Max's Politburo

The American casualty of Abu Ghraib?

Spare a few moments to ponder the fate of an all-but forgotten Charles Graner, notorious torturer at Abu Ghraib.  Injustice has many faces, and this one is hard to get to grips with but noteworthy indeed...

The full story is here, courtesy of Salon.com.  An excerpt: 

The detainee held on charges related to the so-called war on terror is clad in an orange jumpsuit. His wrists are shackled to a leather belt cinched tight around his waist. A short chain connects his ankles, so he can only shuffle down the barren hallways of the prison, escorted by a guard at each arm.

[…] You remember [Charles] Graner, the alleged ringleader of abuse at Abu Ghraib who showed up in those harrowing photos back in 2004.

He has spent more than 29 months in solitary confinement over the past four years, allowed out of his narrow cell during some of that period only to stretch his legs, alone, for one hour a day. In solitary, he has almost no contact with other human beings. He is allowed no radio, no TV and, in a disorienting twist, no watch or calendar to mark the brutal grind of passing time.

[…] it is easy to argue that Graner deserves whatever he gets.  Graner is now the only person involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal who is still behind bars.

[…] 
Years of revelations, however, show that the prisoner abuse started at the top, yet nobody who ordered the abuse has ever been tried or convicted of anything. The Army convicted a handful of soldiers from Abu Ghraib in courts-martial focused almost exclusively on acts captured by the soldiers' own digital cameras, not on policy decisions from above. As the nation prepares to change presidents, the administration that sanctioned, encouraged or ordered the abuse of prisoners taken in the war on terror is about to leave office, having long ago decided that no one in a position of authority will be held accountable.

Let the politicians speak for themselves

One of the new media formats I really like is Fake Blogs.  It's the new media outlet for first-person parody.  First there was Fake Steve Jobs, then MockMarkCuban (the billionaire everyone loves to hate), and now we have the politicians who most deserve to be skewered by their own words: The PalinDrome for Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney's Blog.  Enjoy.

The Saakashvili delusion and the New World Order

Mikhail Saakashvili was always going to be a risky friend to keep.  But the combination of his delusions of grandeur with Bush's over-the-top support over the years has created a major liability for everyone.

First, for Georgians: if Saakashvili really thought he could prevail in a pre-emptive strike to reclaim territory occupied by people who don't want him he was sorely mistaken.  Instead of a waffling Russian government divided between President and Prime Minister he got the worst possible combination: Medvedev with no military credentials and desperate to prove himself strong plus Putin -- architect of the demolition of Chechnya -- still smarting the loss of Kosovo and seething about NATO's gradual encroachment on Russia.

Second, for the US and Europe: it was only a matter of time before the impulsive, arrogant and provocative Saakashvili caused a major incident.  By lavishing him with praise and turning a blind eye to his faults, Bush emboldened him to the point of delusion.  Here is a description of Bush's 2005 visit to the country, when 150,000 turned out to see him speak:

President Bush, under the influence of Georgian food, music and high-concept schmoozing, stayed up celebrating hours past his bedtime. "I learned firsthand what it means to be fed by a Georgian," said Bush right before hitting the dance floor. Georgians were so impressed that they renamed the road to the airport George W. Bush Highway.

Iraq proved to be the tipping point in Georgia's commitment to the West.  First, the US helped rewrite Georgian military doctrine and sent advisers to restructure its chain of command and train its officers. Then, Saakashvili eagerly sent a contingent of 2000 troops (the third-largest, after Britain) to Iraq.  What better way to obtain live-field training for his forces, without the provocation of American-run military exercises on the Russian border?  How stupid did he think the Russians were?

No one knows the byzantine politics of ethnicity and tribal conflict in the Caucasus better than Vladimir Putin, who personally engineered the first and second wars on neighboring Chechnya with a vengeance.  As soon as that region returned to an uneasy, brutalised calm in recent years, Russian troops were being repositioned for action er... peacekeeping in Georgia's renegade provinces.  At the same time Russia gave national passports to nearly all residents of Abkhazia, providing the requisite cover of 'protecting our citizens' if an excuse for intervention were ever needed.

Meanwhile, former New York lawyer Saakashvili showed the world that he is a Democrat (sort of), a free trader, that he wants to join NATO and the EU, that he is protecting an alternative oil pipeline to the West, and that he is willing to fight our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It's easy to see why he thought the West owed him something.  Easy, but delusional.

