A widening war. American forces bombed Iraq and Syria over the weekend, and more strikes are likely in the coming days. The attacks come in retaliation for a drone strike late last month that killed three American soldiers and wounded dozens of others.
The weekend attacks targeted at least 85 locations linked to the Iranian military and various militia groups supported by it. In a call with members of the media, National Security Council Coordinator John Kirby promised "additional action" in the coming days to further degrade Iran's ability to target American troops.
"The goal here is to get these attacks to stop," Kirby said. "We are not looking for a war with Iran."
Iran likely doesn't want a direct war with the United States either. But the two countries are already in a low-level conflict that could accelerate in ways that neither intends, warns Michael Hirsh, a journalist with extensive foreign policy experience, in an excellent piece at Politico. The combination of an overextended American military and Iran's inability to directly control the groups it funds means that "events are on a permanent hair trigger that is constantly threatening to explode at the slightest pressure. Biden's secretary of state, Antony Blinken, appeared to acknowledge this this week when he suggested 'that we've not seen a situation as dangerous as the one we're facing now across the region since at least 1973, and arguably even before that.'"
Separately, American and British forces carried out a series of strikes Saturday in Yeman that "hit 36 Houthi targets in 13 locations," according to the Associated Press.
Meanwhile, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani—the leader of the country that American troops are supposedly protecting, at American taxpayers' expense—visited some of the militia fighters wounded by those U.S. strikes and issued a statement condemning America's "new aggression against Iraq's sovereignty."
What are we even doing here, you guys?
Immigration deal? Probably not. A bipartisan group of senators unveiled a bill Sunday that would spend $118 billion on a combination of border security and military aid to Ukraine.
The deal would not grant amnesty to anyone who has already entered the United States illegally, would erect additional barriers to future amnesty claims, and would hike funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) so it could keep up to 50,000 migrants in custody. (The figure is about 34,000 today.) The proposal also calls for "effectively shutting down the border to new entrants" if the average number of migrants per day exceeds 5,000 in a given week, The New York Times reports, or if more than 8,500 try to cross the border in a single day.
Much of the spending in the bill would be directed overseas. Politico reports that the deal would send about $62 billion in military aid to Ukraine—more than the entire annual budget of the U.S. Marine Corps, Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) notes. It would also send about $14 billion in military assistance to Israel, while setting aside $10 billion in humanitarian aid for Ukraine and Gaza. Another $5 billion would be sent to various countries in the Indo-Pacific region, and about $20 billion would be directed to the immigration issues addressed in the bill.
The specifics of the deal may not matter much, as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) and several other prominent Republicans have declared the bill a dead letter.
I've seen enough. This bill is even worse than we expected, and won't come close to ending the border catastrophe the President has created. As the lead Democrat negotiator proclaimed: Under this legislation, "the border never closes."
If this bill reaches the House, it will be…
— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) February 5, 2024
You can't afford fries with that. Several fast food chains, including McDonald's and Chipotle, will respond to a hike in California's minimum wage for restaurant workers by raising menu prices, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Starting in April, that new law will require paying fast food workers at least $20 per hour, a 25 percent increase over the state's baseline minimum wage of $16 per hour. It will add an estimated $250,000 in annual labor costs for each McDonald's restaurant, and that means more expensive Happy Meals. Chipotle has announced plans to raise menu prices by up to 9 percent, while the California-based Jack in the Box is eyeing an 8 percent increase.
Scenes from Miami: I'm in South Florida for a few days to attend a conference about the future of free markets within the conservative movement. It's hard to imagine a better place for such a gathering than a city that reflects the wonderfully chaotic potential of immigration and relatively unfettered markets.
"If politicians are right about what people want, Miami should be a ghost town," writes National Review's Dominic Pino. Instead, the city is thriving as a crossroads of cultures and an example of what's possible when government gets out of the way:
Is Miami succeeding despite having small government and being a living embodiment of globalization and creative destruction? That's what the prevailing narrative from the economic grievance-peddlers would have you believe. It seems more likely Miami is thriving because of those characteristics. And politicians should know that there are plenty of Americans, in Miami and elsewhere, who aren't crying out for protection from the market.
The post Endless War Continues 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.
]]>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. officials ritualistically tout their respect for Iraq's sovereignty and territorial integrity, but the fact is that every U.S. president over the last 33 years has bombed Iraq in one way or another. The 1991 Gulf War occurred during George H.W. Bush's administration. Bill Clinton authorized several rounds of airstrikes against Iraqi military facilities, including a four-day bombing campaign in December 1998. George W. Bush's decision to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003 sucked hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops into a nearly decade-long morass. Barack Obama brought U.S. troops back to Iraq in 2014 after the Islamic State arrived at the gates of Baghdad, while Donald Trump continued the military campaign throughout his term.
President Joe Biden, too, has taken military action in Iraq during his first three years as president. Approximately 2,500 U.S. troops are stationed in several large bases across the country, ostensibly tasked with the "enduring defeat" of ISIS. U.S. special operators partner with their Iraqi colleagues to capture and kill ISIS leaders, planners, and facilitators. The U.S. military has also taken unilateral action against Shia militias that have lobbed attack drones and rockets toward U.S. bases on a regular basis since mid-October. On January 4, the U.S. killed Abu Taqwa, a senior commander of the Harakat Al Nujaba militia, in the heart of Baghdad.
The Iraqi government responded with fury to that airstrike in particular, blasting the U.S.-led coalition for violating the agreement governing the U.S. military's operations on Iraqi soil. Days later, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al Sudani, who a year ago insisted Baghdad still needed a U.S. military presence, pledged to form a committee to boot U.S. forces out.
The conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C. is to shudder with fright at the news. But for those who have long believed the U.S. military presence in Iraq had lost its utility, two words sum up the development: good riddance.
First, we should be clear about one thing: while ISIS is still around, its capacity to plan and execute large-scale terrorist attacks is severely degraded. ISIS no longer controls any territory in Iraq (or Syria, for that matter), which means the group has lost its ability to tax people living under its thumb. The decline in financial resources, combined with the constant targeting of ISIS commanders and the Iraqi army's growing capabilities, translates into a low pace of attacks from the group (less than 20 per month, according to the Pentagon's inspector general for the counter-ISIS mission in Iraq and Syria). Attacks that do happen are unsophisticated, against targets of opportunity, and typically take place in remote areas where the Iraqi state has long had trouble extending its writ. Whatever support base ISIS once possessed is gone, replaced instead with millions of angry Iraqis who have first-hand experience with ISIS's brutal rule and no intention of letting the organization reemerge as a viable pseudo-state actor.
Despite all this, successive U.S. administrations continue to argue that Washington's job isn't done. Before he retired as the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, Gen. Frank McKenzie predicted that U.S. forces would be in Iraq for years. The Biden administration apparently agrees with this assessment. During a bilateral security committee meeting with Iraqi defense officials last summer, the Defense Department said in a joint statement that both delegations "reaffirmed their commitment to developing Iraq's security and defense capabilities and determination to deepen security cooperation across a full range of issues to advance our countries' shared interest in Iraq's security and sovereignty, and in the stability of the region."
Parse the cookie-cutter language, however, and one can see just how maximalist all of these objectives really are. If the U.S. is prefacing a withdrawal from Iraq on the stability of the region, then it either doesn't really want to leave Iraq in the first place or does, but only in the most ideal of circumstances. Either way, the result is the same: a perpetual U.S. military mission with little return on investment.
If U.S. troops weren't dealing with so much risk in the meantime, perhaps advocates of a long-term U.S. military deployment in Iraq would have a halfway decent case to make. But this isn't the reality our troops are dealing with. Iranian-backed militias have attacked U.S. forces more than 115 times since October 17. Some of the militias launching these attacks are technically a part of the Iraqi state. Fortunately, fatalities have been avoided thus far. Even so, the danger is of such sufficient gravity that President Biden authorized a few rounds of precision airstrikes in retaliation. Defense Department assertions that these strikes are having a deterrent effect on these militias don't pass the laugh test for the simple reason that the drone and missile attacks keep coming. U.S. pressure on the Iraqi government to get the militias under control (CIA Director William Burns reportedly warned the Iraqi prime minister of "harsh consequences" if the militias couldn't be reeled in) isn't working either. That shouldn't be a surprise; the only reason Al Sudani is in the prime minister's office is because the Coordination Framework, which represents the militias' interests in the Iraqi government, supported him.
U.S. policymakers, therefore, have a choice to make. They can continue the status-quo policy, which amounts to being a willing hostage to an indefinite mission and carrying on with the delusion that any Iraqi prime minister has the power to do much of anything about the militias. Or they can finally admit that the U.S. has succeeded in doing what it set out to do—eliminating ISIS's proton-state—and extricate the U.S. military from a mess only the Iraqis have the ability to clean up.
The post The U.S. Is Done In Iraq 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.
]]>This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which I co-host every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern with my Reason colleague Zach Weissmueller.
Today's guest is Jacob Siegel, a journalist who served in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He's written a fantastic essay for Tablet magazine called, "A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation."
This is, simply, the best piece I've read about how what Jacob calls "the ruling class" is trying to literally and figuratively control political and cultural discourse about politics, public health, and other pressing topics. Jacob provides a history and a deconstruction of the concept of disinformation, a term borrowed from Cold War spycraft that became ubiquitous in the wake of Donald Trump's presidential victory in 2016.
Along the way, we discuss elite apologetics for suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story on social media, the revolving door between the national security state and the media, and how tactics devised for use overseas in the global war on terror are now being used against Americans on a daily basis.
The post Jacob Siegel: 'Disinformation' Is the Hoax of the Century appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This week, Congress came one step closer to actually ending an American war, for once.
On Wednesday, by a vote of 66–30, the Senate passed S. 316, the bill to repeal the two authorizations for the use of military force (AUMFs) against Iraq currently in effect. The first AUMF, passed in 1991, authorized the deployment of troops after Iraq invaded Kuwait, while the second, passed in 2002, allowed the president to use military force "as he determines to be necessary and appropriate" to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq." The resulting war would destabilize the region, killing thousands of troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
The repeal bill, barely a page in length, would not have any immediate effect: Neither AUMF currently forms the sole basis for an American overseas conflict. The Congressional Budget Office determined that "enacting S. 316 would not affect the federal budget." Nonetheless, it's a good sign that Congress is willing to reclaim its constitutional powers, even incrementally. And it shouldn't stop there.
Under the Constitution, while the president is the commander in chief, Congress has the sole authority to declare war. But it has not done so since World War II. Instead, over time Congress increasingly ceded war-making powers to the president. Imbuing the president with the power to both make and manage a war deprives a coequal branch of government of oversight opportunities and undermines the system of checks and balances.
In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution, nominally intended to limit the president's powers when deploying troops overseas regardless of a formal declaration of war. But in practice, presidents easily circumvented the statute's meager constraints. Similarly, AUMFs give the president the statutory authority to deploy troops at his own discretion rather than Congress'.
AUMFs are also often cited to justify participation in completely unrelated conflicts. The Obama and Trump administrations each cited the 2002 AUMF in part to justify actions against the Islamic State. The Trump administration further cited it as a pretext for the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.
But while the revocation of the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs is a welcome shift, Congress should go one step further and repeal the 2001 AUMF as well.
One week after September 11, Congress passed an AUMF authorizing the president
to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
Even by AUMF standards, it was remarkably open-ended: Any president, while in office, could deploy the military anywhere and against anyone based upon his own determination of culpability in the 9/11 attacks. He could further do whatever he deemed necessary to prevent future attacks, regardless of any potential constraining factors.
In contrast to the 1991 and 2002 authorizations, the 2001 AUMF has been cited repeatedly in the last two decades to authorize conflicts in at least 19 countries, even though it was nominally intended to apply to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. If Congress is serious about reining in the president's war powers, it should repeal this AUMF too.
Thankfully, there seems to be a bipartisan consensus on the subject, at least on this particular proposal. S. 316 was sponsored by multiple senators from both sides of the aisle, including Sens. Todd Young (R–Ind.), Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa), Tim Kaine (D–Va.), and Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.). It passed the Senate by a comfortable margin, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) indicated his support for the bill and that he would bring it to a vote in the House.
Earlier this month, the White House affirmed President Joe Biden's support for the repeal, but added, "The Administration notes that the United States conducts no ongoing military activities that rely primarily on the 2002 AUMF, and no ongoing military activities that rely on the 1991 AUMF, as a domestic legal basis." The statement made no mention of the 2001 AUMF.
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]]>It's easy to forget that the U.S. has hundreds of troops stationed in Syria whose official mission is to prevent the resurgence of the defeated Islamic State (IS) terrorist group. The American public received its periodic reminder of their presence when those troops were attacked by an "Iranian-backed militia" that's also dead set on preventing an IS resurgence.
Late last night, the Department of Defense (DOD) announced that one U.S. contractor was killed and five service members were injured when a drone of reported Iranian origin attacked a maintenance facility in northeastern Syria.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the U.S. launched retaliatory airstrikes against groups "affiliated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps."
The U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that U.S. air raids on three different militia posts in the country killed 11 fighters, reported Al Jazeera. Iranian state media claim the raids hit not military posts, but a rural development center and a grain facility.
"We will take all necessary measures to defend our people and will always respond at a time and place of our choosing," said Austin in a statement. "No group will strike our troops with impunity."
No group in Syria would even have the opportunity to strike U.S. forces if they weren't there. Given that IS lost its last piece of territory roughly four years ago, that would seem to eliminate the stated justification for maintaining an active anti-IS mission there.
The argument now is that we have to keep troops in Syria so that IS stays defeated.
"If you completely ignore and turn your back, then you're setting the conditions for a resurgence," Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The New York Times during a recent visit to Syria.
What exactly the U.S. interest is in further suppressing a rump remnant of a vanquished terrorist group goes unexplained. As yesterday's hostilities illustrate, a byproduct of keeping U.S. military personnel in Syria is that we periodically will bomb other forces who also have a keen interest in suppressing the return of IS.
Foreign policy experts and administration officials say that the "unofficial" reason U.S. troops have to stay in Syria is to forestall a fight for influence over the vacuum we'd leave behind.
"The way the experts and the administration see it, maintaining fewer than 1,000 troops in Syria is worth the occasional risk and minimal cost," reported Politico last year.
The recent deadly attack on U.S. forces shows that the cost is still not zero. One contractor won't be coming home to their family. Five other Americans are injured.
The frenzied diplomacy following yesterday's strikes illustrates how much risk there is for much greater loss of American lives. U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan put in an immediate call to the Qatari foreign minister, according to Qatari state media, who in turn was in contact with Iran's foreign minister in an attempt to prevent any escalation.
A similar tit-for-tat cycle of violence preceded the 2020 U.S. assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, which came very close to sparking a wider conflict between America and Iran.
It certainly doesn't seem like preserving a tiny sphere of influence in far-off Syria is worth the constant risk of U.S. casualties and America being plunged into a wider regional conflict with Iran. At a minimum, it would be nice to have an open, democratic debate about the pros and cons of keeping troops in Syria.
Regrettably, it seems like we won't ever get that debate.
Congress never voted to authorize U.S. hostilities in Syria, as the Constitution would seem to demand. Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden have all made war in that country on their own initiative.
A proposal from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) to authorize military force against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq was resoundingly voted down yesterday, notes Brianna Rosen at Just Security, "suggesting there may be little support for broadening authorities to Syria."
Direct U.S. military involvement in the region lumbers on as if on autopilot without any real democratic discussion or debate. Absent that debate, we can expect our contradictory presence in Syria to continue.
From that same Politico article last year: "No one we spoke to could describe the conditions under which U.S. troops could leave Syria. It's hard to predict when ISIS would be thoroughly unable to reconstitute its ranks or when the Iraqi government no longer needs cross-border help fending off Iranian militias, experts and officials said."
It would be unfair to call this a "forever war" in that the inevitable heat death of the universe will eventually end the possibility of kinetic action in Syria. Odds are we'll go back to forgetting it's happening until the next American gets killed, and/or it escalates very quickly.
The post Recent Airstrikes Are Our Periodic Reminder That We're Fighting a War in Syria appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) responded to the recent criticism he received from former White House coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci. In a new documentary, Fauci accused Paul of misrepresenting the science on U.S.-funded gain-of-function research, which Fauci says could not have caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
Paul disagreed.
"He's arguing a straw man argument," said Paul in an interview on Rising, the show I host for The Hill. "We have never argued that anything that's been published by the Wuhan lab became COVID-19. What we are arguing is that the lab in Wuhan has over 100 coronaviruses that they have manipulated in a lab and have not published."
Federal health advisers have not been sufficiently forthcoming about the extent of the grants authorized by the National Institute of Health (NIH) for research in Wuhan, China, according to Paul.
"Dr. Fauci is disingenuous. He is conflicted," said Paul. "The reason he is conflicted is that if this came from a lab that he funded, he shares culpability. He's been trying to cover this up from the beginning. There's a great deal of information that from January of 2020, in the early days, a cover-up began, and it continued for Fauci's entire term in office."
Paul also expressed frustration that the Senate did not act on his amendment to repeal the 2001 authorization of military force that undergirds the war on terror. The vote failed Wednesday night.
"The bill before us will repeal the Iraqi resolution, the one that says we are authorized to fight against Saddam Hussein's Iraq," said Paul. "The absurdity is that war's been over for 20 years, that resolution is very specific to Hussein, and we still can't get some of these neocons to vote for it."
To stop the United States' forever wars, Congress must repeal the "forever authorizations," added Paul.
Watch the full interview below.
The post Sen. Rand Paul: 'Dr. Fauci Is Disingenuous. He Is Conflicted.' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The existence of a drone program was a secret. The legal justification for the drone program was a secret. It was a secret that through a program called SOMALGET the National Security Agency was recording and archiving the content of every single cell phone conversation in Afghanistan, and it remains unknown what percentage of conversations in Pakistan. It was a secret that algorithms then combed through these conversations and routed concerning ones to linguists, who gisted—paraphrased—anything that seemed important. It was not much of a secret, however, to the men on whom they eavesdropped. They knew America was listening, just as they knew that the high-pitched drones above them transmitted video data back to the States, a long-running film of their daily lives. In western Pakistan, men got high on khat over lunch and told dirty jokes while she listened.
