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Argentina's Dictatorship Was Not a "Dirty War." It Was State Terrorism. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54639"><span class="small">Constanza Dalla Porta and Pablo Pryluka, Jacobin</span></a>
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Wednesday, 10 June 2020 08:19 |
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Excerpt: "Argentina's military dictatorship relied on widespread torture and disappearances to eradicate all political opponents, real or imagined. Seeking to conceal the junta regime's one-sided terror, the Right still refers to those years as a 'dirty war.'"
Grandmothers of the disappeared at Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Argentina during the 'Dirty War.' (photo: Jacobin)
Argentina's Dictatorship Was Not a "Dirty War." It Was State Terrorism.
By Constanza Dalla Porta and Pablo Pryluka, Jacobin
10 June 20
Argentina’s 1976–1983 military dictatorship relied on widespread torture and disappearances to eradicate all political opponents, real or imagined. Seeking to conceal the junta regime’s one-sided terror, the Right still refers to those years as a “dirty war.” But the only accurate way to describe the dictatorship is as a period of “state terrorism.”
 n the United States and across much of the Anglophone world, the term “dirty war” has become a mainstream label to describe the years of dictatorship in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. From the White House to the academy to the international press, the term has been picked up as a political shorthand for those dark years when state repression, kidnapping, and all manner of human rights abuses were used by the state to maintain its military-backed power.
But to what extent is the term “dirty war” an accurate one? To what extent is it neutral? With the implication of having two warring sides, each attacking the other with, if not equal force, then at least some comparable strength, the term implies a very different power dynamic than that which existed during the years of Argentina’s dictatorship. Sometimes extended to describe other violent regimes in the Southern Cone as well, the term distorts the truth of South American history more broadly, even if some may use the term naively. Understanding the history of the term “dirty war,” and the ideological and political positions that underpin it, will help us to discard it altogether and reach for language that better describes the one-sided murderousness of the regime that took power by coup in 1976.
War, What War?
It is historically inaccurate to describe the years of dictatorship in Argentina as a dirty war. There were no two sides vying for control over territory, nor was there a professional army (hidden or not) to rival the state’s forces, be they the official armed forces, the police, or various paramilitary formations.
Political violence was certainly a regular feature of the Argentine landscape since the early 1970s. Before the coup of 1976, there were left-wing guerrilla movements such as Montoneros and the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, and right-wing paramilitary organizations like the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina. However, the coup inaugurated a new era of systematic and unchallenged violence that left little space for these movements.
Left-wing guerrilla groups had no chance to seriously match the might of state forces. The armed capacity of revolutionary resistance was never able to successfully or continuously confront state violence, and they certainly did not use repressive tactics. As Daniel Feierstein and Eduardo Duhalde have shown, the guerrilla activity that characterized the years before the dictatorship was rapidly smashed by the state. A few months after the coup, the leaders of these organizations were dead, disappeared, or exiled. The political terror lasted until 1983.
We can only understand the term “dirty war” within the greater context of the Cold War, and the American fight against communism more broadly. The US doctrine of national security identified what it saw as internal security threats facing each country in Latin America. Through specific training programs for local armed forces, the US military taught torture and counterinsurgency techniques destined to fight against what was seen as communism and to destroy internal enemies.
But the political repression in Latin America went far beyond these declared objectives. Members of left parties and trade unions, as well as Jews, homosexuals, and many others seen as not conforming to the Catholic conservative view, were labeled “subversives” or even war enemies — a designation that wrongly suggests that these political activists and mobilized citizens were warriors bearing arms.
This war rhetoric hid the political and social goals of the military junta. Adopting a broader scope, the dictatorships of the Southern Cone all worked to dismantle the welfare states that had been recently built up and, with it, smash the labor unions. As neoliberalism settled in under the terror of the armed forces, any trace of resistance was silenced. As Federico Lorenz reminds us, we tend to think of the disappeared as young Che Guevaras of sorts. In reality, most of them were workers and unionists.
Tracing the Origins
According to its most widespread definition, during a dirty war, the state employs all of its resources to fight against an elusive and hidden enemy. It is not a conventional war because there are no open battles — the state needs to perform a reticular search when looking for its enemies. Importantly, the enemies of the state are armed and covertly active; as a consequence, kidnapping, torture, rape, and clandestine detention centers are, so goes the narrative, required. The rules of warfare seem to mutate when it comes to eradicating a clandestine opponent.
