North Korea’s “H Bomb”: No Ado About Something

In my opinion, a lot of the mockery of the North Korean nuclear test—the silly little man with his silly little bomb—is racism that reassures.  It evokes the explanation for why many poor rural whites adopted a posture of racial exclusion instead of class solidarity with poor rural blacks in the American South: “because 'If you ain't better than a ****, who are you better than?'”.  We may have our problems, in other words, but at least we’re not North Korea.

But of course, the mockery has another, more unsettling note: that North Korea is one problem that we’re not solving.  And we’d like to ignore that by retreating to the comforting assertion that the leadership of the DPRK is simply bugnuts.

It is an inconvenient fact that US North Korean policy has been a rolling fiasco for the last decade, climaxed by two years of chaos in 2005-7 as hardliners attempted to effect regime change in the DPRK through a campaign of financial sanctions.  The effort backfired, literally, with the DPRK’s first nuclear test, in 2006, accompanied by frantic backpedaling by the Bush administration, and a half-year of desperate obstruction by the discredited hardliners.  There has been a concerted effort to convert this resume stain into one of the great achievements of forceful American diplomacy and, in the current issue of CounterPunch Magazine, in a piece titled The Treasury’s Bomb, I have taken pains to lay out the little known history of this spectacular debacle.

Today, US diplomatic impotence vis a vis North Korea is acknowledged by a do-nothing policy of “strategic patience”.

And a lot of misplaced har-har about the stupid Norks.

On Twitter I saw the eye-rolling if somewhat tongue in cheek assertion that Kim Jung-un had conducted the test out of spite because the PRC had unceremoniously cancelled the concert tour of the NK-Pop band Moranbong for “anti-American lyrics”.

Actually, what it probably meant was that the PRC knew about the upcoming test, either because the DPRK officially or unofficially passed the word or because the PRC figured it out themselves (the preparations are not that easy to hide), and Beijing wanted to pre-emptively dispel any impression of friendly, hunky-dory relations with Pyongyang.

Mocking the DPRK’s nuclear dysfunction by questioning whether Kim Jong-un really had the vigor to detonate a hydrogen bomb also has an anxious edge.  North Korea doesn’t really need an “H-bomb” i.e. a bomb that uses X-rays from a fission package to fuse hydrogen atoms and can be used to build weapons of virtually unlimited yield—and has traditionally been delivered by a strategic bomber force or heavy ICBMs, things that North Korea doesn’t have.  North Korea does, however, have a vested interest in a “boosted” bomb, one that relies on the fusion of a tiny amount of hydrogen at the core of a fission weapon in order to increase efficiency i.e. release more energy before the uranium or plutonium sphere fragments and the chain reaction ends.  

A boosted bomb bumps up the bang you can get out of a weapon small enough to fit on top of a Scud-based missile.  And North Korea has a significant capability in these smaller, mid-range missiles, which can reach Japan and, of course, South Korea.  

As to motivation for the test, it is apparently too simple for many commentators to even consider: the DPRK wants to convince the United States that the costs of not negotiating directly are becoming unacceptable as the DPRK improves and increases its arsenal unchecked in the absence of US engagement.

The flip side is that Kim Jong-un has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to distance himself from the PRC an overbearing not-quite-patron with a predatory interest in exploiting the North’s resources and meddling in its politics.  I suspect that the DPRK’s nuclear program is conceived as a double deterrent against the regime-change calculations of the People’s Republic of China as well as the United States.

One of the most interesting riddles of North Asian diplomacy is why the United States does not respond to Kim’s rather backhanded nuclear overtures and take this opportunity to stick it to the PRC by conducting a bilateral Myanmar-style rapprochement with North Korea, instead of continuing to endorse the PRC’s Six-Party-Talks formula for Beijing’s continued dominance of the DPRK’s foreign engagement.

