijab rules. Amid ongoing protests in Iran, many women in Iran have stopped observing rules described by activists as "gender apartheid". #مهسا_امینی pic.twitter.com/IpgwUXeXdF
— Khosro Kalbasi Isfahani (@KhosroKalbasi) October 18, 2022
"The current protests in Iran sound the death knell of the Islamic Republic," suggests Masih Alinejad in Foreign Affairs this week. Amini's killing "has unleashed a wave of angry and bloody demonstrations, boycotts, work stoppages, and wildcat strikes that have exhausted the country's security forces and spread to more than 100 cities. The government has endured major protests before, notably in 2009, 2017, and 2019, but these demonstrations are different. They embody the anger that Iranian women and young Iranians feel toward a regime that seeks to stifle their dearest desires. And they promise to upend Iran's establishment."
Alinejad continues:
The compulsory wearing of the hijab is to the Islamic Republic what the Berlin Wall was to communism, a symbol not just of power and endurance but of vulnerability. The Berlin Wall was also an admission of the fragility of the communist system, which depended on exercising great control over people. Similarly, compulsory hijab laws reflect the Islamic Republic's fear of allowing its citizens personal freedoms and its intent to control society by treating women as if they are pieces of property to be corralled and protected. Once the Berlin Wall fell, communism was doomed. The same fate awaits the Islamic Republic once women can throw off their veils and participate in social life as men do.
Alinejad points out how the internet and social media have invigorated a younger generation of protesters:
Iranian officials have used footage from surveillance cameras in public places such as subways and motorways to help identify and fine women who flout the mandatory hijab rule. The chief of the Headquarters for Enjoining Right and Forbidding Evil, a government body responsible for enforcing Islamist laws, warned in August that women who post pictures of themselves without a hijab on the Internet will be deprived of some social rights for six months to one year. Authorities have prevented women whom they perceive not to be in full compliance with the dress code from entering government offices and banks and from riding on public transportation.
Such measures have not stopped Iranian women from resisting the hijab. For the past decade, the authorities have had to deal with greater online militancy by Iranian women. With traditional media completely controlled by the state, Iranians have flocked to social media, especially platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Twitter, and WhatsApp, to push back against the veil. For instance, millions follow the social media campaign "My Stealthy Freedom," which seeks to get rid of compulsory hijab laws in Iran, and its various initiatives, such as White Wednesdays (encouraging women to wear white scarves on Wednesdays as a sign of dissent), Walking Unveiled (when women unveil themselves in public), Men in Hijab (when men post pictures of themselves wearing hijab), and My Camera Is My Weapon (in which women share mobile phone footage of abusive men or interactions with the morality police), all designed to enable women to challenge the onerous dress code. The campaigns have empowered women to take off their hijabs and defy the strictures of the regime. Using their mobile phones, women have shared so many videos of morality police harassment via "My Stealthy Freedom" that the government introduced a 2019 law that made sending videos to the campaign an offense punishable by ten years of imprisonment.
For the regime, trying to control a young generation that wants social change and stronger connections to the West is an uphill battle. Despite widespread censorship, Iran's Internet penetration rate (the percentage of the country's population that have access to the Internet) at the beginning of 2022 was 84 percent, a high mark. Iran has over 130 million mobile subscriptions, which gives the country of 84 million people a staggering mobile phone penetration rate of 161 percent, with the average person having more than one phone. The reported number of Internet users in 2022 increased to 72 million from 58 million in 2020, and the real figure could be even higher.
As Iran cracks down on dissidents and perpetuates human rights abuses at home, it's also aiding in human rights abuses abroad.
Iran has agreed to send more weapons to Russia, Iranian officials and diplomats told Reuters. Iran will provide Russia with drones and surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, Iranian First Vice President Mohammad Mokhber and other high ranking officials visited Moscow to discuss the weapons deal earlier this month.
"One of the drones Iran agreed to supply is the Shahed-136, a delta-winged weapon used as a 'kamikaze' air-to-surface attack aircraft. It carries a small warhead that explodes on impact," reports Reuters. "Fateh-110 and Zolfaghar are Iranian short-range surface to surface ballistic missiles capable of striking targets at distances of between 300 km and 700 km (186 and 435 miles). The Iranian diplomat rejected assertions by Western officials that such transfers breach a 2015 U.N. Security Council resolution."
A new study from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finds no scientific evidence to back up bite mark analysis as a crime-solving tool. What's more, "the evidence we do have explicitly refutes two of them," Radley Balko points out:
Studies have consistently shown that human skin is incapable of recording and preserving the details of a bite, and competency tests have shown that not only are bitemark analysts bad at matching bites to human subjects, they often can't even agree on what is and isn't a human bite.
Balko wrote about bite mark analysis for Reason a number of times in 2009 and went on to write a book about the injustices this pseudo-science perpetuates (The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South).
J.D. Tuccille has more on the recent NIST report here.
On October 27, NIST researchers are holding a webinar on their findings.
Tax code adjusted for inflation. "The Internal Revenue Service adjusted key tax code parameters for 2023 to reflect higher inflation, raising the standard deduction and the income thresholds where tax rates take effect," reports The Wall Street Journal. The top marginal tax rate next year will apply to people making more than $578,125 individually or $693,750 as a married couple. The standard deduction will rise to $13,850 for an individual and $27,700 for a married couple, while the maximum contribution to a flexible spending account will rise from $2,850 to $3,050.
• Insanity:
"How the Jones Act Sparked Calls of Treason" via @byrdinator @thedispatch https://t.co/sQTpUNQrUR
NBD, just a Maritime Administration committee doc (reluctantly provided after several FOIA requests) suggesting Cato scholars be charged w TREASON bc of our Jones Act criticism: pic.twitter.com/wLTJKgtOiN— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) October 18, 2022
• Why did the FBI raid this ABC News producer's home?
• The Cato Institute is suing the Biden administration over student loan forgiveness plan.
• The Miami Herald takes a horrifying look at the treatment of Craig Ridley, who starved to death inside a Florida prison. Ridley dislocated his neck after being tackled by a guard, and subsequently couldn't reach his trays of food. For five days, officers ignored his complaints that he couldn't reach the trays of food they were leaving him.
• New York attorney general Letitia James wants to criminalize sharing images or videos of violence. Prosecutors and civil liberties advocates are skeptical.
• Once again, human trafficking panic may lead to new burdens on small businesses and their employees. (Read more about this in my 2020 story on massage parlor crackdowns.)
The post Climber Who Competed Without Her Hijab Apologizes as Protests Continue To Rock Iran appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Iranians in Tehran and beyond have been in the streets for nearly two weeks, protesting the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after she was arrested for wearing her headscarf too loosely. As with the many other anti-government protests in Iran over the last decade, Western hopes are high that this time it will be different, that a younger and more liberal generation of Iranians will finally succeed in overthrowing or at least significantly reforming the oppressive theocratic state that has controlled the country for nearly half a century.
