Politics

In the Darkness of Dick Cheney

Wednesday, 12 February 2014 15:08

Danner writes: "Launching an immediate surprise attack on Syria, Cheney tells us in his memoirs, would not only 'make the region and the world safer, but it would also demonstrate our seriousness with respect to nonproliferation.' This was the heart of the Bush Doctrine."

Former Vice President Dick Cheney speaks about national security in Washington, 05/21/09. (photo: Reuters)

In the Darkness of Dick Cheney

By Mark Danner, TomDispatch

12 February 14

�

f you're a man of principle, compromise is a bit of a dirty word. -- Dick Cheney, 2013

1. "We Ought to Take It Out"

In early 2007, as Iraq seemed to be slipping inexorably into chaos and President George W. Bush into inescapable political purgatory, Meir Dagan, the head of the Israeli Mossad, flew to Washington, sat down in a sunlit office of the West Wing of the White House, and spread out on the coffee table before him a series of photographs showing a strange-looking building rising out of the sands in the desert of eastern Syria. Vice President Dick Cheney did not have to be told what it was. "They tried to hide it down a wadi, a gulley," he recalls to filmmaker R.J. Cutler.

"There's no population around it anyplace... You can't say it's to generate electricity, there's no power line coming out of it. It's just out there obviously for production of plutonium."

The Syrians were secretly building a nuclear plant -- with the help, it appeared, of the North Koreans. Though the United States was already embroiled in two difficult, unpopular, and seemingly endless wars, though its military was overstretched and its people impatient and angry, the vice president had no doubt what needed to be done: "Condi recommended taking it to the United Nations. I strongly recommended that we ought to take it out."

Launching an immediate surprise attack on Syria, Cheney tells us in his memoirs, would not only "make the region and the world safer, but it would also demonstrate our seriousness with respect to nonproliferation." This was the heart of the Bush Doctrine: henceforth terrorists and the states harboring them would be treated as one and, as President Bush vowed before Congress in January 2002, "the United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." It was according to this strategic thinking that the United States answered attacks on New York and Washington by a handful of terrorists not by a carefully circumscribed counterinsurgency aimed at al-Qaeda but by a worldwide "war on terror" that also targeted states -- Iraq, Iran, North Korea -- that formed part of a newly defined "axis of evil."1 According to those attending National Security Council meetings in the days after September 11,

"The primary impetus for invading Iraq... was to make an example of [Saddam] Hussein, to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States."2

And yet five years after the president had denounced the "axis of evil" before Congress, and four years after his administration had invaded and occupied Iraq in the declared aim of ridding Saddam's regime of its weapons of mass destruction, the North Koreans had detonated their own nuclear weapon and the Syrians and Iranians, as the vice president tells us in his memoirs, were "both working to develop nuclear capability." What's more,

"Syria was facilitating the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq, where they killed US soldiers. Iran was providing funding and weapons for exactly the same purpose, as well as providing weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan. They were both involved in supporting Hezbollah in its efforts to threaten Israel and destabilize the Lebanese government. They constituted a major threat to America's interests in the Middle East."

By the vice president's own analysis the "demonstration model" approach, judged by whether it was "guiding the behavior" of the axis of evil countries and their allies, was delivering distinctly mixed results. No matter:

"I told the president we needed a more effective and aggressive strategy to counter these threats, and I believed that an important first step would be to destroy the reactor in the Syrian desert."

Launching an air strike on Syria, as he tells Cutler, "would sort of again reassert the kind of authority and influence we had back in '03 -- when we took down Saddam Hussein and eliminated Iraq as a potential source of WMD."

"Back in '03" had been the Golden Age, when American power had reached its zenith. After Kabul had fallen in a few weeks, the shock and awe launched from American planes and missiles had brought American warriors storming all the way to Baghdad. Saddam's statue, with the help of an American tank and a strong chain, crashed to the pavement. The first of the "axis of evil" countries had fallen. President Bush donned his flight suit and swaggered across the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. It was the "Mission Accomplished" moment.

And yet is there not something distinctly odd in pointing, in 2007 -- not to mention in the memoirs of 2011 and the film interview in 2013 -- to "the kind of authority and influence we had back in '03"? Four years after the Americans had declared victory in Iraq -- even as the vice president was "strongly recommending" that the United States attack Syria -- more than a hundred thousand Iraqis and nearly five thousand Americans were dead, Iraq was near anarchy, and no end was yet in sight. Not only the war's ending but its beginning had disappeared into a dark cloud of confusion and controversy, as the weapons of mass destruction that were its justification turned out not to exist. The invasion had produced not the rapid and overwhelming victory Cheney had anticipated but a quagmire in which the American military had occupied and repressed a Muslim country and, four years later, been brought to the verge of defeat. As for "authority and influence," during that time North Korea had acquired nuclear weapons and Iran and Syria had started down the road to building them.

Given this, what exactly had the "demonstration model" demonstrated? If such demonstrations really did "guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity...to flout the authority of the United States," how exactly had the decision to invade Iraq and the disastrous outcome of the war guided the actions and policies of those authority-flouting countries? The least one could say is that if the theory worked, then that "authority and influence we had back in '03," in conquered Baghdad, had been unmasked, as the insurgency got underway, as an illusion.

The pinnacle of power had been attained not in Baghdad but long before, when the leaders decided to set out on this ill-starred military adventure. By invading Iraq Bush administration policymakers -- and at their head, Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- had managed to demonstrate to the world not the grand extent of American power but its limits. The most one could say is that the "demonstration model" had had the opposite result of that intended, encouraging "rogue states," faced with the prospect of an aggressive United States determined to wield its unmatched conventional military forces, to pursue the least expensive means by which to deter such an attack: nuclear weapons of their own. Now the Iraq war suggested that even if the Americans did invade, a determined core of insurgents equipped with small arms, suicide vests, and other improvised explosive devices might well be enough to outlast them, or at least outlast the patience of the American public.

2. The Smile of Secret Power

By November 2007 two in three Americans had concluded that the Iraq war had not been worth fighting. President Bush, bidding fair to become the least popular president since modern polling began, had just led the Republicans to a decisive "thumping" at the polls, losing control of both houses of Congress -- and had felt obliged finally to fire Rumsfeld, Cheney's longtime mentor, over the latter's dogged and strenuous objections. It was Rumsfeld who had brought the young Cheney into the White House in the late 1960s and who had presided over his astonishing rise, and it was Rumsfeld who had been Cheney's critical partner in advocating "the strategy of the demonstration effect." Even as Bush secretly interviewed Robert M. Gates, Rumsfeld's prospective replacement, at his Crawford, Texas, ranch two days before the election, discussing Iraq, Afghanistan, and the perilous state of the American military, the vice president's shadow loomed. According to Gates, "After about an hour together, the president leaned forward and asked if I had any more questions. I said no. He then sort of smiled and said, 'Cheney?'"3

Two syllables. One word. Hearing it Gates "sort of smiled back." Reading it, we do the same. But what exactly does that word, accompanied by that "sort of" smile, mean? It raises first and foremost a question about power -- secret power. Untrammeled power. Hard power. The power behind POTUS. The Dark Side. The man who, even as he could no longer prevent his longtime mentor and close collaborator from being fired, himself never could be.

