Crimea & Punishment: US Influence in Decline

"If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merits of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning."

Robert S. McNamara

John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, recently visited Kiev, the besieged Ukraine capital. From there he accused Russia “of making up reasons for intervention in Ukraine, saying that ‘not a single piece of credible evidence supports any one of these claims*."  Kerry went on to further refute Russia’s justification for amassing troops in Crimea based on their assertion that “Russian-speaking citizens (were) under siege…*" (*Source: CNNArticle).

At face value I would be inclined to agree with Mr. Kerry. The people of Kiev marched in protest of their elected government led by Russian strongman Victor Yanukovich to overthrow him. It is true he was democratically elected (even though there were numerous anomalies and allegations of voter fraud and vote rigging). For our purposes let’s assume he was democratically elected. So while we can argue that his government’s demise was un-democratic in that it did not transpire at the ballot box, what cannot be argued is the fact that Mr. Yanukovich completely lost the confidence of his own ministers, cabinet and party. In the end he had no credibility, and therefore no legitimacy, left to govern the people of Ukraine. It was just a matter of time before he would have had to submit his resignation and hold new elections, which is why he fled.

What surprises me most about the current crisis in Crimea is not the recent turn of events but that nobody in NATO, the European Union, MI-5, State Department, CIA, NSA or the White House saw this coming. In my estimation, Putin was always going to take all necessary means to protect his substantial trade and geopolitical investments in Ukraine. We were all aware that Mr. Yanukovich was the Kremlin’s man in Kiev. Russia has historical ties to the region starting in the 18^th century. Nikita Khrushchev gifted Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, but they still share the same language and many Ukrainians work in Russia today. Most importantly Russia has billions of dollars invested there. “Take Crimea, for instance. More than half of its 2 million people are Russian, and Russia still maintains a naval base there.” (Source: NPR Article). Did the Western powers seriously expect Putin to walk away or agree to settle this matter with meetings, phone calls and group hugs? Mr. Putin is ex KGB and a man who has long portrayed a tough guy image. We have all seen the pictures of him wrestling a bear and riding a horse shirtless. He is not going to go silently into the night when there is a direct challenge to his authority and influence within his geopolitical sphere and right on Russia’s doorstep.

Putin claims that he was asked by Mr. Yanukovich to send troops to protect the Russian speaking populations in the East and in Crimea; it is a pretty thin argument. Even without a law degree one can see that there is no legal justification for Russia’s action. Let’s for a moment forget Putin’s claims for amassing troops in Crimea and go back to 2005 to another invasion of a sovereign country. Now consider John Kerry’s statement accusing Russia and substitute Ukraine for Iraq - of making up reasons for intervention in (Iraq), and that ‘not a single piece of credible evidence supports any one of these claims;" funny how his statement still applies to the Iraq invasion. To this day there is not proof of Iraqi links to Al-Qaeda, nor any evidence they supported, funded or harbored any terrorist organizations. We all know that there was never any credible evidence presented (only anecdotal from exiles and dissidents; which were written off by German intelligence who provided them to US and UK) of a stockpile of deadly chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. There was never any imminent threat to the United States of America or the world at large, as we were repeatedly told by Cheney, Bush and Blair. No matter how you feel about the Iraq invasion there can be no dispute that there was no legal justification for it within International Law. Perhaps this is why the US was able to convince only one of the more than one hundred and ninety countries in the world of its need to invade a sovereign nation.

There is no question that Mr. Putin has no moral right or legal justification to invade the Ukraine. The problem is that after the invasion of Iraq, the United States lost its moral authority to stop Russia or any other country from doing the same. It is a simple matter of International law; if the US can break it at will, then why not another country? Bush and Cheney set a very dangerous precedent, that too at a time when US economic dominance is in decline. Mr. Putin is well aware of this fact and has taken a calculated but smart risk. He knows the US can no longer take the high ground or afford another war. While the European Union can take the high ground, they are averse to war. However, since Russia supplies almost a quarter of their oil and natural gas, Putin knows that the EU is highly unlikely to do anything too damaging in terms of sanctions or economic reprimands. Perhaps, now Bush and Cheney can add this to the already high cost of their Iraq war.

September 11 - Ten Years Later (Part 1)

“If we were about to be attacked or had been attacked or something happened that threatened a vital U.S. national interest, I would be the first in line to say, ‘Let’s go,’ I will always be an advocate in terms of wars of necessity. I am just much more cautious on wars of choice.”

