The US drone attack that killed Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was an act of war. Soleimani was a clear enemy of the US and has been for a very long time. But others–including Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama as well as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu–resisted the urge to assassinate him because he was so highly regarded in Iran and Iranian allies. All three had plenty of opportunities to kill Soleimani but all three were wise enough to know that creating a martyr would not advance their country’s interests.
The Trump Administration chose this moment to kill Soleimani and we are justified in asking why. US Secretary of State Pompeo claimed that the assassination was justified because US intelligence suggested that Soleimani was planning an “imminent” attack against American forces. If true, then the attack would be legal under the US Constitution since the US Commander in Chief is obliged to provide self-defense for US service members. But Pompeo provided no evidence for his claim and it would be strange if the Administration started to suddenly believe the intelligence services it has descried over their findings regarding Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election.
My own initial belief is that the attack was an attempt to divert attention from the release of documents that indicate that the Trump Administration was well aware that its decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine was illegal. Frida Ghitis writes about the emails that were released yesterday under a Freedom of Information Act court order that the Trump Admionistration had previously refused to release:
“Pentagon lawyers and others appeared to grow increasingly anxious. Duffey later writes, “Clear direction from POTUS to hold,” again making it clear this was the President’s doing.
“On July 26, the “Ukraine Deputies Small Group” met. The National Security Council’s top Ukraine experts — Trump’s own team — declared ‘unanimous support‘ for restarting military funding as Russia’s allies continued their assault on eastern Ukraine.
“As the clock ticked toward a disbursement deadline, aides increasingly raised the legality of the issue.And rightly so. The decision didn’t just run against national security, it violated the law.
“Under the Impoundment Control Act (ICA), the administration is obligated to spend the money as directed by Congress. If it doesn’t, it is required to inform Congress that it is doing so and why.
“In a draft letter by the Pentagon to the OMB, top Defense Department officials noted, ‘We have repeatedly advised OMB officials’ that the suspension of aid jeopardizes ‘the Department’s ability’ to comply with the ICA.”
Not surprisingly. this information was buried under the avalanche of news concerning Soleimani.
I still need more time to think this through, however. I will be watching to see what the Iraqi Parliament decides. I would not be surprised if the Parliament asked the US to leave, fulfilling Suleimani’s main objective. The Iranians will undoubtedly respond, but I suspect that their response will be calibrated so that an American attack on Iranian soil cannot be justified. But my main emotion right now is deep sorrow over the stupidity of the US actions. I will try tonight and tomorrow to see if I can discern any strategic objective that is served by the attack on Suleimani.
The immediate crisis over the US Embassy in Iraq seems to have subsided. The protesters who breached the compound–with the apparent complicity of Iraqi security forces–have pulled back after US President Trump talked with the Iraqi government and send additional troops to Iraq. But that clam is entirely misleading. Dov S. Zakheim has written a short essay for The National Interest which argues that the protesters, who are proxies for the Iranian government, seem to be intent on forcing the US to respond militarily to their provocations. The belief among the protesters is that the use of force will give greater legitimacy to the presence of Iranian forces in Iraq. Zakheim asserts that the American people will not tolerate the necessary military presence to pose a real threat to the Iranian militias who operate in Iraq and that President Trump will ultimately be obliged to back down.
Both the US and Iran have stepped up their hostile rhetoric:
“US President Donald Trump and other top US officials have blamed Iran for attacks on US forces and for storming the embassy compound.
“’They will pay a very BIG PRICE! This is not a Warning, it is a Threat,’ Trump wrote on Twitter, adding ‘Happy New Year!’
“Iran’s supreme leader Wednesday condemned US strikes on Iraq and warned that his country was ready to hit back.
“’I and the government and the nation of Iran strongly condemn this American crime,’ Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech broadcast on state television.
“’If the Islamic Republic decides to oppose or fight against a country, it will do this explicitly,’ he said.”