Of course, the United States is hobbled by President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize-worthy commitment to nuclear non-proliferation, and the awkward fact that North Korea will never give up its nukes, thanks in part to President Obama’s distinctly non-Nobel-Peace-Prize-worthy effort to acquire some Arab Spring cred by backing the bloody deposition of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

In addition to creating a black hole of dysfunction, anarchy, and terror in what used to be one of the more prosperous enclaves in North Africa, the Libyan adventure undid one of the few foreign policy accomplishments of George W. Bush: the denuclearization (and renunciation of all WMD ambitions) by Gaddafi in an extremely expensive deal, whose outlines are worth repeating:

Gaddafi revealed and decommissioned his nuclear and chemical WMD programs under international inspection, acceded to the Chemical Weapons Convention, re-opened Libya’s oil industry to foreign investment, and ponied up over US$1 billion in compensation for the Lockerbie bombing (if, as some suspect, Iran engineered Lockerbie as retaliation for the U.S. shootdown of Iran Air 655, the mullahs of Tehran must be grateful indeed).  In return, Libya got normalized relations, a U.S. shield from terrorism lawsuits, visits from Condoleezza Rice and Tony Blair, and the pleasure of receiving, incarcerating, and abusing repatriated anti-Gaddafi dissidents.  The “Libya model” was actually touted as a precedent for bringing North Korea in from the cold.

Today, the “Libya model” works the other way.

North Korea’s jaundiced view of any security guarantees the US might be willing to provide is encapsulated in one of the rare examples of eloquence one encounters in its US-language press releases.  In announcing the “H-bomb” test, the DPRK stated:

Genuine peace and security cannot be achieved through humiliating solicitation or compromise at the negotiating table.

The present-day grim reality clearly proves once again the immutable truth that one's destiny should be defended by one's own efforts.

Nothing is more foolish than dropping a hunting gun before herds of ferocious wolves.

If you look closely, it appears the DPRK is willing to show up at the negotiating table.  As long as the nukes are not on that table.

A foolish consistency in non-proliferation policy is not one of America’s faults (or virtues), so any switch to a negotiated track with a nuclear-armed North Korea could presumably be finessed.  For precedent, President Obama has followed President Bush in giving a free pass to India to bring its nuclear sector into the international system by brokering an inspection exemption for its nuclear weapons programs, and India has generously reciprocated America’s trust by proceeding with construction of a secret “nuclear city” whose probable objective is to add hydrogen bombs, real ones, mega-yield bombs, to India’s nuclear arsenal targeting China.  

 

A factor in US reticence in engaging with North Korea is probably the PRC has declared unambiguously that North Korea is off-limits and Beijing will not brook any North Korean regime that is aligned with the US against the PRC.  Washington’s road to Pyongyang, in other words, must run through Beijing.  And the United States is not really interested in going down that road, and contributing to a revitalized North Korea that would simply serve as a more functional and formidable strategic and economic asset for the People’s Republic of China.

So, the US might tacitly acknowledge North Korea as a sphere of PRC vital concern—the northern analog to the much-contested South China Sea “core interest” formulation—but it comes at a price.

One price is maintaining the status quo of North Korea as a sanctioned pariah state, a resentful, needy, disruptive, bomb-detonating incubus that sees the PRC as selfishly and unreasonably blocking its attempts to engage with the world economic system.

As for the second price, I suspect that any US arms control-related priorities relating to engagement with North Korea on its nuclear threat and/or working with the PRC to “denuclearize” the Korean peninsula are submerged by the realization that for noble purposes of anti-Chinese pivot strategy and vulgar considerations of military contractor profit, it is better to use the North Korean program as a justification to make hay while the sun shines and slug in as many missile-defense systems as possible into North Asia and around the PRC.  No need in rushing in to address a relatively insignificant threat at the expense of the greater strategic and financial good, in other words.

This is a mindset apparently shared by Prime Minister Abe, America’s BFF of the moment in Asia, so the threat/military buildup narrative inevitably has to get serviced before any thought of diplomatic jaw-jaw.

In the final analysis, North Korea’s “H Bomb” test is the price for doing nothing.  And that’s a price it seems everybody is quite happy to pay.

5000 Pretexts for War

My working assumption about international affairs is that people in mortal peril are careful and clever.  On the other hand, people with plenty of money, power, and impunity are often arrogant and sloppy.

This outlook colors my perspective on various US dustups with adversarial nations, most recently Syria.

That’s why I’m unwilling to rule out the possibility of a false flag chemical weapons attack.  Assad might be stupid enough to order an attack with the UN inspectors in Damascus; but as more details emerge concerning Saudi Arabia’s determination to bring down the Syrian regime pronto, the circumstantial case for Prince Bandar organizing the atrocity is strengthened.

I must say I have not been particularly impressed with the public dossier, which leans on the “panicky” exchanges and the interception of a conversation between the last Hezbollah higher-up clueless enough in this post-Snowden era to use an unsecured landline to dish dirt on Assad with his Iranian compadre.