Robert Gates

This is what George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense said on being asked if he had any words of wisdom during his final interview before retirement. This lifelong Republican said that the human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that he has witnessed first-hand are far too great to start wars that were not necessary. He said he had learned clearly over the past four and a half years that wars “have taken longer and been more costly in lives and treasure” than anticipated.” 

 

The man George Bush handpicked to fix the mess his predecessor Donald Rumsfeld made in Iraq, effectively told America that the Iraq war was not something he would have embarked on; a war that was clearly one of America’s choosing. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/us/politics/19gates.html) 

Ten years after the September 11^th attacks, Americans are still avoiding having an open, honest and meaningful discussion about the far reaching implications and long-term costs of the decisions their government made in the name of national security. 

 

I truly believe that until America has this conversation and in doing so faces the real ghosts of 9/11, they will struggle to move forward as a unified nation again. Instead, the country will continue down the post 9/11 path of a nation deeply divided and one that has never stopped living in and reacting out of fear. 

 

Nobody denies the fact that the country’s security should be a major concern when attacked in this way. Nor would anyone have a problem with the United States going after those responsible with any and all means possible; we can also expect and discount a certain amount of knee-jerk reactionism in the short-term. 

 

However, after a short period of time the elected leaders should have been the first people to step up and ensure that cooler heads prevailed. They should have been the ones to ensure that both the short-term costs and the long-term implications of every major decision was weighed and counter-weighed; that every plan was carefully examined before there was a rush to judgement. 

 

Now, ten years later, the best way to have this important conversation is to do it by looking at the facts and figures, and by studying the realities and outcomes that resulted from those decisions made by the Bush government in those fear filled months and fear-mongering years after 9/11. 

Let’s start by examining the financial burden of both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. This figure now stands at a staggering $1.7 trillion and counting; and that is just for military operations, base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans’ health care. It is worth mentioning that 1% - 2% of this total amount has been misplaced. The government now acknowledges that they have no accounting for this loss of taxpayer money. 

 

The Iraq war accounts for $872 billion (or 63%) of the total. Of that amount, $803 billion has been spent on military operations, $28 billion on local security and $41 billion that includes funds for reconstruction and foreign aid (source: “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11” prepared by the Congressional Research Service). 

 

Keep in mind this does not include the future cost of both these wars; which along with the estimated veteran care are projected to cost US taxpayers another $867 billion. Of course critics say these projections are too high but think back to when Cheney was lobbying for the Iraq war, he also repeatedly re-assured us that the price tag for this war - to oust Saddam, restore order and install a new government would not exceed $50-$60 billion. 

 

As we compile the total costs of post 9/11 government actions we are still not accounting for the increased expenditure from huge new additions to the government bureaucracy with the inception of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Department of Homeland Security and increased domestic intelligence budgets that were all non-war related expenses. In fact, if you tally all of this government expenditure, then George W. Bush has the distinction of “presiding over the largest increase in the size of government since the Great Society,” and those are John McCain’s words.