The US State Department has released its annual report, “World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers, 2019 edition”. It is a very valuable resource for those who wish to analyze how much the world is spending on military power. By way of summary:
” From 2007 through 2017, in constant 2017 U.S. dollar terms, the annual value of world military expenditures appears to have risen about 11% – 33%, from about $1.51 – 2.15 trillion in 2007 to about $1.77 – 2.88 trillion in 2017, and to have averaged between $1.72 and $2.61 trillion for the 11-year period….
“During the eleven-year period, for the world, the share of GDP to which military expenditure was equivalent – an indicator sometimes called “the military burden” – appears to have averaged between 1.9% and 2.5%, peaking at between 2.2% and 2.8% in 2009 and trending downward thereafter to between 1.7% and 2.2% in 2017….
“From 2007 to 2017, the global annual value of international arms transfer deliveries appears to have averaged about $181 billion in constant 2017 U.S. dollar terms, and to have risen by about 65%, from about $119 billion to about $195 billion, despite declining after 2012 from a peak of $206 billion in that year. The arms trade’s share of world trade in goods and services appears to have ranged from about 0.6% to about 0.9%, averaging about 0.8% and trending upward until 2009 but thereafter declining, recovering and staying at its 2009 level of about 0.9%. During the eleven-year period, about 79% of the world arms trade, by value, appears to have been supplied by the United States, about 10% by the European Union, about 5% by Russia, and less than 2% by China. There was no clear trend in either the U.S., the Russian, or the Chinese market share during the period.”
There are a very large number of tables and charts, broken down by geographic region, economic status, and political groupings. The charts and tables are in spreadsheet format and easily accessible.
Protesters broke into the US Embassy compound in Baghdad, Iraq as Iranian-backed militias protested against the US strikes against Iranian militia positions in Syria and Iraq two days ago. The US strikes were in retaliation for militia ambushes which killed a US defense contractor and wounded 4 US soldiers. The Embassy protests raised memories of the US hostages which were held in the US Embassy in Tehran, Iran from 1979-80 as well as the attacks against the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya in 2012. But tensions between the US and Iran have been rising ever since the US pulled out of the Iranian nuclear agreement and imposed crippling sanctions on Iran in 2018.
The responsibility for protecting Embassies falls on the host government (even though the land upon which the Embassy is built is considered the sovereign territory of the country represented). The Iraqi security forces did not prevent the protesters from entering the compound and the US brought in Apache helicopters to aid in the defense of the compound. The US has had a military agreement with Iraq ever since the US overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The agreement was modified to allow some US forces to remain in Iraq in the conflict with ISIS in Syria and Iraq. But Iranian forces also joined in the fight against ISIS and those forces cooperated with US forces against that common enemy.
But now that ISIS has been deprived of a sustained territorial base in Syria, the differences between Iran and the US have returned to the fore. There are some Iraqis who are quite sympathetic to Iran and there are others who consider Iran to be an uninvited meddler. But there are few Iraqis who wish to see US troops stay in Iraq and there has been growing antipathy toward those forces. So the Iranians have a clear advantage in provoking actions against the American presence in Iraq. One must admit that the lack of support for the US is depressing since the US has had almost 17 years to build up solid support for its presence. But that opportunity has been squandered and Iraq seems to increasingly fragile despite US military and economic support.
I suspect that there will be more protests and the US will be confronted with a very difficult choice: to keep its representatives in Baghdad by intervening more decisively (a long-term loser) or to withdraw its Embassy staff to avoid a Benghazi scenario. There is no good alternative for the US and that summarizes current US Middle East policy.
