Smoke rises after an Israeli air strike in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday. (Edi Israel/AP)
Is Hamas responsible for Gaza rocket fire? Not exactly.
Israel's air offensive on the Gaza Strip today is a response to rocket fire from the coastal Palestinian enclave. Hamas, which governs the strip, has borne the brunt of the assault. The action began with a missile that targeted Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari as he drove through Gaza City today (the IDF quickly shared a video of that attack) and was followed by dozens more.
Here's how Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren explained the Gaza strikes this afternoon: "The scope of the IDF's defensive operation depends on Hamas and whether it takes the decision to cease firing missiles on our homes."
But Hamas has not been the principal one firing the rockets at Israel, at least not lately. Other, smaller militant groups in Gaza like Islamic Jihad and the popular resistance committees in the strip do much of the shooting, though the Al Qassam Brigade that Mr. Jabari headed until his death has taken credit for some attacks in recent weeks.
This may be a distinction without a difference to Israeli officials. They frequently argue that Hamas is the governing authority in Gaza, and therefore is de facto responsible for all rocket fire.
But Hamas has in fact been trying to keep rocket fire under control in the years since Israel's Operation Cast Lead in the territory in late 2008/early 2009. One of their most important men in keeping militancy under wraps? Mr. Jabari, who was powerful enough and respected enough to prevent a major outbreak of violence from Gaza that could have invited powerful reprisals.
Here's how veteran Israeli columnist Aluf Benn put it today:
Ahmed Jabari was a subcontractor, in charge of maintaining Israel's security in Gaza. This title will no doubt sound absurd to anyone who in the past several hours has heard Jabari described as "an arch-terrorist," "the terror chief of staff" or "our Bin Laden." But that was the reality for the past five and a half years. Israel demanded of Hamas that it observe the truce in the south and enforce it on the multiplicity of armed organizations in the Gaza Strip. The man responsible for carrying out this policy was Ahmed Jabari.
Now Israel is saying that its subcontractor did not do his part and did not maintain the promised quiet on the southern border. The repeated complaint against him was that Hamas did not succeed in controlling the other organizations, even though it is not interested in escalation. After Jabari was warned openly (Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff reported here at the beginning of this week that the assassination of top Hamas people would be renewed), he was executed on Wednesday in a public assassination action, for which Israel hastened to take responsibility. The message was simple and clear: You failed - you're dead.
Hamas control of the strip was never ironclad, and it could well get worse from here on out. Under the best of conditions, Hamas has had a politically understandable reluctance to target Palestinian militants who seek to strike out at Israel. A majority of the strip's population are descendants of refugees who were forced out of their homes in 1948, and the rocket-fire now falls in the areas where their ancestors formerly lived.
Hamas's rise to power there was thanks in equal measure to the widespread corruption of Fatah and to Hamas's image as a more serious and committed resister of Israel than its secular rival. So there are political costs to shutting down the militant groups that fire rockets at Israel, not to mention that such efforts could escalate into a civil war. Though Israel publicly seems to assert that Hamas can simply turn of the rocket attacks if it chooses too, the reality in Gaza is a bit more complex.
Now, Hamas will be mulling whether it should retaliate with some of the longer-range rockets from their arsenal. The argument against that would be Israel's overwhelming military advantage, which would be brought down hard on Hamas leaders, the rank and file, and average Gaza residents alike. The Hamas deal with Israel in recent years – restraining rocket attacks – has been to its own advantage. While taking a tough stance against Israel is generally popular, provoking the powerful neighbor with tactically useless rocket-fire, is not, particularly since Israel's response cause so much misery among Gaza's population.
That logic still holds, as furious as the group must be about the attacks today. So far, the message from Hamas has been fairly restrained.
Spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement: "I warn those who violate all laws and accords of grave consequences if they persist in this unprovoked aggression. The resistance has the full right to respond, to provide security and protection for the Palestinian people in the face of these repeated murderous raids." Declaring a right to respond is something different than promising a response.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a statement to the media in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, Nov. 14. Israel launched a major offensive against Palestinian militants in Gaza on Wednesday, killing the military commander of Hamas in an airstrike. (Ronen Zvulun/Reuters)
For Israel, costs and benefits of striking Gaza
(Since this story was published on November 14, a lot has happened. Some of the Monitor's latest stories include a consideration of the effectiveness of Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system, Israeli preparations for a possible ground assault on Gaza, a look at the propaganda war, an analysis of the costs and benefits of escalation for both Israel and Hamas, and sympathy for Gazans and doubts about a ground war from Israel's south, the region of the country most vulnerable to rocket fire.)
Israel's assassination of senior Hamas militant Ahmed Jabari on Wednesday appears to be just the start of the farthest-reaching offensive on Gaza for years. Various Israeli officials had been agitating for days for serious retaliation to rocket fire from Gaza, never mind Hamas promising to stop the rockets on Tuesday. Today, those officials' wish was granted.