When I look at Syria, I think about the PRC, with the caveat that if and when the United States tries to take down China, China will also have plenty of money, power, and impunity and the US will have to be more careful and clever than it has been.

The issue of red lines and casus belli was very much on my mind when I wrote my recent piece for Asia Times Online on Air Sea Battle, the think tank recipe for massive conventional war with the PRC.

What interested me was the fact that China has counterprogrammed asymmetrically against the United States in Asia in order to deny the US the justification and opportunity to enter the lists on behalf of Japan and The Philippines as a military power.  The PRC advances the maritime conflicts as strictly civilian affairs, using maritime survey vessels and so on, keeping the disputes as much as possible on a bilateral, law-based basis.

The PRC has been careful and clever, in other words.

However, over recent decades the United States has not stood idly by as the PRC, Russia, and other antagonists/competitors of the United States have tried to shield themselves from the full-spectrum exercise of American power.

Through a combination of doctrine and dirty tricks, the United States has done its best to be able to go to war when it wants to.

In my Air Sea Battle post, I highlight an exchange between two U.S. Senators in 1968:

Senator CASE: Mr Chairman, I think one of the suggestions, I do not know that it has quite been put into these words, is that the Defense Department, for purposes which it considered most patriotic and necessary, decided that the time had come to stop shillyshallying with the commies and resist, and this was the time, and it had to be contrived so that the President could come along, and that the Congress would follow. That is one of the things.

Senator HICKENLOOPER: I think historically whenever a country wants to go to war it finds a pretext. We have had 5,000 pretexts historically to go to war.

Or, in other words:

Senator Case and Senator Hickenlooper’s thoughts were recorded in an executive session of the Foreign Relations Committee convened to discuss a staff report concerning the Gulf of Tonkin incident.  The transcript was declassified in 2010 through the efforts of John Kerry.

The takeaway from the staff report was that the Johnson administration was very, very keen to escalate US involvement in the Vietnam War.  Therefore, it brushed aside worrisome details of the August 4, 1964 incident in order to rush through a retaliatory attack (the first bombing attack against North Vietnam by the US, signaling that the entire country was in play and the US would no longer limit its involvement to propping up the strongman du jour in Saigon against the assault of the Viet Cong) and pass the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

The immediate context for Senator Hickenlooper’s ruminations is that the staff report made a very strong case that no attack had actually occurred on August 4, 1964 (the Maddox and the Turner Joy were chasing their own tails, not North Vietnamese PT boats); nevertheless questions about the true character of the incident were hurriedly brushed aside in order to launch the retaliatory attack and push through the resolution.

By contrast, the committee was wrestling with the current issue of the sigint vessel USS Pueblo’s capture by North Korea and also remembering the attack on another US signals intelligence vessel, the Liberty by Israel in 1967 (quick note: Wikipedia needs to take a look at its article on the Liberty incident, which was apparently written by the public relations office of the IDF; interested readers may refer to the NSA’s declassified report on the incident, in which an NSA deputy director is quoted as dismissing the Israeli investigation as “a nice whitewash” .)

Since the United States was not interested in going to war with North Korea or Israel, those genuine attacks on US sigint vessels were not casi belli; but a spurious attack attributed to North Vietnam provoked a retaliatory attack, a congressional resolution, and a great big war.

Hence Senator Hickenlooper’s musing.

The U.S. has worked to sweep aside barriers to armed intervention with remarkably vague and non-legalistic invocations of red lines, universal values, human rights, global norms, the delicate sensibilities of the international community, etc.  Of course the Bush administration attempted to broaden the legal basis for military action with the doctrine of pre-emption of potential threats (basically anything and everything) instead of imminent threats (the maniac cutting through your door with a chain saw).  

 Remarkably, the Obama administration, through Susan Rice, has signaled its determination to expand this doctrine beyond threats to the United States or its allies with the doctrine R2P—responsibility to protect the citizens of an adversary.  R2P would give a green light for the United States to intervene when some local slice of humanity, not just US citizens, was exposed to threat from an unsavory government.  

In fact, that’s pretty much what we did in Libya, albeit through a UN resolution and with a lot of cajoling by France.