It is according to these mutating rules that the Argentine military defended their own performance during the dictatorship. In a crusade against those who aimed to subvert the Catholic and traditional lifestyle of the country, the junta proclaimed that they were fighting against a slippery and internal enemy. As James Brennan has shown, the term “dirty war” was favored by the military itself in the last stages of the dictatorship, and was first used in a press conference by General Reynaldo Bignone, head of the last military junta between 1982 and 1983.
The junta’s use of the term is no accident. The term “dirty war” deliberately invokes another campaign of counterinsurgency, specifically by the French in Algeria. Indeed, many Argentine military personnel had been trained in counterinsurgency tactics by French intelligence agents. By referring to the dictatorship years as a dirty war the junta claimed to link its battle with that of the French, ultimately seeking legitimation from their European counterparts.
The term “dirty war” is concocted by precisely those figures who perpetrated the crimes during Argentina’s dictatorship. Why do so many use it uncritically today? It is similar to talking about the “Middle Passage” to describe the transatlantic slave trade.
Re-Centering the State Responsibility
In December 1983, two months after the fall of the dictatorship and the transition to democracy, then-President Raúl Alfonsín established the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP for its Spanish acronym). After a thorough investigation, that commission published the Nunca Más (Never Again) report, which contained testimonies of torture, kidnapping, disappearances, and other human rights violations during the dictatorship. Its prologue, written by the famous Argentine writer Ernesto Sábato, stated that “during the 1970s, Argentina was torn by terror from both the extreme right and the far left.”
Such words opened the door for a debate still with us today. Many have accused the Nunca Más report of fostering the so-called theory of the two demons, which pins responsibility for human rights violations on both state forces and local guerrilla groups. In 2006, in an effort to address this misrepresentation, and under the Peronist administration of Néstor Kirchner, this prologue was rewritten in a new version of the report. Significantly, in the 2016 presidency of Mauricio Macri, the original prologue was restored.
The term “dirty war” carries this baggage with it today. It is deeply offensive to those victims and their families who suffered — many of whom are still alive. To refer to it is, consciously or not, to align with a right-wing reading of history that seeks to diffuse responsibility for the violence of the dictatorship, and to justify the widespread torture and disappearances that characterized the era.
How do we more accurately name the period that Argentina’s right designates with “dirty war”? Latin American scholars and human rights workers are looking for a better term, and many have argued that “genocide” would be more accurate due to its emphasis on the extermination of a targeted part of the population. Others have focused on the precise features of authoritarian states, proposing terms such as “parallel state” to highlight their illegal use of repression, or “national security state” to underline their ideological origins.
The concept of state terrorism might be the most accurate due to its emphasis on both aims and methods. The term clearly signals the state’s agency for using illegal practices to spread terror among the population to impose a specific economic, social, cultural, and political model. Indeed, it is this concept that most human rights conversations in Argentina employ today.
Words matter, and terms like “dirty war” cannot be used innocently. There was no war; there was only persecution, torture, disappearance, and extermination. We cannot echo the junta’s language and we cannot reproduce its narrative.
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Send In the Troops |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54638"><span class="small">Tom Cotton, The New York Times</span></a>
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Tuesday, 09 June 2020 12:24 |
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Cotton writes: "This week, rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy, recalling the widespread violence of the 1960s."
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) listens as President Trump speaks on Jan. 4, 2018. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
Send In the Troops
By Tom Cotton, The New York Times
09 June 20
 Obviously, The New York Times has jumped back from this piece since they first published it. RSN is republishing it as a reminder of who we are dealing with and what the stakes are. Meet Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. No, he’s not joking. Time to get busy. – MA/RSN
The nation must restore order. The military stands ready.
NY Times Editors’ Note, June 5, 2020:
After publication, this essay met strong criticism from many readers (and many Times colleagues), prompting editors to review the piece and the editing process. Based on that review, we have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.
The basic arguments advanced by Senator Cotton — however objectionable people may find them — represent a newsworthy part of the current debate. But given the life-and-death importance of the topic, the senator’s influential position and the gravity of the steps he advocates, the essay should have undergone the highest level of scrutiny. Instead, the editing process was rushed and flawed, and senior editors were not sufficiently involved. While Senator Cotton and his staff cooperated fully in our editing process, the Op-Ed should have been subject to further substantial revisions — as is frequently the case with such essays — or rejected.
For example, the published piece presents as facts assertions about the role of “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa”; in fact, those allegations have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned. Editors should have sought further corroboration of those assertions, or removed them from the piece. The assertion that police officers “bore the brunt” of the violence is an overstatement that should have been challenged. The essay also includes a reference to a “constitutional duty” that was intended as a paraphrase; it should not have been rendered as a quotation.