Richard Bruce Cheney, the man who had acceded to Governor George W. Bush's request in 2000 that he lead his search to find a perfect vice president, and who found that this arduous and exacting effort led to none other than himself, would be there at Bush's side, or somewhere in the murk behind him, until the bitter end. For all his experience and sophistication, that grimly blank expression -- calmly unflinching gaze, slightly lopsided frown -- embodied a philosophy of power unapologetically, brutally simple: attack, crush enemies; cause others to fear, submit. Power from time to time must be embodied in vivid violence, like Voltaire's executions, pour encourager les autres.

When it comes to Cheney's rise and his persistence we are in the realm of miracles and wonders. In 1969, Cheney was a 28-year-old fledgling academic wannabe from Wyoming laboring obscurely as an intern on Capitol Hill -- and lucky to be there, having twice flunked out of Yale, twice been jailed for drunk driving. Five years later he was Gerald Ford's White House chief of staff. Can American history offer a more rapid rise to power? Even the firework arc of his mentor Donald Rumsfeld pales before it.4 He'd owed his rise in large part to Rumsfeld's patronage, but also to Watergate itself, to the once-in-a-lifetime opportunities offered by the resignation of one president and the humbling of his successor. At close range Cheney, still in his early thirties, had seen the secret organs of executive power, notably the CIA, exposed to the light, humiliated, leashed. If it was true that "after 9/11, the gloves came off," Cheney, as a young and unlikely power in the Nixon and Ford White Houses, had had a front-row seat to observe the methods by which Congress first put those gloves on.

After Ford's defeat in 1976, Cheney won Wyoming's single House seat and rose with astonishing speed, advancing within a decade from freshman to minority whip, the number-three leadership position. He was on his way to the Speakership when he accepted President George H.W. Bush's offer to become secretary of defense and then, after leading the Pentagon during the wildly popular Desert Storm, left after Bush's defeat to become CEO of Halliburton, the giant oil services company. After gaining wealth and influence as a corporate leader, he finally departed to become -- to use the commonplace but entirely inadequate phrase -- "the most powerful vice president in history."

And all the while, like an ominous ground bass booming along beneath this public tale of power and triumph, runs another, darker narrative of mortality, in some ways even more remarkable. While campaigning for the House in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1978, Cheney was struck down by a heart attack. His doctor, and coauthor of Heart: An American Medical Odyssey, Jonathan Reiner, remarks that he knows no one who had a heart attack in the Seventies who is still alive today. For Cheney that 1978 coronary would be the first of five, his survival increasingly owed to the most advanced medical technology that with almost miraculous fortune became available just as he needed it to survive -- as if, Cheney writes, he "were traveling down a street, late for work, and all the lights ahead of me were red, but they turned green just before I got there."

In the book's most striking scene, Reiner recalls hearing a colleague summoning him back to the operating table late one afternoon in March 2012: "Hey, Jon, take a look." Entering, he is confronted with a singular vision:

"In Alan's raised right hand, festooned with surgical clamps and now separated from the body that it had sustained for seventy-one years, rested the vice president's heart. It was huge, more than twice the size of a normal organ, and it bore the scars of its four-decade battle with the relentless disease that eventually killed it.

"I turned from the heart to look down into the chest.... The surreal void was a vivid reminder that there was no turning back."

3. The End of the "Demonstration Effect"

No turning back would be a good slogan for Dick Cheney. His memoirs are remarkable -- and he shares this with Rumsfeld -- for an almost perfect lack of second-guessing, regret, or even the mildest reconsideration. "I thought the best way to get on with my life and my career was to do what I thought was right," he tells Cutler. "I did what I did, it's all on the public record, and I feel very good about it." Decisions are now as they were then. If that Mission Accomplished moment in 2003 seemed at the time to be the height of American power and authority, then so it will remain -- unquestioned, unaltered, uninflected by subsequent public events that show it quite clearly to have been nothing of the kind. "If I had to do it over again," says Cheney, "I'd do it in a minute."

Yet lack of regret, refusal to reconsider, doesn't alter the train of cause and effect; certainty that decisions were right, no matter how powerful -- and the imperturbable perfection of Cheney's certainty is nothing short of dazzling -- cannot obscure evidence that they were wrong. Often the sheer unpopularity of a given course seems to offer to Cheney its own satisfaction, a token of his disinterestedness, as if the lack of political support must serve as a testament to the purity of his motives. "Cheney is an anti-politician," remarks Barton Gellman, author of the brilliant study of Cheney's vice-presidency, Angler.5 "But no president can be an anti-politician. No president can govern that way."

By 2007, even President Bush had begun to realize this, to understand the pitfalls and risks of Cheney's certainty. Having ventured his own one-word query in the interview with Robert Gates -- "Cheney?" -- Bush supplies his own answer: "He is a voice, an important voice, but only one voice." This observation would appear to be proved true in the debate over attacking Syria, in which Gates as secretary of defense joined Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Secretary Adviser Stephen Hadley in opposing Cheney. "The idea that we could bomb the Syria reactor to make a point about proliferation in the face of uncertain intelligence," Rice remarks in her memoirs, "was, to put it mildly, reckless."

It was not just the possibility that such a surprise attack could ignite a regional conflagration and pull the Syrians and Iranians deeper into the Iraq quagmire, or the fact that the American public was exhausted with war and desperate to withdraw from the Middle East rather than attack another country there. The Chinese were deeply involved -- they were critical to pressuring the North Koreans, who had helped build the Syrian reactor -- and, Rice notes, "they (and the rest of the region) would never have tolerated the military strike the Vice President recommended."6

No matter. Cheney prided himself on keeping political concerns out of decisions about "what was right"; and no war gone wrong, let alone a defeat at the polls, would change his views on the terrible "nexus" between terrorists and their state sponsors and weapons of mass destruction. As he tells Cutler: "You don't want Syria to have that kind of capability that they might be able to pass along to Hamas or Hezbollah or al-Qaeda." Despite the ongoing war in Iraq, and the widespread fears of a regional conflagration, and the war-weariness and anger among Americans, the United States had no choice but to attack Syria and to do it without delay. And as Gates remarks, though "Cheney knew that, among the four of us, he alone thought a strike should be the first and only option... perhaps he could persuade the president."7

Perhaps he could; if so, it would not be the first time that Cheney's voice, isolated or not, had carried the day. The vice president lobbied the president directly and then made his case to a National Security Council meeting in June 2007:

"I argued in front of the group and in front of the President.... I thought I was rather eloquent.... The President said, 'All right, how many people agree with the Vice President?' And nobody put their hand up."