Next, we need to examine the current state of the regions within which these conflicts reside to fully understand the very real outcomes from both a regional stability and geopolitical stand-point. In the Middle East, the US’s closest ally Israel finds itself increasingly isolated and alone in the region. Meanwhile, Iran’s influence and power has grown substantially, directly as a result of America removing enemies on her borders, Iraq and Afghanistan.  What’s more, today Iraq is one of Iran’s largest trading partners, and Iran is rapidly strengthening trade ties with Afghanistan, giving it unparalleled clout and influence in both countries.  Ironically, Bush’s War on Terror has resulted in unimaginable gains and geopolitical power for this “axis of evil” country. The US has inadvertently helped change Iran’s status from an isolated pariah state, in 2003, to a major regional power broker by 2009. One wonders if America had not taken its eye off the ball when it had the Taliban and Al’ Qaeda on the run, and finished the job, if the situation would be different today with Iran. By taking the entire focus away from the Afghan conflict and relying instead on writing blank cheques to Pakistan and a corrupt Afghan government, it seems America was hoping they could have their cake and eat it. The US expected to wrap up a quick and cheap Iraq war – we all know how that turned out. This decision is even more amazing given that the US was fully aware of the murky history between the ISI and Taliban and acutely aware of Pakistan’s paranoia about India’s growing influence in a new Afghanistan. By 2008 the Taliban had the opportunity to fully re-group, and had turned Pakistan’s tribal regions into a new safe harbor for themselves and a host of other affiliated terrorist networks, including Al Qaeda. Pakistan is still the launching point for all attacks on US troops in Afghanistan, and arguably closer to being a failed state, with nuclear weapons, than ever before in its history. I believe there is a strong argument that things would be very different in this region, today, had the US not diverted all its military resources, assets, support and political focus and diverted it to a war of choice in Iraq. 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, between warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation, water boarding, the patriot act and illegal domestic surveillance programs, we are only now starting to scratch the surface of secret government decisions made in the name of our security. It is also apparent that many of these decisions did not uphold America’s high ideals, beliefs and strong democratic values. Rather than get into a discussion about civil rights violations, let us examine the net result of the actions of creating a huge new domestic security apparatus with the TSA, Homeland Security and a mega-billion dollar domestic intelligence gathering network. One that starts with a SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) that local police officers are encouraged to fill out on their beats, which gets stored in a massive database without any further scrutiny or investigation of the person named in the report. All this information is then analysed using sophisticated software that is meant to stitch disparate pieces of information together, distributing it to federal “authorities” in real-time. In the context of this enhanced security apparatus, let’s review the last three major terrorist plots against the US, starting with the Christmas Day bomber.  Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab managed to board a flight to Detroit with an explosive device hidden in his underwear. Luckily this device failed to detonate, after which he was wrestled to the ground by a fellow passenger. What boggles the mind is the fact that this new and improved multi-billion dollar security apparatus completely missed him - this after his father, a respected Nigerian banker, called US authorities and warned them that his son was becoming radicalized. Despite being on a no fly list Abdulmutallab was not stopped at two different airports, and even though he bought a one-way ticket (like all the 9/11 hijackers) it was not picked up as a red flag by all our new and highly sophisticated security algorithms and apparatus. We are told that his name was misspelled on the no-fly list; clearly our government’s multi-billion dollar taxpayer funded state-of-the-art software does not contain a basic spell check or even the level of sophistication that Google’s search box provides with its query suggestions. Next we had the Times Square bomber who was caught, not by our enhanced security, but only because some alert citizens noticed a man acting strangely after parking his SUV near Times Square. A couple of street vendors called police after seeing what looked like smoke and some strange apparatus inside the abandoned vehicle, Finally, we had another close call with two packages located on separate cargo planes bound for the US from Yemen. Both had home printers with plastique explosives and a sophisticated detonating mechanism timed to blow up in mid-air over US cities. The only reason we discovered and disarmed them was thanks to a call from a reformed Al Qaeda terrorist to the head of Saudi intelligence. It begs the question of what all this increased prying, searching, and snooping has resulted in. Clearly it has not served as a deterrent, because the number of terrorist attacks has actually increased dramatically worldwide* (see footnote for sources), and in the US, in the past decade and at a much greater rate than before the Iraq war. The point is that securing the country is important but finding the right balance between technology, paranoia and human intelligence is equally important. Think about the fact that every new action by terrorists has led to a knee-jerk and piece-meal reaction to our growing security paranoia. First, we were asked to remove our shoes, then our belts, then gels were prohibited, next liquids had to be less than 3.4 ounces, and put in clear plastic baggies. Now since they cannot ask us to take off our undergarments we are instead virtually strip searched. Arguably, all this money is not being well spent because it is being done in a completely reactionary fashion rather than as part of a well thought out plan. We know that the terrorists will stop at nothing to kill us, so the only question is where will we draw the line?

Read Part 2: September 11 - Ten Years Later (part 2)

*NOTE: Sources: The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) from September, 2006.  The NIE is issued by the President’s Director of National Intelligence and their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all the US spy agencies.  It is an assessment on national security.  The 2006 NIE said that the number of terrorist attacks (defined as “as an act of violence or the threat of violence, calculated to create an atmosphere of fear and alarm”) had risen dramatically worldwide since the Invasion of Iraq in 2003.  The same NIE also cited the Iraq war as a major factor in this startling rise in global jihadist terrorist attacks.   We also have the US State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism, 2006 which stated that there had been a 29% increase in terrorism worldwide in 2006, over the previous year; terrorist attacks on non-military targets rose to 14,338 with an increase of deaths to 20,498.  If you need any more data then I can point to another independent global study on terrorism conducted by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law.  They found that there was a 607 percent rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks since the Iraq invasion. It is true that Iraq and Afghanistan do cause a huge blip and together account of 80 percent of attacks and 67 percent of fatalities; however, if you exclude these two countries you still see a solid 35 percent per year increase in the number of terrorist attacks in the rest of the world.