My friend's toddler calls shadows "zero" things; the shadow of a hippo is a "zero hippo," the shadow of herself "zero me." A zero America precedes even the name, but after 2001, government in secret was unfathomably well funded. Much of it remains literally hidden: in bunkers underground or in the vast underground netherworld of dystopian Crystal City. But much is hidden by virtue of its ability to blend into a corporate landscape too dull to take in: glassy buildings you float past without processing their existence, mile-long office parks behind straight lines of spindly trees. They have names such as "National Business Park" and "L-3 Communications," names that in their intentional forgettability oppose the purpose of naming; often there is no exterior signage of any kind. Sometimes they are siloed in clusters of bland buildings, but the secret state also dispersed itself amidst extant office buildings. There are floors of D.C. buildings not listed in the lobby's directory. Government agencies few Americans had heard of spent amounts of money few could fathom; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency built itself a $1.8 billion facility in the bland suburb of Springfield, Virginia, that, in the literalism prevalent in so much public art and architecture, looked from above—or from a drone—like a giant eye. The head of the Army's intelligence school described all this new construction as being "on the order of the pyramids," but the pyramids are spread over a much smaller geographic area. The "alternative architecture" of secret America, as journalist Dana Priest calls it, extends from D.C. to Tampa to Indianapolis to Salt Lake City to San Antonio and beyond, in landscapes so dull as to seem staged: office parks with ghostly Starbucks and unused gyms flanked by extended-stay hotels. Each secret program established by the government was serviced by an army of contractors hawking technical skills, language skills, data entry; each CEO well aware that a seemingly limitless amount of money was available and oversight nonexistent.
The currency of zero America is the secret, but the currency is degraded. Documents are marked classified for no particular reason, because it's always safest, because they may be potentially embarrassing, because no one takes a document not marked secret seriously. Freedom of Information Act requests have unearthed a fan letter from J. Edgar Hoover to his favorite baseball player, the state of Florida's list of rejected license plates (DRUNK), an agreement between the 2012 movie Battleship and the U.S. Navy in which the Navy is promised 10 DVDs of the movie, the FBI's dictionary of Twitter slang ("L8R G8R" for later, gator). Thousands of new programs absorbed billions of dollars, generating new, mostly banal secrets, plenty of them public information easily gleaned from Google.
John Kiriakou, a CIA analyst based in Virginia, once wrote a paper about Iraqi nuclear weapons and sent it to the Department of Energy, which has its own classification system. As he pressed send, it became illegal for him to access the paper he had written; he did not have the clearance. Kiriakou wanted to tell the president, as the military was preparing to invade Iraq, that someone had had a nervous breakdown. "I knew he had had a nervous breakdown," he told me at his kitchen table in Clarendon, "because I saw the original data, but I couldn't tell anybody that he had a nervous breakdown, because it was so highly classified, so highly compartmentalized. I couldn't put it in writing, because before it gets to the president, it goes through six other people, who wouldn't be cleared for the information." The president never found out; the information hit a dead end with Kiriakou.
Once, a report had come in suggesting that a high-placed Iraqi source was unreliable and unstable. Kiriakou thought the president needed to know, and Kiriakou knew the director of the CIA was about to meet with the president. But he couldn't print out the information—it was too highly classified, there was no print option—or tell the director of the CIA's assistant, who was not cleared, so he remembered the report as best he could, ran up to the director's office, and told him. "Give me the report," the director said. "I'm not going to remember that stuff." Kiriakou said he couldn't print it out. He repeated what he knew, from his memory, three times. The director then repeated what he could remember to the president. Anyone who has played telephone can see the problem, though in this case the original information was later revealed to be false. It's hard to fact-check information when no one can see it.
"I could count on my two hands the times that I used my open telephone in those 15 years," he told me, "because everything is classified, including the classified email system. So I want to meet my wife for lunch, so I send her an email. 'You wanna meet for lunch?' And I classify in secret note form. Why? Because everything is classified. Everything. Like I would have to stop and think, should I really make this unclassified? So eh, fuck it, I'm just gonna say secret note form. That's what everybody does, for everything."
The secret state reveals itself in its need for people with security clearance to sift through emails about inviting one's wife to lunch. On clearedconnections.com, employers based in 47 states try to rustle up cleared candidates; at the time of writing, just one company, Northrop Grumman, had 2,250 job postings. In 2003, two million people had security clearance, approaching 1 percent of the population, which suggests less a security state than a caste system. Checking the backgrounds of so many Americans costs billions more. A zero state that keeps metastasizing would eventually become a world in which the majority are holding secrets from the few remaining people ineligible.
One petabyte of information is equivalent to 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text. At one intelligence agency, one petabyte of classified data accumulates every year and a half. Sifting through a petabyte of information in a year would require two million employees; around 100,000 people work in intelligence for the government. "There are billions and billions of documents, and there are like 16 people declassifying everything," says Kiriakou. "So the email about meeting my wife for lunch will never be declassified, never."
On a base in New York in 2009, the Army gave a 21-year-old soldier raw war footage from which she was supposed to write reports for the higher-ups. All day long Chelsea Manning watched acts of war take place on a screen and tried to process them. She had access to all sorts of footage taken from above, alongside the recorded voices of soldiers watching it, all in Iraq, where the mission to stop another attack had metastasized. There was a grainy black-and-white video of a Baghdad suburb, seen from a helicopter above, palm trees and low square buildings and hauntingly empty sidewalks. That day in the suburb, men had been shooting at American soldiers. When the men in the helicopter saw Iraqis with various black objects slung over their shoulders gather on a street corner, they got very excited. The Iraqi men walk casually into the frame. Two of them—though the American soldiers do not know this—are journalists stringing for Reuters. One is Saeed Chmagh, a 40-year-old driver and camera assistant with a wife and four children at home. The other, a 22-year-old celebrated photographer named Namir Noor-Eldeen. There are men in the group carrying actual weapons. The journalists carry only cameras. Manning saw what the American soldiers saw from above, and listened to them negotiate the lives of the Iraqis below.
"That's a weapon," says an American voice. "Fuckin' prick."
"Request permission to engage."
"You are free to engage," comes the response.
"All right, we'll be engaging."
"Just fuckin' once you get on 'em, open up!"
They engage. The helicopter shoots 8-inch-long exploding tubes, 10 of them in a second. They weigh—each individual round—a half pound. From the helicopter they whir: duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh. The visual disappears behind a cloud of dust and smoke, then resolves into a pile of bodies.
"Keep shooting, keep shooting!"
Mostly, they are still; it seems like less of a firefight than a light switch. Men on, then off. Except, that is, for Saeed, the driver, who, as the smoke resolves, is running along the side of the building.
"I got 'em!"
The Americans laugh.
"I hit him."
Saeed squirms on the ground. His legs are splayed. He's shaking. He is, one suspects, thinking of his children. There are four of his own, but he supports three more, and also the children of his sister, since her husband was killed. He talked about his kids all the time on long drives with journalists.
"Got a bunch of bodies laying there."
"Yeah we got one guy crawling around down there."
"Oh yeah look at those dead bastards."
"Nice."
"Good shootin'."
"Thank you."
"Come on, buddy," says a soldier, as if to Saeed, "All you gotta do is pick up a weapon."
Saeed never had a weapon. But should he pick up what looked like a weapon—the camera—the Americans would have permission to shoot him again.
"We have a van approaching and picking up bodies," says an American.
A van swerves into the scene. A man jumps out to help Saeed and carry his limp body into the van. What the Americans do not see, but is visible should you look for it, are two small heads peeking out the front window on the passenger's side. A little girl and a little boy watch.
"Can I shoot?" asks an American. He's talking about the van.
"Come on, let's shoot!"
Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.
A smashed mirror flips off the van and falls to the ground. When the van comes into focus again, there's a massive hole in the windshield.
Now it is time for ground troops. A soldier runs from the van with a little girl in his arms. She is 4, and she is bleeding. There is windshield glass lodged in her eyes. The boy, 8, has shrapnel in his brain.
After silence, the voice, again, of the Americans in the helicopter.
"Well, it's their fault," one says, "for bringing their kids into a battle."
"That's right."
The view of Iraq from the sky became so familiar to the soldier that when she was transferred to a base near Baghdad, the layout was known to her. Now it was simply real; one could feel the wind that moved the trees on screen. One could hear the car bombs. But it was just a closer screen. Real and not real. The world she watched all day and the one she emerged into, safe. There's nothing remarkable, after all, about two tiny children irreparably damaged in a war zone. What is new is that she can call up the footage. The soldiers were under surveillance as they killed a man who held not a gun but a camera.
Her workplace was called a SCIF, a sensitive compartmented information facility, but was really a bunch of plywood thrown up on top of a basketball court. She sat at the free throw line, and in all the accounts I have ever read of Chelsea Manning spilling America's most shameful secrets, I have never seen it noted that it was here where it would occur to her to blow the whistle. Security was such that analysts kept passwords on sticky notes stuck to their laptops. Days on the job were long and boring and left plenty of time to dig deep, scanning the system for anything of interest, in a way not dissimilar to other 22-year-olds digging into the internet that happened to be available to them.
"I don't believe in good guys versus bad guys any more," she said, via chat, to the hacker who would eventually betray her. "Only see a plethora of states acting in self-interest, with varying ethics and moral standards, of course, but self-interest nevertheless. I mean we're better in some respects, we're much more subtle, use a lot more words and legal techniques to legitimize everything. It's better than disappearing in the middle of the night, but just because something is more subtle, doesn't make it right. I guess I'm too idealistic." She is a person emerging from adolescence, negotiating the ethical questions, as self-serious as any undergraduate taking a first course in philosophy, realizing that her parents had been wrong about everything, eager to set them straight and convinced that a straight-setting is possible. I am not mocking this moral seriousness and ambition. I miss it.
On leave in D.C. for a bit, she bought women's clothes and rode the Metro with no purpose but to be female in a public space. On the laptop brought from Iraq was classified data illegally downloaded. In the United States, she was surprised to discover how few people were discussing the bloodshed she'd spent all day watching. "There were two worlds," she later said. "The world in America, and the world I was seeing. I wanted people to see what I was seeing."
Zero America was conceived in a time when the legitimacy of the state was assured, unquestioned. But the state's infrastructure was hard and solid and the sense of legitimacy a mist already burning off. The structure would outlast the faith that built it.
Julian Assange established WikiLeaks in 2006. It was a list of links. It was "an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking." "We're going to crack the world open," Assange said. He cited Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and compared himself to academics forced to labor in Russian camps. "True belief begins only with a jackboot at the door. True belief forms when led into the dock and referred to in the third person. True belief is when a distant voice booms 'the prisoner shall now rise' and no one else in the room stands." He released a report about the corrupt president of Kenya. A copy of the British counterinsurgency manual. A cache of emails from a speechwriter to Hugo Chávez. He couldn't get the mainstream media to cover the documents. If he had cracked the world open, no one cared to look down the chasm.
This excerpt is adapted from Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
The post The Degraded Currency of the Shadow Government 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.
]]>March will mark 20 years since the United States launched its invasion of Iraq, and with it a wave of catastrophic choices that continue to plague American foreign policy. It took a little over a month for President George W. Bush to declare victory over Saddam Hussein's forces and announce the continuation of a reconstruction mission.
But the end of the war wasn't really the end of the war. That's true in the context of Iraq, where the U.S. occupation helped exacerbate violence and instability for nearly nine years post-Saddam. It was true procedurally, too; to this day, Congress has not repealed the authorization it passed to allow the president to invade Iraq in 2003.
On Thursday, lawmakers in the House and the Senate introduced a bill to roll back that measure, the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), as well as the 1991 AUMF, which authorized U.S. participation in the Gulf War. "The 1991 and 2002 AUMFs are no longer necessary, serve no operational purpose, and run the risk of potential misuse," said Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Va.), one of the bill's sponsors. Sen. Todd Young (R–Ind.), another sponsor, added that "Congress must do its job and take seriously the decision to not just commit America to war, but to affirmatively say that we are no longer at war."
This isn't the first time lawmakers have tried to roll back AUMFs. But efforts to repeal the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs—as well as the never-used 1957 AUMF, which authorized action against communist threats in the Middle East, and the constantly used 2001 AUMF, which authorized action against any party involved in the 9/11 attacks—have never made it all the way. It's proven easy for Congress to give up its war powers; it's been much harder for it to reclaim them.
AUMFs allow the president to take military action without first asking Congress, which is the sole body allowed to declare war according to the Constitution. Congress hasn't formally declared war in over 80 years. Worse still, it's passed laws giving the president more discretion in military conduct, insisting less on proper oversight. AUMFs have served as blank checks that shield the president from accountability for military adventurism.
The threats that motivated those emergency powers in the first place are largely gone. The Gulf War is long over, Saddam Hussein is long dead, and there is no longer a Soviet Union looking to wreak communist havoc in the Middle East. Still, repeal efforts have always stalled.
For lawmakers, repealing the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs should be a political slam dunk. Neither AUMF is the sole statutory basis for any current U.S. military action (and the 1991 AUMF hasn't even been used since the Gulf War). Even if lawmakers are reluctant to engage in broader debates over congressional war powers and presidential overreach in conflicts, repealing the toothless AUMFs makes it look like they're tackling those issues.
The measures remain on the books, though, ripe for potential abuse. Presidents have used the 2001 AUMF's broad phrasing to justify military operations in at least 19 countries. Given this AUMF's ongoing usage, lawmakers have been far less willing to tackle it than they have others. The 2002 AUMF has had a much smaller footprint, and it hasn't been the sole authorization behind any military action since the Iraq War ended in 2011.
AUMFs have diluted Congress' own say in American foreign policy by reallocating so much war-making power to the president. But some lawmakers are still trying to give up more. Last May, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R–Ill.) introduced AUMF legislation that would've allowed the president to send U.S. troops to Ukraine. And in January, Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R–Texas) and Mike Waltz (R–Fla.) introduced an AUMF that would've allowed the president to use military force against Mexican drug cartels.
Even as some lawmakers attempt to formally end wars, their colleagues are pushing for the president's power to enter new ones. It's ultimately the American people who lose when it's no longer a requirement for the president to make his case for military force and face the political costs that follow.
The post Why Is It So Hard for Congress To End a War? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On March 20, 2003, what was officially one of America's shorter wars began with an airstrike on Saddam Hussein's presidential palace in Baghdad. U.S. armed forces, 160,000 strong, moved out of Kuwait and across Iraq, and after overcoming a few small roadblocks along the way took the capital city within three weeks. On May 1, President George W. Bush declared victory from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, off the coast of San Diego. With combat over, "our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country," Bush said. "In this battle, we have fought for the cause of liberty, and for the peace of the world."
As it turned out, neither the U.S. military mission nor the broader cause of liberty and peace were accomplished by May 2003, nor were they in the months and years to follow. What the Bush administration sold as a grim but necessary surgical strike for democracy and stability in the Middle East and the world has been revealed over the past two decades as one of the most grievous errors in superpower history. 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.
To understand war, your vision must focus on details more intimate and specific than geopolitical generalities and great-power prerogatives. This particular war began with human bodies split open with bombs from the air and shells from the ground and bullets from every direction. In some cities, more than half of the accomplishments that make us civilized—buildings and homes and the complicated machinery that brings us safe water to drink and electricity to light up the darkness and power machines—were damaged or destroyed.
Because of the "kinetic actions," in bloodless militaryspeak, that the U.S. government initiated in March 2003, for many years Iraqis would view the common automobile—usually a symbol of industrialized society meeting basic human needs—as a potential harbinger of violent death. The vehicles would, with a frequency too horrible to accept, explode, shattering the glass that kept homes and stores secure from the elements and intruders; tearing the skin and arteries that kept human bodies alive; robbing children from parents and parents from children and breadwinners from families and merchants from the customers who relied on them; sending shockwaves of grief and rage that set up motive and opportunity for the next violent assault on life and on the orderly operation of bourgeois society that constitutes the good life.
The invasion eliminated a brutal dictator, something many Iraqis were grateful for in itself. But it also for years eliminated even the distant vision of that good life. As one Iraqi woman told journalist Nir Rosen for his 2010 book Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World, "My message to the American people after five years, they destroyed us and didn't help us, they didn't reconstruct the country, they even added more destruction to us. The days during Saddam were better. Now there is killing and nothing good. Before there was security and life was going on easily…now things are getting worse and worse, killing in the streets." As late as 2016, 93 percent of polled young Iraqis considered Americans their enemies for a war that Bush and his team framed as their liberation.
The boys doing Bush's foreign policy thinking had a prewar paper trail planning Saddam's overthrow that stretched back a decade. It had become an article of neoconservative faith by the turn of the century that Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, should have deposed the Ba'athist dictator as the capper to the 1991 war that expelled his armies from Kuwait. In 2001, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), full of folk who would forge W.'s foreign policy, made it clear that this grand plan was much larger than a single tyrant: It was about a "need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf [that] transcends the…regime of Saddam Hussein." The government's official National Security Strategy for 2002, issued in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, incorporated PNAC's thinking, pushing the principle that any country seen as credibly threatening U.S. interests should be brought to heel with hard military power, not just the softer stuff of cultural influence and diplomacy and trade.
Even before September 11, Bush Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill would later report, one of the administration's highest priorities was finding a way to topple Saddam. In the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, most any military act, no matter how severe or reckless, could be framed as an urgent fight against terrorism, even if not related to 9/11 itself. The prospect of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)—deploying them, selling them, maybe just handing them over to Osama bin Laden—was a bedtime story with terrifying potency for a rattled public. Newspaper publisher Knight Ridder reported as early as February 2002 that the White House was clandestinely planning to invade a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11.
Saddam had been pushing back against a United Nations WMD inspection regime imposed on Iraq following the 1991 Gulf War. The Clinton administration bombed him directly for this in 1998 (it had already been bringing routine death from the air via anodyne-sounding "no-fly zones") and made his ouster official U.S. policy with that same year's bipartisan Iraq Liberation Act. Iraq was also under an international economic sanctions regime, one that U.N. humanitarian aid coordinators had decried as destroying the country in concert with the previous war's destruction of the nation's power, food storage, oil, sewage, road, and railway systems—$232 billion's worth.