The days had passed when Bush would ignore the hands and choose Cheney's path anyway. There would be no return to the glorious "authority and influence we had back in '03." Having refused Israeli demands that he order an air strike, Bush also discouraged, at least nominally, direct Israeli action, supposedly intending to follow Rice's and Gates's insistence that the reactor be exposed at the United Nations. But the Israelis had other plans. Late one night in September 2007, American-made Israeli F-15s streaked across the Syrian border and, using precisely targeted bombs, "took out" the reactor. In the event, the Israelis made no grand announcement to promote Israel's "authority and influence" or that of its American ally. The Israelis kept the attack secret and insisted the Americans do the same -- as did the Syrians, who quietly demolished the ruins and plowed them under. The era of the "demonstration effect" was over.

4. Working the Dark Side

And yet we live still in Cheney's world. All around us are the consequences of those decisions: in Fallujah, Iraq, where al-Qaeda-allied jihadis who were nowhere to be found in Saddam Hussein's Iraq have just again seized control; in Syria, where Iraqi jihadists play a prominent part in the rebellion against the Assad regime; in Afghanistan, where the Taliban, largely ignored after 2002 in the rush to turn American attention to Saddam Hussein, are resurgent. And then there is the other side of the "war on terror," the darker story that Cheney, five days after the September 11 attacks, was able to describe so precisely for the country during an interview on Meet the Press:

"We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies... That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective."

The day after Cheney made these comments President Bush signed a secret document that, according to longtime CIA counsel John Rizzo,

"was the most comprehensive, most ambitious, most aggressive, and most risky Finding or MON [Memorandum of Notification] I was ever involved in. One short paragraph authorized the capture and detention of Al Qaeda terrorists, another authorized taking lethal action against them. The language was simple and stark... We had filled the entire covert-action tool kit, including tools we had never before used."8

This memorandum, as Rizzo remarks, "remains in effect to this day." So too does Congress's Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Bush signed the following day. More than a dozen years later these are the two pillars, secret and public, dark side and light, on which the unending "war on terror" still rests. Though we have become accustomed to President Obama telling us, as he most recently did in the State of the Union address, that "America must move off a permanent war footing," these words have come to sound, in their repetition, less like the orders of a commander in chief than the pleas of one lonely man hoping to persuade.

What are these words, after all, next to the iron realities of the post-September 11 world? The defense budget has more than doubled, including a Special Operations Command able to launch secret, lethal raids anywhere in the world that has grown from 30,000 elite troops to more than 67,000. The drone force has expanded from fewer than 200 unmanned aerial vehicles to more than 11,000, including perhaps 400 "armed-capable" drones that can and do target and kill from the sky -- and that, following the computer directives of "pilots" manning terminals in Virginia and Nevada and elsewhere in the United States, have killed in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia an estimated 3,600 people.

The "black sites" -- the network of secret prisons the CIA set up around the world, from Thailand and Afghanistan to Romania and Poland and Morocco -- were ordered shut down by President Obama, but despite his executive order on his second day in office, Guant�namo Bay, the "public black site," remains open, its 155 detainees, but for a handful, uncharged and untried. Among that number live "high-value detainees" who were once secretly imprisoned at the black sites, where many were subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques."9 Asked by Cutler whether he considers "a prolonged period of creating the sensation of drowning" -- waterboarding -- to be torture, Cheney's response comes fast and certain:

"I don't. Tell me what terrorist attacks that you would have let go forward because you didn't want to be a mean and nasty fellow. Are you gonna trade the lives of a number of people because you want to preserve your, your honor, or are you going to do your job, do what's required first and foremost, your responsibility to safeguard the United States of America and the lives of its citizens? Now given a choice between doing what we did or backing off and saying, 'We know you know their next attack against the United States but we're not gonna force you to tell us what is is because it might create a bad image for us.' That's not a close call for me."

Quite apart from the large factual questions blithely begged, there is a kind of stark amoral grandeur to this answer that takes one's breath away. Just as he was likely the most important and influential American official in making the decision to withhold the protection of the Geneva Conventions from detainees, Cheney was likely the most important and influential American when it came to imposing an official government policy of torture. It is quite clear he simply cannot, or will not, acknowledge that such a policy raises any serious moral or legal questions at all. Those who do acknowledge such questions, he appears to believe, are poseurs, acting out some highfalutin and affected pretense based on -- there is a barely suppressed sneer here -- "preserving your honor." What does he think of those -- and their number includes the current attorney general of the United States and the president himself -- who believe and have declared publicly that waterboarding is torture and thus plainly illegal? For Cheney the question is not only "not a close call." It is not even a question.

As I write, five men are being tried for plotting the attacks of September 11, 2001. Though one would expect that such proceedings might be dubbed "the trial of the century" and attract commensurate attention, it is quite possible -- likely, even -- that you have not even heard of them. The five defendants accused of killing nearly three thousand Americans are being tried before a military commission at Guant�namo Bay. Those handful of visitors who are able to gain permission to attend, including a very few journalists, find the conditions rather unusual, quite unlike any courtroom they have ever seen, as Carroll Bogert of Human Rights Watch reports:

"Visitors observe the hearings behind sound-proof glass, with an audio feed that runs 40 seconds behind. When something sensitive is said in the courtroom, the infamous 'hockey light' on the judge's bench lights up and the comment is bleeped out...

"The degree of classification of banal matters is bewildering. A former camp commander issued a memo on exactly what material the defense lawyers were allowed to bring in to their clients. One thing that was not allowed to be brought in? The memo itself."

The defendants include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of September 11, who was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March 2003 and immediately disappeared into the CIA's network of secret prisons, spending time, reportedly, at black sites in Afghanistan, Thailand, and Poland, where he was subjected to a medley of "enhanced interrogation techniques," including prolonged sleep deprivation, beatings, forced nudity, "walling," cold water immersions, and waterboarding, which procedure he endured no less than 183 times. Though this particular information comes from CIA documents, including an authoritative report by the CIA's inspector general, which have long been public, any mention of the treatment of Mohammed, and the other defendants, is forbidden in court. And yet, Bogert writes, "Torture is Guantanamo's Original Sin."

"It is both invisible and omnipresent. The US government wants coverage of the 9/11 attacks, but not the waterboarding, sleep deprivation, prolonged standing and other forms of torture that the CIA applied to the defendants. It's tricky, prosecuting the 9/11 case while trying to keep torture out of the public eye. 'Torture is the thread running through all of this,' one of the detainees' psychiatrists told me. 'You can't tell the story [of 9/11] without it.'"