I'm not sure those hopes will be realized, as much as I share them. But however these protests go, I do feel confident saying this: They do not vindicate "maximum pressure," the onerous sanctions regime instituted by former President Donald Trump when he withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and continued by President Joe Biden to this day. They do not prove that recent U.S. policy toward Iran has been moral or wise.
That's not to say maximum pressure has had no effects on life in Iran—far from it. U.S. policy has been very effective over the past few years in adding to ordinary Iranians' suffering, damaging our reputation as a trustworthy actor and exemplar of liberty, and ensuring that, if the Iranian government is indeed weakened or overthrown, the country will destabilize with a stockpile of enriched uranium it would not have had the deal remained intact.
The idea that broad sanctions will motivate ordinary people to demand positive changes from their governments makes sense on paper. If U.S. sanctions make people cold and hungry, and Washington explains that the cold and hunger will go away if only the government of the targeted country will do X, Y, and Z, then, it stands to reason, the people of that country will push their rulers to do X, Y, and Z. Facing mass discontent, the government will comply, and the sanctions will go away, and U.S. interests will be advanced via a win for democracy.
But in practice, broad sanctions rarely work this way. Indeed, research suggests they only rarely work at all. Targeted governments often have a strong sense of national interest which makes defying U.S. pressure worth the domestic turmoil it brings. Sometimes, as has happened in Iran, sanctions rally nationalist sentiment and strengthen hardliners by giving the public and their oppressors a common enemy in the United States. (People are not so stupid as to fail to realize that whatever reason is given for the sanctions, their direct cause is a decision in Washington.) And, often, the public has very limited power to force their government to change course, to do the desired X, Y, and Z. It's not as if Iranian protesters can simply vote out Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, renegotiate the nuclear deal themselves, or organize a national referendum doing away with the modesty laws that landed Amini in police custody.
And that raises another strike against the case for crediting maximum pressure with sparking Iranians' demands for more freedom: The instigating event for these demonstrations is about personal liberty, not shortages and financial hardship. Iranians do protest economic troubles, including over this past summer, often mixing critique of Tehran and Washington. The starting point here is different, though. Indeed, what makes this round of protests so tantalizing as the possible start of a new era is that they're about much more than shortages.
Yet if Iranians trying to liberate their own country were looking for a "well-wisher to [their] freedom and independence," the "benignant sympathy" of an example of governance better than their own, U.S. policies—maximum pressure, along with Trump's exit from the nuclear deal and Biden's unwillingness to make fairly minor timing concessions to restore it—have hardly situated us well for the role. Instead, rending that diplomatic framework has painted Washington as unreliable and capricious, more interested in exercising U.S. power than taking practical steps to advance peace, liberty, or stability.
And if these protests do succeed in toppling or significantly weakening the regime in Tehran, potentially placing it in open domestic conflict with parties as yet unknown, Trump's blow to stability should be judged even more egregious. Before the U.S. exit from the nuclear deal, outside observers confirmed Iran was compliant with its terms, which included strict limits on its stockpile of enriched uranium. Since 2019, however, after the U.S. withdrawal the previous year, Iran has gradually moved out of compliance with the deal as well, acquiring more than 10 times the permitted amount of uranium that it was allowed under the deal and enriching it to 60 percent instead of the permitted 3.67 percent.
If the regime were to fall, where would that material go? We don't know yet, but we do know Iran may be on the precipice of an internal crisis with an added element of risk which would not be a factor had U.S. policy not been so reckless.
At this stage, unfortunately, there's no easy way to undo the harm the Trump and Biden administrations have done here. It takes time to restore trust and reputation, and nuclear diplomacy remains in its four-year limbo. Aside from granting permission on Friday for Elon Musk to offer Iranians internet access through his Starlink technology, the Biden administration largely has not used its year and a half in office to lift sanctions that have made life measurably more miserable for the Iranian people. Now the administration is reportedly considering adding even more sanctions to signal its disapproval of Tehran's brutal response to the protests.
If the Iranian people win their freedom, it will be no thanks to Washington—no thanks to Trump, and no thanks to Biden.
The post The Iranian Protests Were Not Made in the U.S.A. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Protests have been shaking Iranian cities for nearly a dozen nights, sparked by the death of a young women's rights activist in the custody of the country's morality police. The 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, was arrested for wearing her headscarf too loosely while on a family visit to Tehran.
Officially, Amini died of heart failure. But her family (and many, many others) believe she died from injuries sustained as police beat her during and after her arrest on September 13. "She was tortured, according to eyewitnesses," said Amini's cousin, Erfan Mortezaei. "She was tortured in the van after her arrest, then tortured at the police station for half an hour, then hit on her head and she collapsed."
The protests sparked by Amini's death in custody have led to more death, as Iranian security forces have turned violent on protesters. Thirty-five people have reportedly been killed in the protests as of last weekend (which is almost certainly an undercount, as the figure comes from the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting).
"It's the libertarian cliche: don't make a law unless you're willing to kill someone to enforce it," said Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward during yesterday's Reason Roundtable podcast. In this case, the law Iranian authorities are willing to kill to enforce is a prohibition on women showing their hair. That says a lot.
Young Iranians "don't want this system any more," says Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis. "They want democracy."
"They want a new government… This generation is very, very different from us," she tells me, especially young men's solidarity with women's rights inside Iran. pic.twitter.com/Q5EXpwqJ8K
— Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) September 26, 2022
But the current protests are about much more than Amini's death and Iranian women being forced to wear hijabs. Samira Mohyeddin, a Canadian journalist born in Tehran, told Slate:
Most of the people protesting are young….This generation had nothing to do with bringing the Islamic Republic to power. That's something their parents' generation did. So, they're like, "We don't want this. We didn't ask for this." It's obvious from their chants. It's not, "Where is my vote?" or "End the veil." Their chants are "Death to the dictator," "Clerics get lost," "We don't want an Islamic Republic." There are videos of hand-to-hand skirmishes between protestors and Iranian riot police holding tasers, guns, batons, and protestors are coming right at them. This is unprecedented. We haven't seen this level of fury and fearlessness. People are angry, and it's moved beyond the morality police and Mahsa Amini. Mahsa was the spark, but it's moved way beyond that at this point.
At least 1,200 Iranian protesters have been arrested, the state-backed news agency Tasmin said on Saturday.
Information coming out of Iran has been spotty, since the country's leaders disrupted internet access, blocking it entirely in some areas and blocking certain social media platforms in others, according to NetBlocks.
Clashes between protesters and security forces in #Susangerd city of #Iran
Internet is shut down and very difficult to get videos from Iran.
Most proxies people use to go around the filtering is not working anymore #Mahsa_Amini pic.twitter.com/F2OiF6UjS5
— Sima Sabet | سیما ثابت (@Sima_Sabet) September 27, 2022
Elon Musk is responding by activating Starlink internet access in Iran, though the hardware required for it—and absent there—may mean Musk's efforts are futile.