William Burns has written an essay for Foreign Affairs, entitled “The Demolition of US Diplomacy” which looks at the serious harm the US State Department has suffered over the last three years. From his point of view the damage has been both immediate and long-term:
“Even before the Ukraine mess, the Trump administration had been waging a war on diplomacy for nearly three years. The White House regularly pushes historic cuts to diplomacy and development spending, which is already 19 times smaller than the defense budget. Career diplomats are sidelined, with only one of 28 assistant secretary-rank positions filled by a Foreign Service officer, and more ambassadorships going to political appointees in this administration than in any in recent history. One-fifth of ambassadorships remain unfilled, including critical posts.
“Not coincidentally, applications to join the Foreign Service have declined precipitously, with fewer people taking the entrance exam in 2019 than in more than two decades. The pace of resignations by career professionals is depressing, the pernicious practice of retaliation against individual officers just because they worked on controversial issues in the last administration is damning, and the silence from the department’s leadership is deafening.”
The same point of view is echoed by Steven Kashkett, a Foreign Service officer of 35 years in an op-ed published in USA Today. The hollowing out of the State Department only serves to enhance the influence of the Pentagon.
“The fires have already killed at least 10 people, torched more than 11.3 million acres, and destroyed more than 900 homes since September. The blazes made breathing the air in Sydney as bad as smoking 37 cigarettes and have killed 480 million animals, environmental officials told the Times in the United Kingdom, including nearly one-third of the koalas in one of Australia’s most populated koala habitats in an area 240 miles north of Sydney.”
There have been a strong of anti-Semitic acts of violence in the US over the last month, culminating with an attack on a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York. But the violence in the US has also been mirrored by acts in Europe:
“In Europe and the United States, Jews have been repeatedly assaulted on the street. Tombstones were desecrated in Slovakia. In London, anti-Semitic graffiti was painted on synagogues and Jewish-owned stores. A Belgian daily newspaper accused a lawmaker who is Jewish of being a spy for Israel. A Polish town refused to install small brass plates that commemorate Holocaust victims. In Italy, the town of Schio did the same because, the mayor said, they would be “divisive.” (Divisive to whom?) This intolerance is coming from right-wing extremists, progressive leftists, and other minorities who, themselves, are often the object of persecution. Anti-Semites seem to think it is open season on Jews. And maybe, given the many incidents, they are right.”
The US Federal Reserve has released a research paper which analyzes the effects of the tariff increases in the US on the manufacturing sector in the domestic economy. The tariffs were justified as an effort to “level the playing field” for manufacturers who suffered from unfair trade practices in China. There is little question that the manufacturing sector in the US has been substantially reduced because many firms stopped producing in the US and moved their facilities abroad in search of lower labor costs and more relaxed environmental regulations. According to the US Department of Labor:
“Today’s manufacturing output is at least 5 percent greater than it was in 2000, but it has become much more capital intensive and much less labor intensive. Accordingly, workers in the sector are more likely to have at least some college education than their counterparts of years past. But there are far fewer manufacturing workers overall, with about 7.5 million jobs lost since 1980. These job losses have likely contributed to the declining labor force participation rate of prime age (between the ages of 21 and 55) U.S. workers. In “The transformation of manufacturing and the decline of U.S. employment,” (National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 24468, March 2018), economists Kerwin Kofi Charles, Erik Hurst, and Mariel Schwartz examine the factors that have played a role in the decline of prime age manufacturing workers since 1980 and focusing in the 2000s.
“Before examining the factors that have led to job losses, the authors discuss two periods that saw manufacturing employment fall sharply—1980 to 2000 and 2000 to 2017. Two million jobs were lost between 1980 and 2000 and 5.5 million jobs were lost between 2000 and 2017. The authors note that these losses have affected the employment rates of prime age workers, finding that a ’10 percentage point decline in the local manufacturing share reduced local employment rates by 3.7 percentage points for prime age men and 2.7 percentage points for prime age women.'”
