Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R) of Utah (left) and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R) of California, both claim the Benghazi consulate sought more security before the deadly Sept. 11 Libya attack, voted to cut the State Department's embassy security budget. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File)
Libya attack: Congressmen casting blame voted to cut diplomatic security budget
Who's to blame for the Sept. 11 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi?
If you believe Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz, the answer is the State Department. He complained in an interview with The Daily Beast yesterday that US guards were replaced with Libyan nationals in the months before the attack.
"The fully trained Americans who can deal with a volatile situation were reduced in the six months leading up to the attacks," he told the website. "When you combine that with the lack of commitment to fortifying the physical facilities, you see a pattern.”
Mr. Chaffetz has been among those leading the Republican effort to pin the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi on the Obama administration. Earlier claims from Chaffetz and fellow Republican Congressman Darrell Issa that the administration ignored pleas for more security from Libya embassy officials should be treated with caution until there's some proof.
But it's certainly true that US embassy security is under strain around the world. Foreign nationals increasingly replace US citizens in everything from visa offices to security details. The new consulate in Benghazi, just over a year old, would have been particularly top-heavy with US nationals to start. Some reduction in US staffing was inevitable.
After I wrote a piece earlier this week about the political gain being sought from the deaths of Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, a number of diplomatic acquaintances of mine emailed to say I should have looked at the State Department's security budget. Two of them had unprintable things to say about Congress.
Who can be blamed for that? Well, Chaffetz and Issa among others.
Since retaking control in 2010, House Republicans have aggressively cut spending at the State Department in general and embassy security in particular. Chaffetz and Issa and their colleagues voted to pay for far less security than the State Department requested in 2011 and again this year.
A bit rich
Is that responsible for the tragedy in Benghazi? Probably not, at least not entirely. Usually when security goes wrong, it's down to a cascade of small failures piling up. But it's a bit rich to complain about a lack of US security personnel at diplomatic missions on the one hand, while actively working to cut the budget to pay for US security personnel at diplomatic missions on the other.
It would have been Ambassador Stevens' call as to whether he made that visit from Tripoli, with advice from his regional security adviser. If they thought there was a high likelihood of an attack, they wouldn't have gone. They sadly got it wrong. A glaring intelligence failure? A cavalier attitude towards security? Or simply bad luck, in a dangerous country that the US is eager to see stabilized?
To be sure, the embassy security budget has been under the knife for years. “During both the latter years of the Bush presidency and throughout the Obama presidency, the administration has recommended boosting spending on foreign aid and [State Department] foreign operations, including security, and Congress has always cut it back,” Philip Crowley, a former State Department spokesman under President Obama, told the Washington Times in late September.
What's the gap between security budget requests from State and the actions of Congress?
Scott Lilly, who spent three decades as a senior staffer for Democrats in Congress, often working on budget matters, and now a fellow at the Center for American Progress in DC, says the cuts sought by Congress have been steep since the new House sat in 2011.
The Worldwide Security Protection program (WSP), which the government says provides "core funding for the protection of life, property, and information of the Department of State," and a separate embassy security and construction budget, which in part improves fortifications, have both been under fire.
"In 2011 they came in and passed a continuing resolution for the remainder of that fiscal year. The House proposed $70 million cut in the WSP and they proposed a $204 million cut in Embassy security," says Mr. Lilly. "Then the next year, fiscal 2012, they cut worldwide security by $145 million and embassy security by $376 million. This year's bill is the same thing all over again. The House has cut the worldwide security budget $149 million below the request."
Roughly 260 installations
That's not the actual budget – simply the negotiating position of Congress. The Senate and the President have sought more money than the House for embassy security, but the horse-trading means that the State Department ends up with less than it requested. For instance, in the fiscal 2012 budget, the cuts over the State Departments' request were "whittled back by the Senate," he says, to $109 million for WSP and $131 million for embassy security.
"We've got something like 260 embassies and consulates around the world, and there's a remarkable number of them that aren't anywhere close to Inman standards and are still particularly dangerous," says Lilly. "Inman standards" refers to the report written by Admiral Bobby Ray Inman on US building security abroad after the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut that left 241 US troops and 58 French soldiers dead.
Nearly 30 years later, many US missions abroad don't meet the code. Lilly recalls traveling to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, on a congressional delegation years ago and finding the embassy, in a crumbling old Soviet party building, cramped and nowhere near a safe offset from the road to guard against attacks. "They had file cabinets on landings of stairways because they had so little room, the building was barely five feet off the road," he says. "It was so bad I got Bob Livingston, who was chairman of the appropriations committee at the time, to cancel an event and go look at it. He was so upset that he put an earmark in a bill to fix it."
I suggested to Lilly that if there weren't enough trained personnel for diplomatic protection in Libya, then maybe Stevens should have reined his operation in and done a lot less. Basically bow to the limitations.
He pushed back on that idea: "If the foreign service took that attitude, a hell of a lot less would get done. They know they're taking risks just by living in these places. They're pretty adventuresome and they've got to get out and do the job," he says. "Benghazi is a critical point in creating a stable environment in Libya, and Stevens knew he had to get out and work it."
To be sure, US missions abroad are much safer now than they were years ago, thanks to the Inman standards and a major overhaul of security measures after the 1998 Al Qaeda attacks on three US embassies in Africa.
Adam Serwer at Mother Jones wrote earlier this week on embassy security in a piece that has a chart on attacks on US diplomats going back to 1970. It shows that annual attacks have declined sharply since over 30 in 1991.
Libyan investigators leave the US Consulate, in Benghazi, Libya, Sept. 15 after finishing their investigation regarding the attack that killed US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. (Mohammad Hannon/AP/File)
The politics around the Benghazi consulate attack? Plenty of spin to go around
The murder of US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three Americans in Benghazi, Libya three weeks ago was a tragedy. Serious questions have to be asked – indeed, are being asked – about the local security failures that led to their deaths and what to do next.
Why was a lightly guarded US Ambassador in a semi-lawless Libyan city filled with militias, both pro- and anti-American ones? And on the anniversary of Al Qaeda's 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington? Should threats, albeit vague and non-specific ones, have been taken more seriously by Ambassador Stevens and the diplomatic security team around him? What's the best way to identify and dismantle the group responsible for the murders? And, most importantly, what are the benefits of having diplomats that take some risks versus the costs of having a fearful diplomatic corps living in bunkers?
But are these the questions being asked by America's political classes? No. Instead we have an ever increasing drumbeat of partisan attacks entirely focused on attacking President Barack Obama as the race for the White House against Mitt Romney enters its closing stages.
The entire aftermath of the event has been played for cheap political gain, with little real focus on the big picture. And that's a minor tragedy in its own right.