At The Bulwark, Shay Khatiri offers a good analysis of how this protest movement fits into Iranian (and U.S.) history:
It was around this time of the year in 1978 that, thanks to the brutality of the shah's security guards, mass protests devolved into a cycle of violence that would give rise to the current regime. The coalition of dissent was split among the Communists, the nationalists, and the Islamists. But only the last group had a charismatic leader to offer, so the rest had to fall in line behind him. It helped that American and European media promoted Ruhollah Khomeini as a liberal democrat. Within months, the shah had fled his country forever, and Khomeini would be Iran's ruler.
Although this event is commonly called the "Iranian Revolution," it was anything but Iranian. Khomeini had condemned Iran's national traditions as a divergence from Islam. The revolution of 1979 was Islamist—sacrificing national character on the altar of religious identity—and it established an Islamist regime. More precisely, it was an anti-Iranian Islamist revolution, and it led to an anti-Iranian Islamist non-hereditary monarchy.
It was this Islamist regime that instituted a dress code that included women wearing a hijab. It was one of many moves to dictate what women could wear and do and to deny women full rights.
Protests have broken out many times since then, and have been especially frequent since 2017. Iranian lawyer Artoniss Ehsani called the current protests part of a "slow revolution." But others are skeptical:
I've heard the same predictions multiple times in my life. Hope it's true this time. https://t.co/W1fvpbpTRL
— The Alex Nowrasteh (@AlexNowrasteh) September 24, 2022
In yesterday's Reason Roundtable, Editor at Large Nick Gillespie suggested that the Iranian people would have overthrown the dictatorial government long ago if the U.S. hadn't invaded Iraq and destabilized the region.
The best thing the U.S. government can do now is probably to welcome more Iranian refugees.
Kind reminder: Any Western politician expressing support for Iranians, whilst simultaneously building borders to keep out Iranian refugees, is not in the business of human rights but is in the business of regime change & destabilisation of the Middle East.
— Tiara Sahar Ataii سحر (@tiara_sahar) September 24, 2022
We should immediately expedite all asylum requests from Iran, Russia, Ukraine, Yemen, and anywhere there is an active war zone or uprising against tyranny.
We should be the most welcoming nation to those seeking asylum. We should be a lamp of liberty to the world.
— Chase Oliver (@ChaseForLiberty) September 25, 2022
A subreddit is pushing back against Texas' social media law in a novel way:
Subreddit is stress testing Texas' content moderation law by requiring every comment to include a statement about how Texas governor @GregAbbott_TX "is a little piss baby." https://t.co/Fr0sATqKdB
— Mike Masnick (@mmasnick) September 26, 2022
A bevy of bad economic indicators. Companies are cutting jobs, the lowering of gas prices has stalled, and "and a long-simmering national housing shortage may be catching up with us," writes Jim Geraghty at National Review. For example:
Meta—you know, Facebook—plans "to cut expenses by at least 10 percent in the coming months, in part through staff reductions." Google is eyeing similar cuts, with CEO Sundar Pichai characterizing it as "being a bit more responsible through one of the toughest macroeconomic conditions underway in the past decade." Twilio has announced plans to lay off 11 percent if its workforce, and Snap has announced plans to lay off 20 percent of its workforce.
A lot of big companies, even outside the tech sector, are announcing the elimination of executive positions. The Gap is eliminating 500 corporate jobs. Boeing has announced that it will eliminate about 150 positions in finance and accounting in October. Last month, Walmart announced that it would eliminate 200 corporate jobs.
FedEx is enacting a hiring freeze and closing more than 90 FedEx Office locations.
It's not just big brand companies: It's also an ice-cream plant in New York; it's also a slew of hospitals nationwide. God help you if you work in real estate: "Some of the biggest players in the real estate industry, including RE/MAX, Redfin and Wells Fargo, have announced layoffs in recent months totaling thousands of jobs. Industry analysts are projecting the cuts could eventually be on par with what was seen during the housing crash of 2008."
More bad news here, if you can stomach it.
• An Oregon rape victim was held in jail for nine days to ensure that she would show up to testify against her rapist.
• Italy has elected right-wing populist Giorgia Meloni as its next prime minister. Meloni—who represents a political party called the Brothers of Italy—"is poised to lead Italy's first far-right-led government since World War II," notes the Associated Press.
It's striking that twice in this short clip Meloni stretches to blame "financial speculators" for scheming purposefully to inflict societal ills you might think were remote from financial markets as such. That's a rhetorical theme with a history we should recognize. https://t.co/4AdBgQbCVu
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) September 26, 2022
• Why are people fleeing American territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific?
• "Black people represent less than 15 percent of the U.S. population, but they account for more than half of all exonerations, according to a new report" that Reason's Scott Shackford covered yesterday.
• The British pound is crashing, reaching a record low against the U.S. dollar on Monday.
• American factory jobs are booming like they haven't since the 1970s.
The post Iran's Hijab Protests Are Part of a Long, Slow Revolution appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie consider the elevated risks from the conflict in Ukraine and commend the recent protests in Iran.
2:22: Russian President Vladimir Putin's mobilization push
16:09: Protests in Iran
30:19: Weekly Listener Question:
It's belated by almost a couple months, but the CIA turned 75 on July 26. Is there a libertarian argument in favor of having a Central Intelligence Agency, and if yes, how closely would a libertarian-approved CIA resemble the one we have?
40:38: New York state lawsuit against former President Donal Trump
48:39: This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Abolish Nuclear Weapons? A Soho Forum Debate," by Gene Epstein
"Russians Are Fleeing the Threat of Conscription," by Eric Boehm
"Ukraine Changes the Face of War Forever," by Nick Gillespie
"Will Ruger: How Libertarians Should Think About Ukraine Invasion," by Nick Gillespie
"How the United States Can—And Cannot—Help Iranian Protesters: Podcast," by Nick Gillespie
"New York Attorney General Sues Trump for Fraud, Seeks $250 Million in Restitution," by Joe Lancaster
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Putin's Push and Ponytail Solidarity appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Oil, the State, and War: The Foreign Policies of Petrostates, by Emma Ashford, Georgetown University Press, 365 pages, $34.95
It doesn't take a Ph.D. to see that oil drives conflict. Just looking at the recent history of America's interventions in the Middle East will do.
During the Tanker War of the 1980s, the U.S. Navy fought Iran to protect Iraq's oil. Then, during the first Gulf War, the U.S. military fought Iraq to protect Kuwait and Saudi Arabia's oil. After three decades of war in Iraq, the United States came full circle, with the Trump administration threatening Iran while Iran threatened Saudi Arabia's oil.
Less understood is how oil drives conflict. The popular view, espoused both by many anti-war critics and by violence enthusiasts like former President Donald Trump, is that larger countries go to war to steal the oil wealth of smaller ones. Strong consumers take what they can; weak producers provide what they must.