But how serious will the retaliation be? That is the question that has yet to be answered. There have been at least two dozen airstrikes in Gaza so far today, and there are unconfirmed reports coming out of the territory that other senior Hamas officials have been targeted.
Will there be a ground incursion? Israeli Home Defense Minister Avi Dichter seemed to call for one when he said Tuesday: "There is no precedent in history of destroying terror by air power alone. It hasn't happened and it won't happen. Thus it is necessary to reformat Gaza altogether."
Or will the guns soon go silent, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refocusing on his country's January election, having bolstered his "tough on terror" credentials without a messy and uncertain ground action?
Israeli spokesmen say more than 750 rockets fired from Gaza have hit southern Israel this year. The rockets sow real and deep terror in Israeli communities. But that's about all they can do. The vast majority of the rockets from Gaza are like C-minus high school science fair projects, carry limited amounts of explosive, and are impossible to aim. For all that rocket fire, not a single Israeli has been killed by one this year.
Israel's overwhelming military superiority to all the armed groups in Gaza (Hamas may be the biggest, but it's not the one that usually fires the rockets) means that when it retaliates, lives are lost on the Palestinian side of the fence and substantial damage is done to the enclave's infrastructure. That's what happened in the last major assault on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, which ran for three weeks starting in late December 2008. The toll was more than 1,100 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead, along with devastation of Gaza's electricity system and other basic infrastructure.
Then, as now, the precipitating issue was the firing of rockets from Gaza. And then, as now, there are potential costs for Israel in an aggressive response to the Gaza militants. Hamas has an arsenal of Fajr rockets from Iran, that have much longer ranges than the rockets typically fired from Gaza. Israel says it has been targeting launch sites for the rockets in the attacks today, but has it gotten them all? Unlikely. Will Hamas decide to unleash the weapons on Israel in retaliation? Possibly.
Impact on Israel-Egypt ties?
Egypt, now led by the Muslim Brotherhood, was already edging away from its longstanding cold peace with Israel. A major offensive in Gaza will accelerate that process, and perhaps cause the Egyptian government to rethink its cooperation with Israel in sealing up Gaza's borders. State TV in Egypt is reporting that the country has recalled its ambassador from Israel.
Cast Lead's extensive civilian casualties delivered a major blow to Israel's standing, and a repeat of 2008 will likely drain additional international sympathy for the Israeli side of the conflict with the Palestinians.
And an Israeli assault in Gaza will make it much more politically costly for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to back off his promised push for Palestine to be given the status of nonmember observer state at the United Nations. He would look like an appeaser of Israel while the true Palestinian "resistance" in Gaza was suffering under Israeli weapons. (For more on the Palestinian bid at the UN, see the Monitor's briefing today.)
Causing Mr. Abbas to harden his UN stance is clearly not what Israel wants. Reuters reported today on a proposed policy document from Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's office that suggested driving Mr. Abbas from power and "dismantling the Palestinian Authority" as a possible response to a successful UN bid.
Empowering hard-liners
Would Israel really do that? Well, all things are possible. But events in Gaza suggest why that's not a very attractive option for Israel, either. The government of Mr. Netanyahu may not be happy with Abbas and the Fatah party he represents, but the Palestinian government in the West Bank has largely given up armed struggle and Abbas has been committed to the creation of a Palestinian state through negotiation. Taking him out would leave his rivals in Hamas, with whom Fatah fought and lost a brief civil war in Gaza in 2007.
Hamas, of course, takes a much harder line toward Israel than Fatah, and it now has rivals of its own in Gaza like the Islamic Jihad, who are more militant still. In the 1980s, Israel viewed the rise of Hamas as a rival to Fatah with some favor. Today, Israeli military spokesmen were calling Hamas an "Iranian proxy" on social media sites. The odds of any group that replaces Fatah being more favorable for Israel look poor.
To be sure, if Israel believes it can stop or seriously diminish the threat of rockets from Gaza, perhaps by frightening surviving Hamas leaders into suppressing rocket fire, that's a benefit that would outweigh all potential costs. But Hamas, for its own prestige, will feel the need to strike back.
In this July 2011 file photo, USMC Gen. John Allen (l.) and Army Gen. David Petraeus, greet former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta (r.) as he lands in Kabul, Afghanistan. (Paul J. Richards/AP/File)
Be wary about what you read on the Petraeus scandal
General David Petraeus was the most lionized general of his generation. General John R. Allen, the marine who replaced him as head of the Afghan war when Petraeus went to the CIA, was likewise the subject of near unanimously fawning press.
That is all over. St. David's halo has been permanently dented by the revelations of his affair with Paula Broadwell, the army reservist who he anointed as his personal biographer. And the strange tale of sex and secrets is only growing stranger, with Ms. Broadwell's North Carolina home thoroughly searched by FBI agents last night.