Buoyed by claims mostly from self-interested Iraqi exiles that Saddam's roads were crawling with mobile biowarfare factories and that his emissaries were scouring the globe to buy tubes and uranium for his active nuclear weapons program, the Bush administration told Americans and the world that safety and justice required preemptive conquest. Those claims were based on intelligence that was almost comically false in retrospect, some from pure fabricators and some from people who were tortured. Officials did their best to keep such more-than-reasonable doubts from the public, but they were well-known within the U.S. intelligence community.
Bush and his British ally, Prime Minister Tony Blair, considered as a possible casus belli for an invasion ginning up a confrontation, such as flying a U2 reconnaissance aircraft over Iraq "with fighter cover…painted in U.N. colours," according to a memo written by a Blair aid who was present for the conversation. But ultimately the legal basis for this dubiously legal war was that America said so. Congress in October 2002 authorized a bipartisan measure allowing Bush to invade Iraq, with then-Sen. Joe Biden voting for it despite believing that the WMDs "do not pose an imminent threat to our national security." Like many in Washington, he saw such a war as part of a "march to peace and security."
In March 2003, the destruction of Iraq began. Bombs dropped and bullets flew and bodies (and a civilization) were annihilated. Saddam's armed forces, presumed to have numbered around 400,000, barely fought, a phantom menace that in great numbers took off their uniforms and tried to fade back into Iraqi society, such as it remained.
As a military operation, Bush's invasion did everything it needed to do, nearly flawlessly. And thus an American and Iraqi disaster began.
The WMDs were not found. They were not there. Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, commander of the I Marine Expeditionary Force, gave it to us straight: Nothing was found to justify the war on its own terms. "It's not for lack of trying," Conway said in a May 30, 2003, Defense Department briefing from Baghdad. "We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwait border and Baghdad but they're simply not there."
The administration fell back on the argument that Saddam never gave up "aspirations and intentions" toward obtaining such weapons. (Of course, nothing would inspire him more to use them if he had them than invading his country to overthrow him. But not much was said about that.) Very thin accusations that Saddam had allied with or aided Al Qaeda before 9/11 were floated and similarly did not hold water.
As head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer by then was essentially viceroy of Iraq; to flex how deeply we were obliterating the cause and memory of Saddam Hussein (who was executed in December 2006), Bremer disbanded the old Iraqi army and barred nearly all Ba'ath Party members from participation in government. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of aggrieved and unemployed young men were stalking the country, and nearly anyone with experience running schools or hospitals or water treatment facilities or oil refineries or electrical plants weren't allowed to work on any of those things.
By the end of 2004, Iraq had become so violent that most U.S. officials—no matter how much their tasks might require seeing, understanding, and speaking to Iraqis (though the vast majority could only do so through translators)—just hunkered down in the area around Saddam's old Republican Palace. In an act of bloody irony, the U.S. had made this its headquarters, known as the Green Zone. Projects from generating electricity to distributing food were stymied or halted because it simply wasn't safe to be anywhere or to do anything in this nation cursed by U.S. liberation; nervous contractors hired armed guards, who too often killed Iraqi civilians merely for not stopping their cars when warned.
Guaranteed profits for well-connected corporations (some of them run by absurdly underqualified conman cowboys who knew the right people) were more common than improvements to the average Iraqi's life. Marquee state-of-the-art hospitals favored by D.C. got more cash and attention than basic clinics to deal with more mundane but still deadly problems, such as the diarrhea that afflicted Iraqi children who often lacked access to clean water.
A pivot to security in late 2004 meant that near-majorities of planned water and electricity projects never got finished; the funding for them was diverted to trying to keep Americans and their employees alive. (Some that got finished were better left undone, like the series of natural-gas-powered generators erected in places where there were no conceivable pipelines to deliver the gas.) Nor did Iraqis seem prepared to step up: When the U.S. handed over control of the Health Ministry in March 2004, for example, 40 percent of medicines the ministry declared "essential" were not in stock in hospitals, and public clinics dealing with chronic diseases were out of 26 of 32 needed drugs. Three years later, the Iraqi health minister faced trial for such crimes as selling pharmaceuticals meant for his citizens to Iran (at a discount) and to foreign firms (for profit)—and ordering the deaths of guards from a Commission on Public Integrity that was investigating. He was acquitted, an event that a later Governance Assessment Report from the U.S. declared "a signal that those in government are above the law."
As an occupying army, the U.S. was understandably afraid to hire many Iraqis, which left more unemployed people angry at that occupying army in a nation awash with weapons. Even those employed in the Iraqi military or police would frequently sell their bullets and guns for walking-around money. In the meantime, Washington was widely perceived as propping up Shiite Muslims (who had been suppressed under Saddam's government) in their increasingly violent dealings with Sunni Muslims. The new Iraqi government, run by a Shiite, was torturing Sunnis, even in hospitals. Many Sunnis crawled into the arms of Al Qaeda in Iraq and began shooting back at the Shiites.
Things got bad, and things got worse. The Syrian border became a pathway for foreign militants to come in and make trouble. Iran's influence over the Shiite government of Iraq deepened, and it has continued to this day. The Sadrist Movement withdrew from normal governance and became its own insurgent army. Insurgent courts would administer acid baths for unveiled women, and electric prods and hot irons for Sunni men who insisted on continuing to live where their families had long been living.
After seven years of U.S. occupation, Rosen writes in Aftermath, "hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed. Many more had been injured. There were millions of widows and orphans. Millions had fled their homes. Tens of thousands of Iraqi men had spent years in American prisons. The new Iraqi state was among the most corrupt in the world. It was often brutal. It failed to provide adequate services to its people, millions of whom were barely able to survive."
With negotiations complicated by Washington's insistence that its troops must be able to act with complete legal impunity in Iraq, Bush, and later Obama, agreed to pull out all armed forces by the end of 2011. But with the rise of more militant chaos in the 2010s from the Islamic State group, American troops were back fighting throughout most of the 2010s. With that mission now officially over, about 2,500 troops still remain there, allegedly to merely assist and advise the Iraqis (who recently spent nearly a year trying to pull together a government, an effort marred by the usual factional rivalries, mass protests, arrests, and murders).
By some metrics, modern Iraq has shown improvement since 2003. Life expectancy is up, if only by two years, and gross domestic product has increased sixfold (while still barely half what it was prior to the first Western wreckage of Iraq in 1991). Crude oil production (nearly 90 percent of the nation's income) has more than doubled. But it is dangerous to let economic growth fool us into deciding, decades past the daily piles of bodies in the streets, that it all seems to have worked out well enough in the end.
Beyond all the misery and chaos caused in Iraq itself, the U.S. came nowhere close to the neoconservative dream of a democratic domino effect in the Middle East. What resulted from the Iraq adventure was greater power and influence for America's sworn enemy Iran, plus weapons and experienced jihadists and sectarian rivalries spreading around the region.
"Rather than being inspired by what happened in Iraq after the invasion," former Middle Eastern CIA man Paul R. Pillar wrote in The National Interest in 2011, "Middle Easterners were repelled by it. If the violence, disorder, and breakdown of public services in Iraq were the birth pangs of a new Middle Eastern order, most people in the region wanted nothing of it."
Even after Iraq, the U.S. has not given up on its hegemonic hunch that it can expend treasure and kill strangers to push the Middle East in desired directions. But it is now doing this more with mechanized drones in the air and less with American soldiers on the ground. While American bombardment helped topple Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, leading to still more chaos and instability and death, and we have troops and drones acting to this day in Syria, the U.S. since then has had the general sense—or the exhaustion—not to again try to invade and reconstruct a Middle Eastern nation from the ground up. In the post–Donald Trump GOP, support for the Iraq War has largely become anathema.
Yet the U.S. has still not fully internalized that war's lessons. The Iraq debacle should have taught the U.S. it can never again scare itself into war based on guesses about how sinister some enemy is or will be. It should have taught Americans the damage that can be done by treating a foreign bogeyman as inherently intolerable—whether it's Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin or the mullahs of Iran, a nation whose feared pursuit of nuclear weapons has vexed Washington for many years. Instead, President Joe Biden declared in November 2022 that "we're gonna free Iran!"
In 2007, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D–Texas) summed up America's bloody, buffoonish attempts at conquest and reconstruction. "This war," he said, "was launched without an imminent threat to our families" by "radical know-it-all ideologues here in Washington" who "bent facts, distorted intelligence, and perpetrated lies designed to mislead the American people into believing that a third-rate thug had a hand in the 9/11 tragedy and was soon to unleash a mushroom cloud."
Even the commingled scents of burning rubber, plastic, and flesh from car bombs dissipate with time. But the lessons of the folly that destroyed so many lives should never fade.
The post Examining America's War in Iraq After 20 Years appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Iranian Kurds were risking their lives to protest the government's Islamic dress code. Protests that had begun over the death of a Kurdish woman in "morality police" custody turned into a nationwide uprising against the theocracy. Teenagers confronted the police while women burned their mandatory headscarves in the street.
Just across the border, some Iraqi Kurds held solidarity rallies. Iraqi Kurdish influencer Dana Nawzar Jaf, who wants to "make Kurdistan great again" (and whose Twitter account is now suspended) had other ideas.
"There is freedom to wear the hijab, but not to burn the hijab. It is disrespectful and cowardly," he tweeted. "Publish the names, photos, and addresses of those who have insulted the veil."
Reason could not reach Nawzar Jaf, who has since been banned from Twitter, for comment. His brother Yahya Nawzar Jaf declined to share his contact information, arguing that Dana Nawzar Jaf "does not talk to the media. His views are published on Twitter and YouTube."
The Nawzar Jaf brothers are part of a chorus of conservatives gaining ground on Kurdish social media. Positioning themselves as the protectors of traditional culture, they've harnessed the internet to swing their weight around Iraqi Kurdish politics. And it seems to be working.
Last month, Egyptian rapper Mohamed Ramadan had been set to perform in Erbil, the Iraqi Kurdish capital. He is known for mahraganat music, a rowdy genre full of references to sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. After a hashtag campaign, authorities shut down the concert, citing "the values and principles of society."
Earlier this fall, the Iraqi Kurdish parliament shot down a bill to strengthen protections against domestic violence. The parliament is now debating a law, which has majority support, to censor pro-LGBT publications and arrest people who "promote homosexuality." Activists believe that social media pressure influenced both moves.
Most Kurds are Muslim, but the rising Kurdish conservatives are not old-style Islamist theocrats. (Recent events, such as the war against the Islamic State, have made that brand of politics toxic.) Instead, they've focused on stirring up outrage about supposed insults to Islamic family values and Kurdish identity. And they've found social media to be their best tool for organizing their campaigns.
In other words, right-wing cancel culture has come to Kurdistan.
***
Islamist politics had once been all the rage in the Middle East. Beginning in the late 1970s, a wave of religion-based movements swept through the region, successfully installing an Islamic republic in Iran, forcing the Soviet presence out of Afghanistan, and seriously threatening Arab governments.
With the Arab Spring in the early 2010s, religious populists joined Arab liberals in revolutions calling for greater political freedoms. As the uprisings were crushed or turned into bloody civil wars, Arab public trust in Islamist parties dropped tremendously, polling shows.
And many Iranians soured on theocracy as their society became more educated and plugged into international media. Even government-sponsored polls, which once claimed that Islamic dress codes were overwhelmingly popular among Iranians, now find that a shrinking minority wants the police to enforce the hijab.
Following the U.S. wars with Iraq in 1991 and 2003, Kurdish parties with pro-American politics managed to carve out an autonomous zone in northern Iraq. After the 2003 war, Erbil and Sulaimani became known as some of the few Iraqi cities where Americans could party openly.
Add to that the rise of left-wing Kurdish rebellions in Turkey and Syria, with their own women's brigades. These guerrillas gained international fame by confronting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Long-haired fighters chanting the slogan "women, life, freedom" shot back at wild-eyed sectarian extremists.
In September 2022, a Kurdish woman named Mahsa Jina Amini died in Iranian police custody after her arrest for supposedly wearing an "improper" hijab. Protests against religious rule spread from her hometown in Kurdistan Province to cities across Iran, and many non-Kurdish liberals adopted the slogan "women, life, freedom" as their own.
French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy has declared that the Kurds are standard-bearers of an "exceptional strain of enlightened Islam" against "every form of tyranny that the terrible 20th century spawned." But looks can be deceiving.
Even though Islamism has not caught on in the same ways, Kurdish society is still very traditional, and Iraqi Kurdish politics are rooted in the aristocratic rural clans that dominate the region. Yahya Nawzar Jaf argues that Kurds are actually more "conservative compared to Persians, Arabs, and Turks."
Edith Szanto is a professor of religious studies at the University of Alabama who taught at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani for eight years. She argues that Kurdistan is quite similar to the American South, as family honor and social stigma are powerful social forces.
Naren Briar, a Kurdish-American researcher who works on ethnic and religious minority issues in Kurdistan, describes those forces differently, as "violent misogyny and pseudo-intellectual nonsense."
"It is evident that this ideology permeates deeply in Kurdish society, through social media, and in everyday life," she says.
Even Erbil is more old-fashioned than it may seem. While its gated communities are happy to cater to the lifestyles of foreign patrons and jet-setting elites, the old city is quite conservative, even by Middle Eastern standards. Shop loudspeakers play Quranic recitations rather than Muzak background music, men and women alike wear traditional garb in the streets, and alcohol is not sold openly in Muslim neighborhoods.
Sulaimani has a more liberal reputation because the hijab is less common and alcohol more abundant. (Drinking is considered a sin in Islam.) Other social norms are still in play.
"There are families who have money to send their daughters to school, who might dress a certain way, but that doesn't mean they're letting their daughters go out into the bazaar, because that's eyb," argues Szanto, using a Kurdish word for social stigma.
The internet was originally a liberating force in Kurdistan, according to Kurdish writer Kamal Chomani.
"It was very revolutionary. For the first time, uncensored criticism appeared in the Kurdistan region," he says. "All of a sudden, I was connected with everyone. Every single [non-Kurdish] activist, Kurdish activist, journalist, academic from any part of the world. That gave me and many other people like me a chance to discuss issues, to debate, to strategize, to mobilize."
But conservatives and religious extremists also took advantage of it "from the beginning," according to Chomani, who is a non-resident fellow at the Kurdish Peace Institute, a nonprofit research organization where I am also a non-resident fellow.
In general, social media has become another place for enforcing social conformity. In some cases, Kurdish women who "marry someone of status will put on the hijab and delete everything from before" in order to preserve their reputations as loyal wives, Szanto notes.
Kurdish conservatism isn't always the drab, by-the-book puritanism that militant Islamists favor. Many conservatives are more drawn to Sufism, a current of Islam focused on mystical experiences and charismatic preachers.
"They go to zikr on their phones," Szanto says, using a term for Sufi meditation circles. "They're the equivalent of evangelicals."
In addition to families policing their own, Chomani and Briar say that a major force behind conservatism online is unemployed young men with nothing better to do.
On the flip side, Yahya Nawzar Jaf argues that the liberal elite has been pushing foreign values on the humble masses of Kurds.
"Those who have ruled [Iraqi] Kurdistan for the last 30 years," he says, "do not feel attached to Kurdish values, but rather to the [foreign] countries where they studied and grew up."
***
The picture is a bit more complicated than that, Szanto argues.
Many liberal Kurds were indeed educated abroad, the sons and daughters of Kurdish exile families who returned to Kurdistan after a long stay in wealthier and more secular places like Berlin, Oslo, and Nashville. Yet many conservative voices also come from elite backgrounds. Although they often enjoy foreign luxury goods, they do not feel attracted to a fully cosmopolitan lifestyle.
"'Conservative' in Iraqi Kurdistan does not mean 'poor people,' by the way. It means middle- and upper-middle-class," Szanto says. "It's self-policing within the same social class."
That may help explain why Mohamed Ramadan's concert was canceled last month.
In its homeland, Egypt, mahraganat music is known as a working-class genre that aggressively flouts social taboos. At underground street concerts and on SoundCloud pages, mahraganat musicians rap about gangster adventures, messy breakups, and smoking weed. Egyptian authorities have repeatedly tried to ban the genre.
The planned concert in Erbil was a different story. It would be held at the Ankawa Royal Hotel, a posh venue down the street from the U.S. Consulate. (Ankawa, the old Assyrian Christian quarter, has become the favorite neighborhood of foreigners from rich countries.) Basic tickets sold for $100 apiece (in American dollars) or $500 for the VIP section.
"Who's going to buy tickets to the Mohamed Ramadan concert? The kids of the conservative elite," Szanto says. "When your own children might go, that's when it becomes threatening."
Iraq had already hosted a Ramadan concert in December 2021. His concert in Baghdad was a public relations fiasco. Images of the rapper wearing a skimpy shirt and kissing a woman's hand scandalized Iraqi social media. To make matters worse, conservatives were angry that the concert coincided with the Martyrdom of Lady Fatima, a Shiite Muslim day of mourning.
Islamic cleric Jaafar al-Ibrahimi condemned the concert, complaining in a sermon that Baghdadis had spent millions of dollars to see an "ugly, filthy, gay, black prostitute." Protesters held up placards and prayed outside the venue. Officials distanced themselves from the performance. Politicians condemned it.
"The main issue wasn't political or religious for me, but preserving public decency," says Erbil-based journalist Othman Alshalash, who opposed both the Baghdad and Erbil concerts. He says society is "under pressure from groups that want to spread this trashy art."
In late September 2022, Ramadan announced a new Middle Eastern tour, including one stop in Erbil.
Arab conservatives demanded the cancellation of the concerts. Governments quickly caved. Within a few days, Egyptian authorities shut down a planned concert in Alexandria, while the Syrian artists' guild and the Qatari Ministry of Culture denied that they had given approval to the performances to begin with.