Jimmy Carterizing Obama
For weeks, the Republicans have been seeking to create a useful election "narrative." They're trying to hold President Obama personally responsible for the deaths and to "Jimmy Carterize" him in the eyes of the electorate for: 1. Failing to personally oversee security arrangements at the State Department's roughly 270 embassies and consulates; 2. The contradictory statements and flip-flopping that poured out of senior officials in the first week after the attack.
Point 1 is patently absurd, and has been fed entirely by political partisans or their media surrogates. Whatever mistakes were made that allowed the coordinated attack on the Benghazi consulate to take place, they don't rise to the rank of the president. It's a level of detail presidents don't handle and couldn't if they wanted to. If you believe that Obama is responsible for a failure to personally put together a series of vague threats and non-specific warnings into concrete knowledge that an attack was planned for Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, then you should also believe that President George W. Bush was personally responsible for the intelligence failures that led to the murder of 2,977 people in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001.
Neither case is fair.
Point 2, however, has some legs. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President Obama and others made strong, non-specific statements in the first day or so after the attack that tracked what any informed observer believed: That the involved a level of complexity that required some advanced planning from a reasonably well-organized group. Before facts were in, it was reasonable to believe it might have been simply mob violence whipped up by an anti-Islam YouTube video, which did indeed spawn a small crowd of protesters outside the consulate. But not after details emerged – if anything the protesters provided an opportunistic form of cover for the attackers, which also were set up on a US safe-house on the outskirts of town.
But then on Sept. 16, the message from a White House that's usually pretty good at controlling the message changed abruptly. UN Ambassador Susan Rice started saying things like "we do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or planned" and implying that the event was a spontaneous attack. State Department spokesmen declined to characterize the attack as "terrorism."
This story eventually changed to one that much better fits the available information. Why the strange turnaround? It seems quite likely that the administration feared admitting an attack of terrorism against the US ambassador to Libya, a country whose uprising Obama had championed, would be political damaging. Just like the Republicans, there's been an element of spin here.
But team Obama within a week got on song with the facts, and is moving forward. End of story? Hardly. First there's been a campaign to undermine Ambassador Rice from the right that's been at times comic in its messengers.
Rumsfeld's chutzpah
For instance on Monday night, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld raced into the lead of the chutzpah stakes. Lobbed a question from Fox News' Greta Van Susteren on whether Rice should resign because her early comments on the consulate attack emphasized the importance of the anti-Islam YouTube video, Rumsfeld said: "I thought it was amazing that someone in her position would go on with that degree of certainty, that fast, and that authoritatively, and be that wrong" and that "her presentation was demonstrated to be inaccurate within a matter of hours, which has got to be embarrassing."
Mr. Rumsfeld, of course, has never expressed a shred of remorse or embarrassment for insisting that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or that the US invasion of Iraq would be a glorious achievement that would enhance America's standing in the world. The war in Iraq cost the US $4 trillion and 4,480 soldiers. The cost of the tragedy in Benghazi will be well south of that.
On Tuesday, former Vice President Dick Cheney told Sean Hannity of Fox News on Hannity's radio program that "Benghazi demonstrates that [the Obama Administration doesn't] have a handle on foreign policy and national security matters" and that the Libya investigation "is going to get messier and messier, and in fact, it looks like the administration’s been involved in a cover-up claiming that it was all caused by this YouTube video when in fact it was clearly the result of the developments with respect to Al Qaeda and terrorism in North Africa.... they refuse to recognize the situation we are in, and that's the first step towards ultimate failure and ultimately, future terrorist attacks."
Vice President Cheney was a leading figure in the aftermath of the original 9/11 attack arguing that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved and urging war on his regime in Iraq.
Ahead of tonight's debate between Obama and Romney, the Republican effort to make the attack in Benghazi an act of criminal negligence on the part of the administration has heated up. Leading the charge have been Republican congressmen Darrell Issa of California and Jason Chaffetz of Utah from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who released a letter they sent to Ms. Clinton on Tuesday charging that "Washington" denied extra security requested by people working with the US government in Libya.
"Multiple US Federal government officials have confirmed to the Committee that, prior to the Sept. 11 attack, the US mission made repeated requests for increased security in Benghazi," the pair wrote. "The mission in Libya, however, was denied these resources by official Washington."
This is a stunning charge, and no evidence for it is given. I find it very, very hard to believe that the State Department would have denied repeated requests for extra security in Benghazi, a city where security incidents involving foreigners have been on the rise in the past year. Since the Al Qaeda attacks on three US embassies in Africa in 1998, diplomatic protection has been a top priority and US embassies have been turned into fortresses. While incompetence is always possible, the way Mr. Issa and Mr. Chaffetz have framed their letter it sounds as if the State Department told its people in the field to jump in a lake when they said they feared for their lives.
A Facebook threat
Some of what they write to bolster their case that the events in Benghazi could have been headed off seems rather strained. For instance they write:
"Ambassador Stevens was in the habit of taking early morning runs around Tripoli along with members of his security detail. According to sources, sometime in June 2012, a posting on a pro-Gaddafi Facebook page trumpeted these runs and directed a threat against Ambassador Stevens along with a stock photo of him. It is reported that after stopping these morning runs for about a week, the Ambassador resumed them."
Stevens was probably killed by an Islamist group empowered by the ouster of Muammar Qaddafi. And he was killed in Benghazi, a very long way indeed from Tripoli. Was it imprudent of him to resume running after pausing to assess the threat posed by a Facebook posting? It's hard to say. Is the implication from the congressmen that the experienced Arabic speaker, whose strength as a diplomat was building local relationships, should have stayed confined to embassy grounds because threats (which are always made) were made? Perhaps.
As I said, it's very hard to believe a diplomatic mission's urgent requests for tighter security were ignored up the chain of command. But if evidence is provided for their assertions, that could prove damaging indeed. Another Fox News story out this morning seeks to bolster this case. The network says it obtained letters that "show the State Department refused to get involved when the company tasked with protecting the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, raised security concerns."
The only quotes used from the letters in the Fox story are from one dating to July 10. Fox quotes the letter, written by State Department contracting officer Jan Visintainer as saying "The government is not required to mediate any disagreements between the two parties of the Blue Mountain Libya partnership" and that up until that point the "contract performance is satisfactory." Blue Mountain is a security contractor to the State Department in Libya with a Libyan and UK branch. According to unnamed people that Fox spoke to, the Libyan side of the partnership was worried that security was seriously inadequate. If the State Department was brushing off security concerns, that is both tragic and scandalous. But nothing quoted from the letters amounts to proving that in the Fox story. Perhaps more will be forthcoming.
Whatever new revelations are brought forth, political hay will be made, and the punditocracy will thunder down the TV about the greatest scandal of all time, before they move on to the next thing after the election, no matter who wins.