General Allen, who was expected to fly through a pro-forma confirmation hearing on his appointment as the head of US forces in Europe on Thursday, is now caught up in the middle of it all, though it's hard to say precisely how with any certainty, with contradictory reports flooding from unnamed "officials" and "sources" to various DC-focused reporters.
Last night, an unidentified "senior defense official" told reporters that Jill Kelley, a married Tampa Bay socialite who complained to an FBI acquaintance that she was receiving anonymous and threatening emails over her relationship with Gen. Petraeus, was linked in some way to Allen. Ms. Kelley's complaint led to the FBI probe that forced the public revelation of Petraeus' affair with Broadwell.
What's the link to Allen? Well, The Washington Post originally reported that, according to the Pentagon official, "the FBI was looking at 20,000-30,000 pages of email between Allen and Kelley that contained "potentially inappropriate" content."
That claim has been partially walked back by the same reporter in a followup in the Post this morning, The Post now reports the original allegation as: "According to a senior U.S. defense official, the FBI has uncovered between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of documents — most of them e-mails — that contain “potentially inappropriate” communication between Allen and Jill Kelley."
The distinction might seem subtle, but it isn't. The first suggests 20,000 or more emails between the two, a staggering volume that's suggestive more of forwarding on floods of email from his inbox rather than personal communication. The second refers to 20,000 or more "documents" that might contain "inappropriate" email between Kelley and Allen. That is, any contact between the two, inappropriate or not, is a subset of a large number, not its entirety.
The Post also quotes another unnamed "senior" official who appears to take Allen's side in this confusing tale. According to the second anonymous source, Allen and Kelley exchanged “'a few hundred e-mails over a couple of years,'” beginning when Allen was the deputy commander at the Central Command, this senior official said. But “most of them were about routine stuff. 'He’s never been alone with her,' the senior official said. 'Did he have an affair? No.'"
What's going on here? Well, welcome to the "wilderness of mirrors," as legendary CIA counter-intelligence boss James Jesus Angleton once called the world of deception and counter-deception in intelligence. In this case, the wilderness is the happy hunting grounds of national security reporters and the anonymous sources who love them, with self-serving spin, efforts to undermine rivals, and leaks made by concerned whistle-blowers all echoing through the hills and valleys daily.
For those of us on the outside, great care should be taken in assessing each new "reveal." For the moment, Allen's appointment to Supreme Allied Commander Europe is on hold, and if it turns out his emails with Kelley were about more than charitable balls and base dances, he will never take up that post.
So what of it? The politics of this scandal will reverberate for months, and is particularly messy given that Petraeus was also originally due for questioning this week on the large CIA operation in Benghazi that was targeted by a militia on Sept. 11, leaving four US government employees dead. But has a blow been dealt to the US military or to its intelligence capabilities?
Probably not. For each general appointed to a high post, there are other candidates just as qualified who didn't get the job. As for the leadership of the CIA, Petraeus was far from indispensable there.
The Afghan war will continue to sputter along, and the debates over the role of the CIA in the government's drone assassination program abroad, which has been championed by President Obama, will continue. Much as they were with Petraeus and Allen in harness.
Boatmen wait for passengers at a jetty Friday, Nov. 9, in Sittwe, Rakhine state, western Myanmar. Myanmar's government says it 'warmly welcomes' President Obama's decision to visit the country this month, noting it will increase the momentum of democratic reform. Obama will become the first US president to visit the once pariah nation, which is emerging from decades of military rule. (Khin Maung Win/AP)
Obama to visit Myanmar, an overture to a one-time pariah
Rarely has a country been brought back into the American fold as fast as Myanmar (also known as Burma) has.
Starting in late 2010, the military junta that has run the country since 1962 stunningly reversed course.
Not only did it release Aun San Suu Kyi, whose political party won the 1990 elections that the military promptly ignored, from almost two decades of imprisonment and house arrest, but allowed her unprecedented freedom of movement and political organization.
Last year the country swore in a civilian government – though still tightly controlled by the military – released hundreds of political prisoners, and rescinded its ban on Ms. Aun San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD).
This year, the country again released hundreds of political prisoners, held parliamentary by-elections the NLD won in a landslide, and promised elections for a new parliament in 2015.
The pace of change in Myanmar, a country whose ruling generals implacably resisted outside pressure for change for decades, even as the country descended into penury under the weight of US sanctions and the corrupt and capricious rule of the military, has been matched by American and European overtures.
This summer the EU rescinded almost all of its sanctions on Myanmar. This June the US suspended many of its own sanctions, particularly allowing US firms to invest in the government-controlled oil and gas industry, and sent Derek Mitchell as the first US ambassador to Myanmar in 22 years.
Now President Obama is making Myanmar a stop on his first international trip since winning reelection. The visit will be the first time a sitting US president has ever visited the country (when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited last year, she was the most senior US official to visit the country in five decades). Obama's trip, slated for Nov. 17-20, will also include stops in Thailand, Cambodia, and Myanmar, as part of his ongoing push for an increased US policy focus on Asia.