The rapper responded by holding an impromptu parade in the streets of Alexandria. Surrounded by cheering fans, he posted a video to Facebook with the caption, "You have the power to cancel my concert, you have the power to destroy, but you're not popular like I am."
The controversy was a bit slower in reaching Kurdistan. In mid-October, word of the tour spread through Kurdish conservative circles.
While the concert in Baghdad had been tame by American standards, the internet allowed Kurds to see Ramadan's more wild exploits in other countries.
Influencers dug up images of the Egyptian rapper thrusting his hips without a shirt on and dancing with women in bikinis. Some of the images were taken from "BUM BUM," a satirical music video in which Ramadan gets blackout drunk and then realizes he had tried to seduce another man.
"Kurds and even many [Arab] Iraqis still adhere to their traditions and social norms. Mohamed Ramadan, who broke them in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and even in Baghdad, may not know the nature of Iraqi society in provinces outside of Baghdad," says Alshalash.
Thousands of Facebook accounts posted under the hashtag "Erbil doesn't welcome immorality," and videos with that hashtag received tens of thousands of views on TikTok. It got the attention of political authorities.
Two days after the hashtag campaign began, the Kurdish regional government brought the hammer down. Omid Khoshnaw, governor of Erbil, canceled the concert. Ali Hama Saleh Taha, a member of parliament from the anti-establishment party Movement for Change, took credit for inspiring the decision.
"We did this for the sake of our community. I hope it won't be mistaken for opposing freedom," Saleh Taha wrote in a Facebook post. "In every society, there are lines that must be defended. Some things do a lot of damage to social values."
Calling the Egyptian rapper an outcast in his own society, Saleh Taha accused Ramadan of promoting "drug abuse, sexual abuse, and homosexuality."
Social media activism was "the first and last [cause] in the concert's cancellation," Yahya Nawzar Jaf claims.
The concert's organizers seem to agree. In a statement after the cancellation, organizer Ammar Selo complained about the "systematic campaigns against the Egyptian legend, Mohammad Ramadan, whether through social media or otherwise."
***
The cancellation campaigns on social media are just one part of a broader swing toward the right in Kurdish politics. In the past few months, the Iraqi Kurdish parliament has rejected a proposal to increase protections against domestic violence and introduced a new law against LGBT activism.
This summer, Kurdish women's rights organizations had been sounding the alarm about a disturbing increase in beatings and murders by family members. And brutal crimes against women in Jordan and Egypt—in both countries, a young man killed a female college student for rejecting him—had sent shockwaves across the Middle East.
"Every month we are plagued with another news headline that offers the story of a woman seeking freedom from her abusive husband, only to fall victim to an honor killing—if not perpetrated by her husband, then her own brother," says Briar.
In September, lawmakers introduced amendments to the Kurdish criminal code to punish domestic violence. Among other things, the draft law would criminalize marital rape and allow bystanders outside the family to press charges for domestic abuse.
Muslim preachers and members of parliament, however, argued that the bill was a ploy to weaken religion and the Kurdish family. Jalal Pareshan, a member of the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), claimed that Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even the Yezidi religious minority all "condemn" wives who "refuse to fulfill their husbands' rights."
The draft was eventually withdrawn.
"Nothing in the law was against Islam, nothing in the law was against religion," Chomani says. "You know why they were able [to stop it]? Because of social media, especially Facebook."
Conservative activists succeeded there, he says, by painting the law as a conspiracy by "feminists," especially Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani's American wife Sherri Kraham.
Yahya Nawzar Jaf also credits social media campaigns for stopping the amendments, which he calls a foreign import that "contradicts our values." He argues that the Kurdish law on domestic violence did not have any "legal gap" that required fixing.
And then there's the bill against LGBT activism, which 76 members of parliament proposed in September. (The Iraqi Kurdish parliament has 111 members in total.) The law would punish "promoting homosexuality" with a year's imprisonment or a 5 million dinar ($3,430) fine. Media outlets and nonprofit organizations guilty of the same could be shut down for a month. Human Rights Watch called it an "odious" proposal that "comes amid a heightened crackdown on free assembly and expression."
Chomani attributes this bill to pressure from social media as well.
The ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), according to Chomani, have "completely cracked down on dissent." (That includes sympathizers with the women's guerrilla movement in Turkey and Syria.) Online religious and social campaigns are some of the few ways people can organize outside the two parties.
"The more you get attention, the more you get likes, the more you get shares, the more you get followers—you also become more relevant for the KDP and PUK to want to deal with you," he says.
Despite the success that online activists have had at pushing back against so-called immorality, Yahya Nawzar Jaf takes an ambivalent view toward the internet.
"It plays a negative role, weakening social values, because social media sites are not of our making, and we do not administer them," he says. "For example, Facebook has harsh penalties for those who say even one bad word about homosexuals!"
He argues that social networks allow some freedom "on the margins" for conservatives to raise awareness of their cause.
Yet the modern internet may give conservatives some distinct advantages.
Social media has lowered the barrier to entry for political activism. While street protests are the realm of desperate youth and committed left-wing ideologues, online campaigns are open to anyone—like, say, bourgeois parents.
Szanto compares older Kurdish conservatives to the "Parent-Teacher-Association crowd" in America. Older people, she says, are "just as screen-addicted as the rest of us."
"Because they are middle class, and because they tend to be a more cohesive group, they tend to be better organized," Szanto argues. "In many ways, they have more practical demands that can be addressed."
In other words, politicians find it easier to shut down a concert or table a specific bill than to satisfy a leaderless movement for systemic change.
Identity politics, cancel culture, and extremely online old people have become a force to be reckoned with all around the world. That's as true in America as it is in Kurdistan.
The post Conservative Cancel Culture Comes to Kurdistan appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie unpack results from a recent Harvard-Harris poll that highlight the mismatch between voter concerns and party interests ahead of the midterm elections.
4:20: Harvard-Harris poll results ahead of midterm elections
20:14: PayPal's fines for "misinformation"
33:25: Weekly Listener Question:
Noah Smith makes an interesting case (below) that the TARP bailouts avoided a second Great Depression. What say you, Roundtable?
"An Econ Nobel for research that saved the world," by Noah Smith
45:30: The 20th anniversary of Authorized Use for Military Force (AUMF) for Iraq
46:52: This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"What the 1970s Can Teach Us About Today's Inflationary Politics," by Peter Suderman
"Inflation Hits 8.2 Percent After Another Month of Sharply Rising Prices," by Eric Boehm
"Should Anyone Be Offended by Ye? Live with Eli Lake," by Nick Gillespie and Natalie Dowzicky
"Social Media Interaction Does Not Improve Political Knowledge, but It Does Polarize Us," by Ronald Bailey
"Welcome to the Post-Post-9/11 Era," by Bonnie Kristian
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 Midterm Polling, PayPal, and Patellas 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.
]]>President Joe Biden will travel to the Middle East on Wednesday in an attempt to strengthen ties with some countries and address threats posed by others. Key stops include Israel and Saudi Arabia—neither of which is without controversy.
Biden took to the pages of The Washington Post to justify the trip in advance and outline what he sees as his administration's wins in the Middle East, which he called "more stable and secure than the one [his] administration inherited 18 months ago." One of his successes, Biden wrote, has been keeping American soldiers out of conflicts: "Next week, I will be the first president to visit the Middle East since 9/11 without U.S. troops engaged in a combat mission there," he said. "It's my aim to keep it that way."
That's true on some level. Biden announced the full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan last April, stuck to his August 31 deadline, and ended America's longest war. It was an overdue move and one that undoubtedly helped spare U.S. soldiers from bloody conflict down the line.
But the Middle East is far larger than just Afghanistan, and so is America's involvement in the region. In truth, U.S. troops are engaged in all sorts of activities there—not all of them peaceful.
Biden: "Next week, I will be the first president to visit the Middle East since 9/11 without U.S. troops engaged in a combat mission there." Hard to see how this is not misleading, unless he is removing U.S. troops from Iraq, Syria, and Yemen within days. https://t.co/SXpIUqVXrq
— Stephen Wertheim (@stephenwertheim) July 10, 2022
Biden himself sent a letter to Congress last month to keep lawmakers "informed about deployments of United States Armed Forces equipped for combat." He outlined a bevy of activities involving American soldiers across the Middle East (many of which sound a lot like U.S. troops engaged in combat missions). "No United States Armed Forces are in Afghanistan," Biden noted, but they are "working by, with, and through local partners to conduct operations against ISIS forces in Iraq and Syria and against al-Qa'ida in Syria." Some American soldiers remain "in strategically significant locations in Syria to conduct operations" against terrorist threats there.
American military personnel are also "deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS." Approximately 2,733 U.S. forces are present in Saudi Arabia, where they "protect United States forces and interests in the region against hostile action by Iran and Iran-backed groups" and "provide air and missile defense capabilities" to the kingdom. Nearly 3,000 American military personnel are in Jordan under the guise of helping to fight ISIS, and some are in Turkey doing the same.
None of that even begins to touch on U.S.-led operations in the Middle East that involve activities short of involvement in war but look like combat nonetheless. Arms deals to Saudi Arabia that translate to civilian deaths in Yemen, airstrikes on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria—these are far enough outside the boundaries of Biden's claim that U.S. troops aren't involved in combat missions, allowing him to claim relative peace. Such lawyering is a major part of how presidents have skated constitutional restrictions on war powers and kept the U.S. involved in conflicts.
Take Biden's decision last summer to end the U.S. combat mission in Iraq. At face value, it sounded like U.S. troops might be exiting hostilities in the country. But instead, the Pentagon said it would only remove a small number of the 2,500 American soldiers there, redesignating the remaining troops on paper as being in "training and advising" roles. Ultimately, there was no truly meaningful change to American involvement in Iraq.
Withdrawing from Afghanistan gave the Biden administration's foreign policy a patina of restraint that has since proven largely misleading. A more prudent U.S. approach to the Middle East requires politicians to be realistic about American engagement. Refusing to call a spade a spade will only complicate diplomatic efforts.
"Biden rejected 'forever wars' when he terminated the war in Afghanistan, but he has not applied the principle anywhere else," said Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Denying the existence of U.S. wars positively participates in their continuation as invisible and endless operations."
The post Biden Told Congress U.S. Troops Are Fighting in the Middle East. Now He Says They Aren't. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Faisal Saeed Al Mutar and Melissa Chen are the outspoken, courageous co-founders of Ideas Beyond Borders (IBB), a nonprofit that translates books about pluralism, science, civil liberties, and critical thinking like John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now into Arabic and distributes them for free as e-books throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. They've also translated thousands of Wikipedia pages on the same topics and made them available to an audience desperately interested in new ways of thinking about culture, politics, and ideas. Faisal left Iraq after extremists killed his brother and threatened his life, and Melissa was once a persona non grata in her native Singapore due to free speech activism.
Founded in 2017, IBB is also funding underground girls schools in Afghanistan, actively helping Afghans find refuge from the Taliban, and running a campaign against global censorship at endbannedbooks.org. Disclosure: I'm on the board of Ideas Beyond Borders.
This interview was taped live on Monday, May 2, 2022, as part of the Reason Speakeasy series, held monthly in New York City. Go here for podcast and video versions of past events.
Interview by Nick Gillespie; edited by Adam Czarnecki
The post Destroying Islamic Fundamentalism With Books appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Faisal Saeed Al Mutar and Melissa Chen are the outspoken, courageous co-founders of Ideas Beyond Borders (IBB), a nonprofit that translates books about pluralism, science, civil liberties, and critical thinking like John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now into Arabic and distributes them for free as e-books throughout the Middle East. They've also translated thousands of Wikipedia pages on the same topics and made them available to an audience desperately interested in new ways of thinking about culture, politics, and ideas.
Faisal left Iraq after extremists killed his brother and threatened his life, and Melissa was once a persona non grata in her native Singapore due to free speech activism. Founded in 2017, IBB is also funding underground girls schools in Afghanistan, actively helping Afghans find refuge from the Taliban, and running a campaign against censorship at endbannedbooks.org. Disclosure: I'm on the board of Ideas Beyond Borders.
This Reason Interview podcast was taped live on Monday, May 2, 2022, as part of the Reason Speakeasy series, held monthly in New York City. Go here for podcast and video versions of past events.
Today's sponsor:
The post Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, Melissa Chen: Bringing Enlightenment Values to the Middle East appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On this day in 2003, the United States launched its air invasion of Iraq, with the ground component beginning one day later. It was the first stage of a war that would ultimately drag on for over eight years, killing thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians as the U.S. and its allies sought to overthrow Saddam Hussein's government.
Nineteen years on, Americans watch as a conflict embroils Eastern Europe. Russian President Vladimir Putin's large-scale invasion of Ukraine beginning last month has brought frequent reports of deaths of innocents and strikes on civilian spaces.
Horrific scenes from the conflict in Ukraine have fetched headlines much like those published during the Iraq War. But there is a difference between journalistic reporting on a conflict and coverage that trends more toward activism. Reporters operating under the guise of objectivity repeatedly trended toward the latter approach during the Iraq War. Now, as establishment journalists not-so-subtly agitate for a more interventionist U.S. policy in Ukraine, it's worth keeping an eye on these tried-and-trued hawkish tendencies.
In a press conference on March 15, reporters pelted White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki with questions regarding the Biden administration's opposition to certain military support for Ukraine. There were over one dozen questions mentioning military assistance—including five distinct mentions of a no-fly zone—and only one question about the potential American role in facilitating negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.
Neither were the numerous questions about military assistance purely fact-based. "Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials have made so clear that what they believe they need the most is more warplanes and fighter jets. So why is the U.S. assessing something different?" asked a reporter. "Why does the U.S. believe they know better what Ukraine needs than what Ukrainian officials are saying they need the most?"
This is wild pic.twitter.com/CNZZ1wVzcz
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) March 16, 2022
Indeed, in old-guard media outlets and press conferences alike, journalists have taken a hawkish turn. Substack columnist Adam Johnson put out an article this week titled "Attacking Democrats From the Right: The Faux Adversarial Sweet Spot for U.S. Journalists," having compiled numerous recent examples of the conflict-hungry press. Among them: Richard Engel of NBC News calling the Afghanistan withdrawal the "worst capitulation of Western values in our lifetimes"; CNN's Jim Sciutto asking a State Department spokesperson why the U.S. wouldn't "shoot down the [Russian] planes that are bombing hospitals"; The New York Times' Peter Baker including a comment from a Raytheon board member as an example of someone opposing the Afghanistan withdrawal and later lamenting that "Biden saw no middle ground in Afghanistan between ending the war or endless escalation."
These instincts inevitably tinge mainstream coverage of conflicts, the public sentiment it provokes, and the questions lobbed toward press officials in the highest political settings, as this week's Ukraine briefing shows. "It's a time for tough questions, Peabody-baiting TV coverage, mugging about innocent life, and the need to 'act' 'now' to 'protect civilians,'" writes Johnson, "all of which just so happens to track with the forces of increased militarism."
The hawkish press played a significant role in shaping public opinion during the Iraq War, with reporters helping to bolster government justifications for the war. Alternative views were few and far between. The common criticism of the Iraq-era press was that "it had been too slow to subject government claims to scrutiny—indeed, that it had amplified official assessments in advance of the war and given them credibility," as The Atlantic's Cullen Murphy wrote in 2018. The New York Times' Judith Miller and other reporters at establishment outlets propagated false information about Saddam Hussein's regime, including charges that it possessed weapons of mass destruction. (Miller, for her part, later released a book defending the mistakes she made in her coverage—"not because I lacked skepticism or because senior officials spoon-fed me a line.")
The Iraq War was clearly a different conflict than the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the U.S. plays a different role now than it did then. The U.S. is not directly involved in the fighting in Ukraine, and there are no American boots on the ground as there were in Iraq. Much of the Iraq era's reportage centered on a politically and publicly sanctioned conflict. In a sense, this makes an activist press uniquely concerning during the current conflict. Broadly speaking, contemporary journalists have aligned their questioning with a path of increased militarism that the American public does not desire when it comes to Ukraine.
Sitting in "the faux adversarial sweet spot," members of the establishment press are pushing back on what the American public has in large part rebuffed. When a CBS News/YouGov poll asked respondents what they thought of a no-fly zone "if it's viewed as an act of war"—which it necessarily would be in the Ukraine-Russia conflict—62 percent opposed it. The Biden administration has ruled it out as a component of the American response, with good reason.
The American press isn't speaking truth to power by pushing in less-than-objective ways the matter of direct military involvement in Ukraine—an idea that both the power and the people it rules have rejected. Nor is it playing an informative role by asking after the same war-related information on a self-admitted "168th" occasion.
Establishment media outlets and the journalists who write for them are by no means chiefly responsible for the disastrous Iraq War. Governments, not journalists, wage war. But they absolutely deserve a heap of the blame for uncritically perpetuating half-truths and government accounts when balanced coverage may have made restraint a more publicly desirable approach. Now playing a hawkish role in America's response to the conflict in Ukraine, they're displaying a concerning behavior in full view: In the name of balanced national security coverage, they're mercilessly hounding officials who dare to convey the dangers of intervention.
The post From Iraq to Ukraine, the American Press Loves a War appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I dislike politicians. I don't trust people who are so desperately eager to run others' lives.
But former Texas congressman Ron Paul is different. He wants government to leave us alone.
He promoted the benefits of limited government and free markets long before I'd even thought about them.
I first interviewed Paul in 2007. ABC News wouldn't broadcast it. They only played it online. Now everything's online. I like it better that way.
This week I released a new, longer video with Paul.
Paul ran for president three times, losing first as a Libertarian—and then twice as a Republican. The second time, he won 10 percent of the primary vote.
I then thought Americans were finally coming to appreciate libertarianism. The New York Times Magazine even asked, "Has the 'Libertarian Moment' Finally Arrived?"
That was the kiss of death.
Libertarian candidates now get fewer votes than Paul got in 2012.
"Did you make progress?" I ask him.
Paul says his goal was to get people to think about freedom. He's succeeded there, at least somewhat.
Paul first got politically active in 1971, when President Richard Nixon took the U.S. dollar off the gold standard.