Emma Ashford, a foreign policy scholar at the Stimson Center, makes the opposite claim in Oil, the State, and War. It isn't the need for cheap energy that drives foreign policy, she argues; it's the economics of energy production that make petrostates more trigger-happy. On one hand, control over energy markets removes constraints on warmaking. On the other hand, the "resource curse" warps political institutions. And of course, oil money helps governments buy fancy weapons.
Oil is unique in how it influences state behavior. Like many other natural resources, petroleum is scarce and expensive. Unlike those other resources, oil is necessary for the world economy to keep running. And all oil is bought and sold on the same global market, priced in U.S. dollars, meaning a change anywhere affects prices everywhere.
But not every petrostate is created equal. Oil plays a very different role in Saudi, Norwegian, Iranian, and Mexican societies. While most countries have put their oil resources under government control since the mid-20th century, the United States—the world's largest oil producer—has a private and competitive oil industry.
Rather than discussing petrostates as one bloc, Ashford draws three overlapping categories of oil producers. In oil-dependent states, a large chunk of government revenue is tied up in the petroleum sector. Oil-wealthy states earn a significant amount of income, whether or not they depend on it, from oil production. Finally, super-producers and super-exporters control a substantial percentage of the global oil market.
An oil-dependent nation is the classic image of a petrostate. Rather than providing services to earn the trust of taxpayers, leaders manage a firehose of unearned income, which they use to buy loyalty or pay for the tools of repression. Many scholars have theorized how the "resource curse" damages a country's political culture. Ashford skillfully illustrates those theories with specific, detailed examples of Saudi and pre-2003 Iraqi government dysfunction.
Timothy Mitchell's 2011 book Carbon Democracy contrasts coal-based labor unions' successes in Europe with worker power's failure in societies that are dependent on oil income. In the latter societies, he argues, it is hard for ordinary people to inflict pain on elites, which slows democratic development. Ashford makes a similar argument about the private sector, suggesting that the lack of a business lobby in oil-dependent countries quashes dissent within the ranks of the elite.
Ashford also delves into how great powers use military aid and protection for dictators as a form of "indirect control" over oil-producing states. Yet her book does not ask an obvious follow-up question: Does foreign intervention have an effect on the "resource curse"? The history of U.S.- and U.K.-sponsored coups in the Middle East certainly suggests that it does. When powerful outsiders are interested in local political disputes, it tends to inflame those disputes.
Where Ashford excels is linking the effects of the oil curse to producers' foreign policy processes. Oil dependency concentrates power in the hands of small cliques or single dictators. It discourages the development of diplomatic institutions or intelligence agencies that can provide those leaders with good advice.
Unlike politicians in democratic republics or even well-developed one-party states, petro-tyrants like Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman or Iraq's Saddam Hussein have been free to act on their wildest impulses. And oil-rich states, dependent or not, have a glut of free money they can spend on large militaries. In fact, Ashford found that high oil prices correlate to increased levels of military spending on a global level. She suggests they have a similar impact on proxy warfare, when states like Iran fund foreign militants or allied countries to do their bidding.
Saudi Arabia's purchases of American-made arms and support for militant groups might be the most infamous example. (Iran was also a major customer for American weapons before an anti-American government took power in 1979.) Russia dumped so much cash into military "modernization" during the last decade, Ashford observes, that "it was near-impossible for Russia's defense sector to absorb the spending." In Carbon Democracy, Mitchell argues that Britain, the Soviet Union, and, above all, the United States were willing to feed petrostates' weapon addiction as a way to keep them using pounds sterling, rubles, or dollars.
Powerful military capabilities are a dangerous temptation for trigger-happy leaders. Iraq and Libya, for example, repeatedly attacked their neighbors. Americans themselves are quite familiar with how a large army makes politicians more eager to go to war.
Armies bloated by oil money also become a source of fear for non-oil-rich neighbors, who build up their own forces in an attempt to keep up. Although neither Israel or Turkey export oil, the cold war between oil-rich Saudi Arabia and Iran has sucked them in all the same.
The combination of oil wealth and oil dependence is especially toxic. Petrostates buy flashy new toys when oil markets are booming, then end up in debt when oil prices fall. The same effect applies to oil-funded social spending, as Venezuela demonstrates. As Ashford puts it, any government spending in an oil-wealthy or oil-dependent state is "a bet on the future price of oil."
The resource curse is not "solely responsible for poor foreign policy decisions," Ashford writes. But in many cases, it clearly contributes to "a chaotic and generally poor foreign policy process."
Oil is most directly linked to foreign policy when it comes to super-producers and super-exporters. Again, because all oil is sold on the same market, changes in supply anywhere affect prices everywhere.
Turning market effects into political leverage is harder than it seems. The one big historical example of the "oil weapon" is the 1973 oil embargo, when Arab states decided to punish international supporters of Israel by cutting oil supplies. While American consumers suffered shortages, which were severely exacerbated by the U.S. government's attempts at price controls, the embargo failed to force Israel or its supporters to make any policy changes. Arab leaders gave up after they realized they were hurting their own economic interests more than anything else.
Russia has been more successful at coercing its neighbors using natural gas, because Soviet-era pipe infrastructure and the fragmented nature of gas markets give Moscow power over supply chains. Even so, this blackmail has undermined Russia's economic power by encouraging Europe to look for alternative energy suppliers.
Beyond their practical impact, the 1973 crisis and the Russian threats have had a psychological effect, making politicians in rich countries obsessed with energy security. While the "oil weapon" is ineffective in reality, Ashford argues, politicians' belief in the danger of oil embargos has given energy producers much more clout—an effect she calls "soft oil power"—and driven international powers to offer their protection to oil producers.
In the 1980s, the small petrostate of Kuwait backed an Iraqi invasion of Iran by opening its ports (and a financial lifeline) to Iraq. When Iran retaliated by attacking Kuwaiti shipping, Kuwait extracted promises of protection from both the Soviet Union and the United States. Thus began a four-decade stretch of U.S. military intervention in the Persian Gulf.
The world may have passed what Ashford calls its "peak petrostate" era. Technological advances such as fracking have opened up new petroleum sources outside of traditional oil-producing regions. At the same time, the fight against climate change has prompted industrialized countries to move toward less carbon-intensive energy sources.
So the trend is toward an economy that does not value or rely on petroleum products as much. But the damage done by oil-fueled rulers may last much longer.
The post Are We Past 'Peak Petrostate'? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The fallout from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988) was even more bizarre and terrifying than the novel's opening sequence, in which a hijacked plane flying from India to Britain explodes over the English Channel and the two protagonists, Gibreel and Saladin, are transformed into an archangel and devil, respectively.
While Gibreel—who has been transformed into the archangel Gabriel—falls into the Atlantic, he has several dreams, including one about an alternate-universe founding of Islam by a man named Mahound. (Mahound, another name for Muhammad, was used by Christians in the Middle Ages.) In these visions, the emerging religion allows the worship of several goddesses, and doubt is cast on the divine nature of the prophet's words. Rushdie went so far as to name the book's prostitute characters after Muhammad's wives.