Has there ever been faster restoration of US relations with a country it had once worked so hard to isolate, in the absence of either a US invasion or a revolution? I can't think of one.
The once-maligned leaders are being brought in from the cold. The US even indicated in October that Burmese officers would be invited to the annual Cobra Gold military exercise between the US and Thailand as official observers.
The Obama administration's motivations are clear: Demonstrate the benefits of the generals’ political opening and turn toward democracy.
But with the breathless rush to friendship comes a country where ethnic tensions still dominate, and ethnic violence, specifically against ethnic Rohingya Muslims, that the generals have been either unwilling or unable to stop.
To much criticism, Aung San Suu Kyi has avoided both condemning and condoning the specific violence against the Rohingya, which saw 75,000 displaced in Rakhine state this June.
While she's a hero to many for her principled opposition to the military junta – at great personal cost – she's first and foremost a politician with a nationalist constituency that looks askance at many of the country's minorities, perhaps the Muslims chief among them.
So, is the US moving too fast?
The International Crisis Group (ICG), which is publishing a report on the country next Monday, says all is not well in the Southeast Asian nation. An advance copy of the report, "Myanmar: Storm Clouds on the Horizon," details a host of worries, most pressing; the violence that started out targeting Rohingyas but has apparently spread to the country's Muslim minority in general.
In the last two weeks of October, a further 89 people were killed in the communal fighting. And in a separate ethnic clash along the Thailand border, 32,000 more were driven from their homes in the Christian Karen state.
The ICG argues that the very lifting of decades of oppression can create communal violence as new freedoms lead to political jockeying.
Unquestionably. In Indonesia after the fall of Soeharto in 1998, small ethnic and religious wars flared across that sprawling nation, costing thousands of lives.
Myanmar, like Indonesia, is a patchwork of ethnicities that have spent much of the country's modern history in a tense relationship with the central government, when not in open revolt. Even new media freedoms, often seen as an antidote to violence, could have been part of the problem.
"The transition has opened up unprecedented space to organize that has been denied for decades, including for long-suppressed nationalist causes," the ICG writes. "It has allowed sub-national groups to air bitter grievances and issue a call to arms without moderation or censorship. Access to the internet has only aided the spread of these ideas."
The Rohingya people are classified as illegal migrants, although many of them came from modern day Bangladesh to Myanmar during British rule. And some 800,000 of them do not have official Burmese citizenship, despite having lived in the country for generations.
The issue surrounding the Rohingya minority, and Islam in general, is a powder keg in the majority Buddhist country.
In the ICG's words: "The experience of others in the region and the country’s own past suggest that communal tensions can be exploited and inflamed for political gain. In particular, there is a real risk that the violence in Rakhine State will take on a more explicitly Buddhist-Muslim character, with the possibility of clashes spreading to the many other areas where there are minority Muslim populations. This would have very serious consequences for stability and reform."
READ MORE: Monitor Staff Writer Peter Ford's Why deadly race riots could rattle Myanmar's fledgling reforms
The real test of change in the country will be in 2015, when full parliamentary elections are held.
Until now, all change has largely been at the pleasure of the military, which remains political powerful.
"There is a serious risk of instability if existing power holders feel threatened by their inevitable loss of political power (which is different from a serious risk of a return to authoritarianism, which is unlikely), or if important constituencies are marginalized," argues the ICG. "It will be necessary for the NLD to ensure that its expected electoral success in 2015 does not come at the expense of the broad representation needed to reflect the country’s diversity and ensure an inclusive and stable transition – whether by introducing some form of proportional representation, reaching a transitional national unity agreement with the current government, or building coalitions with other parties."
If all goes well, the Obama administration’s overture toward Myanmar will go down as a major foreign policy achievement, and more importantly signal a brighter future for Mynmar’s 48 million people. But there are challenges and pitfalls ahead, and with each concession the US and other major powers make before 2015, a potential carrot to offer for positive change is spent.
Hopefully, Obama will not have gone to Myanmar too soon.
More coming across the border.. or less? (REUTERS)
On marijuana and the Mexican drug war...
Earlier today, I wrote a piece expressing skepticism that legalization of marijuana in Washington and Colorado could deal a major blow to that country's violent drug gangs.
But one point that I failed to consider is the impact of two approved US ballot measures on Mexican policy. It turns out that incoming Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto may adjust his country's approach to tackling marijuana production in his country in response.
The AP reports that the head of President Pena Nieto's transition team Luis Videgaray told Radio Formula that:
... the Mexican administration taking power in three weeks remains opposed to drug legalization. But he said the votes in the two states complicate his country's commitment to quashing the growing and smuggling of a plant now seen by many as legal in part of the U.S.