The queasy character of the US intervention doctrine is on full display in Syria, where the Obama administration has reserved for itself the role of judge, jury, and executioner (and for that matter, legislator, by unilaterally promulgating the chemical weapons red line) in the matter of Bashar al Assad’s alleged transgressions in the matter of weapons of mass destruction.  Since the US anticipates that the UN Security Council will be unwilling to authorize action against Syria, President Obama reserved the right to act independently.  Even as he submitted the question of a resolution to the US congress, his spokespeople reserved the right for the president to order an attack even if the resolution didn’t pass.

A fine kettle of fish.

This got me to thinking that a lot of American wars start with a lie.  Not because the United States is especially mendacious or wicked, but because when it comes time to start a war, its designated enemies have probably done a pretty good job of establishing plausible factual and legal rebuttals to the popularly accepted legal justifications for war.

Like Saddam.  He dealt with the demand to get rid of his WMDs by getting rid of his WMDs.  But President Bush figured out a way to deal with Saddam!

 Like Gaddafi.  He declared a ceasefire to comply with UN Resolution 1973.  Didn't help him!

The PRC government has deployed all of the stratagems that America’s adversaries have deployed in order to keep from getting bombs dropped on them: non-military management of disputes that might impinge on the US, legalistic adherence to international law, a reliance on the restraining factor of a useful veto in the UN Security Council, and advocacy of the principle of sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs.

If China is throwing its weight around in a manner that the United States deems unacceptable, how does the United States bring into play its most important great power asset—the ability to threaten and carry out military attacks on a recalcitrant state?

It occurs to me that a prime directive of US military planners and diplomats must be the issue of how and when to start a war with the PRC if we want and need one.

I think about that in the conclusion of the Asia Times Online article, where I dig through the history of the Gulf of Tonkin incident made available by government declassification over the last decade or so, and how the Johnson administration was able to conjure up a war out of a clusterf*ck in the Tonkin Gulf.

I also think about it when the western press credulously amplifies spurious claims that “China is flying fighter jets through Japanese airspace” and “China is preparing to erect structures on the Scarborough Shoal.”

Starting a war with China, if the US wants one, is really not going to be terribly hard.

Which brings me back, by a long and circuitous route, back to my even longer and more circuitous article about Air Sea Battle at Asia Times Online.

Air Sea Battle (or ASB) makes the case for a massive upgrade of US military capabilities in the West Pacific in order to successfully handle one rather improbable scenario—a simultaneous attack against all US military and security interests in the region within reach of the People’s Republic of China.

This is not a likely scenario for a variety of reasons. 

But not impossible, I suppose, if China’s Brezhnev fights his way to the top of the political pile in the CCP with a divine mandate to resurrect the COMECON bloc and convinces the PLA that the key to China’s future is obliterating its economic relationships with the United States, Japan, and Western Europe and cutting itself off from Middle Eastern energy so the PRC can monopolize the economic opportunities of The Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam and lap up all that sweet, sweet crude that apparently lurks under the South China and East China Seas.

Could happen, I guess.  I’m not holding my breath.

The closest thing to a real-world justification for ASB is that it will prevent or at least delay the Finlandization of China’s smaller neighbors--even though the PRC seems to have enough economic and enforcement levers and legal and diplomatic cover to create a lot of problems for the Philippines and Vietnam (and to a lesser extent, Japan) without running afoul of the US military.

But, as I point out in the article, the United States needs to be at war with the PRC if it wishes to bring full US power to bear.  And the chances that the PRC will initiate a full-spectrum attack against the US military and give the United States a justification to destroy all of the PRC’s military assets and much of its economy in a prolonged campaign are pretty small.

So I think if and when war comes, it will come courtesy of one of Senator Hickenlooper’s 5000 pretexts, in response to a US policy decision, perhaps a decision by that the US policy makers decide that China is getting stronger and more assertive and less cooperative, US military dominance is a wasting asset, and it better be wielded to cut China down to size before the PRC becomes a genuine peer competitor.

War with China is, to me, a remote contingency.  But ASB makes it more likely, by holding out the promise that the war is winnable and increasing the temptation to figure out the best way to start one.

The ATOl piece is below the jump.  It can be reposted if Asia Times Online is acknowedged and a link provided.

Gaddafi, Khaled Mattawa, and the Bacchae

I suppose the Western media caravan has moved on, and there isn’t going to be a lot of interest in the latest footage of Muamar Qaddafi’s capture obtained by Global Post.

Basically, Qaddafi is brutalized for four minutes by a frantic mob. One triumphalist tries to stick something up his rear end. Everybody yells and shoots in the air as they stomp and pummel the terrified, blood-covered ex-supremo.

