Think Progress

Joint Chiefs Stand And Applaud Obama’s Nuclear Comments, Sit Silently During Call To Repeal DADT

Although President Obama spent a significant amount of his State of the Union speech last night talking about domestic issues, he also addressed several national security issues. The Joint Chiefs sat quietly when Obama talked about a timeline to begin the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and committed to working with the military to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:

And in the last year, hundreds of al Qaeda’s fighters and affiliates, including many senior leaders, have been captured or killed — far more than in 2008. And in Afghanistan, we’re increasing our troops and training Afghan security forces so they can begin to take the lead in July of 2011, and our troops can begin to come home. [...]

This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are. It’s the right thing to do.

However, as Joe. My. God. points out, the Joint Chiefs didn’t sit passively during the entire speech, as the Supreme Court justices are supposed to do, although they traditionally applaud “rarely.” The Joint Chiefs stood and applauded when the President talked about supporting veterans or pledging to secure nuclear materials:

And at April’s Nuclear Security Summit, we will bring 44 nations together here in Washington, D.C. behind a clear goal: securing all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world in four years, so that they never fall into the hands of terrorists.

Watch a compilation:

A new study by UCLA’s Williams Institute estimates that there are an “estimated 66,000 lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals are serving in the US military, accounting for approximately 2.2% of military personnel.” Additionally, repealing DADT “could attract an estimated 36,700 men and women to active duty service and 12,000 more individuals to the guard and reserve.” The Pentagon has reportedly been “stepping up internal discussions on how gay men and lesbians might be able to serve openly in the armed services,” in anticipation that Congress and the President will move forward on repeal.

Notably, Defense Secretary Robert Gates did stand and clap for Obama’s call to repeal DADT. (HT: AMERICAblog)

Congress Rushing To Pass Iran Sanctions That No One Thinks Will Work

The House is expected to take up and pass “a bill imposing tough new sanctions on Iran before the holiday recess.” Americans for Peace Now’s Lara Friedman reports that the bill maybe also pass the Senate quickly:

Today, at around noon, Senate leadership hotlined the bill. Meaning that barring any objections, the bill will be brought to the floor and passed without debate, without amendment, and without a roll-call vote. This is called unanimous consent — a move reserved, generally, for bills that are clear and non-controversial. [...]

It remains to be seen if the entire Senate will agree that a bill that would impact virtually every aspect of US policy (and policy options) related to Iran — now and for the foreseeable future — is clear and non-controversial. One can hope that at least one senator will be brave and conscientious enough to refuse the U/C request — something known as putting a “hold” on the bill. Holds, it should be recalled, are anonymous (and generally remain that way).

Barring that, it looks very possible that IRPSA [Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act], in some form, could become law before the end of the year, popular wisdom, good intentions, and good US policy be damned.

The Iran sanctions legislation “targets foreign companies that sell gasoline or other refined petroleum products to Iran; firms that provide ships, shipping services, or insurance for this trade; those that finance or broker such activity; as well as those assisting Iran’s effort to increase its domestic refining capacity.” One thing worth noting is that no one in Washington — on the right or left — seriously argues it will actually work to change Iran’s behavior. But this may be of secondary concern to legislators looking for a cheap and easy way to appear “tough” on Iran.

What the IRPSA sanctions will do, however, as members of Iran’s pro-democracy movement have warned, is inflict pain on Iran’s people and provide the embattled Iranian regime with precisely the scapegoat they need at precisely the moment they need it.

As Carnegie analyst Karim Sadjadpour told the Middle East Bulletin, the Green movement has been “trying to recruit as many people as possible under the tent of the green movement, including disaffected clerics and Revolutionary Guardsmen.” It’s hard to see how “crippling” unilateral sanctions like those contained in IRPSA would enhance the Green movement’s recruitment efforts.

Elliott Abrams: Iranian People Wouldn’t Oppose A Military Attack On Their Country

This afternoon, Elliott Abrams, Deputy National Security Adviser under President Bush, appeared on Fox News to discuss U.S. policy towards Iran. Abrams pled guilty to misleading Congress about the Iran-Contra scandal under Reagan and handled Iran policy under Bush.

When asked if any recent President has had “a successful strategy with Iran,” Abrams implicitly admitted his own decades-long failure. “No, I don’t think we’ve really had any successful strategies with Iran,” Abrams responded. “And you know, meanwhile they’ve been building up their nuclear program and missile program.” But Obama recently established the first high-level diplomatic engagement with Iran in 30 years, which produced results quicker than expected.