"The money issue touches every aspect of liberty," says Paul. "If you're inclined to think that we're in too many wars, well, there wouldn't be—if they couldn't just print money for it."
Now the Federal Reserve does just print more money. When Paul first went to Congress, he says, "nobody cared about the Federal Reserve."
His presidential campaigns brought attention to the Fed, and the liberty movement, especially from young people. In fact, Paul came in first place among young people in almost every Republican primary.
But now Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) is most popular among the young. I remind Paul that "young people today say they prefer socialism to capitalism."
Paul responds, "There's more socialist professors."
Although Paul was always anti-war, after 9/11, he joined the congressional majority and voted to send soldiers to Afghanistan. He wanted to find and punish the people responsible for the attack and get right out.
"That did not mean [America] had the authority to occupy and try to transform Afghanistan," says Paul. Yet that's what American politicians tried to do.
In a 2007 Republican presidential debate, the audience booed Paul when he suggested that the U.S. was attacked because "we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years…what would happen if somebody did it to us?"
Candidate Rudy Giuliani won applause responding, "That's really an extraordinary statement…I don't think I've ever heard that before. And I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11."
Really? Giuliani hadn't heard that explanation before?
Then he wasn't paying attention. Osama bin Laden long complained about Westerners occupying the Middle East. "Expel them in defeat and humiliation from the holy places of Islam," he wrote.
Posting American soldiers in other people's countries is certainly a serious provocation. I'd be mad if Chinese soldiers patrolled my street.
Giuliani won the debate applause, but 15 months later, no delegates. Paul won 21 delegates.
But today American politicians still want to police the world. The United States has 750 bases in 80 countries. Paul calls the military industrial complex "the most deadly PAC."
Last month, President Joe Biden sent 3,000 soldiers to Eastern Europe saying, "As long as [Putin's] acting aggressively, we are going to make sure we can reassure our NATO allies and Eastern Europe that we're there."
"That's garbage," Paul responds. "By what right do we go over there? There's no national security. We had troops in Saudi Arabia for national security and look at what that brought…it has nothing to do with helping Americans, except those who might get a better paycheck."
I push back. "President Biden would say, 'We have to go there just to deter Russia. If we don't, we're inviting them to invade other countries.'"
We shouldn't let government scare us into going to war, says Paul. "Fear is the tool of totalitarians." Paul's anti-war arguments have shifted public opinion. Today we might be fighting in Ukraine if it were not for Ron Paul and his warnings about the risk of America policing the world.
COPYRIGHT 2022 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
The post 'Fear Is the Tool of Totalitarians': Ron Paul on War, Money, and the Libertarian Moment appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Just days into 2022, multiple military bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria came under attack. Two drones carrying explosives were destroyed last Tuesday as they headed toward U.S. troops in western Iraq. The next day, rockets and indirect fire hit bases in western Iraq and eastern Syria. And last Monday, two armed drones were shot down as they approached a facility housing American advisers at the airport in Baghdad.
Though there were no casualties, the Iran-backed militias behind the attacks have made clear that they will continue. That alone should encourage the Biden administration to get American soldiers out of harm's way—and if it doesn't, the faulty justifications keeping troops in Iraq and Syria should.
Last week's attacks show how a continued U.S. troop presence in the Middle East invites danger. Americans and Iran-linked groups have exchanged many attacks in recent years, especially after former President Donald Trump ordered the January 2020 assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. Last week's skirmishes are the latest installment. According to the Associated Press, the drones shot down near the Baghdad airport were decorated with the words "Soleimani's revenge" and "revenge operations for our leaders."
"It is certainly possible that [the increased frequency of attacks] could be related to the anniversary of the Soleimani strike," said Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby in a January 5 statement. "It is certainly possible that it could be related to the change in mission."
The change in question was marketed as a significant shift in U.S. activities in Iraq, but it amounted to little more than an on-paper adjustment. President Joe Biden announced last summer that U.S. military forces in Iraq would be shifting to a noncombat mission, with American troops focused on "training and advising" the Iraqi Security Forces. Around 2,500 U.S. troops remain in Iraq and will be there for the foreseeable future, according to Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie.
Dan Caldwell, vice president of foreign policy at Stand Together and a Marine veteran of the Iraq War, calls this change in mission "a distinction without a difference" and says "an American military presence in Iraq and Syria is not required for our safety nor for the protection of our vital national interests." Beyond this, Caldwell notes, "our stated mission [in Iraq] is to train and equip the Iraqi Security Forces to counter ISIS. But ISIS's caliphate is destroyed and the Iraqi Security Forces are often allied with the very militias trying to kill American troops in Iraq."
Meanwhile, roughly 900 U.S. troops are still stationed in Syria. Biden officials say a withdrawal from that country is unlikely anytime soon. These troops too are theoretically there to fight the Islamic State, even though the group was effectively defeated years ago. The Islamic State has not held territory in Iraq or Syria since 2019.
"We are long overdue to declare victory and come home," says Gil Barndollar, a senior research fellow at Catholic University's Center for the Study of Statesmanship and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. "The remaining anti-ISIS mission is best left to Iraqi and Syrian forces."
"The United States needs to ruthlessly prioritize where and when it deploys military forces abroad," Barndollar adds. "Even for putatively low-risk advising missions."
Withdrawing from the two countries "would save lives, tens of billions of dollars, and allow the United States to focus on more urgent priorities at home and abroad," Caldwell argues. He says the Afghanistan withdrawal "was more than justified" despite the chaos seen as the country fell to the Taliban. The Islamic State is unlikely to mount a similar resurgence in the event of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Syria, and the possibility should not be used "as an excuse to [continue] to risk American lives in other endless wars that aren't necessary for our security."
Biden rightly stuck to his guns when he defended the long-overdue U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, but he fails to apply the same logic to Iraq and Syria. In Afghanistan, Biden said last August, "the real choice" was "between leaving or escalating." The same is true in Iraq and Syria. The U.S. has accomplished its mission in both countries. Keeping boots on the ground at this point will do little more than put American lives at risk.
The post Strikes on U.S. Troops Show the Need To Withdraw From Iraq and Syria appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Throughout America's War on Terror, whistleblowers have been warning that drone strikes have frequently killed people who were neither terrorists nor insurgents, just innocent civilians trying to survive in a war zone.
Over the weekend, in a detailed, heavily reported two-part story, The New York Times documented how Washington's "precision drone strikes" have been anything but precise. Not only did they repeatedly kill innocents, including children, but more often than not the military failed to examine adequately why these mistakes were made, failed to correct its procedures, and failed to hold anybody accountable.
When an ill-advised August drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, killed aid worker Zamari Ahmadi and nine of members of his family (including seven children), military officials first insisted the strike had hit terrorists plotting to attack the airport as American troops were leaving the country. Only after the media began investigating the strike did the truth came out. Yet last week, the Pentagon announced that no troops involved in the misbegotten strike would be disciplined. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said, "What we saw here was a breakdown in process, and execution in procedural events, not the result of negligence, not the result of misconduct, not the result of poor leadership."
An alternative way to read that quote, based on the massive Times report from the weekend, is that what happened to Ahmadi and his family was an example of how America's drone program actually works. It has not, in fact, operated as a tool to surgically take out ISIS terrorist leaders and destroy individual cells, as Americans have been told again and again. The military will admit to killing at least 1,300 civilians in these strikes. That's just the number of civilians documented in Pentagon reports the Times analyzed. The actual (uncertain) number of civilian deaths due to drone strikes is much higher—between 22,000 and 48,000.
Don't expect accurate accounting from the government. The military has regularly failed even to analyze fully what happened in most of its mistaken strikes. Pentagon's records calculate that in only 4 percent of cases of civilian deaths did misidentification of targets play a role. But when the Times went to the locations of these strikes and investigated, the paper found that misidentification of targets accounted for nearly a third of civilian deaths and injuries.
In one 2016 strike in Syria, the Pentagon claimed to have bombed a staging area and trucks being used by the Islamic State and to have killed 85 militants. There were also immediate reports of civilian deaths, and the Pentagon acknowledged that 24 civilians "intermixed with the fighters" may have been killed. But when the Times went to the village for a thorough accounting, it found that the strike had probably killed more than 120 civilians—and may have killed absolutely zero ISIS soldiers.
As with the more recent cast in Kabul, the military's own analysis of the strike found that there was no evidence of wrongdoing. The military didn't even arrange for condolence payments for victims.
A small but shocking detail is buried deep in the Times report: When reviewing the legitimacy of its strikes, the military does not even send anybody in person to investigate what happened. The Times reports, "Of the 1,311 assessments from the Pentagon, in only one did investigators visit the site of a strike. In only two did they interview witnesses or survivors."
Instead, the same type of distant surveillance video that was used to justify mistaken drone strikes was often used to examine the consequences. Often there was no footage to review, which led the Pentagon to reject allegations that civilians were killed because nobody in their own operation had evidence otherwise.
So New York Times journalists spent years doing the investigative work that the Pentagon failed to do. This story focuses entirely on drone strike reports in Iraq and Syria, based on what they've been able to force into the public eye from Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits. The paper has a separate lawsuit trying to wrest out reports about drone strikes in Afghanistan.
Right now, whistleblower Daniel Hale is in federal prison in Illinois, sentenced to 45 months for leaking some documentation to journalists that shows these very problems with how U.S. drone strikes operate. To judge from this Times report, Hale's leaks were just the tip of the iceberg. The Times shows that time and time again, these drone strikes not only kill innocents but fail to take out the insurgents being targeted. Even under the cruel calculus that innocents may end up as collateral damage, this is a failure: Sometimes those innocents were the only people killed or injured.
In a follow-up story, journalist Azmat Khan wrote a first-person account of what it was like investigating these strikes on the ground, reading these Pentagon reports, and then reconciling them with what actually occurred. She ends her piece going over a strike in West Mosul, Iraq, that took place in 2017. The military believed a location—a home—was being used solely by Islamic State militants. The government planned a strike, but then military observers noticed via surveillance three children playing on the roof.
Nevertheless, they military believed that ISIS was manufacturing weapons there. Even though children had been seen there, the strike was authorized due to the "military advantage" of taking out an ISIS location. The Pentagon then reported that three ISIS members were killed by the strike. But ISIS-linked media reported that, in fact, they had killed 11 civilians.
Khan went to the site of the strike in June and talked to people who lived there. They told her 11 members of a family had been killed. She tracked down witnesses and the sole survivor. They all said the family had nothing to do with ISIS. There was an ISIS bunk house across the street they said, but it had been vacated before the strike (and was not damaged by it).
The sister of one of the victims told Khan that she thought there must have been some mistake: They must have seen an ISIS truck nearby or meant to target something else and hit them by accident. Khan told her that the military intelligence officials actually knew about the children before ordering the strike. They had concluded the deaths were acceptable because they'd gain an advantage over ISIS by destroying a weapons facility. But there was no weapons facility.
"But they didn't gain any advantage," the sister told Khan. "The only thing they did is they killed the children."
The post Will America's Military Reckon with the Reckless Murders Perpetuated by Its Drone Wars? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The comedian and political satirist Ahmed Albasheer is the most popular media figure in Iraq—half of the country regularly tunes into his show. An outspoken critic of government corruption, Albasheer has also lamented the failure of the 2003 U.S. invasion and the toppling of Saddam Hussein to bring democracy to the country.
"In Iraq, we have this saying that before Saddam we had one Saddam and now we have a thousand Saddams," Albasheer told Reason during an interview conducted in Miami at the 2021 Oslo Freedom Forum, a conference that gathers media figures, activists, and dissidents to talk about government oppression and human rights violations all over the world. The Albasheer Show, which started in 2014 and airs weekly on DW's Arabic channel, disappeared from Iraq's TV channels after the country's Communications and Media Commission banned it on the grounds that it wasn't "culturally appropriate." Iraqis are still able to watch the show online.
Albasheer was also a supporter of the protest movement that started in 2019, which has called for an end to the sectarian political system established by the U.S. The Swiss-based Global Influence Research Centre named Albasheer one of the 20 most influential people in the Arab world.
Born and raised in Ramadi, which experienced the worst of the Iraq War, Albasheer lost several family members, including his brother and father. In 2005, he was kidnapped and tortured by a Shia militia. He hasn't stepped foot in his country since 2011.
The U.S. invasion "brought even worse people," he says. "When you ask Iraqis, they say [before 2003] at last we had security…now anyone with a black suit and a black mask can break into my house and take me and kill my family."
Written and narrated by Noor Greene; intro edited by Isaac Reese; interview edited by Ian Keyser; shot by John Osterhoudt and Jim Epstein
Music: Antionetta Song by BoreÍs, Artlist
Photos: Sebastian Castelier/SIPA/Newscom, Stringer/Iraq/Reuters/Newscom
The post Iraqi Comedian Ahmed Albasheer: The U.S. Invasion Created a Thousand Saddams appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded and occupied two countries, bombed four others, helped create 21 million refugees and cause over 800,000 deaths, and spent over $6 trillion on combat and anti-terrorism measures. Republican and Democratic presidents and congressional leaders authorized sweeping new initiatives that effectively put all American citizens under surveillance.
Even as the United States has left Afghanistan, ending our longest war, many of the programs and mindsets born out of events 20 years ago are still firmly in place. In Reign of Terror, national security reporter Spencer Ackerman argues that the war on terror also profoundly destabilized American politics and helped to produce the Donald Trump presidency by stoking fears of a racialized Other. "The longer America viewed itself as under siege," he writes, "the easier it became to see enemies everywhere."
He talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about how a coalition of libertarians and progressives can work to stop ongoing government surveillance and military interventionism underwritten by overwrought fears of Islamic terrorism.
Edited by Ian Keyser. Intro by Paul Detrick. Interview by Nick Gillespie.
Photos: Randy Taylor/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom, GORAN TOMASEVIC/REUTERS/Newscom
The post Biden Won't End the Warfare-Surveillance State appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded and occupied two countries, bombed four others, helped to create 21 million refugees and cause over 800,000 deaths, and spent over $6 trillion on combat and anti-terrorism measures.
In Reign of Terror, national security reporter Spencer Ackerman argues that the war on terror also profoundly destabilized American politics and helped to produce the Donald Trump presidency. He talks with Reason about how to stop the growth in government surveillance and military interventionism underwritten by overwrought fears of Islamic terrorism.
The post Spencer Ackerman: How 9/11 Destabilized America and Produced Trump appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"You don't get to lose a war and expect the result to look like you won it," says historian Stephen Wertheim of the violent and chaotic withdrawal of United States forces and personnel from Afghanistan. "Yet some in Washington are denying reality, calling for still more war and blaming Biden for their failure."
Wertheim is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, a study of how American strategists during and after World War II conflated military supremacy with internationalism. Wertheim is also a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
He talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about how charges of "isolationism" were used to delegitimize dissent in the buildup to World War II, why the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were doomed to failure from their earliest days, what policy makers should be focused on as we approach the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and why a fundamental rethinking of U.S. military and foreign policy is not only urgent but, after a radical shift in public opinion, eminently possible.
"It's remarkable how much the debate over foreign policy has changed [due to]…certain policies like the war in Afghanistan," says Wertheim. "My hope is that we're moving to a new place." He says that the widely recognized failures of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the low risks of war with China and Russia in the near term have shifted public opinion to embrace "a more general military restraint."
Music: Revelation—No Atmosphere FX, Tristan Barton, Artlist.
Photos: U.S. Central Command Public Affa/Newscom; Peter Morgan.Reuters/Newscom.
Intro edited by Noor Greene; interview edited by Ian Keyser; hosted and narrated by Nick Gillespie.
The post 9/11's Lesson: War Doesn't Work appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"After 20 years, I've learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces," said President Joe Biden in defending his decision to take U.S. personnel out of Afghanistan. "How many more generations of America's daughters and sons would you have me send to fight…Afghanistan's civil war when Afghan troops will not?"
Biden's decision to pull the United States military out of Afghanistan after two decades has been roundly condemned by interventionists, who say that the retreat was "humiliating" and disastrously planned, leaving thousands of Afghans prey to vengeance and violence at the hands of the Taliban.
For Scott Horton and other critics of U.S. foreign policy, the biggest question about the withdrawal is what took so long. Horton heads up the Libertarian Institute, is editorial director at Antiwar.com, and hosts The Scott Horton Show podcast. He's also the author of Enough Already: Time To End the War on Terror.
Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with the Austin, Texas-based Horton about why he believes American intervention in Afghanistan was doomed from the start, U.S. foreign policy has been a disaster for all of the 21st century, and a libertarian approach to both domestic and foreign affairs would make people better off all over the globe.
Photo Credits: Scott Horton; Mohammad Rahmani on Unsplash; Antiwar.com; Joshua Sukoff on Unsplash; Pool ABACA, Newscom; Saifuraham Safi Xinhua News Agency, Newscom; ScottHorton.com; Voice of America News, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.jpg; Tayfun Salci ZUMAPRESS Newscom; SSG LEOPOLD MEDINA JR, USA, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons; AP POOL ABACA picture alliance Consolidated News Photos, Newscom
Music Credit: When The Sunrise, Instrumental Version, by Sivan Talmor from Artlist
Written by Nick Gillespie; produced by Regan Taylor; audio post-production by Ian Keyser
The post Why It Took So Long To Leave Afghanistan: Antiwar.com's Scott Horton appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Was President Joe Biden's withdrawal of United States troops and personnel from Afghanistan a poorly planned mistake or a long-overdue decision?
Scott Horton says it's the latter. He's the head of the Libertarian Institute, the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and the host of the Scott Horton Show podcast. Based in Austin, Texas, Horton is also the author of the new book Enough Already: Time To End the War on Terrorism.
Nick Gillespie talks with him about Biden's defense of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, why U.S. foreign policy has been a bipartisan disaster for all of the 21st century, and how a libertarian approach to both domestic and foreign affairs would make people better off all over the globe.
The post Scott Horton: U.S. Should Have Pulled Out Of Afghanistan Years Ago appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>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.
The post After 18 Disastrous Years, the U.S. Should Withdraw All Troops From Iraq appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted yesterday to repeal the two laws that authorized America's wars in Iraq. The resolution will now progress to the Senate floor for a full vote.