All this will continue to obscure the meaningful debate over how best to do diplomatic outreach in dangerous corners of the world, how to balance security and access, and what if any risks are acceptable.
Muslim protesters burn a US flag during a protest against the film 'Innocence of Muslims,' which ridicules Islam and depicts the Prophet Muhammad as a fraud, a womanizer, and a madman, outside the US Embassy in Jakarta, Monday. (Dita Alangkara/AP)
A big, angry Indonesian protest you may have missed (video)
A small protest outside the US Embassy in Jakarta last Monday (the original version of this story said "Friday," apologies) was rolled into the global Islamopocalypse coverage.
Old friend Arian Ardie pointed out on Facebook that an angry, mostly-Muslim crowd also protested in Jakarta a year ago today. That protest got far less media attention than the one spearheaded by the Front Pembela Islam (Islam Defenders Front) at the embassy on Monday. (I wrote a little bit about the FPI earlier this year). The same number of protesters, more or less, were involved in both, which both started at the Hotel Indonesia traffic circle, not far from the US embassy.
Given recent events I thought the Sept. 18, 2011 protest deserves a little more attention:
What riled those folks up? Jakarta governor Fauzi Bowo said after two horrific gang rapes in the city that women wearing "provocative" clothing were partly responsible for the crimes. He soon apologized.
To be sure, the Islamist protest against the US, over a video clip put on YouTube by an anti-Islam activist, was far more raucous and potentially violent (I've put some footage of the protest -- teargas! shouting! great TV! -- below for comparison). And it certainly should have been reported in the context of a wave of protests across the globe prompted by the insulting YouTube video. But have a look at both protests, and remember that the "Muslim world" monolith is a fiction.
A Shiite Muslim holds a placard during an anti-American rally organised by the Majlis-e-Wahdat-e-Muslimeen (MWM) in Lahore September 17. Pakistani police fired in the air to disperse a crowd headed towards the US consulate in the city of Karachi on Monday to protest against a film mocking the Prophet Mohammad. (Mohsin Raza/Reuters)
Is the Islamopocalypse really upon us?
You are forgiven if you hold the mistaken belief that the entire Muslim world is aflame with anti-American "rage." Cable news has been pumping the message for days now, and Newsweek has jumped on the bandwagon with a cover that perfects the approach to the world's 1.5 billion Muslims as a violent, reactive mob.
"Muslim Rage," screams the banner headline for an article written by anti-Islam activist Ayaan Hirsan Ali, over a picture of two men (one helpfully wearing a turban) looking rageful. "How I survived it, How we can end it," goes the subhead.
I'll return later to the policy dangers of viewing the world's Muslim inhabitants as an undifferentiated mass that can be "solved."
But it's time for some perspective. The protests in more than 20 Muslim countries, over a deliberately insulting YouTube video, have been small. Small as a proportion of the world's Muslims, and small when compared to other Muslim "insult" protests in the past. And almost certainly small, when their impact is considered a few months from now.
As the #muslimrage Twitter hashtag (killing Newsweek with comedy) has pointed out all day, most Muslims aren't raging at the US or anything else. Some are raging at rude taxi drivers. Others are kind of nervous about problems at work. And still others are thinking about maybe having a sandwich.
While sensational headlines have played up the story, the cumulative total of protesters so far in about 30 countries appears well under 100,000. At Tahrir Square on Friday, wide angle overhead shots (rather than the tight, ground shots favored by TV news producers) showed a sparse group reminiscent of Mubarak-era political protests (when people ran a major risk of going to jail for simply shouting slogans) and not the hundreds of thousands that have routinely come out to protest against their own government in the past year-and-a-half.
And if you expect the occasional mass freakout like this, as I do, there's actually a small sign of progress in these protests. The protests over the Danish cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad in 2006 were larger and more violent, and there was far less in the way of condemnations of the violence and apologies from Muslim-majority states than there have been this go around.
Ashraf Khalil, whose judgment I trust, estimated about 1,000 protesters at Tahrir on Friday, with a further 300 football hooligans picking a fight with riot police nearby. That's in a city of 15 million people, at least 90 percent of them Muslim. In Jakarta, Indonesia, a few hundred protesters clashed with police (who outnumbered them by 3 or 4 to 1) near the US embassy. Jakarta is, like Cairo, another sprawling Muslim majority city.
I've seen big protests in both – the popular uprising that ended the US-backed dictator Soeharto's reign in 1998, and the popular uprising that ended the US-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak's reign in 2011 – and by those standards these were not protests at all.
This doesn't mean that there's no story here or events aren't worth paying attention to. It's just that there's nothing new to learn about the "Muslim world" in all this. Yes, it's true that many Muslims are intolerant of perceived insults against their religion. Yes, a lot of Muslims don't much like the US. If you think that's news, try getting out more.
What we can learn is about the specifics of each country, from both how events unfolded and how government's responded. Consider Libya, where Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his colleagues were murdered in the second-largest city, Benghazi. It was a terrible tragedy that says something about post-Qaddafi Libya, but little about anywhere else. The Americans were killed by one of the dozens of militias that continue to roam the country, particularly in Benghazi. The particular militia is almost certainly one of the anti-American jihadi outfits operating there.
Is there good news in that? Of course not. But the Libyan authorities have vigorously pursued the culprits and pro-American demonstrations have been held in both Benghazi and Tripoli.
In Egypt, we learned something about new President Mohamed Morsi, who was propelled to the presidency earlier this year by the Muslim Brotherhood. Security was nonexistent when a crowd of maybe 2,000 protesters descended on the US embassy and managed to scale the wall and destroy the US flag flying there. Most of the protesters breaching the embassy walls, and the violent group at Friday's protest, were football hooligans, mostly out for a fight with the cops, not Islamist ideologues.
Still, in the first day after that incident, Mr. Morsi was largely silent on the embassy breach, and far more interested in complaining about the insult to Islam. But he changed his tune after furious private complaints from the US and a pointed comment made by President Obama that Egypt is not a US "ally." Is the fact that the democratically elected president of Egypt isn't a particular fan of free speech or of the US positive? Of course not. But does the fact that he changed his tune and eventually did the right thing (security was much better for Friday's protest) tell us that a way to work with the new Egyptian government can still be found? Of course.
Then there's Lebanon, where Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah emerged to join some of the most raucous anti-American protests in the world. Though Mr. Nasrallah's America-hating credentials hardly need any burnishing, his regional popularity has been on the wane, since he's seen as a close ally of President Bashar al-Assad in neighboring Syria, where the civil war has claimed at least 30,000 lives so far. The hypocrisy of protesting a 14-minute YouTube clip while staying silent about a Syrian leader who's had thousands killed was noted by many.