Beyond those factual questions, the tone of the essay in places is needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate. Editors should have offered suggestions to address those problems. The headline — which was written by The Times, not Senator Cotton — was incendiary and should not have been used.
Finally, we failed to offer appropriate additional context — either in the text or the presentation — that could have helped readers place Senator Cotton’s views within a larger framework of debate.
 his week, rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy, recalling the widespread violence of the 1960s.
New York City suffered the worst of the riots Monday night, as Mayor Bill de Blasio stood by while Midtown Manhattan descended into lawlessness. Bands of looters roved the streets, smashing and emptying hundreds of businesses. Some even drove exotic cars; the riots were carnivals for the thrill-seeking rich as well as other criminal elements.
Outnumbered police officers, encumbered by feckless politicians, bore the brunt of the violence. In New York State, rioters ran over officers with cars on at least three occasions. In Las Vegas, an officer is in “grave” condition after being shot in the head by a rioter. In St. Louis, four police officers were shot as they attempted to disperse a mob throwing bricks and dumping gasoline; in a separate incident, a 77-year-old retired police captain was shot to death as he tried to stop looters from ransacking a pawnshop. This is “somebody’s granddaddy,” a bystander screamed at the scene.
Some elites have excused this orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic, calling it an understandable response to the wrongful death of George Floyd. Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.
But the rioting has nothing to do with George Floyd, whose bereaved relatives have condemned violence. On the contrary, nihilist criminals are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction, with cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.
These rioters, if not subdued, not only will destroy the livelihoods of law-abiding citizens but will also take more innocent lives. Many poor communities that still bear scars from past upheavals will be set back still further.
One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers. But local law enforcement in some cities desperately needs backup, while delusional politicians in other cities refuse to do what’s necessary to uphold the rule of law.
The pace of looting and disorder may fluctuate from night to night, but it’s past time to support local law enforcement with federal authority. Some governors have mobilized the National Guard, yet others refuse, and in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined. In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military “or any other means” in “cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws.”
This venerable law, nearly as old as our republic itself, doesn’t amount to “martial law” or the end of democracy, as some excitable critics, ignorant of both the law and our history, have comically suggested. In fact, the federal government has a constitutional duty to the states to “protect each of them from domestic violence.” Throughout our history, presidents have exercised this authority on dozens of occasions to protect law-abiding citizens from disorder. Nor does it violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which constrains the military’s role in law enforcement but expressly excepts statutes such as the Insurrection Act.
For instance, during the 1950s and 1960s, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson called out the military to disperse mobs that prevented school desegregation or threatened innocent lives and property. This happened in my own state. Gov. Orval Faubus, a racist Democrat, mobilized our National Guard in 1957 to obstruct desegregation at Little Rock Central High School. President Eisenhower federalized the Guard and called in the 101st Airborne in response. The failure to do so, he said, “would be tantamount to acquiescence in anarchy.”
More recently, President George H.W. Bush ordered the Army’s Seventh Infantry and 1,500 Marines to protect Los Angeles during race riots in 1992. He acknowledged his disgust at Rodney King’s treatment — “what I saw made me sick” — but he knew deadly rioting would only multiply the victims, of all races and from all walks of life.
Not surprisingly, public opinion is on the side of law enforcement and law and order, not insurrectionists. According to a recent poll, 58 percent of registered voters, including nearly half of Democrats and 37 percent of African-Americans, would support cities’ calling in the military to “address protests and demonstrations” that are in “response to the death of George Floyd.” That opinion may not appear often in chic salons, but widespread support for it is fact nonetheless.
The American people aren’t blind to injustices in our society, but they know that the most basic responsibility of government is to maintain public order and safety. In normal times, local law enforcement can uphold public order. But in rare moments, like ours today, more is needed, even if many politicians prefer to wring their hands while the country burns.
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Yes, American Police Act Like Occupying Armies. They Literally Studied Their Tactics |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54637"><span class="small">Stuart Schrader, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Tuesday, 09 June 2020 12:24 |
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Schrader writes: "For the past week, our social media and television screens have been dominated by images of police officers in head-to-toe body armor wielding batons, pepper-ball guns, riot shields, and teargas against mostly peaceful protesters."