Those laws, the 1991 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) and the 2002 AUMF, were passed to give the president broad discretion in his military campaigns against Iraq. They authorized military action absent the approval of Congress, which the Constitution designates as the sole body allowed to declare war. Congress in recent decades has enacted AUMFs and other legislation that have slowly diminished its ability to oversee the U.S. military's involvement in conflicts.
Repealing the two AUMFs could, in theory, give some of that power back to Congress. But these are antiquated authorizations and repeal would be largely symbolic. The 1991 AUMF hasn't been invoked since the original Gulf War. The 2002 AUMF has never been the sole statutory basis for U.S. military operations and has instead bolstered the formidable 2001 AUMF, which was passed to authorize action against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. That measure has been used to justify counterterrorism operations in at least 19 countries, thanks to presidents' generous interpretations of its phrasing.
Because the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs don't undergird any current U.S. military conduct on their own, repealing them has been much more feasible than axing the 2001 AUMF. The administration has expressed its openness to replacing the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs with a "narrow and specific framework" governing military force, but given President Joe Biden's recent questionably legal airstrikes, it's unlikely he would cede a lot of power. AUMF reform might not limit executive war making, anyway—Biden hasn't invoked an AUMF to justify any of his attacks so far, instead relying on Article 51 of the United Nations Charter and Article II of the Constitution.
This year has seen plenty of AUMF reevaluation, with the House voting to repeal the 1957, 1991, and 2002 AUMFs in June. (The 1957 AUMF, signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, authorized force to counter possible communist hostility in the Middle East. It has never been used.) Members of Congress generally agreed that the first two are archaic.
But rolling back the 2002 AUMF has provoked some controversy. Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) warned recently that it "will be used as justification for continuing to go soft on Iran." Sen. Mike Rounds (R–S.D.) has cautioned that "a full repeal of the 2002 AUMF, without a tailored replacement, will limit our ability to combat the malign influence of Iran in the Middle East."
Even without the broad discretionary powers granted by an AUMF, the president has ways to wage war. Repealing AUMFs could put some power back in the hands of Congress. Military engagement is unlikely to stop altogether under those constraints, but we could get more deliberation and discussion before a president unleashes it.
The post Resolution To Repeal 1991 and 2002 Military Force Authorizations Advances to Senate Floor appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi on Monday, President Joe Biden announced that the U.S. combat mission in Iraq would draw to a close by the year's end. At face value, the move sounds much like Biden's push to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan by August 31.
But the devil's in the details, and a closer look reveals that these troops won't be leaving Iraq. Rather, the Pentagon and other administration officials say they will remove a small number of the 2,500 American soldiers in Iraq, and will reclassify on paper the roles of those who remain. They won't be fighting anymore; they'll be "training and advising" the Iraqi Security Forces. When quizzed, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki wouldn't say how many American troops would stay in Iraq—signaling that there may not even be a meaningful drawdown, let alone a full departure.
What could've been a promising end to another bloody theater of U.S. involvement in the Middle East is actually an anticlimactic maintenance of the status quo. Held against Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal, the Iraq option seems even less sensible. If the president feels it's time for Afghans "to decide their future and how they want to run their country," and if he questions the sense in leaving American troops in Afghanistan where their lives are at risk, why isn't he applying that logic to Iraq?
Dan Caldwell, senior adviser to Concerned Veterans for America and himself a veteran of the Iraq War, says an American troop presence in Iraq "is not required for our safety or conditions or prosperity," nor will it "fundamentally alter the direction in which Iraq is heading."
American troops began fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2014, leading to the group's territorial defeat in 2019. The New York Times reports that U.S. officials maintain "there are no combat troops" in Iraq, but concede that "a small number of U.S. Special Operations Forces serving as advisers and trainers occasionally accompany Iraqi counterterrorism forces on combat missions against Islamic State fighters." Beyond this, proponents of involvement say the U.S. needs to counter the threats of Iran and Iran-backed militias. The mission isn't yet over, and the U.S. has invested so much money and manpower up to this point, so it's too soon for American forces to fully depart. So goes the forever war logic, and so goes the justification for staying entangled in Iraqi affairs.
Caldwell notes that leaving American boots on the ground, no matter the capacity they nominally fill, means putting them in harm's way. "American service members in Iraq will still likely be attacked frequently by rockets fired by Iraqi militias," he says, which "will not…make the distinction between combat and non-combat troops and will continue to view American forces in the country as easy targets."
"When I left Iraq from Al Asad Airbase in 2009," Caldwell continues, "the feeling was that the war was over and that we would not be in the country much longer. However, 12 years later, there are still American troops at Al Asad and they are under frequent attack."
Rockets hit the base in early July, proving that maintaining even a small U.S. troop presence in Iraq—reduced drastically from a December 2007 peak of 170,000 soldiers—carries risks. Though no American soldiers were injured or killed in that attack, it's only a matter of time before they are. Those lives are just as worth preserving as the troops coming home from Afghanistan, even if on paper they're not engaged in combat. To hostile parties in the Middle East, that distinction will mean nothing.
The post On Paper, Biden Is Ending the U.S. Combat Mission in Iraq. He's Actually Leaving American Troops in Danger. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On Monday, rockets struck Ayn al-Asad air base, a military facility in Iraq that hosts American troops. U.S. Army Colonel Wayne Marotto, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, tweeted that the attack did not result in casualties. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the action.
Even without human loss, Monday's hostilities highlight the risks associated with a continued U.S. troop presence and ongoing military engagement in the Middle East. The attack came just one week after President Joe Biden's June 27 airstrikes on facilities used by Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, which prompted rocket attacks against U.S. troops in Syria the very next day. There have been many tit-for-tat exchanges between the U.S. and Iran-linked parties since former President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. Though it's unclear who ordered the Monday attack, it is clear that U.S. strikes and troops have failed to deter further antagonism from hostile parties in the region.
While Biden has made the Afghanistan troop withdrawal a centerpiece of his presidential agenda, his plans for the U.S. presence in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East are far vaguer. Following the Soleimani assassination on Iraqi soil, the Iraqi Parliament passed a resolution to expel U.S. troops from the country. No timetable for that withdrawal has emerged during bilateral negotiations, however, leaving the fate of the roughly 3,500 remaining U.S. troops in Iraq unsettled. Roughly 900 are still in Syria and their future is similarly murky.
That leaves ample targets for hostile parties throughout the Middle East, even though the reasons behind a continued troop presence in the two countries are questionable. The main goals for recent U.S. activities in Iraq and Syria—to defeat ISIS and help those nations reclaim seized territory—have largely been accomplished. Given current tensions in the Middle East, keeping American boots on the ground means keeping them in harm's way in order to achieve ill-defined ends.
While justifying the February strike in Syria, Biden claimed the action was "pursuant to the United States' inherent right of self-defense." Democrats in Congress questioned that line of reasoning and pointed out the lack of a congressional authorization for the use of military force in Syria (though previous resolutions authorize such presidential actions in Iraq and Afghanistan). Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Va.) called the attack "not constitutional" given Biden's lack of communication with Congress. Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) agreed and criticized Biden for carrying out a strike that was "not in self-defense against an imminent threat."
Biden's June strikes received similar scrutiny. They reignited debate over presidential war powers, spurring the House to vote to repeal several military force authorizations. That resistance is making it increasingly difficult for the president to justify the dubious constitutionality of strikes, unnecessary escalation of tensions, and endangering the lives of Americans stationed in the Middle East.
As he announced the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden questioned the sensibility of delaying the troop departure further at the expense of even more lives lost. He invoked "the living cost of war" shown in American deaths, saying, "Every one of those dead are sacred human beings who left behind entire families. An exact accounting of every single solitary one needs to be had."
They are indeed sacred, and Biden is right to ask why he should pass the responsibility of the war in Afghanistan to yet another presidential administration. He should take that logic a step further and realize that his concern about the safety of American troops is contradicted by the U.S. presence and actions elsewhere in the Middle East. Though the Monday strike did not result in American deaths or injuries, U.S. forces may not prove so lucky next time.
The post Airstrikes Against U.S. Troops in Iraq Highlight Dangers of Our Presence in the Middle East appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On Tuesday, the House voted to repeal two war authorizations, the 1957 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) and the 1991 AUMF, which grant the president broad discretion in military operations in the Middle East absent congressional approval. The measure passed 366–46 as part of a larger bill package.
AUMFs allow the president to use military force against certain hostile parties without an official declaration of war, for which the Constitution grants Congress sole authority. Though Congress has not formally declared war since World War II, the U.S. has engaged in conflicts far and wide thanks to ever-broadening interpretations of AUMFs and other war legislation.
The 1957 AUMF was signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and authorized him to counter possible communist hostility in the Middle East. The measure had a provision allowing the president to "use armed forces to assist any such nation…requesting assistance against armed aggression from any country controlled by international communism." Critics have pointed out that the language of the 1957 AUMF did not simply authorize force, but "declared a policy to use it."
The 1957 AUMF has never been invoked by a presidential administration to justify military activity. Rep. Peter Meijer (R–Mich.), who sponsored the 1957 AUMF repeal bill, noted that rolling back the measure would have no impact on ongoing military conduct.
The other measure subject to yesterday's House vote, the 1991 AUMF, was the primary authorization through which the U.S. entered the Gulf War. It hasn't been invoked since that conflict, but as sponsor Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D–Va.) explained, "The fact that it hasn't been misused or hasn't been abused doesn't mean that that possibility doesn't exist at some point in the future."
On June 17, the House voted to repeal the 2002 AUMF, which granted the president the authority to combat Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq without congressional approval. The vote margin for that bill was tighter than Tuesday's at 268–161, even though its repeal would not affect current U.S. military conduct either. It hasn't been used as the sole authorization behind operations since the Iraq War ended in 2011.
Meanwhile, the 2001 AUMF that authorized the president to invade Afghanistan—and which has been the basis of 41 operations in 19 countries—has not seen a formidable legislative challenge.
The measures Congress has repealed won't lead to a meaningful reduction in presidential overreach in military conduct. Indeed, these bills passed the House in part because their repeal wouldn't affect contemporary military campaigns. The White House backs repealing the 2002 AUMF because it would "likely have minimal impact on current military operations." Repealing benign laws, even those with concerning underpinnings, would do little to change how Congress and the president collaborate—or don't—on military operations.
What's especially telling is that President Joe Biden hasn't invoked a single AUMF—not the one from 1957, 1991, 2001, or 2002—to justify the airstrikes he's carried out in his 161 days in office. To authorize his February airstrikes in Syria and his Sunday attacks there and in Iraq, he cited Article II of the Constitution, which allows the president to protect U.S. service members in self-defense. (Whether the strikes were truly defensive is still open to debate.)
That dynamic highlights an important aspect of presidential war making—an executive determined to wage war has tools at his disposal, even without the broad discretion granted to him by AUMFs. As symbolically important as it is to repeal the legislation that took away much of Congress' combat oversight, more will need to be done to tie the president's hands.
The post House Votes To Repeal 1957 and 1991 Authorizations for the Use of Military Force appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On June 27, U.S. military forces struck targets in Iraq and Syria "used by Iran-backed militia groups," according to the Department of Defense. Maybe that's the full story, and maybe it's not; we learned long ago to resist taking at face value the assurances of government mouthpieces. In fact, we were reminded of the need to question official stories when former Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska), who helped to publicize the Pentagon Papers which revealed hidden details about the Vietnam War, passed away just a day before American bombs fell on the Iraq-Syria border region. And June 30 is the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision recognizing the right to publish those historic documents.
The targets bombed over the weekend "were selected because these facilities are utilized by Iran-backed militias that are engaged in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks against U.S. personnel and facilities in Iraq," Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby added. Assuming that Kirby is being completely candid about the attack, we might attribute his honesty to an awareness that this country's embarrassing military secrets have a history of leaking out and gaining public attention with a little help from those disgusted by official mendacity.
Gravel, who passed away on Saturday, was one of those who gave truth a helping hand when he had the opportunity. When Daniel Ellsberg leaked documents which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers that revealed greater and longer U.S. military involvement in Vietnam than was officially acknowledged, and an unspoken goal of containing communist China rather than defending South Vietnam, the U.S. government attempted to prevent their publication.
"Senator Gravel obtained a copy of the Pentagon Papers at the height of the Government's legal efforts to block The New York Times and other newspapers from continuing publication of their comments," The New York Times noted in 1972. "In an emotional midnight subcommittee hearing, the Senator tearfully read long passages into the official subcommittee record. He later arranged for them to be published by The Beacon Press, a nonprofit publishing division of the Unitarian Universalist Association."
Gravel entered the documents into the record on June 29, 1971, to make sure they were available for public consideration and debate. The next day—50 years ago, today—the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that The New York Times could continue to publish the Pentagon Papers.
The U.S. government subsequently went after Gravel and The Beacon Press, but the effort petered out with the eruption of the Watergate scandal. Meanwhile, the information in the published documents helped to shift public opinion against the Vietnam War.
The legacy of the Pentagon Papers, and of the exposure of official bullshit about government shenanigans, lingers decades later. In 2019, when The Washington Post reported on documents revealing "that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable," the newspaper labeled the report "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War" in an echo of the Vietnam-era revelations. If officials couldn't resist the precedent set by previous high-level dishonesty, neither would leakers and journalists fail to follow in the footsteps of those who revealed earlier misdeeds.
But government officials who remain prone to conceal the truth also continue their resistance to exposure and criticism. Vietnam-era officeholders stumbled in their efforts to punish The New York Times, Mike Gravel, The Beacon Press, and Daniel Ellsberg, but their successors fight the same awful battles. Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Reality Winner are among the high-profile revealers of inconvenient secrets targeted in recent years by the powers-that-be. From one administration to the next, no matter which party is in power, officials try to plug (sometimes brutally) the release and publication of government information that threatens to embarrass officialdom in the eyes of the public. There's no reason to think such efforts will stop anytime soon.
"During the final days of the Trump administration, the attorney general used extraordinary measures to obtain subpoenas to secretly seize records of reporters at three leading U.S. news organizations," Fred Ryan, publisher of The Washington Post, pointed out earlier this month. "Unfortunately, new revelations suggest that the Biden Justice Department not only allowed these disturbing intrusions to continue — it intensified the government's attack on First Amendment rights before finally backing down in the face of reporting about its conduct."
"With the revelation that the Justice Department has secretly obtained phone and email records at multiple news organizations to sniff out the identities of journalists' sources, government employees who would otherwise come forward to reveal malfeasance are more likely to fear exposure and retaliation, and therefore to stay silent," Ryan added.
That, of course, is the whole point of targeting whistleblowers and journalists. Officials don't cherish the memory of the Pentagon Papers, or of any other exposures, before and since, of their misconduct.
Under pressure to change its ways, the Justice Department has promised to play nicer and that it "will not seek compulsory legal process in leak investigations to obtain source information from members of the news media doing their jobs." But, at this point in history, are we really about to start taking government pronouncements at face value? That would be an odd choice to make, 50 years after the Supreme Court ruled that the government couldn't prevent the publication of information contradicting official lies, and after subsequent decades of efforts to prevent new leaks of embarrassing truths.
So, take the Defense Department's spin on the airstrikes in Syria and Iraq with a grain of salt, as you should with every government pronouncement. To the extent that the spin is truthful, it's held to some degree of accuracy by officials' fears that their secrets will be leaked by insiders with a sense of decency, and then disseminated by journalists and publishers willing to risk the state's wrath. Fifty years later, the Pentagon Papers still cast a long shadow and remain an ongoing example for dealing with government misconduct.
The post The Publication of the Pentagon Papers Still Sets an Example 50 Years Later appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>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.
]]>Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie gather to discuss an unwarranted vape scare and the consequences of repealing the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). Hear their takes on this Monday's Reason Roundtable.
Discussed in the show:
1:54: What to know about the AUMF repeal.
21:14: Vaping isn't related to higher coronavirus infection rates—but Reason readers knew that.
31:36: Weekly Listener Question: Is it possible to be in favor of the public accommodations law and be in favor of the recent Supreme Court rulings that sided with private organizations?
42:51: New York's mayoral election.
48:21: Media recommendations for the week.
This weeks links:
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 Regan Taylor.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve.
The post Did Prohibition Teach Us Nothing? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Politico reports today that President Joe Biden is willing to work with Congress to repeal the Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs) that launched the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and continue to be invoked today to justify military intervention throughout the Middle East.
This could be great news, depending on what ultimately gets negotiated. The problem is that while Biden talks a good game about ending "forever wars" (as did his two predecessors), the most recent military strike on Syria shows that our president wants to keep the authority to engage in some surgical uses of force. And while Biden did campaign on ending the wars (as did all the Democratic candidates), he still wants to keep some military forces active in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East to collect intelligence.
The statement White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki sent Politico said Biden wants to "ensure that the authorizations for the use of military force currently on the books are replaced with a narrow and specific framework that will ensure we can protect Americans from terrorist threats while ending the forever wars."
Reading between the lines, though, while Biden wants to end the full military authorizations, he still wants to be able to act on what the administration sees as threats without having to get the approval of Congress.
On Wednesday, Sens. Tim Kaine (D–Va.) and Todd Young (R–Ind.) introduced bipartisan legislation to repeal two AUMFs passed in 1991 and 2002 that authorized military force in Iraq.
At the moment, that's all the resolution does. It repeals the two AUMFs, does nothing else, and replaces them with nothing. This is good, meaning that there aren't any exceptions here authorizing strategic or smaller military interventions in Iraq.
But the resolution most notably does not repeal the AUMF passed in 2001 just days after September 11, which authorizes the use of the military against any nation, terrorist group, or individual the president deems to have been involved in the attacks. That AUMF is why we still have troops in Afghanistan, and so this resolution will not end our military intervention there.
We are being warned that, despite the promises made both to Americans and the Afghan government, the Biden administration may not pull military forces out by the established May deadline.