An Egyptian woman holds a black flag with Islamic inscription in Arabic that reads, 'No God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet,' in front of the US embassy in Cairo, Egypt, on Sept. 12. (Nasser Nasser/AP)
There may be no anti-Islamic movie at all
As I finished this post, I came across an interview with an actress who appears in some of the footage given to Gawker. It goes a long way to clearing up some of the mystery, though not entirely.
Cindy Lee Garcia tells the website that she was hired last summer for a small part in a movie she was told would be called "Desert Warriors," about life in Egypt 2,000 years ago (Islam is about 1,400 years old).
She told Gawker "It wasn't based on anything to do with religion, it was just on how things were run in Egypt. There wasn't anything about Muhammed or Muslims or anything and that, according to Gawker, "In the script and during the shooting, nothing indicated the controversial nature of the final product. Muhammed wasn't even called Muhammed; he was "Master George," Garcia said. The words Muhammed were dubbed over in post-production, as were essentially all other offensive references to Islam and Muhammed. Garcia said that there was a man who identified as "Bacile" on set, but that he was Egyptian and frequently spoke Arabic.
The online 14-minute clip of a purportedly anti-Islamic movie that sparked protests at the US embassy in Cairo and and the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya is now looking like it could have been ginned up by someone sitting a basement with cheap dubbing software.
Full credit goes to Sarah Abdurrahman at On the Media and Rosie Grey at Buzzfed who appear to be the first to highlight (there may be others, but they're the ones who caught my eye) the fact that almost every instance of language referring to Islam or Muhammad in the film has been dubbed in. That is, mouths are mouthing but the words you're hearing don't match.
There have already been a bunch of lies associated with the alleged film. A man named "Sam Bacile" was identified as being the writer and producer. He claimed to be an Israeli citizen. The Israelis say they have no record of him. He claimed to have spent $5 million on the movie. The clip online doesn't look like even $100,000 was spent. There is no record of a "Sam Bacile" living in California, and his strange insistence on the fact that he was Jewish and that he had exclusively Jewish funders for his film in an interview with the Associated Press now looks like something of a red flag.
The one verifiable person involved in this strange tale so far is Steve Klein, an evangelical Christian and anti-Islamic activist with ties to militia groups and a Coptic Christian satellite TV station based in California. Klein told Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic earlier today that he was a consultant on the film, that "Sam Bacile," was a pseudonym, that the person behind the name probably isn't Jewish, and he didn't know the real name of the man. He doesn't know the name of someone he worked on a movie with? Yet another strange, credulity-stretching claim.
Now comes the part with the compelling case of no movie at all.
If you watch closely, you can see that when the actors are reading parts of the script that do not contain Islam-specific language, the audio from the sound stage is used (the audio that was recorded as the actors were simultaneously being filmed). But anytime the actors are referring to something specific to the religion (the Prophet Muhammed, the Quran, etc.) the audio recorded during filming is replaced with a poorly executed post-production dub. And if you look EVEN closer, you can see that the actors’ mouths are saying something other than what the dub is saying.
For example, at 2:53, the voiceover says “His name is Muhammed. And we can call him The Father Unknown.” In this case, the whole line is dubbed, and it appears the actor is actually saying, “His name is George (?). And we can call him The Father Unknown.” I assume the filmmakers thought they were being slick, thinking that dubbing the whole line instead of just the name would make it more seamless and less noticeable to the viewer. But once you start to look for these dubs, it’s hard to see anything else.
And Grey writes:
As the video above — cut from the YouTube video tied to a global controversy — shows, nearly all of the names in the movie's "trailer" — is a compilation of the most clumsily overdubbed moments from what is in reality an incoherent, haphazardly-edited set of scenes. Among the overdubbed words is "Mohammed," suggesting that the footage was taken from a film about something else entirely. The footage also suggests multiple video sources — there are obvious and jarring discrepancies among actors and locations... whoever made (it) may well have made use of little more than the standard editing software Final Cut Pro — far from a cast and crew of over 100 and millions of dollars.
Both make very, very convincing points (read their full posts) and if you watch the footage carefully, it's hard to escape their conclusions. In one scene a man is apparently teaching his daughter about the evils of Islam and writes on a blackboard that "Man + X = BT" as he explains to her that "Man + X = Islamic terrorist." Then he writes the equation in reverse, again intoning "Islamic terrorist" as he writes "BT."
If suspicions are right, the low-quality footage has been re-purposed from somewhere, and you'd expect someone to come forward and explain soon (since a lot of actors are involved).
What's really going on here? I have no idea.
Behind the anti-Muhammad movie – a new pastor Terry Jones?
The people responsible for the murder of US Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans yesterday are those who attacked them. The serious security breach at the Cairo embassy, in which a crowd was allowed to climb the fence of the ordinarily heavily guarded compound and take down the US flag, is likewise the fault of those people first, and the Egyptian government second.
And what led to the mobilization of crowds against the US embassy in Cairo and the US consulate in Benghazi was the decision of an Islamist TV station to draw attention to a hate-filled anti-Islamic film, with it's own spin that it was a "US" production, implying the US government had something to do with it.
Without that, the year-old movie, would have remained in obscurity.
But the existence of the film is the precipitating event. A 14-minute clip from the film online, which presents the prophet Muhammad as a lascivious simpleton who condoned child-rape, will never go down as later-day "Birth of a Nation" when it comes to propaganda films. The shooting, acting, and dialogue literally drew chuckles from me and could be used to teach a film class what not to do. Many of its claims and assertions about the founding of Islam and the contents of the Koran are manifestly false.
Who made it? The Associated Press spoke to a man who identified himself as "Sam Bacile," who told their reporter that he's Jewish, Israeli, and real estate developer residing in California. The man claimed he'd raised $5 million from "100 Jewish donors" to make the film, that it was filmed in the summer of last year, and that it's been shown once in a mostly-empty theater in Hollywood.
Neither I nor anyone else can find any records of a "Sam Bacile" in California, and it looks highly likely that it's a pseudonym. Israeli officials say they have no records of a citizen of that name. (I wrote a piece earlier today in which I credulously accepted the identity as provided by the AP, and for that I apologize.) I can't see how someone prominent enough in the Jewish community to raise $5 million from exclusively Jewish donors could have no online footprint at all. I very much doubt there is such a person.
Some details of one of the people behind the film can be confirmed. The AP also spoke to a man named Steve Klein, who told them he'd acted as a consultant for the film. A little online sleuthing turned up a "Steven A. Klein," who's involved with a group called "Concerned Citizens for the First Amendment," which appears mostly focused on criticizing Islam, which the group says is a fundamental threat to the US Constitution and way of life.
For instance, in July 2011, Mr. Klein was the only signatory on a letter from the group that said it would hold a "First Amendment educational outreach" in front of the Los Angeles County Administration Building. The letter is largely focused on opposition to Islamic law and its threat to the US, and also argues that the First Amendment should allow regulation of religion when it comes to Islam.