And yet in that Guant�namo pseudo-courtroom American military officers acting under color of law as well as some civilian lawyers are trying to do so. This peculiar, mortifying procedure -- a futile attempt to render a kind of disfigured justice to those responsible for killing thousands of Americans and upending the history of the country -- is one more legacy of the misshapen response to the attacks: not a remnant of a past we want to forget but of a present we are trying to ignore. Bogert goes on:

"The 9/11 defendants are not being tortured today, at least not in the way they once were. But we don't know much about conditions in their prison. For years, even its name, 'Camp Seven,' was a secret. Proceedings have now ground to a halt while the mental competency of one defendant, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, is evaluated. He kept interrupting the hearings last month with shouts of 'This is my life. This is torture. TOR! TURE!'

"We're not sure what else he said.... Bin al-Shibh's audio went fuzzy partway through."10

Orwellian? Kafkaesque? The words seem pale and inadequate. Against the backroom noise of these distant, choked-off voices, largely forgotten and ignored, stands the former vice president, speaking clearly and forthrightly, defiantly unashamed. One can't help feeling grim gratitude to him for this, for, as I shall explore in the next article, it was Dick Cheney, more than any other official, who set the terms for the post-September 11 world we all share.

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While We Celebrate Michael Sam, Don't Forget Sasha Menu Courey

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29443">Steven Hsieh, The Nation</a>

Wednesday, 12 February 2014 14:58

Hsieh writes: "As Michael Sam becomes a household name and Mizzou's football team basks in the glow of positive press, let's not forget the other reason the university has been making headlines in recent weeks."

The quad at the University of Missouri. (photo: University of Missouri)

While We Celebrate Michael Sam, Don't Forget Sasha Menu Courey

By Steven Hsieh, The Nation

12 February 14

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his week, on ESPN's Outside the Lines, Missouri defensive end Michael Sam came out of the closet, setting himself up to become the first openly gay player in NFL history.

We're still celebrating today, and we should. Sam is a hero. "Owning his truth" on Sunday meant risking an all but assured third- to fifth-round position in the upcoming draft. While not everyone welcomed the news, the outpouring of support from fellow players, fans and the media signaled the football community's growing tolerance.

But we can't lose perspective. As Michael Sam becomes a household name and Mizzou's football team basks in the glow of positive press, let's not forget the other reason the university has been making headlines in recent weeks. (Full disclosure: I did my undergrad at Mizzou.)

Continue Reading: While We Celebrate Michael Sam, Don't Forget Sasha Menu Courey

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FOCUS | Ross Cardinal Douthat, Archbishop of Dorkylvania

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104">Charles Pierce, Esquire</a>

Wednesday, 12 February 2014 13:30

Pierce writes: "First we have Ross Cardinal Douthat, Archbishop of Dorkylvania, rousing himself in 800 of the 1800-odd words he writes per week to warn us that we're all becoming lazy slobs who don't want to work as hard as he does."

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. (photo: unknown)

Ross Cardinal Douthat, Archbishop of Dorkylvania

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

12 February 14

�

hings are lining up sweetly for conservatives in the 2014 midterm elections. The congressional strategy of throwing sand in the gears in working splendidly. The party's real owners have indicated that they will spend whatever it takes to make all their dreams come true. Then why in the same of Hephaestus's iron oysters are conservatives so outright hysterical about things? First we have Ross Cardinal Douthat, Archbishop of Dorkylvania, rousing himself in 800 of the 1800-odd words he writes per week to warn us that we're all becoming lazy slobs who don't want to work as hard as he does.

One of the studies used to model the consequences of Obamacare, for instance, found a strong work disincentive while looking at a population of childless, able-bodied, mostly working-class adults - a demographic that's already becoming more and more detached from steady, paying work.

The study in question came from the American Enterprise Institute, the wingnut intellectual talking-points factory, which His Eminence oddly declines to mention to us, probably because we all know that, if you asked the "scholars" at the AEI to study the effect of sunlight on a field of daisies they would conclude that Obamacare contained a strong work disincentive. But His Eminence's concern for our vanishing work ethic is nothing compared to Kevin D. Williamson at National Review, who is hearing the thumpety-thump of jackboots in the not-too-distant future. First, though, he would like you to know that he's had enough of what political correctness has done to Versailles, mom.

I was a bit taken back by the company's current billboard in Tribeca: "The French aristocracy never saw it coming either." Patting Manhattanites on the head for being good little Democratic doggies is one thing, but flippant cheerleading for what was, let's remember, mass murder is quite another. For those of you keeping score, the number of people slaughtered during the Terror included 16,594 killed in the guillotine alone, along with tens of thousands more victims of summary execution by other means.

The ad in question:

You have to be stupid or behaving like a complete charlatan to conclude that a storage company is "cheerleading" for the Terror because of a joke it made on a billboard in 20-fking-14. I have been on TV with Williamson. He is not stupid. Unfortunately, it all gets worse.

At a time in which the Left is rediscovering the joy of totalitarianism in the pages of Rolling Stone, when Occupy activists are attempting acts of terrorism, and the organs of the state are being turned against the president's political enemies, it is worth keeping in mind who and what the Left is at its heart. The Left gets good PR, but it is not really about the minimum wage or Head Start or bigger school budgets. Its agenda is control and domination, and it has been known to endorse and use political violence to achieve those ends. When part of the Left's corporate arm is happily contemplating the Terror, we should take note, and perhaps ask our progressive friends under which other circumstances execution without trial seems to them an admirable course of action.

This is sub-Glenn Beck bullshit, and working with Jonah Goldberg is no excuse for writing it -- especially in a week when a Republican member of Congress sat there like a bobblehead German Shepherd while one of his constituents argued that the president be hung. First of all, if Manhattan Mini-Storage is "the Left's corporate arm," then the Left is pretty well screwed, I'd say. I missed Rolling Stone's turn to Der Sturmer, but I'm willing to bet it had something to do with Daft Punk. The Occupy terrorists are those poor saps in Cleveland who told an undercover FBI agent that they'd like to blow up a bridge, all of whom are in the federal sneezer from now until the end of time. And, of course, you recognize the scary set decoration that Williamson has hung on the IRS dumbassery, which fell on Left and Right alike, and which, anyway, is a chicken that the Right has pretty much fked to death at this point. The rest of it is something Ann Coulter argued in that book where she pretended to be a Christian scholar. Frankly, if I wrote for National Review, I'd be less worried about summary executions, and more about what might happen in civil court, but that's just me.

If the Left ever gets the revolution it wants, the owners of multi-million-dollar downtown lofts surely will be among the first to the guillotine. Perhaps they will be comforted by the words of Robespierre: "Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country."

Jesus, man, have some warm milk and go to bed. If I got the revolution I want, we'd have single-payer health-care, no Keystone pipeline, and a top tax rate back where JFK left it. Then I'd be happy. If you're looking at the American Left now and seeing Robespierre, then, by all means, buy your mushrooms somewhere else. It used to be that people thought that allowing the base to live in the information bubble was all right because, sooner or later, the more serious conservative intellectuals would be there to rein in the wilder impulses of the tribe. At this point, I don't know who's outside the bubble any more.

29 comments

Is Hillary Clinton a Neocon-Lite?

