A US State Department official, quoted in the Sunday Telegraph:
“There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”
War on Afghanistan
On message
Wherever you start looking, the same excuses crop up over and over again. From the NATO Media Operations Centre’s socalled “master narrative“, as leaked by Wikileaks, come the following points its P.R. people should push when talking about civilian casualties in Afghanistan:
Militants deliberately force civilians into situations where they are either killed or are at risk of being harmed by NATO/ISAF or coalition forces in order to undermine support for NATO/ISAF in Afghanistan and in the International Community.
Militants tactics are to launch attacks from civilian areas, retreat to civilian areas and use civilians as human shields. Militants want civilians caught up in the fighting, because they think this will undermine support for NATO/ISAF in Afghanistan and in the international community and weaken the legitimate Afghan government.
Where have we heard this before?
Headline Of The Day
Comes from the Daily Wail:
Ant and Dec come under Taliban rocket attack
Withdrawing from Iraq to fight in Afghanistan? Hell-no!
Obama says he wants to withdraw from Iraq by 2010 to concentrate on Afghanistan and send more troops there. Juan Cole comments on how awful this policy would be and where it comes from:
If the Afghanistan gambit is sincere, I don’t think it is good geostrategy. Afghanistan is far more unwinnable even than Iraq. If playing it up is politics, then it is dangerous politics. Presidents can become captive of their own record and end up having to commit to things because they made strong representations about them to the public.
I think Obama has a little bit of a tendency to try to fix his political problems by going overboard. Thus, he faces skepticism from Jewish American voters. So he made a Zionist speech in Boca. In the context of US politics, that is to be expected; he would not be any sort of politician, much less a phenomenon, if he did not try to reassure Jewish Americans about his commmitment to Israeli security, which is after all a worthy goal. But Obama went on to praise Zionist thinker Theodore Herzl, who started this nonsense about a people without a land for a land without a people. And then he gave away Jerusalem, undivided and permanently, to the Israelis in the middle of ongoing negotiations over its status between Israel and the Palestine Authority in the context of the Quartet, which the US government supports. Neither of those two things was necessary. It was overkill. And Obama now has some bridge building to do with the Arab and Muslim worlds if he becomes president, since Jerusalem is also dear to their hearts.
Search and destroy in Afghanistan is an even worse example of going overboard. My advice to his campaign team is to give more thought to how he can take a strong enough position on an issue to win on it, without giving away the whole store.
A good example of how much domestic concerns are driving US foreign policy, to a much greater extent than in other countries. Leftie bloggers have long noticed how much Democrats are “locked in” to supporting awful foreign policies out of fear for being seen as weak; this does seem to be another, particularly egrigious example of this tendency.
On the other hand, the War of Aghanistan has always been seen as a “good war” even by leftwing Americans and Obama isn’t the first Democratic heavyweight to criticise the War on Iraq because it’s a distraction from Aghanistan. I’m not sure Juan Cole is right in thinking Obama went overboard because he wanted to look more serious or tough, or whether Obama doesn’t genuinely believe in the fight against the Taliban. Neither position is likely to do much good of course.
Torture porn
During World War 2, Hitler and his pals liked nothing so much as have a nice little torture film after dinner, recordings made during Gestapo interrogation sessions. Would it go too far to believe Bush and Cheney may have done the same with videotapes from Guantanamo Bay, for example this video of the interrogation by Canadian intelligence agents of Omar Khadyr:
TORONTO—Burying his face in his hands, a 16-year-old captured in Afghanistan sobs and calls out “Oh Mommy!” in a hidden-camera video released Tuesday that provides the first look at interrogations inside the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay.
[…]
The seven hours of grainy footage, recorded over four days of questioning by Canadian intelligence agents in 2003, shows Khadr breaking down in tears. At one point he pleads for help and displays chest and back wounds that he says had not healed six months after his capture.
Peeling off his orange prisoner shirt, he shows the wounds and complains he cannot move his arms, saying he has not received proper medical attention, despite requests.
“They look like they’re healing well to me,” the agent says of the injuries.
“What you see in the video is a teenager begging for help and what you see is an interrogation that violates U.S. law and any international law concerning the rights of children,” said Wells Dixon, a lawyer for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents dozens of Guantanamo prisoners.
“If this is the way a teenager in Guantanamo has been treated, you can just imagine how anyone else has been treated.”
It honestly would not surprise me at this point if Bush, Cheney et all collectively popped a stiffy over videos like this. There seems to be a deep sexual perversion at the root of the War on Terror, ever so often surfacing in e.g. the pictures from Abu Ghraib. Supposedly the naked pyramids and forced simulated fellatio of prisoners is done to soften them up for interrogation “because Arabs are uniquely shamed by sexual matters”, but you do wonder whether the incessent fascination with sexual humiliation isn’t much more present in the minds of the interrogators themselves…. As if 9/11 gave a certain part of America carte blanche to force its power fantasies on an unending supply of helpless victims.
Meanwhile the treatment of Omar Khadr is justified on him supposedly being a murderer, but as Eli notes:
George Bush (and Barack Obama and the Congress and the media and etc.) insist the U.S. is at “war” in Afghanistan, and they don’t mean that metaphorically as in the “war on drugs,” they mean it literally. Well, if the U.S. is at “war,” then Omar Khadr is a prisoner of war and has to be treated as such. If every single person captured by the U.S. in such a “war” is an “illegal combatant” and not a prisoner of war, then the U.S. can’t possibly be at war, since there is no opponent in this war. You can’t have it both ways.