"Obviously we can't handle a product that is illegal in Mexico, trying to stop its transfer to the United States, when in the United States, at least in part of the United States, it now has a different status," Videgaray said. "I believe this obliges us to think the relationship in regards to security ... This is an unforeseen element."
Videgaray stopped short of threatening to curtail Mexican enforcement of marijuana laws, but his comments, less than three weeks before Pena Nieto travels to the White House days before taking office, appeared likely to increase pressure on the Obama administration to strictly enforce U.S. federal law, which still forbids recreational pot use.
The AP also quotes Alejandro Hope, a former senior Mexican intelligence official who helped author a paper arguing that Mexican drug gangs would be damaged by the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington (summarized here) as saying that if the US federal government cracks down on the marijuana trade anyways, the impact in Mexico will be negligible. What will the Obama administration do? We'll see.
And if the Mexican government becomes less interested in enforcing anti-marijuana laws, will that make much difference? On the one hand, probably not. The big drug traffickers move cocaine as well, and remain a violent threat to government authority in multiple Mexican states. But if it does, the marijuana business could become a less dangerous, and therefore less expensive, business for Mexican traffickers to engage in. It's not inconceivable that could lead to much cheaper Mexican marijuana entering the US than currently.
Medical marijuana is packaged for sale in 1-gram packages at the Northwest Patient Resource Center medical marijuana dispensary, Nov. 7, in Seattle. After voters weighed in on election day, Colorado and Washington became the first states to allow possession of up to 1 oz. of legal pot for recreational use. (Ted S. Warren/AP)
Does legal marijuana in the US really mean trouble for Mexican drug cartels?
It has long been a popular argument among campaigners for reform of America's marijuana laws that legalization would strike a major blow against the violent Mexican drug gangs that have brought so much misery to parts of that country and, increasingly, along the US border.
The logic is simple. Marijuana smuggling is a major earner for drug gangs, so a legal crop in the US would have a dramatic impact on their operations, lowering the amount of money available to them to bribe cops and hire killers south of the border.
Fairly typical of the tone of such reporting was a nice piece for the Monitor earlier this month by Sara Miller Llana, titled "Biggest blow to Mexican drug cartels? It could be on your state ballot."
The piece summarizes a paper from a Mexican think tank that argued legalization in any of the three US states considering legalizing recreational use of the drug – Oregon, Washington, and Colorado – could do major damage to organized crime south of the border:
A “yes” for any state would have huge implications for the US, but the referendums would also have ramifications south of the border. A new study released by the think tank Mexican Competitiveness Institute (IMCO) shows that if the referendums do pass, proceeds for Mexican drug trafficking organizations could be cut by up to 30 percent, depending on which state goes forward with the referendum. (Read the report here in Spanish.)
“The possible legalization of marijuana at the state level in the US could provoke a considerable loss in proceeds of drug trafficking for Mexican criminal organizations,” the report concludes. In fact, it says, ballot initiatives Tuesday could represent the biggest blow to Mexican criminal syndicates in decades.
Well, yes, it could. But with Washington and Colorado now having passed their measures (voters rejected legalization in Oregon), the theory of "more legal pot = less drug violence in Mexico" is about to be put to the test of experience, with a whole host of assumptions made about its salutary effect coming up against facts.
Color me skeptical. While any student of American history knows that Prohibition creates the opportunity for big profits for criminal syndicates, and violence always follows that, the prediction of a big hit in the cartel pocketbook relies on a set of uncertain assumptions: That marijuana production in Washington and Colorado will surge; that this additional supply, without the expense and danger of crossing an international border, will be cheaper and bleed out into the 48 other states, displacing Mexican imports; and that the malign influence of drug gangs on Mexican society will therefore be reduced.
The Mexican think tank estimates that $6 billion a year is derived from marijuana exports from Mexico. Is this estimate accurate? Hard to say. It's not as if we can crunch the numbers from excise tax rolls. But let's assume that's a fairly accurate picture – what portion does that represent of cartel income? Well, nobody knows.
The US Justice Department has estimated that drug shipments from Mexico are worth a total of $18 billion to $39 billion a year, a staggeringly wide range that shows how hard it is to quantify the economics of the overall trade. Is the $6 billion assumption one-third of overall illegal drug shipments? Or is it one-sixth? Or some other number entirely?
Then there are the assumptions of what legalization will cost the drug gangs. The think tank suggests that roughly $2.7 billion in cartel income will be lost as a result of legalization in Colorado and Washington, as new legal production comes on line. But Washington is already one of the top 10 producers of marijuana in the US (as is Oregon).
While surely some additional acreage will come on line in response to legalization, the Feds will be watching closely for evidence that Washington state's marijuana is flooding its neighbors, and growers will still face the risk of seizure of property under federal laws by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Any businessman thinking about a major marijuana operation in Washington or Colorado, particularly one that will rely on markets where the drug is still deemed illegal, will think long and hard about how much capital to risk. The Obama administration has been fairly aggressive in going after major pot businesses in states that already have legalized medical marijuana.