Tuesday, 11 February 2014 14:53

Parry writes: "Most Democratic power-brokers appear settled on Hillary Clinton as their choice for President in 2016 - and she holds lopsided leads over potential party rivals in early opinion polls - but there are some warning flags flying, paradoxically, hoisted by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his praise for the former First Lady, U.S. senator and Secretary of State."

Is Hillary too conservative? (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP)

Is Hillary Clinton a Neocon-Lite?

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

11 February 14

�

ost Democratic power-brokers appear settled on Hillary Clinton as their choice for President in 2016 - and she holds lopsided leads over potential party rivals in early opinion polls - but there are some warning flags flying, paradoxically, hoisted by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his praise for the former First Lady, U.S. senator and Secretary of State.

On the surface, one might think that Gates's glowing commendations of Clinton would further burnish her standing as the odds-on next President of the United States, but strip away the fawning endorsements and Gates's portrait of Clinton in his new memoir, Duty, is of a pedestrian foreign policy thinker who is easily duped and leans toward military solutions.

Indeed, for thoughtful and/or progressive Democrats, the prospect of a President Hillary Clinton could represent a step back from some of President Barack Obama's more innovative foreign policy strategies, particularly his readiness to cooperate with the Russians and Iranians to defuse Middle East crises and his willingness to face down the Israel Lobby when it is pushing for heightened confrontations and war.

Based on her public record and Gates's insider account, Clinton could be expected to favor a more neoconservative approach to the Mideast, one more in line with the traditional thinking of Official Washington and the belligerent dictates of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

As a U.S. senator and as Secretary of State, Clinton rarely challenged the conventional wisdom or resisted the use of military force to solve problems. She famously voted for the Iraq War in 2002 - falling for President George W. Bush's bogus WMD case - and remained a war supporter until her position became politically untenable during Campaign 2008.

Representing New York, Clinton rarely if ever criticized Israeli actions. In summer 2006, as Israeli warplanes pounded southern Lebanon, killing more than 1,000 Lebanese, Sen. Clinton shared a stage with Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman who had said, "While it may be true - and probably is - that not all Muslims are terrorists, it also happens to be true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim."

At a pro-Israel rally with Clinton in New York on July 17, 2006, Gillerman proudly defended Israel's massive violence against targets in Lebanon. "Let us finish the job," Gillerman told the crowd. "We will excise the cancer in Lebanon" and "cut off the fingers" of Hezbollah. Responding to international concerns that Israel was using "disproportionate" force in bombing Lebanon and killing hundreds of civilians, Gillerman said, "You're damn right we are." [NYT, July 18, 2006]

Sen. Clinton did not protest Gillerman's remarks, since doing so would presumably have offended an important pro-Israel constituency.

Misreading Gates

In November 2006, when Bush nominated Gates to be Defense Secretary, Clinton gullibly misread the significance of the move. She interpreted it as a signal that the war was being wound down when it actually presaged the opposite, that an escalation or "surge" was coming.

From her seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Clinton failed to penetrate the smokescreen around Gates's selection. The reality was that Bush had ousted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in part, because he had sided with Generals John Abizaid and George Casey who favored shrinking the U.S. military footprint in Iraq. Gates was privately onboard for replacing those generals and expanding the U.S. footprint.

After getting blindsided by Gates over what became a "surge" of 30,000 additional U.S. troops, Sen. Clinton sided with Democrats who objected to the escalation, but Gates quotes her in his memoir as later telling President Obama that she did so only for political reasons.

Gates recalled a meeting on Oct. 26, 2009, to discuss whether to authorize a similar "surge" in Afghanistan, a position favored by Gates and Clinton, with Secretary of State Clinton supporting even a higher number of troops than Defense Secretary Gates was. But the Afghan "surge" faced skepticism from Vice President Joe Biden and other White House staffers.

Gates wrote that he and Clinton "were the only outsiders in the session, considerably outnumbered by White House insiders. � Obama said at the outset to Hillary and me, 'It's time to lay our cards on the table, Bob, what do you think?' I repeated a number of the main points I had made in my memo to him [urging three brigades].

"Hillary agreed with my overall proposal but urged the president to consider approving the fourth brigade combat team if the allies wouldn't come up with the troops."

Gates then reported on what he regarded as a stunning admission by Clinton, writing: "The exchange that followed was remarkable. In strongly supporting the surge in Afghanistan, Hillary told the president that her opposition to the surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary [in 2008]. She went on to say, 'The Iraq surge worked.'

"The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying." (Obama's aides have since disputed Gates's suggestion that the President indicated that his opposition to the Iraq "surge" was political, noting that he had always opposed the Iraq War. The Clinton team has not challenged Gates's account.)

But the exchange, as recounted by Gates, indicates that Clinton not only let her political needs dictate her position on an important national security issue, but that she accepts as true the superficial conventional wisdom about the "successful surge" in Iraq.

While that is indeed Official Washington's beloved interpretation - in part because influential neocons believe the "surge" rehabilitated their standing after the WMD fiasco and the disastrous war - the reality is that the Iraq "surge" never achieved its stated goal of buying time to reconcile the country's financial and sectarian divides, which remain bloody to this day.

The Unsuccessful Surge

The truth that Hillary Clinton apparently doesn't recognize is that the "surge" was only "successful" in that it delayed the ultimate American defeat until Bush and his neocon cohorts had vacated the White House and the blame for the failure could be shifted, at least partly, to President Obama.

Other than sparing "war president" Bush the humiliation of having to admit defeat, the dispatching of 30,000 additional U.S. troops in early 2007 did little more than get nearly 1,000 additional Americans killed - almost one-quarter of the war's total U.S. deaths - along with what certainly was a much higher number of Iraqis.

For example, WikiLeaks's "Collateral Murder." video depicted one 2007 scene during the "surge" in which U.S. firepower mowed down a group of Iraqi men, including two Reuters news staffers, walking down a street in Baghdad. The attack helicopters then killed a Good Samaritan, when he stopped his van to take survivors to a hospital, and severely wounded two children in the van.

A more rigorous analysis of what happened in Iraq in 2007-08 - apparently beyond Hillary Clinton's abilities or inclination - would trace the decline in Iraqi sectarian violence mostly to strategies that predated the "surge" and were implemented in 2006 by Generals Casey and Abizaid.

Among their initiatives, Casey and Abizaid deployed a highly classified operation to eliminate key al-Qaeda leaders, most notably the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006. Casey and Abizaid also exploited growing Sunni animosities toward al-Qaeda extremists by paying off Sunni militants to join the so-called "Awakening" in Anbar Province.

And, as the Sunni-Shiite sectarian killings reached horrendous levels in 2006, the U.S. military assisted in the de facto ethnic cleansing of mixed neighborhoods by helping Sunnis and Shiites move into separate enclaves, thus making the targeting of ethnic enemies more difficult. In other words, the flames of violence were likely to have abated whether Bush ordered the "surge" or not.