Politico says that Biden's office is looking to Kaine to lead a bipartisan discussion of the repeals of the AUMFs. Keep an eye on what Kaine actually ends up writing. Back in 2018, after Trump's unauthorized military strike on Syria, he drafted a resolution that actually expanded the president's authority to engage in military strikes against selected terrorist organizations without having to get permission from Congress.
That language is fortunately not in the resolution introduced this week. But because Kaine and Young didn't include the 2001 AUMF in the resolution, we can predict that the administration is looking to negotiate keeping at least some military forces in Afghanistan and perhaps elsewhere in the Middle East.
The post Biden Says He Wants War Authorizations Repealed appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Just three days after being sworn into Congress to represent Michigan's 3rd district, Republican freshman Peter Meijer found himself and colleagues trapped without security in the bowels of the Capitol building while a riot that ultimately claimed five lives raged all around him.
The following week, he was one of just 10 Republicans—and the only first-termer—to vote to impeach Donald Trump, a decision that led to a narrowly failed censure vote from his own state's GOP and immediate announcements that he will be primaried in 2022.
The 33-year-old Army veteran who served in Iraq didn't expect his first few days in Congress to be so chaotic, but he says his military training helps him stay steady as he fills the seat vacated by Libertarian Justin Amash. On the campaign trail, Meijer supported Donald Trump but says that the truculent behavior of the former president and many members of his own party after Election Day not only caused the January 6 riot but cost the GOP the Senate.
Meijer tells Nick Gillespie why he believes in limited government, economic freedom, and individualism; why he's against out-of-control stimulus spending and military adventurism; and how he plans to combat the craziness he sees both on the right and left in the House of Representatives. He also talks about what he's learned about business and public service from being the scion of the Meijer superstore chain, how generational fault lines may be every bit as important as partisan ones, and why he's committed to voting his principles rather than his constituents' will.
The post Rep. Peter Meijer: Only GOP Freshman Who Voted To Impeach Trump Tells All appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Donald Trump threatened massive retaliation against Iran for an attack that country's government is allegedly planning as retaliation for the United States' drone-strike slaying of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in January.
"According to press reports, Iran may be planning an assassination, or other attack, against the United States in retaliation for the killing of terrorist leader Soleimani," Trump said in a late-night tweet on Monday. "Any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!"
The press reports cited by the president appear to be a reference to a Sunday Politico article which reported Iran was weighing the assassination of a U.S. diplomat in South Africa. That article in turn cited two unnamed intelligence officials who said Lana Marks, America's ambassador to that country, could be the target.
The president repeated his warning to Iran during an interview on Fox and Friends Tuesday morning, saying "We're all set…They'll be hit a thousand times harder."
Intelligence officials claim they've been aware of the alleged Iranian plot to kill Marks since Spring, but have recently discovered more specific information about it, reports Politico.
The Trump administration's decision to kill Soleimani in January prompted the Iranian government to respond with a missile strike against bases in Iraq that injured several U.S. service members.
"We hope that they do not make a new strategic mistake," said an Iranian government spokesperson on Tuesday in response to Trump's tweet, reports Al Jazeera, adding that any such mistake "will witness Iran's decisive response."
Trump's threats against Iran continue the president's oscillation, in word and deed, between a peacemaker who says he wants to wrap up America's endless wars and a bellicose leader willing to ratchet up international tensions.
Last week, U.S. Gen. Frank McKenzie confirmed prior reports that the U.S. plans to cut its troop presence in Iraq from 5,000 to 3,200. The Wall Street Journal reports that would reduce our military footprint in the country to where it was in 2015. The Trump administration also plans to reduce the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan to 4,500 by late October, about half the number that was in the country when Trump took office.
Also last week, the president renewed the national emergency first issued by President George W. Bush in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. That move received a sharp rebuke from Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.).
On Thursday, Donald Trump quietly renewed the national emergency declared by GWB 19 years ago today. This is insane. There is no continuing "emergency" related to the 9/11 attacks, but there is a continuing use of 9/11 as a pretext for the president and Congress to abuse power. pic.twitter.com/eUhWQMBYIH
— Justin Amash (@justinamash) September 14, 2020
Trump has also fended off efforts to limit his power in other Middle Eastern engagements, including vetoing a resolution that would have cut off U.S. support to Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen last year. His administration has also ramped up America's drone war in Somalia, conducting 40 strikes there compared to Obama and Bush's combined 41, according to Airwars.
On Tuesday, news also broke that Trump had wanted to assassinate Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but had been talked out of it by his military advisors. The president has twice before attacked Syrian government facilities in response to that country's alleged use of chemical weapons against its own people.
The disjointed nature of Trump's first term—bringing troops home from some conflicts, continuing or even increasing our involvement in others, all while playing a dangerous game of brinksmanship with Iran—allows the president and his defenders to sell whatever narrative they want about his foreign policy.
At the Republican National Convention (RNC) earlier this month Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) celebrated Trump for being willing to kill terrorists abroad and tear up the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. In contrast, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) used his convention speech to praise Trump for knowing "we are strongest when we fight hardest, not in distant deserts, but for our fellow Americans."
Trump's own RNC remarks embody that same dissonance. In the space of three sentences, the president bragged about killing Soleimani and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, keeping America out of new wars, and increasing military spending.
The president's constant molting—from dove to hawk and back again—still ultimately leaves him less inclined toward intervention than his immediate predecessors. His mixed record on war, and willingness to tweet out serious threats against Iran, disqualify him from being anything close to a peace candidate.
The post Peace Candidate Donald Trump Threatens Massive Retaliation Against Iran in Response to Rumored Assassination Plot appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The U.S. will be reducing the number of troops it has stationed in Iraq by about a third, reports The Wall Street Journal, leaving behind roughly 3,500 men and women. This news comes after a long series of brags at the Republican National Convention that President Donald Trump is succeeding in ending America's foreign wars.
"Unlike previous administrations, I have kept America out of new wars, and our troops are coming home," said Trump in his acceptance speech last night, promising that in a second term he would "strike down terrorists who threaten our people and keep America out of endless and costly foreign wars."
The Journal reports that the departure of some 1,700 troops from Iraq will occur over the next few months. Once gone, America's military presence in that country will be where it was in 2015.
Under Trump, America's troop commitment to our various foreign wars has oscillated; first surging then tapering off.
PolitiFact notes that when Trump came into office there were around 8,500 troops in Afghanistan. The president increased our military presence up to 14,000 personnel but has since drawn it back down to where it was at the beginning of Trump's term. That number is supposed to fall to 4,000 in November.
Under Trump, the Defense Department has stopped publishing troop numbers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, making it difficult to get an accurate count of how much military personnel is in those countries. The Washington Post reported in July that the number of U.S. troops stationed abroad has slightly increased under Trump.
Outside of troop levels, Trump has amped up the drone war and vetoed a resolution to end U.S. participation in the war in Yemen. He has also escalated tensions with Iran by tearing up the 2015 nuclear deal signed under the Obama administration, reapplying sanctions, and deploying additional aircraft and ships to the region in response to alleged Iranian drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities.
In January, the Trump administration assassinated Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, provoking an Iranian missile counterattack on U.S. military bases in the country.
This broader schizophrenia among the Trump administration between escalating tensions with Iran while promising to end endless wars was on full display in the president's remarks last night. In the space of three sentences, he bragged about killing Soleimani, said he was bringing troops home, and then touted his increases in military spending.
It's good that more U.S. troops are being pulled out of Iraq. It's less encouraging that we still have thousands of troops in the country after nearly four years of a president who keeps promising to end forever wars.
The post Trump, Self-Proclaimed Ender of Endless Wars, Is Reducing the U.S. Troop Presence in Iraq to Where It Was in 2015 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Donald Trump's pitch to "Make America Great Again" included a commitment to rethinking America's interventionist foreign policy.
"After the Cold War, our foreign policy veered badly off course," then-candidate Trump told an audience at the Center for the National Interest in April 2016. "Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, and this led to one foreign policy disaster after another."
Trump's promise to unwind America's foreign commitments won the vote of some anti-war libertarians, who argued that, while many of his political views were odious, foreign policy mattered most.
"Donald [Trump] is a peacenik, practically, certainly compared to the war-mongering Hillary [Clinton]," libertarian economist Walter Block told the audience at a November 2016 debate over whether libertarians should support Trump, which was hosted by the Soho Forum.
On the campaign trail, Trump also attacked Clinton for voting to authorize the invasion of Iraq as a senator, for pushing for U.S. intervention in Libya as secretary of state, and for her hawkish approach to foreign policy in general.
"Almost everything [Hillary Clinton] has done in foreign policy has been a mistake, and it's been a disaster," Trump said in an October 2016 debate.
In a November 2016 Reason podcast, historian Thaddeus Russell made the case that Trump would prove to be the less interventionist alternative to Clinton.
"Whenever there's a dictator or tyrant [America doesn't] like in any part of the world, we are obligated to remove him," Russell said. "Trump is the first president to call bullshit on that very claim…And in doing so, I think he may do great service for actual peace."
But now that we're ending his presidential term, do noninterventionists believe Trump actually has moved the world closer to peace?
"I think Trump has moved America considerably closer to peace," says Russell. "At the very same time, he's moved us into more wars. So it's a terribly mixed bag."
But Russell says that Trump's rhetoric alone still was an important victory for the noninterventionist cause.
"He called into question the need for America to invade countries, to change their regimes and to stay there…Specifically, he called into question the Iraq war."
Trump isn't the first modern president to promise an end to foreign entanglements on the campaign trail only to double down on those commitments once in office. Candidate Barack Obama called the Iraq War "dumb" and promised to end it.
Obama temporarily withdrew troops from Iraq on Bush's pre-negotiated timetable, but then re-intervened a few years later after ISIS filled the power vacuum. He also expanded the war on terror into several new countries and began personally ordering covert drone strikes, one of which killed a 16-year-old American, and another that killed at least 13 people headed to a wedding.
Even George W. Bush, who as president started the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ran against nation-building on the campaign trail.
"I just don't think it's the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, 'We do it this way. So should you,'" Bush said in a 2000 debate.
Scott Horton, a popular anti-war podcast host and author of a book on the history of the war in Afghanistan, says modern presidents often campaign against war because it's a popular position in the abstract.
"The American people want peace," says Horton.
He agrees with Russell that Trump's rhetorical attack on the foreign policy establishment, and specifically on Jeb Bush and the Iraq war, helped the anti-war cause.
"He really got the…Tea Party, Republican voters of America to finally admit that they were wrong to have supported George Bush," says Horton.
But he says Trump is too impulsive to be reliably anti-war.
"The problem with Donald Trump, of course, is that he's a millimeter deep," says Horton. "He has some instincts, but he doesn't have…thinking really on these things."
Trump's wars with the media, Democrats, and protesters have meant that Americans are paying less attention than ever to our actual wars, which nevertheless are still being waged.
Trump hasn't invaded any new countries, but he has ramped up the nearly 19-year-long, $2 trillion Afghanistan war that's cost the lives of tens of thousands of Afghans and more than 3,500 U.S. and NATO troops.
Trump deployed thousands more troops to Afghanistan in 2017 and dropped more bombs and missiles in 2019 than in any previously recorded year.
"Once they get in there, all the incentives are to keep the [wars] going," says Horton. "Afghanistan is the greatest example of this."
Instead of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria once he took office, Trump vowed to stop publicly reporting troop numbers.
The Trump administration did strike a deal with Taliban leaders in late February to wind down the war within 14 months if they pledged to prevent terrorist groups like al Qaeda from operating in the country, and the Pentagon announced a reduction in forces and withdrawal from five Afghanistan bases on July 14.
"The fact that Trump was willing to break with Bush and Obama's policy to go ahead and negotiate directly with the Taliban was a clue that he was really serious," says Horton.
But he worries that deal could be scuttled by uncorroborated reports that Russia paid bounties to Afghans who killed U.S. troops, which prompted Republican Liz Cheney to partner with several House Democrats to place conditions on the withdrawal.
Horton also points out that Trump has increased U.S. involvement in Yemen and Somalia. In Yemen alone, the United Nations estimates that the Saudi-led and U.S.-supported bombing campaign has resulted in almost a quarter of a million deaths.
"These are two of America's most horrible wars and no one pays any attention to them whatsoever," says Horton.
Trump has continued and escalated the war on terror, which could make the U.S. susceptible to getting involved in even more conflicts around the globe. He also undid Obama's nuclear deal with Iran and ordered a targeted assassination of Iranian Gen. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, whom he accused of plotting an attack on an American base.
But after Iran fired back, Trump backed off. He pulled back a strike in 2019 after Iran downed a U.S. drone, and political allies and media commentators portrayed it as a weakness. He faced widespread criticism for moving troops out of northern Syria and praise when he fired missiles into a Syrian airfield after allegations of a chemical attack by Bashar al-Assad.
"Look at the narrative and the agenda in the media," says Horton. "How dare Donald Trump try to end any of America's wars ever."
Russell worries about the increasingly belligerent rhetoric on both sides of the aisle towards China. Trump has escalated tensions with China through his trade war and the reported placement of low-yield nuclear weapons in the region. But Russell still believes Trump's rhetoric was useful.
"The best aspect of the foreign policy of Trump is that…he has revealed the mind of not just the foreign policy establishment…[but] really government workings and the workings of the state," says Russell. "The worst aspect of the Trump foreign policy is that he's a mass murderer, just like the rest of them."
In the end, Trump, as commander in chief, has had ample opportunity to begin making good on his promise to begin extricating the American military from its endless wars. Time and again, he has failed to formulate a coherent strategy for doing so.
"It never should have been this way. We screwed up, got the whole 21st century off on the wrong foot," says Horton. "But we didn't need to. We could call the whole damn thing off…and just forge that new [foreign policy] consensus and stick with it. It should be easy because we're right."
Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Graphics by Lex Villena and Isaac Reese.
Photo credits: "Liz Cheney," Stefani Reynolds/CNP/MEGA/ Newscom; "Mother at military funeral," Kevin Dietsch/UPI/Newscom; "Carrying flag-draped casket," Kevin Dietsch/Newscom; "Woman at veteran's gravesite," Michael A. McCoy/ZUMA Press/Newscom; "Trump and Jeb Bush at debate," Max Wittaker/UPI/Newscom; "Trump holding up fists," Yin Bogu Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; "Chinese ballistic missile," Kyodo/Newscom; "Donald Trump campaigning at podium," by Gage Skidmore; "Trump and Clinton debate," Christian Gooden/TNS/Newscom; "Afghanistan war footage," by Combat Views under Creative Commons license; "Trump with crowd behind him," by Image of Sport/Newscom; "Yemeni children in village," CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Newscom; "Yemeni children getting water," CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Newscom; "Yemeni child in hospital," Abdulnasser Alseddik/ZUMA Press/Newscom; "Bombed Yemeni village," Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; "Nurse wearing face shield," CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Newscom.
Music credits: "Truth or Reality," "Temerity," "Unforeseen," "To Begin Again," by Sean Williams licensed by Artlist.
The post Trump's Failed Promise To Stop America's 'Endless Wars' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The administration of President Donald Trump promised to "restore deterrence" against Iran when it assassinated Iranian spymaster Gen. Qassem Soleimani outside Baghdad International Airport on January 3. But months later, the Iraqi militias formerly armed, trained, and advised by Soleimani seem undeterred, and American troops in Iraq find themselves in an escalating cycle of conflict with no end in sight.
In March, militia forces fired a barrage of Katyusha rockets at Camp Taji, killing a U.S. Army soldier, a U.S. Air Force airman, and a British servicewoman. A local militia close to Iranian intelligence services called Kata'ib Hezbollah appeared to take credit for the attack in a social media diatribe invoking the "right to resist" America's "malicious project of occupation."
American forces responded with what the Pentagon calls "precision defensive strikes" against five Kata'ib Hezbollah weapons depots. Iraq accused the U.S. military of killing Iraqi soldiers and civilians instead of Kata'ib Hezbollah members during the raids, aggravating already strained U.S.-Iraqi tensions. The following weekend, Katyusha rockets slammed into Camp Taji again in broad daylight.
Assassinating Soleimani was supposed to have prevented attacks like these, yet that act was also the result of escalating retaliation: In December, a rocket killed an American translator in Iraq. The Trump administration blamed Kata'ib Hezbollah (though the Iraqi government has since cast doubt on that claim), and U.S. forces retaliated with a round of strikes that killed 25 members of the militia.
In response, the Iraqi militia incited its supporters to ransack the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Trump called the incident his "Anti-Benghazi," referring to the deadly 2012 attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya. And then he ordered Soleimani killed.
Iran responded by firing ballistic missiles at a U.S. airbase in Iraq, injuring more than 100 U.S. troops. Meanwhile, the Iraqi parliament passed a nonbinding resolution asking American forces to leave the country.
The Trump administration initially justified the assassination by claiming that Soleimani posed an "imminent threat" to American lives, but it was later unable to identify any specific threat posed by Soleimani. The administration then gradually changed its justification to "restoring deterrence" against Iran.
"Restoring deterrence is not static," said Brian Hook, the State Department official in charge of Iranian affairs, at a February briefing hosted by the Middle East–focused, D.C.-based publication Al-Monitor. "It is a daily habit, and you've got to get that habit as part of your system, so we every day look for ways to get Iran to go back to its own borders."
Hook also called the Iranian government a "corrupt religious Mafia," hinting that the Trump administration does not see Iran as a state that can be reasoned with. "I don't know how the world's leading sponsor of terrorism is entitled to a claim of self-defense. They're not at peace with their neighbors, because they don't want to be at peace with their neighbors," he said.
Neither Hook nor Trump seemed to be very involved in how American forces responded to the March attacks. Defense Secretary Mark Esper signaled that he was not looking to escalate against Iran itself.
"I have spoken with the president. He's given me the authority to do what we need to do," Esper told reporters in March. "I'm not going to take any option off the table right now, but we are focused on the groups that we believe perpetrated this in Iraq."
America's military leadership has been more concerned with protecting its own personnel than in opening a new front with Iran. U.S. counterterrorism forces even secretly drafted plans to withdraw from Iraq in the wake of Soleimani's death, and the U.S. military is abandoning some of its smaller bases in the country.