Finally, there is the fact that cocaine and heroin are far more profitable ounce for ounce for drug traffickers than marijuana. A kilogram of Mexican pot wholesales for about $1,200 in the US. Meanwhile, drug gangs are thought to buy a kilogram of cocaine in South America for about $2,000, and the wholesale value of that kilogram is about $30,000 by the time it makes it to the other side of the Rio Grande (and ends up retailing for as much as $100,000). There are enormous expenses in transporting the drugs compared to legal goods, what with bribes, violence, "taxes" charged by other gangs to cross their territory, the loss of product to seizures, and the fuss of smuggling across the border.
But within that 15-fold markup, there's a lot of pure profit, surely enough that it could make sense for Mexican drug gangs to try to make up for lost revenue with a volume strategy: Cut their profit margins on the US side of the border to stimulate demand, and increase overall profits (potentially leading to an increase in the use of a far more dangerous drug). And a kilogram is still a kilogram. Moving a high-value good per weight makes a lot more sense than moving a low-value one, when the risk of seizure and prosecution is about the same.
Don't get me wrong. I dearly hope that lives are saved, in Mexico and the US, because of the current, uncertain legalization experiments about to begin in Washington and Colorado. A total end to marijuana prohibition in the US would kill stone-dead illegal marijuana imports, much as it killed illegal liquor imports from Canada after the 18th Amendment was repealed in 1933.
But the US is a long, long way from that. And the thirst for illegal profits is never slaked. Sadly, the grim toll of Mexico's war with drug gangs (with an estimated 55,000 people killed in the last six years) is likely to lurch on.
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula (c.) is escorted out of his home by Los Angeles County Sheriff's officers in Cerritos, California in this September 15 photo. (Bret Hartman/Reuters)
Architect of anti-Islam YouTube clip returns to jail
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula (AKA "Mark Basseley Youssef"; AKA "Sam Bacile;" etc...) was returned to jail yesterday.
Mr. Nakoula, a Coptic Christian and Egyptian immigrant to the US, was jailed for violating the terms of his parole over an earlier fraud conviction stemming from a scheme he ran to steal money from ATM machines. He's far, far better known as the author of the script that became the YouTube clip that prompted a brief takeover of the US embassy in Egypt, and continues to feed much confusion around what exactly happened in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11.
Why has he gone back to prison? Given the nature of his financial fraud, the terms of his release required him to use only his legal name, to tell the truth to his parole officers. In the making of the YouTube clip, he told actors hired for the film that his name was "Sam Bacile." The actors themselves were misled about his plans for the movie, with the most virulently anti-Islamic content dubbed in over their lines later.
In conversations with reporters after the controversy erupted in September, he continued to claim his name was "Sam Bacile" and also lied in claiming that he was an Israeli citizen. His lies, not the content of his video, finally caught up with him.
I wrote about the film as a small cog in the outrage machine between anti-Islam activists in the West and chauvinistic and intolerant Muslim clerics and followers in the East at the time. For a few days, it looked like another major outbreak of mob violence was coming on the heels of the movie, much like what happened after Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in 2005.
But as it turned out, the violence subsided far more quickly. The US embassy breach in Cairo was alarming, but more for what it said about the competence of Egyptian security and perhaps the attention of its new Muslim Brotherhood-led government than of some swelling wave of anti-Americanism. The murder of four US government employees in Benghazi, among them the ambassador to Libya, was at most opportunistically linked to the video, if that. The jihadis who attacked the US government intelligence gathering and diplomatic operations in Libya's second-largest city had planned their attack for some time, and hardly needed extra encouragement to attack Americans.
What's most interesting now is how little notice has been taken of Nakoula's return to prison. While some have expressed suspicion that the push to prosecute Nakoula is more about punishing his speech than his parole violation, there is no evidence to support that, and US officials have not drummed up attention to his punishment as would be expected if this were about mollifying the Muslim world. And so, what seemed like one of the biggest stories in the world for a few days in September is of almost no public interest today.
Dan Senor and Paul Ryan flying off the campaign trail. (Mary Altaffer/AP)
After Obama win, say goodbye to neocons
Dan Senor has no more influence in the White House today than he did yesterday.
That's the key foreign policy takeaway from the US reelection of President Barack Obama last night. Mitt Romney had surrounded himself with neocons and other hawkish advisers, eager to regain the influence they lost when John McCain fell to Mr. Obama in 2008. Now, it looks like four more years in the wilderness for them.