Radical Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr also helped by issuing a unilateral cease-fire, reportedly at the urging of his patrons in Iran who were interested in cooling down regional tensions and speeding up the U.S. withdrawal. By 2008, another factor in the declining violence was the growing awareness among Iraqis that the U.S. military's occupation indeed was coming to an end. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki insisted on - and got - a firm timetable for American withdrawal from Bush.

Even author Bob Woodward, who had published best-sellers that praised Bush's early war judgments, concluded that the "surge" was only one factor and possibly not even a major one in the declining violence. In his book, The War Within, Woodward wrote, "In Washington, conventional wisdom translated these events into a simple view: The surge had worked. But the full story was more complicated. At least three other factors were as important as, or even more important than, the surge."

Woodward, whose book drew heavily from Pentagon insiders, listed the Sunni rejection of al-Qaeda extremists in Anbar province and the surprise decision of al-Sadr to order a cease-fire as two important factors. A third factor, which Woodward argued may have been the most significant, was the use of new highly classified U.S. intelligence tactics that allowed for rapid targeting and killing of insurgent leaders.

However, in Washington, where the neocons remain very influential, the myth grew that Bush's "surge" had brought the violence under control. Gen. David Petraeus, who took command of Iraq after Bush yanked Casey and Abizaid, was elevated into hero status as the military genius who achieved "victory at last" in Iraq (as Newsweek declared).

Even the inconvenient truth that the United States was unceremoniously ushered out of Iraq in 2011 - and that the mammoth U.S. embassy that was supposed to be the command center for Washington's imperial reach throughout the region sat mostly empty - did not dent this cherished conventional wisdom about the "successful surge."

Clinton's Conundrum

Yet, it is one thing for neocon pundits to promote such fallacies; it is another thing for the Democratic front-runner for President in 2016 to believe this nonsense. And to say that she only opposed the "surge" out of a political calculation could border on disqualifying.

But that pattern fits with Clinton's previous decisions. She belatedly broke with the Iraq War during Campaign 2008 when she realized that her hawkish stance was damaging her political chances against Obama, who had opposed the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Despite Clinton's shift on Iraq, Obama still managed to win the Democratic nomination and ultimately the White House. However, after his election, some of his advisers urged him to assemble a "team of rivals" - a la Abraham Lincoln - by asking Republican Defense Secretary Gates to stay on and recruiting Clinton to be Secretary of State.

Then, in his first months in office, as Obama grappled with what to do about the worsening security situation in Afghanistan, Gates and Clinton teamed up with Gen. David Petraeus, a neocon favorite, to maneuver the President into another 30,000-troop "surge" - to wage a counterinsurgency war across large swaths of Afghanistan.

In Duty, Gates cites his collaboration with Clinton as crucial to his success in getting Obama to agree to the troop escalation and the expanded goal of counterinsurgency. Referring to Clinton, Gates wrote, "we would develop a very strong partnership, in part because it turned out we agreed on almost every important issue."

The hawkish Gates-Clinton tandem helped counter the move dovish team including Vice President Joe Biden, several members of the National Security Council staff and U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, who tried to steer President Obama away from this deeper involvement.

Gates wrote, "I was confident that Hillary and I would be able to work closely together. Indeed, before too long, commentators were observing that in an administration where all power and decision making were gravitating to the White House, Clinton and I represented the only independent 'power center,' not least because, for very different reasons, we were both seen as 'un-fireable.'"

When General Stanley McChrystal proposed the expanded counterinsurgency war for Afghanistan, Gates wrote that he and "Hillary strongly supported McChrystal's approach" along with UN Ambassador Susan Rice and Petraeus. On the other side were Biden, NSC aide Tom Donilon and intelligence adviser John Brennan, with Eikenberry supporting more troops but skeptical of the counterinsurgency plan because of weaknesses in the Afghan government, Gates wrote.

After Obama hesitantly approved the Afghan "surge" - and reportedly immediately regretted his decision - Clinton took aim at Eikenberry, a retired general who had served in Afghanistan before being named ambassador.

Pressing for his removal, "Hillary had come to the meeting loaded for bear," Gates wrote. "She gave a number of specific examples of Eikenberry's insubordination to herself and her deputy. � She said, 'He's a huge problem.' �

"She went after the NSS [national security staff] and the White House staff, expressing anger at their direct dealings with Eikenberry and offering a number of examples of what she termed their arrogance, their efforts to control the civilian side of the war effort, their refusal to accommodate requests for meetings. �

"As she talked, she became more forceful. 'I've had it,' she said, 'You want it [control of the civilian side of the war], I'll turn it all over to you and wash my hands of it. I'll not be held accountable for something I cannot manage because of White House and NSS interference.'"

However, when the protests failed to get Eikenberry and General Douglas Lute, a deputy national security adviser, fired, Gates concluded that they had the protection of President Obama and reflected his doubts about the Afghan War policy:

"It had become clear that Eikenberry and Lute, whatever their shortcomings, were under an umbrella of protection at the White House. With Hillary and me so adamant that the two should leave, that protection could come only from the president. Because I could not imagine any previous president tolerating someone in a senior position openly working against policies he had approved, the most likely explanation was that the president himself did not really believe the strategy he had approved would work."

Of the 2,300 American soldiers who have died in the 12-year-old Afghan War, about 1,670 (or more than 70 percent) have died since President Obama took office. Many were killed in what is now widely regarded as the failed counterinsurgency strategy that Gates, Petraeus and Clinton pushed on Obama.

Getting Gaddafi

In 2011, Secretary of State Clinton also was a hawk on military intervention in Libya to oust (and ultimately kill) Muammar Gaddafi. However, on Libya, Defense Secretary Gates sided with the doves, feeling that the U.S. military was already overextended in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and another intervention risked further alienating the Muslim world.

This time, Gates found himself lined up with Biden, Donilon and Brennan "urging caution," while Clinton joined with Rice and NSC aides Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power in "urging aggressive U.S. action to prevent an anticipated massacre of the rebels as Qaddafi fought to remain in power," Gates wrote. "In the final phase of the internal debate, Hillary threw her considerable clout behind Rice, Rhodes and Power."

President Obama again ceded to Clinton's advocacy for war and supported a Western bombing campaign that enabled the rebels, including Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qaeda, to seize control of Tripoli and hunt Gaddafi down in Sirte, Libya, on Oct. 20, 2011.

Clinton expressed delight when she received the news of Gaddafi's capture during a TV interview. Gaddafi then was brutally assassinated - and Libya has since become a source for regional instability, including an assault on the U.S. mission in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. personnel, an incident that Clinton has called the worst moment in her four years as Secretary of State.

Gates retired from the Pentagon on July 1, 2011, and Clinton stepped down at the State Department on Feb. 1, 2013, after Obama's reelection. Since then, Obama has charted a more innovative foreign policy course, collaborating with Russian President Vladimir Putin to achieve diplomatic breakthroughs on Syria and Iran, rather than seeking military solutions.

