“Terrorism and the Public Imagination”

By Hamilton Nolan:

How do you make a terrorist? You just label him a terrorist. You move your attention away from the things that actually matter in your life, and you focus it on The Terror. You participate in becoming terrorized. You allow a small sliver of violent people to warp your entire society’s perspective on reality. And you eventually arrive at a place where it seems perfectly reasonable to forget about children being shot at a Mother’s Day party, because our leaders and our media and our minds are still occupied with Muslims with pressure cookers.

There will be more terrorism, because terrorism works. The American imagination can’t seem to get enough of it.

Drones and the YPC Report

Drones and the YPC Report - a comment on a poll in Yemen where respondents answer an open question regarding their personal security concerns:

I’ve been dealing with Yemen long enough to know that anything drone related will eventually prove to be a lightening rod for attention, so I guess its not surprising. But looking at some of the discussion of this small excerpt of the report, the question remains: what, if anything, does page 32 of the latest YPC report tell us about the perceptions of US drone strikes in Yemen.

On a superficial level, the result could be used to suggest that Yemenis don’t really care about the strikes; only .8% listed drones as the greatest threat to their personal security. It may be worth noting that, ironically, that is a greater percentage than those who answered the same question with “Al Qaeda;” still, it isn’t difficult to imagine how some would seize upon such an interpretation to legitimize certain policies or cast aspersions on certain assertions…

In the end Yemeni perceptions of drone strikes are a complicated issue that can’t be covered in a single question—especially a question in a report that’s devoted to a completely different topic.  The YPC has put out a useful report on an important subject. The temptation to use said report to attempt to derive answers to a question it wasn’t asking is probably one that’s best avoided.

B’Tselem: in most recent Gaza war, half of casualties were civilians, 1/3 children

A B’Tselem report on Operation Pillar of Defense, from Haaretz:

The B’Tselem based its findings on Operation Pillar of Defense on statements issued by the Israel Defense Forces, the Shin Bet security service, and on an internal investigation.

The IDF killed 167 Palestinians during the operation, at least 87 of them non-combatants, according to the data presented in the B’Tselem report.

Thirty-one of these non-combatant civilians, or 35 percent, were minors. Of these minors, 20 were under the age of 12, according to B’Tselem…

The report explicitly states that Hamas and other militant organizations in the Gaza Strip have violated this prohibition by, inter alia, firing directly at Israeli civilians and locales, firing from within civilian Palestinian neighborhoods whilst endangering the inhabitants, and hiding inside civilian buildings.

The B’Tselem report indicates that the IDF also operated in violation of international law at times, in at least some of the cases in which “non-participant” Palestinians were killed.

Reflexive response by the IDF:

Military Advocate for Operational Matters Lt. Col. Ronen Hirsch told B’Tselem in response to its inquiry that the IDF prosecutor’s office sees no criminal act or substantiated suspicion of a violation of the rules of war in four of the incidents in question, and therefore closed the cases.

Henry Kissinger; Arms Exporters; Red Lines; Steve Coll

Robert D. Kaplan writes an article entitled, “In Defense of Henry Kissinger,” where he actually defends the Vietnam War, Kissinger’s role in it (“Anything that flies on anything that moves”), and the installation of Chile’s Pinochet which he admits cost thousands of lives.

People forget that it was, in part, an idealistic sense of mission that helped draw us into [the Vietnam War]—the same well of idealism that helped us fight World War II and that motivated our interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s…

Nixon and Kissinger encouraged a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, during which thousands of innocent people were killed. Their cold moral logic was that a right-wing regime of any kind would ultimately be better for Chile and for Latin America than a leftist regime [sic] of any kind—and would also be in the best interests of the United States. They were right…

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Shadi Hamdi asks a good question: Why Is There a ‘Red Line’ on Chemical Weapons but Not on 70,000 Deaths? Here is he heart of the argument:

Because halting the slaughter — by targeting the Syrian military assets doing the actual killing — is something that the United States and its allies could do, if they wanted to (former senior U.S. official Fred Hof outlines how here). It might not be enough to bring down the regime, at least not anytime soon, but it would be enough to protect and save at least some of the Syrian civilians who find themselves in the regime’s crosshairs.

In the short term, I think that is likely. But in addition to this, I think there needs to be a high degree of certainty that taking sides in the civil war and bombing the more powerful Assad regime’s military assets will, in the long-term, improve the humanitarian situation for Syrians. And if we can’t be reasonably sure, the default should always be to not get involved in war.

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Steve Coll write up a good review of Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars and NYT’s Mark Mazetti’s The Way of the Knife.

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Foreign Policy has a post about a recent study (which I mentioned a while back) which examines the relationship between American and Chinese arms sales and the democratic nature of the countries purchasing their weapons.

Soysa looked at U.S. and Chinese arms transfers to Africa from 1989 to 2006, using data collected by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. They found no statistical correlation between China and the types of regimes it supplied with weapons, while U.S. arms shipments were slightly negatively correlated with democracy. In plain English, China actually turned out to be less likely to sell weapons to dictators than America was.

The ideological make-up of the Syrian rebels

From the NYT:

Across Syria, rebel-held areas are dotted with Islamic courts staffed by lawyers and clerics, and by fighting brigades led by extremists. Even the Supreme Military Council, the umbrella rebel organization whose formation the West had hoped would sideline radical groups, is stocked with commanders who want to infuse Islamic law into a future Syrian government.

Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of…

Among the most extreme groups is the notorious Al Nusra Front, the Qaeda-aligned force declared a terrorist organization by the United States, but other groups share aspects of its Islamist ideology in varying degrees…

The Islamist character of the opposition reflects the main constituency of the rebellion, which has been led since its start by Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, mostly in conservative, marginalized areas. The descent into brutal civil war has hardened sectarian differences, and the failure of more mainstream rebel groups to secure regular arms supplies has allowed Islamists to fill the void and win supporters…

When the armed rebellion began, defectors from the government’s staunchly secular army formed the vanguard. The rebel movement has since grown to include fighters with a wide range of views, including Qaeda-aligned jihadis seeking to establish an Islamic emirate, political Islamists inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood and others who want an Islamic-influenced legal code like that found in many Arab states.

My sense is that there are no seculars,” said Elizabeth O’Bagy, of the Institute for the Study of War, who has made numerous trips to Syria in recent months to interview rebel commanders.