The letter describes both Muhammad and Ayatollah Khomeini, who led the Islamic revolution in Iran, as pedophiles.
The letter is hosted at The Way TV (atvsat.com), a Los Angeles-based satellite television channel devoted to Christian evangelical outreach in the Middle East. A perusal of its website indicates that most of its founders are Coptic Christians, and that it takes a particular interest in Egyptian affairs.
Klein works with Joseph Nasralla, a Coptic-American activist who was involved in the campaign against building the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" in Manhattan and, like Klein, views Islam as a threat to the US. Mr. Nasralla is a founder of The Way TV, which hosts Klein's television show, according to anti-Islam activist Robert Spencer.
A call to the station in California was answered by a woman speaking Egyptian Arabic, who said she's originally from Alexandria. She said that Steve Klein hosts a program on the station called "Wake up America," and that he was indeed the man who worked on the film that sparked yesterday's events. She promised to pass on my number to him. Mr. Klein has not called back, though to be fair I left my message just an hour ago. She also said the station had received an email I'd sent to media4christ@gmail.com, an email address Klein offered as the best way to reach him in the comments of a story about an anti-Islam protest his group had organized at Murrieta Valley High School in California.
"Western civilization is absolutely superior to Islam, period," he says in his latest broadcast, in which he says he served as a Marine in Vietnam and that his son has served as a Marine in Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. When a caller from Egypt to the broadcast says Islam and Muhammad are the "anti-Christ" and that all Muslims are "child-molesters," Klein agrees, and chuckles at the notion that any Muslims might be "good people... "
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks what it terms hate groups, wrote about Klein earlier this year, alleging he's been involved in training a far-right militia in California.
"In a 22-acre compound at the southern edge of Sequoia National Park in California, a secretive cohort of militant Christian fundamentalists is preparing for war. One of the men helping train the flock in the art of combat, a former Marine named Steve Klein, believes that California is riddled with Muslim Brotherhood sleeper cells 'who are awaiting the trigger date and will begin randomly killing as many of us as they can,'" the SLPC writes. It continues: "Over the past year, Johnson and the church militia have developed a relationship with Steve Klein, a longtime religious-right activist who brags about having led a “hunter killer” team as a Marine in Vietnam. Klein ... is allied with Christian activist groups across California."
The SLPC also writes that Klein "has been active in extremist movements for decades," that he founded a group in 1977 that "conducts 'respectful confrontations' outside of abortion clinics, Mormon temples and mosques" and that he has ties to the Minutemen militia movement.
In this photo taken on Tuesday, damage at the US Consulate in Benghazi is seen during a protest by an armed group said to have been protesting a film being produced in the United States. (Esam Al-Fetori/Reuters)
US Ambassador murdered as extremists on all sides win, again
The murder of US Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens yesterday as an unopposed crowd ransacked and torched the consulate in Benghazi, along with a raucous protest at the US embassy in Cairo, are events that are going to reverberate for months to come. That the violence came on the anniversary of the 2001 Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington was not a coincidence.
Mr. Stevens was killed along with three other Americans in Libya's second-largest city, in protests that used as their pretext a hitherto unknown amateur film designed to insult the prophet Muhammad. Stevens was the first US ambassador murdered in the line of duty since Ambassador Adolph Dubs was assassinated in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1979. Early unconfirmed reports from Benghazi indicated the other dead Americans were Marines assigned to diplomatic security.
The ginned-up controversy over the film, which was propelled to violence by a rabble-rousing Egyptian television channel that presented the film as the work of the US government, recalls the protests over cartoons depicting Muhammad published in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper in 2005.
Then, there were violent protests across the Middle East over the exercise of free speech in a Western nation. In some ways, it was the beginning of an era of manufactured outrage, with a group of fringe hate-mongers in the West developing a symbiotic relationship with radical clerics across the East. The Westerners deliberately cause offense by describing Islam as a fundamentally violent religion, and all too often mobs in Muslim-majority states oblige by engaging in violence.
Terry Jones, a fringe evangelical Florida preacher, has been one of the instigators on the US end. In the run-up to the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, he basked in the publicity of a planned Quran-burning and the threats and violence that ensued. Mr. Jones is involved in the latest manufactured controversy as well, since in the past week he's drawn attention to the deliberately insulting film, financed by a self-described Jewish-Israeli real estate developer Sam Bacile living in California.
Jones and Mr. Bacile cannot be blamed for the violence and death of the ambassador. That blame goes to the perpetrators. Who whipped them up? Ground zero for bringing attention to the movie in Egypt appears to be Al-Nas TV, a religious channel owned by Saudi Arabian businessman Mansour bin Kadsa. A TV show presented by anti-Christian, anti-Semitic host Khaled Abdullah before the violence showed what he said were clips from the film, which he insisted was being produced by the United States and Coptic (Egyptian) Christians.
The clip, dubbed from the US film into Arabic, was certainly inflammatory. It shows Muhammad as a grinning fool, talking to a donkey and dubbing it "the first Muslim animal." Max Fisher found a 14-minute video of the movie in English that is even worse, one badly acted anti-Islamic caricature after another, with all Muslims portrayed as cartoonishly violent and depraved child rapists, and a running "joke" that constantly calls Muhammad "the bastard of the unknown father." The frankly disgusting clip is included below.
But the filmmakers are among the least responsible for the chain reaction that followed. More responsible is Al-Nas, which turned it into an anti-Christian propaganda exercise of its own. Then there are national leaders. The US embassy in Cairo is nestled in the usually heavily-guarded Cairo neighborhood of Garden City, with security checkpoints in a half-mile perimeter before you can reach the embassy walls. Yet a group of protesters were not only allowed in, but allowed to scale the wall of the US embassy, stealing the US flag flying there and ripping it to shreds after replacing it with an Islamic flag. The Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi, now Egypt's president, has so far been silent on the total security failure at the embassy.
Events in Benghazi may be more forgivable from a security standpoint, given the turmoil of post-Qaddafi Libya and the general incompetence of the country's emerging security institutions. But video of the assault on the consulate there shows no signs of any security effort at all, and the results were pure tragedy.
That the US ambassador was murdered on a visit to Benghazi is part of a sad irony that will probably be played up in the US presidential race in the days ahead. The city was the center of the uprising against Qaddafi, and was saved from being overrun by Qaddafi's forces in March 2011 by US, French, UK, and other Western countries that pounded his armored column from the air. I was in Benghazi on the night the UN Security Council authorized force against Qaddafi, and witnessed the first cheering crowds I'd ever seen in the Middle East waving American flags.
But many Libyans are not just devout in their faith, but jingoistic in their approach, and eastern Libya has seen its share of religious violence. In February 2006, a mob attacked the Italian consulate in Benghazi after an Italian far-right politician wore a t-shirt with one of the Muhammad cartoons and burned it to the ground. Events in Benghazi are a reminder that gratitude in international politics is a short-lived phenomenon that decisions should never be based on.