The new research indicates that the tariff increases have not had the desired effect and that they have in fact damaged the manufacturing sector. The abstract to the paper summarizes the findings:
“Since the beginning of 2018, the United States has undertaken unprecedented tariff increases, with one goal of these actions being to boost the manufacturing sector. In this paper, we estimate the effect of the tariffs—including retaliatory tariffs by U.S. trading partners—on manufacturing employment, output, and producer prices. A key feature of our analysis is accounting for the multiple ways that tariffs might affect the manufacturing sector, including providing protection for domestic industries, raising costs for imported inputs, and harming competitiveness in overseas markets due to retaliatory tariffs. We find that U.S. manufacturing industries more exposed to tariff increases experience relative reductions in employment as a positive effect from import protection is offset by larger negative effects from rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs. Higher tariffs are also associated with relative increases in producer prices via rising input costs.”
Russia claims to have deployed the first hypersonic missile. A hypersonic missile flies at least 5 times the speed of sound and the Russian version, known as Avangard, also claims to be maneuverable. It is difficult to assess the truth of these claims, but, if true, such missiles would render anti-missile systems obsolete. Since the Reagan Administration, the US has been developing anti-missile systems and the Russians feared such systems, believing that anti-missile systems would nullify their nuclear weapons. Hypersonic missiles could potentially make the US investments in anti-missile systems a wasted effort. Both the US and China are also developing hypersonic missiles and we can expect that a new arms race will unfold. The US left the Intermediate-range Nuclear Force Treaty this year, and the only remaining arms control treaty still in force, START 2, will expire in February 2021.
Russia, China, and Iran are conducting four days of naval exercises in the northern Indian Ocean. The exercises come despite the increased tensions between the US and Iran and it is difficult to figure out exactly what message Russia and China are sending. If an open conflict between the US and Iran were to break out, it is highly unlikely that either China or Russia would intervene–even though both countries have a strong interest in Iranian oil, the interest is not sufficient to risk an open conflict with the US. Nonetheless, joint military exercises are difficult and expensive and one would be derelict to dismiss their significance. The exercises will definitely complicate US attempts to further isolate Iran from the international economic system. The exercises also come as Japan decided to send a destroyer to the region after a very contentious debate:
“Despite being a U.S. ally, Japan’s troop dispatch is not part of a U.S.-led coalition protecting Middle East waterways, apparently an attempt to maintain neutrality in a show of consideration to Iran.
“Under the plan, Japan will send about 260 Maritime Self-Defense Force personnel with a destroyer and a pair of P-3C reconnaissance aircraft, mainly for intelligence-gathering in the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait connecting the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.”
Japan’s interest in protecting the flow of oil from the Middle East is obvious since it gets 80% of its oil from the region. But Japan has tried to maintain good relations with both Iran and the US so it is a difficult balancing act.
Paul Krugman has written an op-ed for The New York Times on the effects of great wealth on the political process in the US. He uses information that was gleaned from published reports by The Guardian, a reliable lefty newspaper (it is not an accident that a British newspaper would report on something that many US media outlets apparently are unwilling to investigate). The article quotes from the research conducted by US academics Benjamin I Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew J Lacombe. The researchers do not mince their words:
“Our new, systematic study of the 100 wealthiest Americans indicates that Buffett, Gates, Bloomberg et al are not at all typical. Most of the wealthiest US billionaires – who are much less visible and less reported on – more closely resemble Charles Koch. They are extremely conservative on economic issues. Obsessed with cutting taxes, especially estate taxes – which apply only to the wealthiest Americans. Opposed to government regulation of the environment or big banks. Unenthusiastic about government programs to help with jobs, incomes, healthcare, or retirement pensions – programs supported by large majorities of Americans. Tempted to cut deficits and shrink government by cutting or privatizing guaranteed social security benefits….
“Both as individuals and as contributors to Koch-type consortia, most US billionaires have given large amounts money – and many have engaged in intense activity – to advance unpopular, inequality-exacerbating, highly conservative economic policies. But they have done so very quietly, saying little or nothing in public about what they are doing or why. They have avoided political accountability. We believe that this sort of stealth politics is harmful to democracy.”