Readers later learn that these visions were sent by the devil. But the fun house–mirror image of Islam nevertheless angered much of the Muslim world. In 1989, Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini called for the author and those involved in the book's publication to be put to death. Clerics and government officials were, in essence, instructing Muslims to hunt and kill Rushdie, with Islamic organizations closely aligned with the government placing a $2.5 million bounty on his head.
The consequences were grim. Rushdie was put under police protection at his home in the United Kingdom for the better part of a decade. Hitoshi Igarashi, a Japanese translator for the book, was killed by an unknown attacker in 1991. An Italian translator of the book named Ettore Capriolo was stabbed (but did not die from his wounds) that same year. Aziz Nesin, a Turkish translator, was attacked by arsonists while praying with others; the fire killed 37 people, though Nesin survived.
In 1989, India banned the book, deeming it hate speech. "These persons, whom I do not hesitate to call extremists, even fundamentalists, have attacked me and my novel while stating that they had no need actually to read it," wrote Rushdie in The New York Times. "That the Government should have given in to such figures is profoundly disturbing." He noted that India's parliament described the ban as a "pre-emptive measure," since "certain passages had been identified as susceptible to distortion and misuse, presumably by unscrupulous religious fanatics and such. The banning order had been issued to prevent this misuse."
Rushdie summed up the government's tortured logic: "It is as though, having identified an innocent person as a likely target for assault by muggers or rapists, you were to put that person in jail for protection."
The post Salman Rushdie's <em>The Satanic Verses</em> Enraged the Muslim World appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Iranian metal band Confess' third album, Revenge at All Costs, is so brutal that the Iranian government sentenced them to 74 lashes, which is probably—horrifyingly—a better advertisement for it than any promotional materials their record label could cook up.
In 2015, Iranian authorities arrested Confess singer and guitarist Nikan Khosravi and his bandmate Arash Ilkhani. The two metalheads were charged with blasphemy and anti-government propaganda for the band's pointed anti-religious lyrics and criticisms of the state. Khosravi spent 18 months in Tehran's infamous Evin prison while awaiting trial, three of them in solitary confinement.
After they were found guilty and sentenced to six years behind bars, Khosravi and Ilkhani were granted political asylum in Norway and fled their home country. They channeled the whole experience into their third album. In a genre where aggression is sometimes an affectation or escape fantasy, Confess' anger is concrete, political, and personal. It's not a put-on when Khosravi screams on "Phoenix Rises," the album's third track, "They can't fucking break me for who I am."
The Revolutionary Tribunal of Tehran gave "Phoenix Rises" a negative review when it was released as a single and raised Khosravi and Ilkhani's combined sentences to 14 and a half years in prison and 74 lashes in absentia.
Stylistically, Confess lands somewhere in the realm of the new wave of American heavy metal, groove metal, and metalcore. Think athletic mid-tempo guitar riffs, breakdowns, and hardcore vocals. If you're a fan of Lamb of God, Slayer, and Sepultura, you'll find a lot more to like here than Iranian authoritarians did. Lamb of God and Clutch collaborator Gene "Machine" Freeman produced the album, giving it a polished touch.
Khosravi's fury cuts through the mix and commands your attention from start to finish. You can hear why the mullahs were scared.
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]]>Is the hero of A Hero actually a hero? For that matter, is anyone, ever? As it turns out, the answers are rather complicated—narratively, but also morally. And therein lies director Asghar Farhadi's new movie, a knotty social fable about justice and decency in present-day Iran.
When we first meet Rahim (Amir Jadidi), he's on a brief leave from prison. He's been locked away for three years because of a debt he owes to his ex-wife's brother, Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh); in the Iranian legal system, an unpaid creditor can have his debtor jailed until the debt is either paid off, or the creditor decides to forgive what is owed. At first, Rahim is on track to pay off a large chunk of what he owes, since Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust), the woman he plans to marry, has found a purse with a sack of gold coins.
But after inquiring about selling the coins—it turns out their value has gone down—he takes the advice of a clerk to post a sign advertising the lost bag. A woman claims it, saying it's money she hid from her lout husband, hoping it might provide a measure of personal freedom. Hearing about his seemingly good deed, the administrators at Rahim's prison facility, trying to distract the public from a recent suicide, decide to alert the local media. But Rahim, it turns out, cannot tell the whole truth, since he must conceal his relationship with Farkhondeh for various reasons. So he begins to lie even as he is being held up to the public as a virtuous hero, which in turn seems to feed Bahram's belief that Rahim is misleading people, perhaps enacting an elaborate plot to save himself at his creditor's expense.
In Farhadi's cunningly plotted story, each individual action leads to a reaction, sometimes from an individual, sometimes from a family, sometimes from an organized group—the media, the prison authorities, a background investigator who holds the keys to Rahim's employment, a charity that helps pay off prisoners' debts looking to use his case to gain attention—until Rahim's predicament consumes the entire community.
Thus, an apparently simple tale of a man trying to escape debtor's prison becomes a labyrinthine journey through Iranian middle-class life. It's a story about the interwovenness of human affairs, the ways in which individual decisions are not truly isolated, but instead always exist in the context of other people's desires and imperatives, and the sometimes arbitrary, sometimes cruel systems in which they are trapped. Everywhere Rahim goes, there are rumors, legal mandates, cultural codes that cannot be broken, personal histories that must be accounted for. A Hero is, on the surface, a tale of one man, but really it's the story of a complete society trying to work itself out.
It also acts, I suspect, as a subtle critique of that society—not of the people within it, but of the legal and cultural systems that maintain an invisible control over their lives. This is not a movie of Big Speeches or Lessons Learned; on the contrary, part of what makes the film so powerful is that everyone simply accepts the social reality around them as a given, then tries to work things out for themselves, their friends, and their family as best they can. But the story pivots on multiple instances of women whose roles, for various reasons, must be kept in the background, and a legal system that allows complex familial disputes to result in prison time, so long as there are financial debts involved. (Indeed, the movie suggests that in a complex society, most debts are not financial, but social and familial, and impossible to reduce to a simple figure.) If nothing else, it sometimes plays, perhaps unintentionally, like an extended advertisement for the U.S. bankruptcy system, which allows for the orderly discharge of most interpersonal financial debts without the prospect of prison time.
What's remarkable about the movie is how finely balanced its motivations are; almost everyone in the movie manages to be both selfish and self-sacrificing, sensible and stubborn, decent and callous in some way. A Hero is a movie of fractal moral complexity; no matter how closely you look at it, it does not resolve into a simple lesson, except that all people have seemingly infinite capacity for both generosity and self-interest, and separating the two is often much harder than it seems.
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]]>In 2003, George W. Bush famously declared victory in Iraq, just as the war was about to turn into a deadly and chaotic quagmire. Eighteen years later, an estimated half a million Iraqis and 6,840 U.S troops have perished in the conflict.