Libyan deputy Interior Minister Wanis al-Sharif told a press conference in Tripoli that Qaddafi loyalists were responsible for the attack, which involved a well-armed militia, though he admitted to government security failings. Is he right? There are plenty of armed Islamist groups in the area who fought against Qaddafi who could have carried out the attack, and the 2006 attack on the Italian consulate developed into a general anti-Qaddafi protest, with many of the figures involved in the uprising against Qaddafi in 2011 present at the 2006 attack.
So far, there is no broader violence. But that could change.
In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai, a man whose power is entirely owed to the billions of dollars spent by the US and NATO allies to install him and by the blood of the thousands of US, UK ,and other foreign nationals who have defended his government, wanted to make sure that Afghans were aware of the movie. His government issued a statement calling the film "inhuman and abusive." Could there be attacks on US troops or foreign staff over this in Afghanistan? That's sadly possible.
On April 2011, roughly 20 United Nations staffers were killed in the northern Afghan city of Mazir-e-Sharif after a compound was overrun by Afghans angry at Jones's first publicized Quran burning. In February and March of this year, six US soldiers were killed by Afghan soldiers and police in the aftermath of US soldiers dumping Qurans into a burn pit at Baghram airbase.
Iraq's Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi speaks to the media as he leaves a meeting with Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, (unseen), in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday. An Iraqi court found the nation's Sunni vice president guilty Sunday of running death squads against security forces and Shiites, and sentenced him to death in absentia. (Burhan Ozbilici/AP)
Iraq's exiled vice president sentenced to death as violence grows
Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi was sentenced to death today over what he asserts are politically-motivated terrorism charges, in the latest move by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government that is certain to stoke sectarian tensions in the troubled Arab nation.
His son-in-law Ahmed Qahtan was likewise sentenced to death by hanging. Mr. Hashemi, the country's most senior Sunni Arab official, was targeted for prosecution within a week of the US military's departure from Iraq last December. Since, he's been on the lam, telling anyone who will listen that Maliki, a Shiite community leader, is amassing dictatorial powers for himself and creating the conditions for a renewed sectarian civil war in the country. In an interview weeks before today's verdict, the one-time staunch critic of the US occupation said he was looking to the US for assistance, and that unbridled sectarianism was threatening the country's tenuous stability.
"I am very much concerned about the future, I can say that my country has reached a turning point, because of the sectarian and unqualified management of Maliki and the trouble-making of Iran," Hashemi told me. "Now all possibilities are coming on the table because of the injustice, the wide-scale corruption. People are getting fed up... people will be forced to think of other drastic solutions to get rid of this ongoing injustice… I’m very scared. And feel very, very much worried about the future."
The growing alienation of Sunnis from the political process has been the main driver of this year's rising death toll, as today's more than 80 killings, many of which occurred before the announcement, remind. The conviction of Hashemi will confirm the second class status of Sunnis in many minds, and likely lead to more attacks.
The promised "reconciliation" that was supposed to follow the US troop surge under General David Petraeus in the closing years of the Iraq war never came. Instead, Iraq's Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish political leaders have remained in their tribal camps.
Iraqi politics has settled down into a long, sectarian cold war, occasionally punctuated by blood. How much blood? Iraq lost 3,063 lives to terrorism in 2011, only behind Afghanistan in fatalities.
July was the deadliest month in Iraq since 2010, with 325 people killed. Though that number dropped to 164 in August, today's bloodshed occurred in at least 7 cities, a sign of the widening arc of violence. The bloodiest attack was in the heavily Shiite southern city of Amara, where car bombs outside a Shiite shrine killed at least 16 people.
Charges
Within a week of of the US military departure last December, Hashemi was accused by the government of running a death squad that targeted Shiite officials. A lurid trial has been ongoing in his absence, with former bodyguards and aides confessing to rape, torture, and murder of senior security officials on the orders of Hashemi.
The politically charged prosecution began when Maliki's government paraded a number of Hashemi's guards on national TV, who confessed to a series of murders. Is it true? Hashemi angrily denies all charges, saying they are politically motivated and that the confessions were extracted under torture.
Torture and the threat of torture are routinely used to extract confessions from the guilty and innocent alike in Iraq, and the word "independent" before "judiciary" in Iraq is the thinnest veil of fiction. But almost none of the past decade's players in Iraqi politics are free from stain. Most senior politicians have dealt with members of sectarian death squads down the years, and more than a few have operated them directly. Visits to politicians in Iraq during the height of the war, whether they were Shiite, Sunni, or Kurd, required passing through their heavily armed bodyguards – men with wolfish grins accountable to no one but the man who paid their wages.
Hashemi has allegations of his own. "I think our situation in terms of human rights, is getting much worse than it used to be during Saddam Hussein’s regime," says Hashemi. "The Maliki government took innocent people and after 24 to 48 hours bodies were delivered to their families. 'These were not the man we were looking for and we’re sorry about your son,' is all they said."
So Iraqi politics are a particularly dirty business, and with justice pursued unevenly, with opponents of Maliki far more likely to face prosecution than allies, the dangers of the country's current course are obvious. Many Sunnis well remember the hanging of Mr. Hussein in 2006, which was videotaped and released on the Internet. The dictator was taunted while being led to the gallows and having the rope fitted around his neck, with shouted Shiite prayers and the name of Shiite militant cleric Muqtada al-Sadr filling his ears in his final moments.
Execution by hanging has surged in Iraq this year, with 96 such executions through Sept. 6, compared to 68 in 2011. Many of the condemned were sentenced under "treason" and "terrorism" statutes.
Dictatorship?
As Hashemi and his allies tell it, Iraq’s unhealed sectarian wounds are being reopened. Hashemi has been left in the strange-bedfellow's position of urging greater US involvement in Iraq's affairs after having been for years a loud and frequent critic of the US military occupation of the country. Maliki, for his part, has been moving ever closer to Iran, even as his government negotiates a $12 billion arms purchase, including 36 F-16s, with the US.
"The American people should understand that the mission was not fulfilled, regardless of the high cost that was paid by American lives... therefore according to the framework agreement, the US should continue its mission in Iraq until there’s a real state, real institutions, and a real democracy," Hashemi said.
"Maliki is now monopolizing the ministry of the interior, of defense, of national security, of intelligence. He’s using nationalistic rhetoric but at the same time behaving in a very sectarian manner. If we are talking about democracy then how come all that happens in Iraq is considered a democracy? All under the control of one man and one party," he added.
Hashemi has headed the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Muslim Brotherhood-style political group, since shortly after the US invasion in 2003. A critic of the US occupation and the emerging Shiite-dominated political order, he was nevertheless willing to work within the political system.