The chance that the US will start a new war has decreased, and Obama and like-minded officials will continue to put their realist stamp on US foreign relations as they wind down the Afghanistan war and try to use sanctions, rather than combat, to slow Iran's nuclear program. The dreams of transforming the world with US troops and tanks that inflamed so many of President Bush's advisers at the start of the Iraq war, will now be dreamt a long way from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Mr. Senor was a key political player for the Bush administration in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, advising Paul Bremer on how to run the country in 2003 and 2004. The frequent Fox News commentator emerged as Mr. Romney's main adviser for the Middle East, squiring him on visits to the UK and Israel. John Bolton, the Bush-Cheney ambassador to the UN (who is famous for hating the UN, among other things), also had Romney's ear and was rumored to be under consideration for Secretary of State in a Romney cabinet. Mr. Bolton has openly mused about going to war with Iran and Syria, and continues to insist the Iraq invasion and occupation was the right course of action.
In all, 17 of Romney's 24 foreign policy advisers served under President Bush, according to Democratic Congressman Adam Smith, and the US approach to both war and peace abroad would have taken on a decidedly more Bushian cast if Romney had won. While Americans mostly voted on pocketbook issues, the fact that most American voters dislike the Bush approach certainly didn't help Romney at the polls. Among the small number of voters who said they cared deeply about foreign policy, Obama had a 56-33 edge over Romney.
That more hawkish orientation was the reason that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was so eager for a Romney victory, since he expected the a Romney White House could be easier to talk into going to war with Iran than an Obama one.
It will be interesting to watch how Obama handles the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the years ahead, given his chilly relations with the Israeli prime minister. While it is unlikely that Obama will make any dramatic overtures to change the nature of US-Israeli relations, Mr. Netanyahu may find an administration that isn't as wholehearted, for instance, in arguing Israel's case at the United Nations.
But in the broad strokes we'll be getting more of the same, with Obama promising to end the Afghanistan war by the end of 2014. The president was reluctant to get directly involved in the civil war in Syria before the election, and that reluctance is likely to persist.
But while there will be fewer boots on the ground, that doesn't mean Obama doesn't have an aggressive foreign policy of his own. It's just of a different style. The president seems as fond of using drones to kill America's alleged enemies abroad as ever, for instance. Obama has ordered alleged Al Qaeda-style militants killed by the hundreds on his watch in Pakistan and Yemen.
This undeclared drone war probably won't abate, with reports from Washington that Obama officials have been working on ways to justify the killings as legal, even when they involve the assassination of American citizens. There is simply no constituency in Washington against it. And the neocons, as they retreat back to their think-tanks and analyst positions on cable news shows, certainly won't complain.
Which way? (Bernard Gagnon/Wikimedia Commons GNU Free Documentation License)
From a distance, Syria 'feels' like Iraq in 2004
Mass casualty suicide car bombs. Kidnappings and executions of noncombatants for having the wrong political views. Religious antagonism. An expanding circle of death beyond leaders and fighters to their loved ones. Violence that can descend almost anywhere in an instant, one part traditional combat, two parts terror tactics and civilian ambushes carried out by a patchwork of militias with murky allegiances and ideologies.
That paragraph well describes Iraq at the start of 2004. The real post-Saddam bloodletting was just getting underway, and while death squads and suicide bombings were spreading dread from Basra in the south to Mosul in the north, almost no one had a full handle on what was happening, or the horrors that were to come. I certainly didn't see what was coming, or at least didn't want to believe what I was seeing on the ground.
Well, from a distance (I have not covered the war in Syria on the ground), Syria now "feels" a lot like Iraq did then. In the past two days or so, there was a suicide bombing in Hama province that was claimed by the Sunni Jihadi group Jabhat al-Nusra and that a pro-opposition group said killed 50 members of the Syrian government security forces. Yesterday, the funeral was held for pro-government television actor Mohamed Rafia, who was abducted and executed by rebels on Friday. Earlier today, Mohamed Osama al-Laham, the brother of Syrian parliament speaker Jihad al-Laham, was assassinated in Damascus.
More generally, fighting raged around the country, with government war planes strafing rebel positions and civilian neighborhoods in rebel-held areas alike. More than 150 people were killed across Syria, many civilians, on Monday.
To be sure, there are stark differences between Iraq then and Syria now. There has been no foreign invasion or occupation, and there are lots of specific differences between the two countries. While Iraq under Saddam had a Sunni-dominated Baathist government and a Shiite majority, in Syria the Alawite sect of Bashar al-Assad is dominant politically and Sunnis are dominant numerically.
A further wrinkle is the presence of the descendants of Palestinians who lost their homes in the foundation of Israel, and now number more than 400,000 people.
The Palestinian community in Syria appears split. While many have taken up arms against Assad, still others have fought on his behalf. There have been persistent claims of Palestinian militiamen from Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command fighting on the side of Assad's forces in some districts of the capital.
The AP reports there's an element of inter-Palestinian conflict in the fighting, with the PFLP-GC saying the fighting started after Palestinians fighting with the rebellion attacked civilians in the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk.