Then Qaddafi is bundled off to be shot in the head, killed in a crossfire, suffer a fatal slip in the shower, or whatever fate the embarrassed kibitzers of the NTC decide to cobble together to explain the subsequent appearance of his corpse in a meat locker in Misrata.
 
The video makes for rather depressing viewing for students of human nature, and also offers a sobering harbinger of things to come in the new Libya.

If I were in Syria, I would find these images dispiriting rather than energizing.

Poet Khaled Mattawa, however, looked at the same tape and had what could be termed a “wargasm”.

He is obviously heir to the ecstatic Dionysian strain of poesy, rather than the detached Apollonian ideal.

The LA Times published his poem After 42 years on its op-ed page. It’s pretty much everywhere now.

What and who taught you O sons of my country to be so fearless cruel?
Him, they say, for 42 years, 42 years of him.
…
Their shrill Allahu Akbars exclamations of astonishment—
What have I done O Lord to deserve the honor of capturing the rat?

If the brutal frenzy is embarrassing, well, blame it on Qaddafi:

Perhaps he was a magnet and he drew evil out of men’s chests,
His hands, his hands saying wait, wait
Reached into their lungs and wound and knotted their raw souls,
A magnet now siphoning cruelty to itself.

Let’s give the older generation a glorious share in the slaughter; in fact, why not ritually wet the hands of the whole country in Qaddafi’s blood, at least vicariously (though I noticed no grateful shoutout to the folks at NATO who made it all possible):

To tear him to bits, my mother’s friend once said.
To tear him to bits, six million hearts had prayed –
O God grant me the sight of him dead!

Heck, let’s just leave humanity out of it:

The rabid beast, captured, kicked about and shot in the head.

Obviously Mattawa really, really hates Qaddafi.

He’s from Benghazi, although his parents sent him to the US during his teens, where he has resided ever since. He is a distinguished poet with a raft of awards and grants, presumably for work better than the stuff quoted above.

Mattawa came out against Qaddafi in February 2011; his family was active in the Benghazi rebellion.

If not for the attention-hogging grandstanding of Bernard Henri-Levy, Mattawa might have the face of the Libyan revolution in the Western media. Now I suppose he must content himself with playing the role of the Kipling of the R2P movement.

Mattawa, who claims Misrata as his ancestral home, doesn’t seem to be above manufacturing outrage for effect.

When one reads After 42 Years, one is invited to assume that Gaddafi’s regime killed his father and brother (certainly the impression you get when Mattawa read this dramatic excerpt on PRI’s The World on October 26):

I was five when the dictator took my brother away


…five years old when my father was killed


standing in front of a hotel.

Matter of fact, as an interview/profile with Mother Jones reported in February 2010, Mattawa and his only brother, Ibrahim, were sent to the United States in their teens, where they have resided ever since.


As for his father, a 2009 profile in the Kalamazoo Gazette ended:

When Mattawa moved from his country in 1979, it was "to wait out Gaddafi." Things have mellowed there lately, and Mattawa, now married to a woman from Libya and the father of a child, returns once a summer to see his parents.

"It's sort of normal, in a weird sense," he said.


As Mattawa has frequently recounted in interviews, one of his dominant memories was not of his father’s demise; it was the humiliation of his terrified father driving around with his car plastered with a poster of Gaddafi that he dared not remove.

Normal, in a weird sense, to imply that one’s father, unmanned by Gaddafi's regime, was “killed standing in front of a hotel.”

Psychoanalysts, start your engines.

To me, the interesting element of Mattawa’s resume is his current employment: University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the same place that Juan Cole works.

I would not be surprised that the desire to keep up with Mattawa had something to do with Cole’s over-the-top cheerleading for the “Free Libya” forces.

You don’t want to be getting the stinkeye from Khaled Mattawa in the faculty lounge for going easy on the rabid beast on Charlie Rose the night before.

For those not yet surfeited with patriotic gore and interested in literature that mixes compassion with its passion, here’s a passage from Euripedes’ The Bacchae (interestingly, Libya was one candidate for the homeland of Dionysus), in the Gilbert Murray translation.

Here the Bacchae, with an assist from NATO—I mean Dionysus--discover Pentheus, son of the high priestess Agave, spying on the proceedings from a treetop.