During the US troop surge he was a main player in encouraging Sunni Arab tribesmen to join the Sahwa, or Awakening, movement that saw Sunni Arab militias abandon the insurgency and take on the government's cause.
He was clearly a figure of respect for Sunni militants. When this paper's former correspondent Jill Carroll was freed after three months as a hostage of Sunni jihadists (who had murdered the Monitor's translator Allan Enwiyah), she was dropped off at Hashemi's Baghdad offices. Now a reliable interlocutor with militants on behalf of the government is frozen out of the political process completely.
Maliki ascendant
Hashemi says "more than 100 of my guards have been arrested without explanation. Even civilians and staff in my office have been arrested. My office has been confiscated, my house has been confiscated. What kind of power does a prime minister have to do all this to a vice president?"
The worst of Iraq's Sunni-Shiite bloodletting may now be behind it, but the horrors of tens of thousands tortured and murdered and untold more maimed physically and psychologically are a burden that Iraqis will be working through for generations. The winner-take-all triumphalism of Maliki has served to stoke those sectarian flames anew.
That is the bitter backdrop to Iraq's deteriorating politics. Factionalism is the name of the game, as Hashemi's legal problems make all too clear. With Al Qaeda-style jihadis resurgent, both thanks to local conditions and the civil war in neighboring Syria, there is little hope of a lasting peace breaking out in Iraq soon.
Peace at any price is probably not Maliki's principal concern. The Shiite Islamist parties that backed him for the premiership are well-entrenched. While they have internal divisions, none of them are interested in doling out power to Sunni groups they generally associate with Saddam Hussein's hated regime.
Maliki is concerned with securing his domestic political position and staying friendly with his powerful neighbor Iran. He has longer standing debts. When Maliki fled a death sentence imposed by Saddam Hussein for his Islamist political activism in the late 1970s, Maliki was sheltered in Tehran and Damascus before finally returning home in 2003.
And though the violence is bad for the economy and for its victims, it is unlikely to threaten to dislodge Iraq's new powers from their perches. The new Iraqi army, armed and trained by the US and other foreign powers, is powerful enough to protect the country's new rulers, its officers answerable directly to the prime minister.
But now with domestic politics deteriorating and the civil war in Syria, where Maliki is seen as backing Iran and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against a predominantly Sunni Arab uprising, the likelihood of a surge in Iraq violence is growing.
Anger and disillusion
The US troop surge that began in 2007 owed its short term success to the US outreach to Sunni militants (and the fact that the chauvinistic Al Qaeda-style hard core had alienated many of their allies). That was a time when Sunni Arabs had hope that while Iraq might never be as good for them as it was under Hussein, it could still be livable. The US paid Sunni militants to join the government cause in organized militias variously called the Awakening or Sons of Iraq, and arm-twisted Maliki and other Shiite politicians into promising those men would be integrated into the security services. Pretty quickly, the Islamic State of Iraq was on the run.
But Maliki has delivered on few of his promises to those Sunni militias. Many of their leaders have been arrested by his security services, many of their rank and file killed by both Shiite death squads and resurgent Sunni jihadis who branded them traitors.
Iraqiyya, a political party mostly supported by Sunni Arabs, won the most seats in the country's 2010 parliamentary election, but was outmaneuvered by Maliki when it came time to form a government. "De-Baathification," the process of disqualifying predominantly Sunni officials from office who belonged to Hussein's Baath party that began when Paul Bremer ran the Coalition Provisional Authority, has continued apace.
Hashemi has been complaining about this for years. In 2009, he and other members of his party repeatedly warned US officials that the Sunni tribes who had joined the Awakening were disenchanted, particularly after the government rounded up some of their leaders. By 2010, Hashemi had completed his evolution from viewing the US agenda in the country with outright hostility to seeing America as the only hope for his community to ward off complete Shiite hegemony.
A promise to share power, particularly a distribution of senior defense positions to Sunnis and Kurds, was the price of forming a government after eight months of negotiations. The US leaned hard on Maliki to reach the power-sharing deal. But Maliki has remained the de facto minister of defense and interior.
A US role?
The US has become a spectator to Iraq's sectarian politics, despite the estimated $4 trillion that the US will ultimately pay for the war in Iraq. Corruption is rampant. In 2011 Iraq was ranked 175th out of 182 in Transparency International's annual poll of corrupt countries. The electricity supply is intermittent, despite the country being one of largest oil producers in the world. Freedom of the press has steadily eroded.
Hashemi, looking for allies, wants the US to do something but he's not sure what. Asked if he'd like to see Washington use its planned arms sales to Iraq as leverage, he hedges. He suggests that's a step the US might try, but declines to say that's what he'd like to see happen.
"The weaponry, the F-16, Iraq is in need of that, and even the heavy artillery is needed. I understand that," he says. "But we are facing difficulties, inside the federal government in Baghdad, or between the federal government and the [Kurdish Regional Government], so how come the US is sending more armaments to an unstable situation in Iraq? To the best of my knowledge I’m looking to the US and not any other country, so don’t ask me what sort of pressurized instrument we have to generate to rectify this situation. The US is still the most powerful country in the world, and they know what to do, all we are obliged to do is to tell the truth."
In this February 2010 file photo, US Marines patrol outside Marjah in Afghanistan's Helmand province. (David Guttenfelder/AP/File)
Remember Afghanistan? The war makes rare appearance in Obama-Romney race.
The Afghan war made a rare appearance in the presidential campaign discourse yesterday, with both President Obama and Republican hopeful Mitt Romney forced by reporters to address a war they've been mostly ignoring on the trail.
The conflict has been grinding on in the background, costing about $5 billion a month and the lives of soldiers, with 418 US soldiers dying in Afghanistan last year, and 236 so far this year. The brief blip in interest now in Afghanistan comes thanks to a surge in so-called "green on blue" killings – Afghan soldiers and cops, armed and trained at the expense of the US taxpayer, murdering the NATO troops working with them.
Romney's and Obama's responses make clear why neither seem to want to talk about America's longest war: There is little difference between their positions on Afghanistan.
Obama and US generals will continue to speak of steady progress as they prepare to depart Afghanistan in 2014. If Mr. Romney wins the presidency, he is unlikely to extend an unpopular, but generally forgotten war. When campaigning, he's said he'd stick to the current withdrawal timeline.
Obama went first, after he made a rare appearance at a White House press briefing. He was asked what senior US officers are telling him about the propensity of Afghan troops to kill US troops.
"On Afghanistan, obviously we’ve been watching with deep concern these so-called green-on-blue attacks, where you have Afghan individuals, some of whom are actually enrolled in the Afghan military, some – in some cases dressing up as Afghan military or police, attacking coalition forces, including our own troops," Obama said. "I just spoke today to Marty Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who happens to be in Afghanistan. He is having intensive consultations not only with our commander, John Allen, on the ground, but also with Afghan counterparts. And I’ll be reaching out to President Karzai as well — because we’ve got to make sure that we’re on top of this."