But the Trump administration continues its campaign of "super maximum economic pressure" against the Iranian economy. Without a civilian effort to support coming to terms with Iran, rocket attacks and "precision defensive strikes" will bring us ever closer to truly endless war.
The post Months After Soleimani's Assassination, Another Strike on Militias in Iraq appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In early January, the United States took out Iran's top military leader, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, as he passed through Iraq. President Donald Trump's decision to order the killing of a foreign government official was controversial both at home and abroad.
Is Trump charting a bold new course in the Middle East or following the failed footsteps of Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush? A day before Iran responded to the killing with a bombing campaign against two U.S. military bases in the region, Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Christopher A. Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.
In 1990–93, Preble served as an officer in the U.S. Navy on the USS Ticonderoga. He's the co-author of Fuel to the Fire: How Trump Made America's Broken Foreign Policy Even Worse (and How We Can Recover) and the author of Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy.
Q: How big a deal is the U.S. killing Iranian Gen. Soleimani?
A: It's a really big deal. The best equivalent I've heard is that it would be as if someone killed both the head of U.S. Central Command and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. One of the key differences between Soleimani and Osama bin Laden, for example, is that bin Laden was a terrorist leader, not a representative of a sovereign state.
Q: Is the difference between a terrorist and a state actor mostly legalistic, in that this could be perceived as an act of war? Or is it more moral, in that we treat generals of states we're not at open war with differently than we do mere terrorists?
A: There's a legal aspect of this in terms of U.S. domestic law, which prohibits the assassination of foreign government officials. But I frankly approach this more from a practical perspective. Does this advance American safety and security? Does it make Americans freer and more prosperous? The answer is no.
Q: What are the ways that this makes us less safe?
A: The Iranians don't have a comparable level of capability to the U.S., but they do have a willingness and the ability to carry out cyberattacks against networks. That's a more pressing concern, perhaps, than conventional reprisals here in the U.S.
Q: Is it possible that this was the type of action that makes Iran change its behavior in the Middle East?
A: That's certainly what Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and what President Trump himself seem to believe. They expect Iran not to retaliate and to be deterred from retaliation by threats. This is consistent with what the Trump administration calls the "maximum pressure campaign," which also involves sanctions.
The maximum pressure campaign has put real pain on the Iranian people. We have credible evidence of Iranians dying premature deaths from lack of access to medicine, for example. But it has not brought the Iranian government back to the negotiating table to comply with the long list of demands that the Trump administration has made.
Q: It seems like, in terms of Iraq, things are going in the wrong direction. The Iraqi government now wants the American military to get the hell out.
A: As recently as December there was rising Iraqi anger and animosity at foreign influence from both the United States and Iran. What we've seen in the last couple of weeks is a lot of that anger and resentment redirected to the United States.
Now, there was a lot of resentment and anger toward us already, because we're a foreign presence in Iraqi territory. But I think that for the time being, the balance of power inside Iraq now tips toward Iran because of that strike.
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 Christopher Preble Says Killing Soleimani Didn't Make America Safer appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi paramilitary commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis on January 2, 2020, seemed to many Americans like the start of a war.
Iranian officials vowed enteqâm-e sakht, "hard revenge." President Donald Trump in turn threatened to bomb Iranian cultural sites in response to any retaliation. On January 7, Iran called his bluff, firing over a dozen ballistic missiles at U.S. forces in Iraq. Fortunately, no Americans were killed, and Trump refrained from further military action.
Unbeknownst to many Americans, we've been hurtling toward a worsened conflict with Iran for nearly two years now. The Trump administration has been quietly escalating against the country and its allies using a selection of counterterrorism laws, many of them passed after 9/11, that allowed it to act without going through Congress or the public. Former President Barack Obama, meanwhile, left a force in the region to counter the Islamic State that the Trump administration eventually pointed against the Islamic Republic.
Trump and his advisors objected to the violence carried out by Iran and its proxies across the Middle East. They also disliked Obama's "nuclear deal," which lifted U.S. economic sanctions on Iran in order to get international inspectors access to the country's nuclear research program. So in 2018, the Trump administration replaced Obama's deal with a campaign of sanctions aimed at forcing the Iranian government to change a range of foreign and domestic policies.
Obama had waived many Iran sanctions previously passed by Congress, meaning Trump could simply allow the waivers to expire. But he also used a curious legal tool to maximize the pressure: Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allowed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a branch of the Iranian military, as a foreign terrorist organization in April 2019.
The U.S. government had never used Section 219 to declare the army of a sovereign state a terrorist group. The Trump administration then used the designation to put sanctions on Iran's oil, banking, construction, and steel industries.
"The IRGC is very expert at creating front companies disguised as any number of organizations, including humanitarian organizations," claimed Brian Hook, the State Department official in charge of Iran. "You can never know if you're supporting commerce or terrorism."
In May 2019, the Trump administration took a further step: By slapping buyers of Iranian oil with economic sanctions, it hoped to cut exports to zero. Iran had threatened to retaliate for such a move by disrupting the global trade in foreign oil. Soon thereafter, tankers began to explode off the country's coast.
U.S. officials blamed Iranian sabotage, and U.S. naval forces massed in the Persian Gulf. On June 20, tensions nearly boiled over when Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance drone. Trump reportedly came within minutes of launching airstrikes against the country before suddenly changing his mind.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration was sitting on a massive legal and military apparatus originally designed to crush the Islamic State, an apocalyptic cult rampaging across Iraq and Syria. That apparatus was created when Obama launched Operation Inherent Resolve in 2014, using his powers as commander in chief under Article II of the Constitution.
It's debatable how far these Article II powers stretch. At the very least, they include self-defense. In the most expansive interpretation, they allow the president to take almost any military action, even without permission from Congress. Trump's State Department told a skeptical Senate Foreign Relations Committee in August 2019 that Article II authorities include the "protection of U.S. persons or property, support of allies, support of U.N. Security Council resolutions, promoting regional stability, [and] deterrence of the use of" weapons of mass destruction.
The Obama and Trump administrations also justified the campaign against the Islamic State, previously known as ISIS, under two authorizations for the use of military force (AUMFs) passed by Congress more than a decade earlier. The 2001 AUMF allowed the president to go after Al Qaeda, of which the Islamic State was a spinoff. The 2002 AUMF, which approved the overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, was vague enough to include the Islamic State because it only mentioned "the continuing threat posed by Iraq."
The House of Representatives voted to revoke the two AUMFs in July and December 2019, after the escalations with Iran began, but the amendments were defeated in the Senate.
Only a few thousand Americans were ever deployed as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, the anti–Islamic State coalition, mostly in training and support roles. But the "light footprint" force was stationed along the "Iranian land bridge," a term used in Washington to describe the chain of territories from Iran's border to the Mediterranean coast controlled by pro-Iran factions.
"We actually had to coexist in this environment with Shi'a [Muslim] militia groups that were, again, fighting ISIS, but were being supported by Iran," retired General Joseph Votel, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East from March 2016 to March 2019, says. "Within the rubric of the Defeat-ISIS campaign, I would not have had any particular military tasks that were related to Iran."
That began to change in September 2018, when National Security Advisor John Bolton declared that U.S. forces would stay in Syria "as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders, and that includes Iranian proxies and militias."
In October 2019, protests against Iranian influence in Iraq broke out, followed by protests against gas prices in Iran. The Iranian government, in a spasm of paranoia, shut down the internet and killed hundreds of protesters in its own country. Iranian-backed militias also massacred Iraqi protesters—and began to act out by firing rockets at U.S. forces in Iraq.
Most of these attacks hurt no one, but on December 27, a rocket killed an American translator named Nawres Hamid in Iraq. Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve responded by killing 25 Iraqi militiamen in a series of air raids.
U.S. military officials called their retaliation "precision defensive strikes" and emphasized the need for "force protection"—that is, protecting the U.S. forces already in Iraq for other reasons. But Iraqi militia supporters responded by ransacking part of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on the last day of 2019. In early January, things spun out of control: Soleimani was dead, and Iranian missiles were in the air.
Trump administration officials offered two justifications in the days after the Soleimani assassination. The first was that the general posed some kind of "imminent" threat to U.S. forces in Iraq. Yet General Mark Milley admitted to reporters in the Pentagon that the intelligence did not "exactly say who, what, when, where" the threat was. In addition, the killing appeared to make the Iranian threat worse, as Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve had to suspend all operations against the Islamic State for security reasons soon after.
The second justification was that the 2002 AUMF provided a blank check for any military action in Iraq—an argument Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) called "insulting."
Trump supporters pulled out a third justification during a January 9 debate in Congress: Militias armed by Soleimani were estimated to have killed 608 U.S. troops during the first U.S. occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2011. But Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D–Mich.), a CIA veteran who served in the country, wasn't buying it. She proposed a resolution to rein in Trump's war powers.
"I have watched friends and colleagues hurt or killed by Iranian rockets, mortars, and explosive devices," Slotkin said. Nonetheless, "Congress has long abdicated its responsibility, as laid out in the Constitution, to our troops when it comes to authorizing war."
The post Trump's Quiet War on Iran Gets Loud appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>U.S. forces launched a massive retaliation Thursday against an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq—a response to a Wednesday rocket attack that killed two Americans.
This weekend, the militia struck again, wounding three Americans and three Iraqi soldiers at the very same base.
The Trump administration had promised to "restore deterrence" against Iran when it assassinated Iranian spymaster Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani outside Baghdad International Airport on January 3. But the army of Iraqi militias armed, trained, and advised by Soleimani is clearly undeterred: The American force in Iraq finds itself repeatedly under fire, in an escalating cycle of conflict with no end in sight.
"Restoring deterrence is not static. It is a daily habit, and you've got to get that habit as part of your system, so we every day look for ways to get Iran to go back to its own borders," Brian Hook, the State Department official in charge of Iranian affairs, had said at a February briefing.
A barrage of Katyusha rockets struck Camp Taji on Wednesday night, killing a U.S. Army soldier, a U.S. Air Force airman, and a British servicewoman. A local militia close to Iranian intelligence services called Kata'ib Hezbollah seemed to take credit for the attack in a social media diatribe invoking the "right to resist" America's "malicious project of occupation."
American forces responded with what the Pentagon calls "precision defensive strikes" against five of Kata'ib Hezbollah's weapons depots. Iraq accused the U.S. military of killing Iraqi soldiers and civilians instead of Kata'ib Hezbollah members during its Thursday air raids, aggravating already strained U.S.-Iraqi tensions.
The clashes continued, and Katyusha rockets slammed into Camp Taji again in broad daylight on Saturday. The U.S. military is now leaving some of its smaller bases in Iraq, although a spokesperson for the U.S.-led counterterrorism coalition insisted to CNN on Monday that the move has nothing to do with the latest provocations, but was "a result of the success of Iraqi Security Forces in their fight against ISIS," the Islamic State.
This weekend was not the first time since Soleimani's death that pro-Iran forces fired on U.S. troops. U.S. forces in Syria clashed with a militia aligned with Russia and Iran in mid-February, killing one Syrian, and rockets struck the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad a few days later.
Assassinating Soleimani was supposed to have prevented these attacks.
In December, a rocket killed an American translator in Iraq. (The Trump administration blamed Kata'ib Hezbollah, but the Iraqi government has since cast doubt on that version of events.) U.S. forces retaliated with a round of "precision defensive strikes" that killed 25 members of Kata'ib Hezbollah.
The Iraqi militia then incited its supporters to ransack the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Trump called the incident his "Anti-Benghazi," referring to the deadly 2012 attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya.
And then the President ordered Soleimani killed. Iran responded by firing ballistic missiles at a U.S. airbase in Iraq, injuring more than 100 U.S. troops, and the Iraqi parliament passed a non-binding resolution asking American forces to leave the country.
The Trump administration initially justified the assassination by claiming that Soleimani posed an "imminent threat" to American lives, but it failed to show Congress the specific threat that Soleimani posed. The administration then gradually changed its justification to "restoring deterrence" against Iran.
Soleimani "was very effective, and very lethal, and very well-networked, and so when someone like that is underway…we would have been culpably negligent had we not taken action," Hook said at the February briefing, which was hosted by the Washington-based newspaper Al Monitor.
Hook also called the Iranian government a "corrupt religious Mafia," hinting that the Trump administration does not see Iran as a state that can be reasoned with.
"I don't know how the world's leading sponsor of terrorism is entitled to a claim of self-defense. They're not at peace with their neighbors, because they don't want to be at peace with their neighbors," he said. "The regime has some of these Westphalian attributes of a state, but in fact it's got the [Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps] and the Qods Force and the Guardian Council and all these things that exist, which are really the true nature of the regime."
Soleimani was the commander of the Qods Force, the covert arm of the Revolutionary Guards. The Guardian Council is a group of Shi'a Muslim clerics that can veto decisions by Iran's elected government.
This week, neither Hook nor Trump seemed to be very involved in the escalation. Defense Secretary Mark Esper took charge of the response to Wednesday's attack, and he signalled that he was not looking to escalate against Iran itself.
"I have spoken with the president. He's given me the authority to do what we need to do," Esper told reporters on Wednesday. "I'm not going to take any option off the table right now, but we are focused on the groups that we believe perpetrated this in Iraq."
America's military leadership has been more concerned with protecting its own personnel than opening a new front with Iran. U.S. counterterrorism forces even secretly drafted plans to withdraw from Iraq in the wake of Soleimani's death.
But without action from civilian leaders, the cycle of escalation is likely to continue. The Trump administration continues its campaign of maximum pressure against the Iranian economy, aimed at changing an array of Iran's domestic and foreign policies.
Tehran has dug in its heels, even as protesters brave bullets and tear gas to confront the state and even as a coronavirus epidemic ravages the country's infrastructure. Covert and overt support to anti-American militias in Iraq is a cheap way for Iran to strike back against the United States at a third country's expense.
For now, the cycle continues: rocket attacks, "precision defensive strikes," and the looming threat of a truly endless war.
The post Déjà Vu in Iraq appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"On the Iraq War Resolution being voted on tomorrow in the House of Represenatives [sic]," President Trump tweeted Wednesday, "we are down to 5000 soldiers, and going down, and I want everyone, Republican and Democrat, to vote their HEART!"
Trump's apparent willingness for Congress to rescind the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq is a curious addition to his administration's often contradictory foreign policy. Two weeks ago, the expectation was that he'd veto a war powers resolution Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.) introduced to require obtain congressional authorization for any war with Iran. And a week before that, the administration told Congress the Iraq AUMF—the very measure about which Trump now invites lawmakers to vote their heart—provided legal cover for the strike on Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
Precisely because of creative uses like that, ending the Iraq AUMF is overdue. But it won't address our broader problem of unaccountable executive war-making. It won't block the false claims of "imminence" that—as we saw in the jumbled justifications for the Soleimani hit—are the means by which that war-making will continue.
Imminence matters because of how foreign policy prerogatives are split between the president and Congress. The framers of our Constitution were chiefly interested in limiting the authority of the executive, but neither did they wish to leave the United States undefended against attack.
To satisfy the first concern, war powers are vested in the legislature. "There is a material difference between the cases of making war, and making peace," James Madison recorded Oliver Ellsworth saying at the Constitutional Convention. "It should be more easy [sic] to get out of a war, than into it," he advised. George Mason agreed, arguing that the president is not to be trusted with authority to initiate military action, and that the precision of "declare war" is preferable to "make war" as a means of "clogging rather than facilitating" the march toward conflict.
The president's role as commander-in-chief, then, has two components. One is to conduct a war once duly underway. The other, as Madison's convention notes likewise indicate, is the power to "repel sudden attacks," to "repel [but] not to commence war." The president may not attack on his own authority, but if the United States is attacked, the president doesn't have to wait for congressional permission to respond.
But what if an attack is imminent? It hasn't happened yet, but it will unless urgent action is taken. Perhaps a missile hasn't struck, but we know it's incoming. The Constitution doesn't explicitly address imminent attacks, but the defense exception to its assignment of war powers has traditionally included such cases.
There's no single, authoritative legal definition for imminence—the Trump administration, for example, is not bound by the test of imminence the Obama administration's legal advisors preferred, which included factors like "the nature and immediacy of the threat; the probability of an attack; whether the anticipated attack is part of a concerted pattern of continuing armed activity," and more. That uncertainty provides any president who wants to bypass Congress on foreign policy decisions a loophole big enough for a whole war (or two or three). By invoking an "imminent" threat, the president is functionally able to go to war unilaterally, ignoring Congress altogether. This is a fig leaf that allows Congress to avoid difficult votes of war and peace.
It isn't difficult to understand the rationale for this system when the threat is legitimately imminent. It also isn't difficult to perceive the risk of abuse.
That risk is exactly the problem with the administration's changing stories about the killing of Soleimani. "The Fake News Media and their Democrat Partners are working hard to determine whether or not the future attack by terrorist Soleimani was 'imminent' or not, & was my team in agreement," Trump tweeted after his team's evolving explanations for the strike came under scrutiny. "The answer to both is a strong YES., but it doesn't really matter because of his horrible past!"
It does matter. If Trump is wrong in his claim that Soleimani had a truly imminent attack underway—and comments from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as well as legislators briefed by the administration have cast major doubt on that narrative under any normal understanding of imminence—the assassination was illegal. Not just illegal in the ordinary sense. Unconstitutional. An executive usurpation of legislative authority.
Rule of law and constitutional constraints matter far beyond this immediate situation, beyond what we may think of Soleimani, Trump, or the prospect of war with Iran. Indeed, the Soleimani strike is only the most recent example. Presidents have long ordered extra-constitutional military action, and Congress has so far refused to stop them.
It matters because the framers of the Constitution were quite right that wars should be difficult to start and easy to end. They were right that a single person who could lead a whole nation into war would often do so, that the bellicose habits of the kings of old Europe must not be replicated in the United States. They were right that Congress—sluggish and querulous and by design closer to the mood of the nation it represents than one individual president can ever be—would be slower to rush into reckless military intervention than an autonomous commander in chief.
They were right, in short, to fear exactly the dangerous system of executive war-making we have today.
The post This Is the Executive War-Making the Founders Tried To Prevent appeared first on Reason.com.
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