In both cases, Obama had to face down hawkish sentiments in his own administration and in Congress, as well as Israeli and Saudi opposition. Regarding negotiations on Iran's nuclear program, the Israel Lobby pressed for new sanctions legislation that appeared designed to sabotage the talks and put the U.S. and Iran on a possible path to war.

Dealing with Iran

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had been a hawk on the Iranian nuclear issue. In 2009-2010, when Iran first indicated a willingness to compromise, she led the opposition to any negotiated settlement and pushed for punishing sanctions.

To clear the route for sanctions, Clinton helped sink agreements tentatively negotiated with Iran to ship most of its low-enriched uranium out of the country. In 2009, Iran was refining uranium only to the level of about 3-4 percent, as needed for energy production. Its negotiators offered to swap much of that for nuclear isotopes for medical research.

But the Obama administration and the West rebuffed the Iranian gesture because it would have left Iran with enough enriched uranium to theoretically refine much higher - up to 90 percent - for potential use in a single bomb, though Iran insisted it had no such intention and U.S. intelligence agencies agreed.

Then, in spring 2010, Iran agreed to another version of the uranium swap proposed by the leaders of Brazil and Turkey, with the apparent backing of President Obama. But that arrangement came under fierce attack by Secretary of State Clinton and was derided by leading U.S. news outlets, including editorial writers at the New York Times who mocked Brazil and Turkey as being "played by Tehran."

The ridicule of Brazil and Turkey - as bumbling understudies on the world stage - continued even after Brazil released Obama's private letter to President Luiz In�cio Lula da Silva encouraging Brazil and Turkey to work out the deal. Despite the letter's release, Obama didn't publicly defend the swap and instead joined in scuttling the deal, another moment when Clinton and administration hardliners got their way.

That set the world on the course for tightened economic sanctions on Iran and heightened tensions that brought the region close to another war. As Israel threatened to attack, Iran expanded its nuclear capabilities by increasing enrichment to 20 percent to fill its research needs, moving closer to the level necessary for building a bomb.

Ironically, the nuclear deal reached in late 2013 essentially accepts Iran's low-enrichment of uranium for peaceful purposes, pretty much where matters stood in 2009-2010. But the Israel Lobby quickly set to work, again, trying to torpedo the new agreement by getting Congress to approve new sanctions on Iran.

Clinton remained noncommittal for several weeks as momentum for the sanctions bill grew, but she finally declared her support for President Obama's opposition to the new sanctions. In a Jan. 26 letter to Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, she wrote:

"Now that serious negotiations are finally under way, we should do everything we can to test whether they can advance a permanent solution. As President Obama said, we must give diplomacy a chance to succeed, while keeping all options on the table. The U.S. intelligence community has assessed that imposing new unilateral sanctions now 'would undermine the prospects for a successful comprehensive nuclear agreement with Iran.' I share that view. "

The sanctions bill has now stalled and its failure is regarded as a victory for President Obama and a rare congressional defeat for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Clinton's successor, Secretary of State John Kerry, also has pressed Israel and the Palestinian Authority to accept a U.S. framework for settling their long-running conflict. Though chances for a final agreement still seem slim, the Obama administration's aggressiveness - even in the face of Israeli objections - stands in marked contrast to the behavior of previous U.S. administrations and, indeed, Obama's first term with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

One key question for a Clinton presidential candidacy will be whether she would build on the diplomatic foundation that Obama has laid - or dismantle it and return to a more traditional foreign policy focused on military might and catering to the views of Israel and Saudi Arabia.

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FOCUS | Turkey in Crisis? Through a Glass Darkly

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</a>

Tuesday, 11 February 2014 12:55

Boardman writes: "It's probably safe to say that the Republic of Turkey is something of a mystery to most Americans, and in part that's due to very limited reporting on Turkey by American media."

Large protests are rocking Turkey, this time over new internet access laws. (photo: Reuters)

Turkey in Crisis? Through a Glass Darkly

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

11 February 14

�

"In line with the concept of nationalism and the reforms and principles introduced by the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Atat�rk, the immortal leader and the unrivalled hero, this Constitution, which affirms the eternal existence of the Turkish nation and motherland and the indivisible unity of the Turkish state�." � Opening of the Preamble of the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey (as amended on October 17, 2001)

t's probably safe to say that the Republic of Turkey is something of a mystery to most Americans, and in part that's due to very limited reporting on Turkey by American media. The following are all true statements about Turkey in early 2014:

Turkey is a democracy, a democratic republic. Turkey is, effectively, a one-party state, and has been since 2002.
The Turkish presidency is a largely ceremonial position in government. The Turkish presidency is on the verge of becoming the most powerful position in government.
The Turkish government supported the Syrian uprising and removal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in early 2011. Now the Turkish government is on the verge of siding with Iran, which has supported Assad all along.
Turkey is a constitutionally secular state. Turkey, with a population of about 75 million that is 99% Muslim, is becoming increasingly Islamist.
The Turkish Constitution of 1982, Article 28, guarantees that: "The press is free and shall not be censored." As of December 2013, Turkey had freed some journalists, but still held 40 in jail, more than any other country in the world, for the second year in a row (top ten include Iran, China, Syria, and Egypt).
Turkey has a history of military coups d'etat (1960, 1971, 1980), most recently a "soft coup" in 1997. Turkey has recently purged its military in a case known as Ergenekon (2008-2013).

If Turkey is to suffer � or cause � a political earthquake in the near future, the fault lines along which one or more might occur include, in no order of priority: the prime minister's consolidation of power, internet censorship, the presidential election, an entente with Iran, renewed Kurdish resistance, or spillover from the Syrian civil war.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 60, isn't a dictator, but some of his opponents suspect that's his ambition, pointing to his government's heavy-handed, violent response to last year's peaceful protests around the country as a possible harbinger of worse police state tactics to come. Erdogan IS a lame duck prime minister, now in his third term, which is the constitutional limit. He is also perceived as the most powerful Turkish leader since Ataturk, and has dominated Turkish politics since 2002.

As a lame duck, Erdogan has proposed changes to the constitution that would make the Turkish presidency more powerful. Then he would run for president in the 2014 presidential election, without giving up his seat in Parliament, or the prime ministership, unless he won. These plans suffered a setback last fall, when a multi-party commission announced that it was not able to draft more than 60 articles for a new constitution, less than half the amount needed.

Further complicating Turkish politics in December was a corruption investigation that reached into the Erdogan administration and led four accused cabinet members to resign. Five others left the cabinet, three to run in local elections, leading Erdogan to announce a new cabinet on December 25. By then, the 24 arrests in the corruption case had also included the sons of three different cabinet ministers.