Georgia's move to reclaim the lost provinces was a gross miscalculation.  No one will intervene on his behalf.  In fact, even if Russia had decided to cross the Mtkvari River and occupy Tbilisi, no one would come to save him.  The West has little political leverage, Russian coffers are bursting with hard currency reserves ($600bn and rising), Europe is divided, Bush is a lame-duck president, and the US is militarily and politically overextended in the world.

Luckily for ordinary Georgians Putin is too wily to get bogged down trying to occupy the fearsomely independent Georgians.  He will settle for his pragmatic war aims: the effective annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and the toppling of this man he despises: Saakashvili. 

In doing so, he has accelerated the establishment of the New World Order According to Putin, and halted NATO's Eastern expansion in its tracks.  This may seem aggressive, but it is consistent, predictable and -- from the Russian perspective -- eminently reasonable.  For NATO, what remains is an opportunity to consolidate its gains in Eastern Europe and the Baltics, with the de facto acceptance that other ex-Soviet states will remain Russian zones of influence.

Russia has been making noises recently about re-establishing its 'special ties' with Cuba, suggesting it might establish a military base there.  Provocative?  You bet.  Perhaps they were trying to highlight the parallels with Georgia.  Fair enough.  Sorry Georgia -- your aspirations are noble and admirable, but on that road to real independence your leaders drove too fast and recklessly crashed the car.

The other war on terror -- Somalia

Has anyone been keeping track of US offensive military activity outside the theatres of Afghanistan and Iraq?  I thought about it recently upon finding a news item -- buried deep inside one of the free tube papers -- of another, the fifth (!) US air strike on targets inside Somalia in the past 18 months.

Not so long ago, staging an attack on (or in) a foreign country required congressional approval.  In fact, not so long ago the US took the moral high ground and declared presidential assassination orders illegal.  It was a strong message to send to the world, drawing a line under the Vietnam war and assassination attemps on Castro.  It was a message that served to underpin America's position as a beacon of freedom and good intentions.  That sure does seem a long time ago now...

Who am I to doubt the veracity of US intelligence agencies tracking high-value terrorist targets around the world?  But even so, I wonder whether the ol' checks and balances shouldn't apply here too.  While not as duplicitous as the US bombing of Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam war, these attacks get scant attention from the media.  I can't assess their true value in the war on terror, but it's clear that they have a disproportionately galvanising effect on Islamic opinion against America.  But maybe because Somalia is a failed state, it doesn't matter, or at least no one cares... 

I am no doubt a cynic, and it's possible that these targets will turn out to be worthwhile, but at the moment it doesn't seem like anyone is actually keeping track. 

So here's a quick tally to date:

May 1, 2008: precision-guided missiles fired from an offshore location hit the town of Dusamareb and destroyed the home of Aden Hashi Ayro, the military leader of Somali militia al-Shabab, which controls most of the country.  Various accounts put the death toll at between 10 and 30.  The US Central Command called him a "known al-Qaeda leader".  The BBC describes al-Shahab thus:

Considered a terrorist group by the US, al-Shabab began as the youth and military wing of the Somali Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), which controlled much of southern and central Somalia in 2006.

When, at the end of that year, the UIC was driven from power by Ethiopian troops supporting the country's transitional government, al-Shabab melted away into remote and distant parts of the country.

It has since re-emerged as a radicalised group of young fighters, who have been conducting an insurgency against the government and its Ethiopian allies, and attacking African Union peacekeepers.

The US has said al-Shabab is part of the al-Qaeda network, although analysts say it is impossible to accurately establish those links. Al-Shabab's leaders insist it is a purely Somali movement.

March 3, 2008: two Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from a US Navy submarine hit a house in Dhoble (Dobley), southern Somalia, possibly killing six people, variously described as "known al-Qaeda terrorists" (Pentagon spokesman) and "Islamist politicians" (local district commander).  The owner of the house claims his daughter and 4 cows were killed.  Kenyan sources later said that the real target -- Kenyan Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, wanted in connection with the 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam -- had left the scene shortly before the attack.

June 21, 2007: a US Navy ship fired missiles at "Islamist fighters and foreign jihadists" in the mountains of northern Puntland.  Somali sources claimed 6 people were killed, including one carrying a British passport and one an American passport, alongside a Swede and a Yemenite.

January 8, 2007: twice in a day, a US AC-130 gunship fired on cornered Islamists fleeing from Ethiopian and Somalian troops.  Apparently a small contingent of US Special Forces followed the bombings to investigate the outcome.

Bush repents, sort of

Bush interviewed by The Times of London a couple of days ago:

"I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric," Bush said. Pointing to phrases like "bring them on" and "dead or alive," he said that these "indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace."

Ya' think?