…scarce was he beheld upon his lofty throne, when the stranger disappeared, while from the sky there came a voice, 'twould seem, by Dionysus uttered-


"Maidens, I bring the man who tried to mock you and me and my mystic rites; take vengeance on him."


…
"Hither” cried Agave; "stand we round
And grip the stem, my Wild Ones, till we take
This climbing cat-o'-the-mount ! He shall not make
A tale of God's high dances! " Out then shone
Arm upon arm, past count, and closed upon
The pine, and gripped; and the ground gave, and down
It reeled. And that high sitter from the crown
Of the green pine-top, with a shrieking cry
Fell, as his mind grew clear, and there hard by
Was horror visible. It was his mother stood
O'er him, first priestess of those rites of blood.
He tore the coif, and from his head away
Flung it, that she might know him, and not slay
To her own misery. He touched the wild
Cheek, crying: "Mother, it is I, thy child,
Thy Pentheus, born thee in Echton's hall!
Have mercy, Mother ! Let it not befall
Through sin of mine, that thou shouldst slay thy son! "


But she, with lips a-foam and eyes that run
Like leaping fire, with thoughts that ne'er should be
On earth, possessed by Bacchus utterly,
Stays not nor hears. Round his left arm she put
Both hands, set hard against his side her foot,
Drew , . . and the shoulder severed ! Not by might
Of arm, but easily, as the God made light
Her hand's essay. And at the other side
Was Ino rending ; and the torn flesh cried,
And on Autonoe pressed, and all the crowd
Of ravening arms. Yea, all the air was loud
With groans that faded into sobbing breath,
Dim shrieks, and joy, and triumph-cries of death.


And here was borne a severed arm, and there
A hunter's booted foot ; white bones lay bare
With rending ; and swift hands ensanguined
Tossed as in sport the flesh of Pentheus dead.
…
And, ah, the head of all the rest,
His mother hath it, pierced upon a wand,
As one might pierce a lion's, and through the land,
Leaving her sisters in their dancing place,
Bears it on high ! Yea, to these walls her face
Was set, exulting in her deed of blood,
Calling upon her Bacchus, her God,
Her Comrade, Fellow-Render of the Prey,
Her All-Victorious, to whom this day
She bears in triumph ... her own broken heart.

Brutal times demand better--not more brutal--poets.

Rapist Turkey Shoot in Libya

News flash: war is hell, even when it’s a humanitarian intervention.

It’s pretty clear, listening to today’s NPR report on Libya, that the “no fly zone” is pretty much past the “protect civilian” stage and well into the “kill Libyan soldiers” phase.

Pictures of dead Libyan soldiers seem to be relatively rare, but here’s one, courtesy of KQED:


The caption for the photo reads:

The bodies of pro-government forces littered the ground in al-Wayfiyah, 35 km West of Benghazi, after reportedly being hit by French warplanes on Sunday.

NPR’s Eric Westerveldt mentioned passing blown up Libyan army tanks, heavy equipment, and other vehicles as he followed rebel troops westward along the coast towards Sirte. 

Sirte is Colonel Gaddafi’s pampered hometown.  It has not experienced significant anti-regime unrest, so it is presumably not a rebel stronghold craving humanitarian intervention.  Instead, the attack represents the first, baby step of the rebels toward NATO-assisted conquest of western Libya.

Westerveldt also reported that Libyan troops had abandoned their uniforms and army vehicles and fled.

Sometimes, when an overextended army does this, it’s because individual soldiers are trying to retreat through hostile territory disguised as civilians to escape opposing ground troops chasing them and revenge-minded partisans behind them.

This doesn’t seem to be the case in Libya.  The threat to the soldiers from partisans—and even the ragtag rebel army in front of them—appears to be minimal.

The most likely explanation is that the soldiers realize that British, French, and possibly American warplanes are targeting Libyan army forces in order to destroy them, regardless of whether they are in ceasefire mode or trying to retreat, withdraw, regroup or whatever. 

For the West, it is a race against time—to mete out as much destruction as possible before it is clear that Gaddafi is trying to conform to the UN resolution by moving to a non-aggressive posture, thereby preserving his military and political forces, and creating awkwardness for the coalition with difficult-to-spin demonstrations of (at least temporary) reasonableness, and eliciting unwelcome international calls for cease-fire and mediation. 

The aggressive air campaign against the Libyan military seems to go beyond paving the rebel’s path to Tripoli.  It also implies that Western confidence in the fighting mettle of the rebels is limited, and the hope is that Gaddafi’s army will respond to its imminent destruction by turning on Gaddafi and deposing him, thus allowing the West to declare Mission Accomplished! and withdraw.