Fethullan Gulen, 71, a Muslim imam living in rural Pennsylvania has long had ties to Turkish authorities, especially in the judiciary and police. Gulen fled Turkey in 1999, accused of plotting an Islamist coup. Both opponents and supporters of Erdogan suspect Gulen is behind at least some of the political unrest in Turkey, but connections are murky.

Demonstrations against government censorship of the internet have been met with extreme force by the government in recent weeks. Despite the protests, Parliament passed amendments to Law 5651, expanding censorship and police power over the Internet, giving government power to shut down websites without a court order and to require Internet providers to collect and share user data with the government. The law passed by Erdogan's AKP party is defended as a consolidation of government power in the midst of the corruption scandal that Erdogan calls a "judicial coup" against his administration. Internet postings, including recordings of corrupt ministers, contributed significantly to public awareness of Turkey's biggest scandal in years.

The AKP � the Justice & Development Party � has held an absolute majority in the Turkish Parliament since 2002, enabling it to pass legislation without modification by the other parties. AKP currently holds 319 of 550 seats. In January, this majority passed a law against giving first aid without a license, punishable by a heavy fine and up to three years in jail. This is seen as an anti-protest measure, adding a new vulnerability for people who help their fellow demonstrators who get beaten, hosed, gassed, shot with plastic bullets, or otherwise attacked by police.

Even though the new Internet control law is not yet in effect, an Azerbaijani journalist married to a Turkish woman was deported for sending two tweets about news articles connecting Erdogan with a presumed financier of al-Qaeda. The deportation followed an unsuccessful attempt by Erdogan's lawyers to bring a criminal complaint under the Turkish criminal code's Article 301, which criminalizes speech or writing that "insults the Turkish nation." (Erdogan himself had been convicted of an offense under Article 301 in 1998, when a judge determined that he had incited religious hatred by reading aloud in public a poem that included the lines: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers." Sentenced to 10 months, Erdogan served four.)

"At present, Turkey is still a wonderful country for tourists, but it is becoming an increasingly difficult place for its citizens. You wouldn�t want to be a writer, journalist, translator, publisher, human rights activist, democrat, thinking person, or anyone who seeks justice in 'my' country." � Tarik Gunersel, president of PEN Turkey, a global human rights and literary organization.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul, 63, is a target of current demonstrations intended to persuade him not to sign the new internet control legislation into law. Gul is variously thought to be an ally of and rival to Erdogan as either president or prime minister. He is the first Islamist president of modern Turkey, who once said, "The secular system has failed and we definitely want to change it."

Gul is under pressure not only from street demonstrations but several civil society organizations to veto the Internet censorship law. Gul has until February 25 to decide. If he fails to veto the law, the main opposition party, CHP � Republican People's Party � has promised to challenge it in the Constitutional Court.

On February 10, CHP Deputy Head Faruk Logoglu said: "This bill contradicts with European Convention of Human Rights articles on the right to privacy, freedom of association, and freedom of speech�. We see that this law has no place among basic human rights. Everyone wonders if the president will veto it, but he has always approved [bills]�. The only objective of this bill is to cover-up the claims of corruption and bribery."

Turkey's application to join the European Union, filed in 1987, remained dormant until 2005. Since then, progress has been slow, not least because of European concerns about Turkish commitment to civil rights and human rights, as well as the rule of law generally. In the spring of 2013, when the Turkish government started cracking down on protesters at Gezi Square in Istanbul, the Europeans suspended talks for several months until the country quieted down.

After visiting European Union headquarters in January, his first trip to Brussels in five years, Erdogan came away speaking contemptuously of European concerns once he was back home in Ankara: "Is the European Union's only issue to prepare a progress report on Turkey? You cannot stand idly by the developments in Syria. The E.U. still doesn't dare to call a military coup against the elected president in Egypt a coup. We sincerely expect the E.U., which sharply criticizes its member countries, should criticize itself and write its own progress report."

The Turkish economy, which grew rapidly in recent years, has turned more sluggish. In 2013 the unemployment rate was almost 10% overall in December, but approaching twice as much for men and women under 26. Unemployment grew in January, with 2.7 million Turks unemployed. The OECD � Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development, first established to run the Marshall Plan after World War II � sums up Turkey's recent development this way: "Turkey has made considerable progress in improving the quality of life of its citizens over the last two decades. Notwithstanding, Turkey ranks low in a large number of topics relative to most other countries in the Better Life Index."

Turkey has relatively low scores for housing, jobs, income, education and life satisfaction. It has better relative scores in health, safety, and especially civic engagement. Nevertheless, Turkey was making progress, at least as measured by the OECD, and there was talk of a "new Turkey" rising under the Islamist one-party state with its popular, charismatic leader.

�The life and times of the so-called �new Turkey� under Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule has been so short that all those analyses based on the �democratic potential� of a rising moderate Islamic political power proved to be a disastrous delusion within a very short amount of time.� � Nuray Mert, columnist for Hurriyet Daily News, February 10, 2014

Turkish foreign policy may not be as lively as the domestic scene (which is blamed for having only six Turkish athletes at the Sochi Olympics), but there's more going on than just the mud wrestling with the European Union.

Turkish relations with Armenia remain chilly mainly because Turkey gets mad when anyone says the Turks carried out an Armenian genocide in 1915. Erdogan is on record saying Turks killed a million Armenians, but that it wasn't genocide.

Turkish relations with the Kurds aren't generally called genocidal yet, but they've killed some 30,000 Kurds in recent years. This is more of a longstanding guerrilla war waged by Turkey's largest minority population, which is also a large minority population in Iraq and Iran, and would really rather have their own Kurdistan. The Alevis are another minority population in Turkey, but a much smaller minority of the wrong kind of Muslim, so the Turkish Sunnis massacre them periodically, most recently in 2010.

Turkey and Iran were at odds over Syria when the civil war there started, but more recently Erdogan's opposition to Assad has been fading for the sake of Turkish-Iranian relations that are said to be better than they've been in centuries. In that context, a recent trial balloon posited that Turkey, Iran, and Iraq might form an alliance that could bring stability to the Middle East.

Turkey has a 511-mile border with Syria, which is virtually defenseless. Southeastern Turkey has become a lawless place pretty much used at will by refugees, Syrian rebels, Islamic jihadists, smugglers, human traffickers, and anyone else with motive and muscle. Turkish and Syrian defense forces are largely a non-factor.

Turkish relations with Israel have been chilly since the Israelis killed eight Turks on a boat loaded with humanitarian aid trying to get past Israel's illegal blockade to help besieged Palestinians in Gaza. The Israelis eventually apologized, but the Turks still want reparations.

Turkish relations with Greece might be improving as Cyprus reunification talks are resuming. Turkey invaded Cyprus to head off a Greek coup in 1974 and talks have gone on sporadically for a decade or so.

Offshore oil and gas reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean could always complicate matters for the closest countries � Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, not to mention interested parties at a greater distance.

And none of this takes into account the nuclear weapons based in Turkey as the result of its 52-year NATO membership.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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