But Abrams, “the neocon’s neocon,” still clings to his long-running desire to bomb Iran. And to justify his view that military action against Iran is the prudent course, Abram told Fox News that the Iranian people would accept it:

FOX: 59 percent of respondents to our Fox News poll say that force should be used. How would Tehran react to that?

ABRAMS: It’s a very big question, Alisyn. My own view is that most Iranians now — after June, after the stealing of the election — would not rally around the flag. People used to say that — that if there’s an attack on Iran, you know the population is going to get patriotic. But that’s what Americans would do. I don’t know that it’s what Iranians are going to do, considering the way that regime is hated in Iran.

Watch it:

Certainly, the Iranian regime does have a great deal of opposition on the ground. But that doesn’t mean they would accept bombs falling on their country. For an Iranian populace that has previously expressed concern that the U.S. is trying to humiliate them, Abrams comments aren’t very reassuring.

A new poll of the Iranian people demonstrates a great potential for the diplomatic engagement that Obama is pursuing. World Public Opinion find that “two-thirds of Iranians would favor their government precluding the development of nuclear weapons in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions against Iran.” 60 percent of the Iranian public favors “full, unconditional negotiations” between their government and the United States.

Pentagon Official On Military Action In Iran: ‘We Can Imagine A Number Of Destablizing’ Consequences »

Today in Geneva, the United States, along with Britain, France, Russia, China, Germany and the EU, engaged in direct talks with Iran over its nuclear program. The talks produced “constructive” progress, with Iran agreeing to allow U.N. inspectors to visit the newly disclosed uranium enrichment facility. Following revelations about the secret facility last week, the right-wing instantly mobilized for war, calling for military action and “regime change” in Iran.

ThinkProgress asked Dr. Colin Kahl, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, what the consequences might be if the war hawks had their way. “We’re a long ways away from that being an eventuality,” Kahl said, adding that the U.S. “is committed” to the “diplomatic track.” Noting that “military action is not desirable,” Kahl then laid out the sobering ramifications:

KAHL: [I]t will have an unpredictable set of consequences for the region but we can imagine a number of destabilizing ones. Depending on how Iran chose to retaliate, whether they chose to retaliate through the use of proxies in places like Iran or in Afghanistan through incitement of Shia communities in places like Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. Obviously if there was direct retaliation against U.S. forces in Iraq or Israeli interests. They could activate potentially activate or encourage Hizballah and Hamas to engage in reprisals and you can imagine the second and third order consequences of that on the peace process and on our outreach to the Muslim world and all of that.

“We don’t exactly know how it would unfold you have the prospects for unintended escalation and kind of losing control of what’s going on,” Kahl warned, adding that even though any military strike could delay Iran’s nuclear program, it could also “incentivize the Iranians to go all the way to weaponize” their nuclear material. Watch it:

Earlier this year, President Obama made it very clear that “regime change” is no longer the U.S. goal in Iran. When asked if the militaristic right-wing rhetoric undermines U.S. negotiations with Iran, a senior State Department official told ThinkProgress that it “could”:

I just saw the other day a quote from Ahmadinejad that talked about President Obama can’t even get his own job done let alone deal with us effectively. We should not underestimate the sophistication of Iran’s foreign policy apparatus and how they hear the messages from us and again, that’s one of the reasons we spend a lot of time on Capitol Hill is trying to make sure that the message they’re hearing from us are consistent.

Thankfully, Defense Secretary Robert Gates appears to have no interest in taking any advice from the neocons, saying on Sunday that “there is no military option that does anything more than buy time.”

Transcript: More »« Less

Torture By Mexican Government In Drug War Highlights U.S. Loss of Credibility On Human Rights

The Washington Post reports today that the Mexican government has employed numerous torture techniques to extract confessions from suspected drug traffickers. The techniques included beatings, suffocation with plastic bags, electric shocks, the insertion of needles under suspects’ finger nails, water torture, and other abuses.

Under what’s known as the Mérida Initiative, the U.S. government agreed in 2007 to provide Mexico with $1.4 billion in funding to fight the war on drugs, but 15 percent (or $90.7 million) of the original funding and $24 million authorized under the Obama administration will be released only after the “secretary of state reports that Mexico has made progress on human rights.”