Forbes, a reliable righty journal, did an analysis of how wealthy politicians have become very prominent in world politics in recent years. The phenomenon of rich politicians is hardly new; but the amount of concentrated wealth in the hands of so few will be difficult for democracies to manage.
On this day one hundred years ago, the Boston Red Sox sold George “Babe” Ruth to the New York Yankees, a.k.a. the Spawn of Satan. The misbegotten sale would condemn the Red Sox to 86 years of wandering in the wilderness of Major League Baseball. Ruth was sold for $100,000 which is equivalent to about $1,522,624.24 in today’s dollar. For comparison, the lowest paid player on the Red Sox today, Heath Hembree, makes $1.6 million. Or put another way, that amount is about 4.75% of what current player David Price makes today. This post is designed to make us all feel better about all the stupid decisions that are being made today in almost every walk of life.
The Pew Research Center has conducted a poll which puts numbers to a state of affairs that seems to be intuitively obvious: that there is a sharp partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats in the US. The poll covers a very large number of issues, and there is an extended section of the analysis which deals with foreign policy.
“Roughly seven-in-ten Americans (73%) say that good diplomacy is the best way to ensure peace, while 26% say that military strength is the best way to do this. By a similar margin, more Americans say the U.S. should take the interests of allies into account, even if it means making compromises, than think the U.S. should follow its own national interests when allies disagree (68% vs. 31%).
“There are stark partisan divides on both of these foreign policy values. Wide majorities of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents see good diplomacy as the best way to ensure peace (90%) and say the U.S. should take allies’ interests into account even if that results in compromises (83%).
“By comparison, Republicans and Republican leaners are more divided in both of these views. About half (53%) see good diplomacy as the best means of ensuring peace, while 46% think military strength will best achieve this. The GOP split is nearly identical in views of how to consider allies’ interests: 51% say allies’ interests should be taken into account even if it means making compromises, while 48% say America’s national interests should be followed even if allies strongly disagree.”
There are some strong effects of age and education on the results of the poll, with older, less-educated individuals more willing to support a US disengagement from the world (even though that same cohort believes that the US should remain the world’s dominant military power).
US President Trump made a speech to a campus group in Florida, accompanied by Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham. It was a rambling speech but one part about the Green New Deal caught my attention. It is not surprising that Mr. Trump does not favor the Green New Deal.
“We’ll have an economy based on wind. I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it better than anybody I know. It’s very expensive. They’re made in China and Germany mostly — very few made here, almost none. But they’re manufactured tremendous — if you’re into this — tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint — fumes are spewing into the air. Right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything — right?
“So they make these things and then they put them up. And if you own a house within vision of some of these monsters, your house is worth 50 percent of the price. They’re noisy. They kill the birds. You want to see a bird graveyard? You just go. Take a look. A bird graveyard. Go under a windmill someday. You’ll see more birds than you’ve ever seen ever in your life.”
The incoherence of this statement is astonishing and should cause alarm. It is obvious that Mr. Trump does not favor wind power, but even if the manufacture of wind turbines emits greenhouse gases, the level of emissions are far lower than that of a coal powered electric plant. And Mr. Trump’s preferred icon–glass skyscrapers–kill many more birds–about 600 million every year–than a wind turbine. Indeed, if Mr. Trump cares about birds, a better first step would be to enforce the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which the Department of the Interior gutted on 14 June 2018. In a letter, the Department stated: “The Solicitor’ s Opinion M – 37050 dated December 22, 2017, issued by the Principal Deputy Solicitor of the Department of the Interior, establishes that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act does not prohibit the incidental take of migratory birds. The take of birds, eggs, or nests occurring as the result of an activity, the purpose of which is not to take birds, eggs, or nests, is not prohibited by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.” In other words, you can destroy birds, eggs, and nests as long as that was not your primary objective.
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