But there are plenty of similarities, particularly the substantial presence of jihadis in Syria, much as they were in Iraq. These are very much the same sort of people who were fighting the US troops in Iraq (and running death squads against Shiites) during the war there. Aaron Zelin shares on Twitter this pre-martyrdom picture of Libyan Ahmad Bishasha, characteristic of Al Qaeda-style propaganda. Jahbat al-Nusra claims that Mr. Bishasha carried out a suicide attack on that group's behalf yesterday.
The international community is looking on with ineffectual alarm, particularly with an eye toward the chances of major sectarian reprisal killings if Assad is defeated and the victorious rebels end up having large numbers of the jihadis in their ranks. UN Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi told the pan-Arab newspaper al-Hayat that Syria may "turn into a new Somalia" dominated by warlords and militias in the wake of a government collapse. Mr. Brahimi says he wants a binding resolution from the UN Security Council on a Syrian transition to end the fighting, though he's well aware that Russia has vowed to exercise its veto against any such resolution.
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister David Cameron tells Al Arabiya that safe passage out of Syria with a promise of no war crimes prosecution "could be arranged."
“Done. Anything, anything, to get that man out of the country and to have a safe transition in Syria,” he told the network. "Of course I would favor him facing the full force of international law and justice for what he’s done. I am certainly not offering him an exit plan to Britain, but if he wants to leave he could leave, that could be arranged."
For now, Assad remains defiant, and he's pounding both the rebels and civilians who oppose him with artillery, warplanes, and helicopter gunships.
How Syria will play out in the coming months is anyone's guess. When regimes collapse, they collapse fast. But until something changes, Syria looks more and more like Iraq on the verge of the worst horrors of its own civil war every day.
All our base are belong to them? (From Wikimedia Commons under GNU Free Documentation License)
'Cyberterror' and Chinese hackers
Find someone who works on security, find an alarmist.
Whether it's the IT guys where you work pestering you to change your password every couple of weeks, to a general briefing from Congress on "emerging" threats (that will require big new spending to counter, of course), people who are paid to worry about danger always overestimate on the downside.
And fair enough. When the worst happens, the outraged cry goes up: "Why didn't you see this coming and prevent it?!" (frequently from the same people who were cutting budgets on security, e.g. Benghazi). It's generally a good idea to have your security people losing sleep at night over insecurity.
But the discussion in the US of the security of government computers can be exasperating in its hyperbole, even when it's dealing with real threats. Consider Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last month. In an Oct. 11 speech on "cybersecurity" (the charmingly archaic "cyber" seems to live on only in government discourse about modern information technology), he seemed to suggest that a computer virus or infiltration of government computers by a hostile foreign power could kill thousands of Americans.
"Before Sept. 11, 2001, the warning signs were there. We weren't organized. We weren't ready and we suffered terribly for that lack of attention. We cannot let that happen again. This is a pre-9/11 moment," Panetta said. "The greater danger facing us in cyberspace goes beyond crime and it goes beyond harassment. A cyber attack perpetrated by nation states (or) violent extremists groups could be as destructive as the terrorist attack on 9/11. Such a destructive cyber-terrorist attack could virtually paralyze the nation."
The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington claimed nearly 3,000 lives. That led the US into two wars that claimed thousands more American lives and those of tens of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis. As far as I'm aware, the current cumulative death toll from "cyberattacks" globally is zero.
This isn't to downplay the real Internet security arms race. Do the Chinese, or the Russians, want to use computer viruses and other forms of electronic snooping to steal US secrets? Obviously. Can computer viruses be used as weapons, to perhaps infiltrate the control systems of missiles or electric grids? You only have to look at the Stuxnet virus that successfully targeted Iran's nuclear enrichment program to see the reality of that.
Clearly a lot of brain power is going in to malicious software, from governments to gangsters. And of course, there's lots of gray area, with all of the data-mining programs that now run in the background of our Internet use, compiling databases of personal information to better target everything from pitches to buy new cars to campaigns for politicians. Or efforts to game online advertising (this story today claims that automated Internet use – bots – jumped to 36 percent of all Internet traffic from 6 percent last year, mostly due to scams to victimize online advertisers).
Another story that caught my eye today on this comes from Bloomberg, which got a peek of a draft of an annual Internet security report for Congress.
"China is 'the most threatening actor in cyberspace' as its intelligence agencies and hackers use increasingly sophisticated techniques to gain access to U.S. military computers and defense contractors," Bloomberg summarizes.
One statistic in that story is highly suggestive of Chinese interest in exploiting the Internet, though I'd bet a lot of the activity is commercial fraud mixed in among Peoples Liberation Army efforts. Apparently, statistics from the company Cloudfire show that on an average day, 15 percent of Internet activity is malicious – viruses, attempted hacks, malware, and so on. Yet on a major Chinese holiday last year malicious traffic plummeted to 6.5 percent of the total.
Suggestive, to be sure.
But so far, computer code doesn't kill. Certainly not directly. On my personal fear scale, I rate "cyberterrorism" a "meh."
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