Today, the U.S. has 2,500 troops in Iraq, down from a peak of 168,000 in 2007. In July, the government claimed that American troops will no longer engage in combat; instead, they'll only train and assist Iraqi security forces in their fight against ISIS.
This is just diplomatic theater. Iraq's Parliament, which has voted for the U.S. to leave the country, points out that renaming combat troops "trainers and advisers" is deceptive. It also won't prevent the conflict from once again escalating into a cycle of violence and retaliation. The U.S. military is still engaging in airstrikes, and in April, after militias attacked five U.S. facilities, the Biden administration made good on its promise to hit back.
The U.S. should withdraw all troops from Iraq and finally end this disastrous war. Our presence in the country has done the opposite of its stated goal of providing safety and security in the region.
I was born in Iraq and lived through Saddam's regime, Operation Desert Storm, U.S. sanctions, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the Iraqi Civil War. I witnessed firsthand how U.S. actions that favored one group inevitably angered another, which is why the war has been an endless game of whack-a-mole.
In 2003, L. Paul Bremer, who was head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, disbanded the Iraqi army, which was the most disastrous decision in the course of the conflict. The 25-person Interim Governing Council Bremer created was designed to represent the diversity of Iraq's population, but all it did was augment the complexity of Iraq's ethnic and religious groups; the result was inflamed sectarian tensions, which led to a deadly civil war.
The region surrounding Iraq is even more complex. Numerous nations have competed for decades throughout the greater Middle East, from Iran to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and more. When the U.S. removed Saddam, it allowed these foreign interests to work through proxies within Iraq, much as they have in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and Libya.
For the U.S. to bring stability to Iraq, it would need to establish peace in the entire region as well. First, all the Sunni majority nations would need to reconcile with themselves, then the Sunni nations with Iran and Iran's proxies. But as long as the U.S. remains in Iraq, it's destined to favor one side over another, and will only exacerbate the regional conflicts.
The decision by the U.S. to back the Kurds and the Iraqi mobilization forces in their battle against ISIS may appear successful, but changing the region's balance of power has caused new threats to emerge. This situation is analogous to the U.S. experience in Afghanistan: We supported the Mujahideen against the Soviets, only to see those same Mujahideen and their Pakistani backers take full control of the country and become new adversaries in the form of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
Similarly, in Iraq, after the fall of ISIS, the Iranian-backed militias that had worked with the U.S., gained new influence within Iraq. And the U.S. presence in the region encouraged other nations to launch their own military operations. Turkey started bombing Syrian Kurds, Saudi Arabia and the UAE joined forces and attacked Yemen, and the Iranian-backed militia Kataib Hezbollah was caught using American-made equipment that the U.S. had given to the Iraqi military.
The result was to strengthen Iran, just as Operation Iraqi Freedom had done back in 2003.
So the U.S. switched its focus to containing Iranian influence, even assassinating Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, whose militia was largely responsible for the defeat of ISIS.
This nonsense won't end until there's a complete U.S. withdrawal from the country.
The U.S. says it's sticking around to support the Iraqi military and government, even though each has publicly stated that they want the Americans to leave.
There's nothing stopping Bush's disastrous war from going on for another 18 years in an endless loop of military actions, followed by unintended consequences, followed by a military response to deal with those unintended consequences, followed by more unintended consequences. After 18 years, it's time to give up on the hope that U.S. troops can bring peace and stability to Iraq. It's time to bring them all home.
Photos: Fabiano Sipa/Newscom, Helene C. Stikkel DOD/Newscom, Ako Rasheed/Reuters/Newscom, Damir Sagolj Reuters/Newscom, Hussain Ali ZUMA/Newscom, Chine Nouvelle Sipa/Newscom, Moore Mike Mirrorpix/Newscom, The U.S. National Archives.
Music: Yule by Ilan Pustopetski, Artlist
Produced and narrated by Noor Greene, audio by Ian Keyser, additional by graphics Isaac Reese.
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]]>The United States and Iran met today at the Tokyo Olympics to play basketball. The elephant in the room—decades of geopolitical saber-rattling and proxy violence—was nowhere to be seen. The Americans clapped as the Iranian national anthem played. The Iranians applauded "The Star-Spangled Banner." Handshakes and niceties were exchanged before and after the game.
It was a match between opponents, not enemies. Historical relations between the U.S. and Iran might make that goodwill seem staggering—but today's game perfectly highlights the difference in how governments interact and how normal people do.
The story of U.S.-Iran hostility features one debacle after another. There was the 1953 Operation Ajax, in which the U.S. overthrew Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh; then, the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis and attack on the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The two countries officially cut diplomatic ties in April 1980. President George W. Bush dubbed Iran part of the "Axis of Evil" in 2002; the U.S. has long been the "Great Satan" to Iran. Recent years have been filled with attacks, threats, and vitriol.
But there have been glimmers of rapprochement, and sports have brought some of that hope. In February 1998, the U.S. sent wrestlers to a contest in Tehran, the first time American athletes had traveled to Iran since the 1979 embassy attack. The event made the front page of the English-language Tehran Times. Iranian audience members "whistled in appreciation" as the wrestlers competed. Viewers cheered even as American Shawn Charles beat Iran's Mahdy Kaveh.
Just two months later, Iran sent its own wrestlers to a competition in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Rep. Robert W. Ney (R–Ohio) delivered congratulatory welcoming remarks, to great fanfare from the Iranians in the crowd. As the competition drew to a close, Iranian Wrestling Federation President Mohammad Taleghani announced on the arena floor that "he looked forward to the day when they could all attend a wrestling match in Iran."
The positivity built up during these citizen exchanges helped spark open dialogue among government officials. Secretary Madeleine Albright and Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif met later that year in the highest-level diplomatic contact between the two nations since the hostage crisis. The U.S. even lifted a few sanctions.
Progress would eventually stall. But the chance of reconciliation was there, and wrestling played a critical role in easing tensions.
Sports have long built bridges where governments have struggled. Perhaps the most famous example was the "pingpong diplomacy" of the 1970s, when the United States and China exchanged table tennis players. The athletic event famously gave way to President Richard Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1972—a turning point for Sino-American relations. The tactic would be used again in the 1999 Baltimore Orioles–Cuba national baseball team exhibition series, and once more in the U.S. and Iran's 1998 World Cup match. Of that exchange, American defender Jeff Agoos said, "We did more in 90 minutes than the politicians did in 20 years."
Today's basketball game likely won't be the turning point in U.S.-Iran relations. But with the two nations now uneasily renegotiating the terms of a nuclear deal, people-to-people interactions like these can't be undervalued. Though the efforts of private citizens can't produce a treaty or reopen an embassy, engaging peacefully with someone who history says you should hate is no small task.
It's often been normal people interacting with normal people—and not high-level political exchanges—that highlight what's possible for brutally opposed countries. By no means do the harsh rhetoric, sanctions, and tit-for-tat regional violence volleyed between the U.S. and Iran represent what citizens in those two countries want. U.S. basketball coach Gregg Popovich was right to lament today, "The Olympics, this is a venue where sports transcends all that petty crap between governments….We just wish this happened in real life."