Dempsey certainly has his work cut out for him. Shortly after Obama spoke, Dempsey's plane was hit by Taliban rocket fire on the tarmac at Bagram Air Field outside Kabul. That's the part of Afghanistan where the US presence is strongest, and where support for the overthrow of the Taliban in 2002 was rock solid. President Karzai? He has little practical influence over what happens in the ranks of Afghanistan's rapidly expanding but ethnically divided Army.
More than 10 years into the war, Afghan soldiers murdering NATO soldiers is a new phenomenon. Data compiled by the New America Foundation show no killings of NATO soldiers by coalition Afghan security forces until 2007, when two NATO soldiers were killed.
In 2008, the number went to zero again, rose to 10 in 2009, 20 in 2010, and then to 36 last year. So far there have been 36 such killings in 2012. Last year’s grim record will almost certainly be broken.
Yet Obama said yesterday: "We are already doing a range of things, and we’re seeing some success when it comes to better counterintelligence, making sure that the vetting process for Afghan troops is stronger."
But is the US seeing success?
The blood, however, points to failure in this regard.
And beyond the loss of life itself is the certain erosion of whatever trust US trainers have in their Afghan counterparts, making the whole exercise of molding an army along Western lines that much harder. The Soviet Union tried to build an Afghan national army during its failed occupation of the country, and also dealt with the problem of Afghans killing their Soviet mentors. After the Soviet withdrawal from the country, the "army" quickly splintered into its various Tajik and Pashtun and Uzbek parts, and the vicious civil war that eventually spawned the Taliban was on.
Of course, the Afghan Army is growing, and more US trainers are in constant contact with Afghan soldiers, so the opportunity for such attacks has also grown.
What does Romney have to say about the issue?
Romney attacked Obama yesterday for being too vague about Afghanistan, with a series of vague and platitudinous comments of his own. Asked about Afghanistan during a campaign stop in New Hampshire, Romney said:
"When our men and women are in harm’s way, I expect the president of the United States to address the nation on a regular basis and explain what’s happening and why they’re there, what the mission is, what its purpose is, how we’ll know when it’s completed. Other presidents have done this. We haven’t heard this president do this. This is something he ought to do time and time again so the people of America know where we stand.”
Actually, Obama often addresses the question of "why we're there": Defeat the Taliban, build a stable democracy, create Afghan institutions that will stand on their own when we go. He basically says about the Afghan mission what Romney said about it yesterday: "I will do everything in my power to transition from our military to their military as soon as possible, bring our men and women home and do so in a way consistent with our mission, which is to keep Afghanistan from being overrun by a new entity which would allow Afghanistan to be a launching point for terror again like it was on 9/11."
But statements of purpose don't accomplish anything on their own. And the US is rapidly coming up against the limits of its power, particularly when it comes to using the military as the agent of an experiment in revolutionary social change in foreign lands.
Should the Afghan war be a campaign issue? Of course. Will it be? Only occasionally, when a tragedy forces it onto the campaign agenda. Polling shows most Americans are fed up with the war, but that it's largely irrelevant to their voting preferences, which are driven more by their beliefs about which president will do a better job at restoring the economy to health. Fewer and fewer Americans know soldiers or Marines in harm’s way, and for many, the deaths afar are abstractions.
Shi'ite masked gunmen from the Meqdad clan, gather at the Meqdad family's association headquarters in the southern suburbs in Beirut, on August 15. (Khalil Hassan/Reuters)
Saudi Arabia and UAE urge citizens out of Lebanon after kidnappings
Both the regional power games over Syria's civil war and the repercussions for the people of that country and the region are heating up.
Today, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar ordered their citizens out of Lebanon after 30 Syrians were kidnapped in the country in retaliation for a Lebanese Shiite's kidnapping by rebel fighters in Syria.
Saudi, Qatar and the UAE are Sunni monarchies and support the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, whose regime draws much of its support from the minority Alawite sect he belongs to. Hezbollah, the powerful Shiite political party and militia in Lebanon, supports Mr. Assad, as does its patron Iran. The Saudi Embassy in Beirut particularly noted the threat of kidnapping by Shiite groups in the country.
Lebanon in the summer is a favorite destination for wealthy citizens of the Gulf monarchies, with its beaches and lax attitudes toward drinking alcohol and relations between the sexes. The Muslim fasting month of Ramadan ends in a few days, and the holidays that follow often provide a tourism boost, with Beirut bars and nightclubs packed with wealthy Gulf Arabs.
While a financial blow for businesses in Beirut isn't nice, the warnings from the two Gulf states are a reminder of how much tension there is in the region, and concern it could spark major problems in Lebanon, which has recovered remarkably from the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990, but still remains a nation split along confessional lines, with Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, and Druze all maintaining their own political fiefdoms and militias.
Writing on the kidnappings of the Syrians, who their abductors alleged were members of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA), Nick Blanford explained the Lebanese context today:
Members of the Meqdad clan, a powerful Shiite tribe from the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, announced today that the "military wing" of the family had abducted more than 20 Syrians in Lebanon whom they alleged were fighters with the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA). The Meqdads said that the abductions were in response to the kidnapping, allegedly by the FSA, of Hassan Selim Meqdad in Damascus at the beginning of the week. The FSA accused Hassan Meqdad of being a member of Lebanon's militant Shiite group Hezbollah, a strong supporter of the Assad regime. Hezbollah and the Meqdad family have denied the claims, with the latter saying that he was an employee of a Lebanese bank...
The Meqdad clan does not have a formal armed faction, although some members of the family do serve with Hezbollah and, like all Bekaa Valley clans, they are fierecly independent, live by strict tribal codes of honor and solidarity, and scorn the authority of the Lebanese state. It would be a rare Meqdad who does not own at least one gun.
Lebanon's war was a playground for proxy battles between regional and global powers, and Syria's war increasingly looks like that today. Further, the Syrian regime was a major player in Lebanon's war and occupied the country until 2005. Assad retains an extensive intelligence network and many allies in the country. If Lebanese politicians and warlords aren't careful, conflict could spread. The country is heavily armed and many of its gunmen are far, far away from formal state control.
Tensions were heightened today by reports that all or some of 11 Lebanese Shiites, kidnapped while traveling home after a pilgrimage to Iran by rebel supporters of the Free Syrian Army in May, were killed by Syrian government airstrikes on rebel positions. One Lebanese television station reported all 11 were killed while an affiliate later reported that just four of them were killed, in Aleppo's Azaz neighborhood.
This story was updated after first posting to include that Qatar has also asked citizens to leave Lebanon.
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