The reports of torture put that money’s release in jeopardy. As a result, Mexican human rights workers are accusing the U.S. of hypocrisy when it comes to human rights abuses, citing the mistreatment of suspected terrorists under President Bush. The Post explains:

Many Mexican human rights activists do not support the [human rights] conditions, noting that they were imposed by a U.S government widely accused of torturing prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“It really takes a lot of cynicism, a lot of hypocrisy, for the United States to say, ‘We will give you money to fight drug trafficking as long as you respect human rights,’” said José Raymundo Díaz Taboada, director of the Acapulco office of the Collective Against Torture and Impunity, which documents abuses in Guerrero.

The accusations of hypocrisy highlight one of the hard-to-quantify costs of the Bush administration’s use of torture against suspected terrorists to extract unreliable intelligence: the loss of credibility as a champion of human rights. In recent months and years, in fact, a growing number of nations have rejected calls from the U.S. to end human rights abuses, citing the Bush administration’s actions:

China: In response to the State Department’s annual human rights report critical of the Chinese government, a government spokesman said the report “exposed the double standards and downright hypocrisy of the United States on the human rights issue, and inevitably impaired its international image.” [3/12/2008]

Iran: The L.A. Times reported on Iran’s latest response to the State Department’s latest human rights report, writing, “Iranian officials regularly accuse the West of hypocrisy in zeroing in on Iran’s human rights record, citing prisoner abuse allegations in the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay. [3/11/09]

Russia: In response to criticism from former Vice President Dick Cheney regarding Russia’s human rights abuses, then-Russian President Vladimir Putin asked, “Where is all this pathos about protecting human rights and democracy when it comes to the need to pursue their own interests?” [5/11/06. Similar remarks: 3/27/08]

Venezuela: The Venezuelan government responded to a recent State Department report on Human Trafficking, saying, “It is scandalous that a country…where torture has been practiced and terrorists are protected, pretends to prop itself up as a judge of human rights in the world.” [6/19/09]

As Matt Yglesias recently explained, the abuses that go on in Iran, China, North Korea, and other nations are perpetrated on a much wider scale and have gone on far longer than those that occurred in U.S. detention centers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba. But the fact remains that “whenever you read about these kind of techniques being applied in Iran or North Korea, it’s immediately apparent to everyone that it’s torture, it’s cruel, it’s inhumane, and it’s wrong.” Indeed, it was immediately apparent to the world that the U.S. abuses were torture as well. Now, Obama must work to rebuild the credibility that his predecessor squandered.

Saddam Hussein Considered ‘Security Agreement’ With U.S. To Counter Threat From ‘Fanatics’ In Iran

Yesterday, the National Security Archive released declassified FBI reports detailing both the bureau’s interrogations and “casual conversations” with former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. According to the documents, Hussein told FBI agent George Piro (one of only a few agents who spoke Arabic) that he let the world believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he feared appearing weak to what he considered his country’s real threat, Iran:

Hussein’s fear of Iran, which he said he considered a greater threat than the United States, featured prominently in the discussion about weapons of mass destruction. … Hussein said he was convinced that Iran was trying to annex southern Iraq — which is largely Shiite. [...]

“The threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not allow the return of UN inspectors,” Piro wrote. “Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq.”

Saddam “felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from ‘fanatic’ leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a ‘security agreement with the United States to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region.’” If that could not happen, only then, he said, would Iraq reconstitute its WMD programs.

Piro revealed to CBS’s 60 Minutes last year that Saddam “didn’t want to associate” with Osama bin Laden and viewed him “as a threat to him and his regime.” The new documents expound on Saddam’s distrust of Al Qaeda and bin Laden, whom he called “a zealot”:

Hussein replied that throughout history there had been conflicts between believers of Islam and political leaders. He said that “he was a believer in God but was not a zealot…that religion and government should not mix.” Hussein said that he had never met bin Laden and that the two of them “did not have the same belief or vision.”

When Piro noted that there were reasons why Hussein and al-Qaeda should have cooperated — they had the same enemies in the United States and Saudi Arabia — Hussein replied that the United States was not Iraq’s enemy, and that he simply opposed its policies.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and numerous members of the Bush administration repeatedly cited the (now debunked) threat from Iraq’s supposed WMD program and Saddam Hussein’s alleged links to Al-Qaeda as the main justifications for launching the invasion of Iraq more than six years ago. The U.S. could end up spending trillions of dollars in Iraq and today, 130,000 U.S. troops remain there, 4,321 have died (4,639 total from coalition forces), and more than 30,000 have been wounded. Over 100,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion while millions have been displaced.