But isn't this real life? Showcases like the Olympics are entertaining, but their true importance lies in showing how different people can and do unite around common pursuits. Even citizens of nations as antagonistic as the U.S. and Iran share the same desires and aspirations, regardless of the way their governments grapple. Without these athletic arenas, where could representatives of the fiercest enemies hang up their differences, agree to put aside decades of political hostility, and just play ball?
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]]>On Tuesday, an unsealed Justice Department indictment exposed a shocking international kidnapping plot. According to federal prosecutors, Iranian intelligence official Alireza Shahvaroghi Farahani and three other foreign intelligence assets conspired to kidnap Iranian American author and journalist Masih Alinejad from her home in Brooklyn.
Alinejad is a champion of women's rights and an outspoken critic of the Islamic Republic of Iran. As host of Voice of America Persian's show Tablet, she has reported extensively on the regime's human rights abuses, particularly those carried out against women.
Recently, she supported Iranian women protesting laws requiring head coverings, tweeting in solidarity, "More women from inside Iran [are speaking out] against #ForcedHijab & risking jail by saying No to Islamic Republic….Iranian people risk everything to reject whole regime." Despite her American citizenship and residency, however, the abduction plot reveals that Alinejad was risking it all, too, by speaking out from Brooklyn.
Third-country captures are commonly employed by Iranian intelligence to eliminate critics, dissidents, and human rights advocates. Operatives used a similar tactic to abduct and eventually execute journalist Ruhollah Zam in 2020. Had the FBI not raised the alarm, Alinejad's future seemed similarly grim. Upon the revelation, she tweeted, "I'm glad to be alive and appreciate your support. Spare a thought for many other Iranian dissidents kidnapped and executed by this regime."
In a statement, Audrey Strauss, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, lamented, "A U.S. citizen living in the United States must be able to advocate for human rights without being targeted by foreign intelligence operatives." Indeed, the foiled plot represents a chilling attempt by foreign actors to silence an activist exercising her right to free expression on American soil.
The indictment details an elaborate kidnapping plot under the direction of the Iranian intelligence network. Planning reportedly stretched back as far as June 2020. According to federal prosecutors, Farahani enlisted private investigators under false pretenses to stalk Alinejad and her family. He even set up a high-definition livestream of her Brooklyn home.
The operatives traced routes from her home to the waterfront, planning to lure her onto a chartered high-speed military style boat heading to Venezuela, whose socialist regime is friendly to Iran. They then intended to capture Alinejad and force her to return to Iran. The four kidnappers named by the FBI are Farahani, Mahmoud Khazein, Kiya Sadeghi, and Omid Noori. All are presently at large in Iran.
The would-be abductors are charged with kidnapping conspiracy, sanctions violations conspiracy, and bank and wire fraud conspiracy. "This is not some far-fetched movie plot," said FBI Assistant Director William F. Sweeney Jr. in a statement. "We allege a group, backed by the Iranian government, conspired to kidnap a U.S. based journalist here on our soil and forcibly return her to Iran. Not on our watch."
Although the FBI caught on before the plot could be carried out, these events nonetheless set a terrifying precedent for dissidents, journalists, and human rights advocates at home and abroad. Iran's abduction attempt is an assault not just on Alinejad but on the very tenets of freedom. No person on American soil should live in fear of retaliation for simply speaking out to defend human rights.
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]]>Analysts agree another round of bombings won't accomplish anything in Syria. One child was reportedly killed and three civilians wounded in U.S. airstrikes near the Iraq-Syria border on Sunday, according to Syrian state news agency SANA. This news has been absent from most U.S. coverage of the bombings, which has emphasized that several alleged members of Iraqi militias backed by Iran were also killed or wounded.
"At least 5 Iran-backed Iraqi militia fighters were killed and several others were wounded in an attack by US warplanes," according to the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The director of the war monitoring group later said seven fighters were killed. He also suggested the strike won't actually affect the Iraqi militia presence in the area.
According to the Pentagon, the bombs targeted facilities used by two Iraqi militias with ties to Iran: Kataeb Hezbollah and Kataeb Sayyid al-Shuhada. "These facilities are…engaged in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks against U.S. personnel and facilities in Iraq," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said in a statement.
Kirby described the strikes as self-defense, calling them "both necessary to address the threat and appropriately limited in scope. As a matter of domestic law, the President took this action pursuant to his Article II authority to protect U.S. personnel in Iraq."
But Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi called the attacks "a blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi national security."
The militias that were bombed "technically are a part of the Iraqi security forces—the very security forces U.S. troops are supposedly training to fight an ISIS caliphate that doesn't exist anymore," noted Defense Priorities fellow and foreign policy analyst Daniel DePetris.
Somebody, please help me out. Where's the "presidents can bomb whomever they want, anytime they want" clause in the U.S. Constitution? I'm having an awfully hard time finding it.
— Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) June 28, 2021
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh accused the U.S. of "disrupting security in the region," warning that "one of the victims of this disruption will be the United States."
This is the second airstrike in Syria since Biden took office. Another bombing, in February, reportedly killed 20 Iraqi militia members.
At least one lawmaker, Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.), worries that this is starting to look like more than just isolated incidents by either the U.S. or Iran.
"My concern is that the pace of activity directed at U.S. forces and the repeated retaliatory strikes against Iranian proxy forces are starting to look like what would qualify as a pattern of hostilities under the War Powers Act," said Murphy in a statement. "Both the Constitution and the War Powers Act require the president to come to Congress for a war declaration under these circumstances."
Just get the fuck out of Iraq and Syria. The strikes happened because US forces are targets of opportunity, by an adversary entirely different than the one they're supposedly still there to fight. No one bothers to pretend anymore that strikes like these accomplish anything.
— Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) June 28, 2021
After the first round of strikes carried out by the Biden administration, senators introduced a resolution to repeal broad authorization for the use of military force in the Middle East. "Last week's airstrikes in Syria show that the executive branch, regardless of party, will continue to stretch its war powers," said Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Va.), one of the bill's sponsors.
"Congress has a responsibility to not only vote to authorize new military action, but to repeal old authorizations that are no longer necessary." The bill's other sponsor, Sen. Todd Young (R–Ind.), complained that "Congress has been operating on autopilot when it comes to our essential duties to authorize the use of military force."
But the Senate resolution hasn't gone anywhere since it was introduced in early March.
Earlier this month, however, the House did pass a bill to repeal the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which sanctioned the Iraq War. By a vote of 268–161, legislators voted to repeal the "nearly two-decade-old war powers measure, marking what many lawmakers hope will be the beginning of the end of wide-ranging authorities given to the president after the 9/11 terror attacks," reported NPR. It's now the Senate's move on that measure.
RIP economist Steve Horwitz.