That seems to me to be an invitation to partition in the short term and reconquest of the east—by whatever neo-Gaddafi finds himself on time of the military pile in Tripoli in the coming weeks--in the long term.

Since we’re being told nothing about the actual objectives or ambitions for the operation—beyond the increasingly threadbare insistence that Libyan “civilians” have to be protected--I suppose my guess is as good as anybody’s.

As cognitive dissonance between the stated aim of “protecting civilians” and the actual practice of  “bombing a retreating army” and “providing air support for a rebel force in its campaign of conquest” sets in, our dedicated and talented reporters and analysts will have their work cut out for them.

My prediction is more rape horror stories like the assault on Iman al-Obeidi, the Libyan woman in Tripoli, and less pictures of dead Libyan soldiers, in order to keep the moral balance firmly tipped in favor of the West and away from Gadaffi.

Well, here’s another rape story, via al Jazeera (which appears to be in 100% lockstep with the aggressive anti-Libya policy of its owner, the Emirate of Qatar):

Several doctors [in the city of Ajdabiya] say they have found Viagra tablets and condoms in the pockets of dead pro-Gaddafi fighters, alleging that they were using rape as a weapon of war.

I don’t doubt that the rape of Iman al-Obeidi actually occurred, by the way.  Many terrible things happen during war, even if it’s called a “humanitarian intervention”.  Rape is one of them.  But accusations of rape are the most useful in dehumanizing an opponent, delegitimizing a regime, and taking the moral sting out of blowing up young men in and out of uniform.

The Guardian got a report from doctors on the other side that will probably gain little traction:

A doctor treating wounded government soldiers described hundreds of deaths, terrible injuries and collapsing morale.

In an obvious journalistic oversight, no report on whether the dead, injured, and demoralized soldiers had Viagra, condoms, or boners in their pockets.

The events along the coast road in Libya put me in mind of another series of turkey shoots—the massacre of Saddam Hussein’s forces in 1991 along Highway 8 and 80 (a.k.a. Highway of Death) after Saddam had accepted the UN resolution and agreed to withdraw from Kuwait, and the slaughter on a causeway in southern Iraq (Battle of Rumaila) after the ceasefire had been declared.

Apparently, prior to a ceasefire, enemy forces are only protected from attack if they are surrendering, stated compliance with a UN resolution notwithstanding.  It was therefore possible to construe Saddam’s withdrawal from Kuwait along Highways 8 and 80 as a “regrouping” for purposes of ordering the assault, something the Libyan military might remember.

There was a concerted U.S, effort to minimize the reported human cost of the attacks on Highways 8 and 80, making the claim that most Iraqi troops abandoned their equipment and were able to flee for their lives in the desert.

Anyway, those rapists had it—“it” being a continuous ten hour attack by US aircraft—coming, according to Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf:

The first reason why we bombed the highway coming north out of Kuwait is because there was a great deal of military equipment on that highway, and I had given orders to all my commanders that I wanted every piece of Iraqi equipment that we possibly could destroy. Secondly, this was not a bunch of innocent people just trying to make their way back across the border to Iraq. This was a bunch of rapists, murderers and thugs who had raped and pillaged downtown Kuwait City and now were trying to get out of the country before they were caught.

If, as the official version states, only 800 to 1000 people were killed on the two roads, then photojournalist Peter Turnley was able to photograph an awful lot of them.



View his full photo essay here.

The so-called Battle of Rumaila, which occurred under the command of Major General Barry McCaffrey after the ceasefire and was reported by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker  is harder to justify and perhaps for that reason is little discussed today.

Also, there apparently aren’t any pictures.

General McCaffrey led the 24th Infantry Division into Iraq in the first Gulf War.  It was a short war without a lot of fighting and of limited value in burnishing the military resume (McCaffrey's division reported 8 deaths in the conflict, perhaps half of which were friendly fire).  The implication that I drew from Hersh’s article is that McCaffrey wanted to have something to show for the deployment of his highly-trained division in Iraq: action, trophies, and renown. 

McCaffrey, by the way, came out of the war reasonably well (despite an investigation of his conduct at Rumaila), served as Clinton’s drug czar, and is visible on the teevee today as a military affairs analyst for NBC and MSNBC laboring to make sure that no political capital accrues to President Obama through his Libyan display of militant manliness.

Wikipedia provides some detail on Rumaila:

Iraqi Republican Guards were engaged while attempting to reach and cross the Lake Hammar causeway and escape northward toward Baghdad. Most of the five-mile-long Iraqi caravan of more than 600 vehicles was first boxed into a "kill zone" and then in the course of the next five hours systematically devastated by Hellfire missiles from AH-64 Apache  attack helicopters, indirect artillery fire, and eventually direct fire from arriving armored ground forces, which met no meaningful resistance   The attack continued until the trapped vehicles were destroyed, including at least 39 tanks and 52 other armored vehicles from the elite 1st Armored Division "Hammurabi". McCaffrey reported the elimination of 187 armored vehicles, 43 artillery systems and over 400 trucks. ... A bus with women and children was also reportedly destroyed by a missile, which later troubled many U.S. soldiers.  The battle was one-sided and desperate attempts by some Iraqis to return fire were almost completely ineffective, as during the engagement only one U.S. soldier was injured and two U.S. armored vehicles were lost (an M2 Bradley fighting vehicle and an M1 Abrams tank). A number of Iraqi survivors were taken prisoner, many others fled on foot and swam to safety.

One would speculate that, on one level, the Iraq massacres were perpetrated to prevent Saddam from extracting his army from Kuwait in a relatively intact state so he could fight another day; also, to shake the loyalty of his army and people and make a coup more possible.

The third reason is one that is more difficult to accept.

Soldiers—at least officers--like to fight because it gives them a chance to kill people, “blood” their less experienced troops and commanders with a baptism of fire, and advance their careers. 

Advocates of humanitarian intervention might do well to recall that next time they promote one of these adventures.

China and Libya...and Corn and Ethanol

In the last couple weeks, I’ve had two articles up at Asia Times.

The March 19 piece, China embroiled in a Libyan muddle, correctly predicted that China—despite its abhorrence of foreign intervention--would not vote against the Libya no-fly-zone because of its desire to stay on the good side of Saudi Arabia.  (The piece was completed and submitted before the UNSC vote.  The editors at Asia Times kindly added a couple paragraphs to the opening of the piece to update it.)  So I can pat myself on the back for that. 

As I describe in the piece, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah detests Colonel Gaddafi for numerous insults and outrages directed at the kingdom, including an assassination attempt on Abdullah allegedly orchestrated by Libyan intelligence in 2003.

The Arab League endorsement of a Libyan no-fly-zone was born of idealism, panic, and near universal disgust with Gaddafi.  But a key factor in the tone and content of the resolution, I believe, was the prior declaration of the Saudi Arabia-dominated Gulf Co-operation Council that Gaddafi’s regime had forfeited its legitimacy, the rebels should be engaged, and a no-fly-zone should be imposed.

My article received a nice notice in the New York Times Magazine blog, The 6th Floor, to whit:

The Arab side in all this has been fascinating (and well described in The Asia Times by Peter Lee).

It is ironic that an article written by a China guy for a publication called Asia Times is considered to be a good source for understanding the Arab side of the equation, but there it is.

Ah, to an ex-New Yorker like me, the whiff of NYT newsprint is intoxicating, albeit virtual and at third hand..

Yes, I know, the New York Times Magazine is not the New York Times.  It’s better than the New York Times, since the magazine’s Sunday crosswords have provided me with hours of wholesome and uplifting entertainment often absent from the Grey Lady’s diplomatic and foreign policy reporting, and it has never, to my knowledge, published Judith Miller.

And I know it’s the blog of the New York Times Magazine, not the magazine itself. But I’ll bookmark it anyway.

Speaking of bookmarks, it’s time to update your Laura Rozen bookmark again.  The Internet’s premier diplomatic reporter has left Politico and has a new blog at Yahoo! News entitled The Envoy.

My previous week’s piece at Asia Times is entitled China’s ethanol binge and corn hangover.

I’m rather proud of that piece because it takes a subject that’s considered rather boring and does not rate any headline space in general interest publications—Chinese agricultural and ethanol policy—and manages to make some interesting and important points about the worldwide ethanol insanity, China’s fraught rural policy, and the dire and unexpected consequences of dodgy agricultural policy in China for world food prices.

There is no subject too ordinary to yield insight to the inquiring mind, I suppose.








Fly away, little bird.  HLL RIP 1927-2011