If you want to get a sense of the kind of man Steve was—and he was the kind of man we all should strive to emulate—listen to this hour of conversation with him about gratitude and optimism in face of death, and hope for the world. https://t.co/itruTHY28i
— Aaron Ross Powell (@ARossP) June 27, 2021
Steve Horwitz passed away this morning. We have lost an outstanding scholar, a staunch liberal, but most of all a great person. His indomitable cheerfulness throughout his illness and his unwavering commitment to liberty and open discussion were an inspiration. RIP Steve.
— Steve Davies (@SteveDavies365) June 27, 2021
???? «The reason to care about economics is not just to understand material well-being but about a much bigger picture: how we cooperate in a world of strangers and diversity, and how we turn that cooperation into better, longer, more peaceful lives»
RIP Steve Horwitz (1964-2021) pic.twitter.com/sJxZPxDWzT
— Institut Ostrom Catalunya (@InstitutOstrom) June 27, 2021
Steve Horwitz has passed away. He was a guest on the @CatoPodcast half a dozen times, and he wrote regularly for @libertarianism. He was at all times genuine, engaging, and an excellent communicator in the defense of liberty. A short thread our our various chats:
— Caleb O. Brown (@cobrown) June 27, 2021
I am greatly saddened to hear of the passing of economist Steve Horwitz, taken from us much too early due to cancer. @JonHaidt & I were very moved by this brilliant article of his: The Importance of Unsupervised Childhood Play for Democracy & Liberalism: https://t.co/vZ7jZR9Irc
— Greg Lukianoff (@glukianoff) June 27, 2021
Sad news today. Steve Horwitz, noted libertarian economist and professor has passed away from his struggle with myeloma. Dr. Horwitz was an acclaimed scholar on Austrian economics. His final published book was "Austrian Economics: An Introduction". https://t.co/VgCUf07LVP
— Libertarian Party of Northern Virginia (@LPNOVA) June 27, 2021
Oregonians can briefly pump their own gas. A heat wave in Oregon has led state authorities to temporarily suspend a silly rule against people pumping their own gas at gas stations. The Oregon state fire marshal announced Sunday that people could pump their own gas through Tuesday, owing to high temperatures. If it's safe for Oregonians to pump their own gas during a heat wave—and during the height of the pandemic, when rules were also suspended—why not regularly?
• Derek Chauvin was sentenced Friday to 22.5 years in prison for the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
• "The number of unemployment-benefit recipients is falling at a faster rate in Missouri and 21 other states canceling enhanced and extended payments this month, suggesting that ending the aid could push more people to take jobs," reports The Wall Street Journal.
• "Mike Gravel, a former U.S. senator from Alaska who read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record and confronted Barack Obama about nuclear weapons during a later presidential run, has died" at age 91, reports NPR.
I love this clip of Mike Gravel recounting reading the Pentagon Papers into the Senate record, because of what it teaches about courage. He was not excited, not confident; he was "frightened to death", scared of going to prison; he was overcome with emotion. And *that* is bravery pic.twitter.com/hLPovl7xrq
— Ben Phillips (@benphillips76) June 27, 2021
• Former Congressman Justin Amash talks to Reason's Nick Gillespie about the Libertarian Party's "horrible messaging."
• The Washington Post: "A grandmother didn't answer her phone during a class. She was sent back to prison."
• When kidnappings were all the rage.
• Return of the Trump rally.
You know how emergency room physicians will gauge somebody's mental clarity by asking "who's the president of the United States?" pic.twitter.com/n77JupMi9G
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) June 27, 2021
• The Apple and Microsoft war is back.
• Could school choice ease the culture war over educational curriculum about race?
• A new study from the Commonwealth Fund found 22 states moved to expand insurance coverage of telemedicine during the pandemic.
The post America Is Back to Bombing Syria appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Almost 70 years after a U.S.-backed coup deposed Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and replaced him with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, relations between the two countries remain at a fever pitch.
In the documentary Coup 53, writer and director Taghi Amirani tells the story of how British and American secret agents overthrew Mosaddegh after he nationalized his country's oil industry, starting a series of events that would eventually enable the rise of the autocratic, U.S.-hating Islamic regime that reigns to this day. Beyond its tragic effects on Iran and the Middle East, Amirani argues that the 1953 coup became the "playbook" for future U.S. covert actions in countries such as Guatemala, Vietnam, and Chile, changing the face of global politics.
In September, Amirani spoke to Reason's Nick Gillespie about his film.
Q: You make the case that this is the beginning of a pattern of American foreign policy and intervention throughout the world.
A: Very much so. The CIA was a relatively new organization in 1953. It was a new kid on the block, and it had money, and it was, you know, "We want to play." And [British intelligence service] MI6 said, "Well, come out and play in Iran. We'll give you some oil in return, if you help us get our oil back." On paper, it was a huge success. It was quick. It was cheap. No American lives were lost. Don't forget at the time America was fighting a hot war in Korea, even considering dropping a nuclear bomb. This was a trouble-free, easy way of changing leaders.
Q: In the film, you talk about how Mosaddegh was essentially a nationalist who didn't want to have foreign powers meddling in the country.
A: Yeah. At the same time that he was trying to get the Brits out of Iran, he was also trying to push the Russians out. He was standing for Iranian independence and control of its raw resources, no matter what the resource was or who was trying to get control of it. He was a truly secular democrat.
Q: What links the coup of 1953 with the overthrow of the shah in 1979?
A: The shah came back [after Mosaddegh was removed], and he was a weak leader at the time. He was very young when he was put on the throne. He wasn't as powerful and authoritative as his father, who was a soldier and pretty strict. The Americans realized, "We need to keep him in power," because the moment something went wrong [in 1953] he got on a plane and left. So that's when they sent their military intelligence people to Iran [to set up] SAVAK, which became the most brutal, frightening secret service in the world, trained in torture techniques both by MI6 and the CIA.
[The shah] became more self-confident and more authoritarian and ruled with an increasingly iron fist until 1979, [when] the state of fear that existed blew up. The moment the revolution happened, people came onto the streets holding Mosaddegh portraits, and they started selling his portraits on the sidewalk. Under the shah, you could not talk about Mosaddegh. Even having his books on your shelf was an arrestable crime. You could not put his portraits up.
Q: I'm sorry to put this crudely, but at what point does a country like Iran have to own its own tyranny?
A: I think that those kinds of internal problems should be owned by the internal structure. That kind of behavior can be exacerbated and amplified by the attempts from outside to undermine, battle, and create a sense of attack. When outside forces are trying to undermine you, trying to attack you politically or physically, [that] unifies the people inside and also strengthens the hand of the leader.
I'm simplifying, and we're both being very crude about this. It's much more complex than that. But an external power unifies the internal machinery and also can do away with some liberties. You know: Wag the dog.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. For a podcast version, subscribe to The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.
The post Taghi Amirani on the Legacy of the U.S.-Backed Coup in Iran appeared first on Reason.com.
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