'Our law enforcement agencies learned many of the most routine aspects of policing from U.S. excursions abroad for the purpose of stamping out rebellion.' (photo: Ricardo Arduengo/AFP/Getty Images)
Yes, American Police Act Like Occupying Armies. They Literally Studied Their Tactics
By Stuart Schrader, Guardian UK
09 June 20
The founders of modern policing quelled foreign uprisings. ‘Demilitarizing’ police will be harder than taking away their tanks
 or the past week, our social media and television screens have been dominated by images of police officers in head-to-toe body armor wielding batons, pepper-ball guns, riot shields, and teargas against mostly peaceful protesters. Many Americans are now more certain than ever that we need to “demilitarize” our police.
In fact, we’ve gotten slightly closer. The aggressive response – and in many cases, over-response – of American law enforcement agencies has invigorated a bipartisan push in Congress to ban transfers of military materials to police. Yet the 20th-century history of US policing shows that truly demilitarizing the police will be more difficult than simply removing the body armor. Our law enforcement agencies learned many of the most routine aspects of contemporary policing from US imperial excursions abroad for the purpose of stamping out rebellion.
Created in the 1990s, the so-called “1033 program” allows police departments to obtain surplus material from the vast stocks of the world’s largest military. Not all the material is what most would consider war-fighting hardware. Some of the inventory consists of exercise gear or even musical instruments. But the renewed clamor to “demilitarize” the police is usually directed at the helmets and body armor, rifles and armored vehicles that have been on abundant display since Minneapolis police killed George Floyd last week.
To be sure, police departments are more heavily armed than ever, in part because of post-9/11 fears of terrorism. But the transfer of military surplus gear long predates the War on Terror. It results from both demand on the part of police and oversupply in the military, particularly as wars wind down.
Every overseas war has reshaped policing in the United States, including by filling the ranks of police departments with veterans and pushing surplus materials into their hands. But many campaigns abroad have also entailed policing civilian populations, with US experts advising other governments while also learning lessons to repatriate in the process.
When the US started to occupy the Philippines at the end of the 19th century, its military forces were met by an anti-colonial guerrilla campaign. In response, army soldiers engaged in grueling search missions, hoping to ferret out insurgents, who were difficult to distinguish from innocent bystanders. The army also established a constabulary of native Filipinos to help pacify the US colony. Though nobody used the term at the time, this was counterinsurgency.
Many of this campaign’s veterans rose to prominence as police administrators in the US in the early 20th century, as documented by the sociologist Julian Go. These ex-soldiers applied the lessons of their Philippines search-and-destroy missions to the US: mobile patrols, horses, bicycles and then motorized vehicles. Field communications in unfamiliar terrain informed how police built their telecommunications networks. And the type of rigorous training, including in marksmanship, that defined soldiering would be adopted by police too. The era’s most famous police leader, August Vollmer, got his start in the infantry in the Philippines and constantly referred to that experience as he reshaped the profession.
Later, after the second world war, the American forces occupied Germany and Japan for several years. While regular police at home received notice from the FBI that they could now obtain surplus machine guns and leg irons from the War Assets Administration, US police trendsetters like Vollmer, his protege Orlando W Wilson, and future Los Angeles police chief William Parker were working to “democratize” the German police, while also making sure to keep tabs on communists. Similarly, in Japan, a young policeman from Kansas City named Byron Engle helped to reorganize the police there, introducing US-style uniforms, handcuffs and teargas.
Upon return to domestic soil, after administering martial law in Germany, Orlando Wilson published the most widely read police textbook, which remained in use for decades. For him, rigid adherence to authority was essential. He even referred to it as a semi-military ethos. Line officers were supposed to submit to command authority, and civilians, therefore, to line officers. Wilson was, in some ways, a reformer. But he was uninterested in reforming the racialized despotism of the police encounter itself, where questioning authority could mean arrest, beating or death.
Byron Engle went on to distribute Wilson’s ideas globally, including during a stint with the CIA. For him, policing and counterinsurgency were synonymous. Engle directed the US Office of Public Safety, which operated in 52 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where it delivered guns, vehicles, tear gas, radios and fingerprinting technology. It also trained officers from 77 countries in its Washington DC academy. Engle’s creed was simple: use cops to prevent communist revolution.
In some cases, these police would commit torture, forced disappearances and massacres. The largest US police assistance mission coincided with the war in Vietnam. When Engle’s operation closed down, many of his subordinates came home to become police chiefs, prison wardens, Washington law-enforcement bureaucrats, private security contractors or criminology professors. One later remarked that his experience in Vietnam remained front and center in his mind while a chief because it was “far more fascinating than any work of fiction”.
Although the gear has changed, American police have always directed their attention toward suppressing political rebellion. Distant lands, colonial occupations and theaters of war have served as crucibles for testing and advancing policing techniques. Demilitarizing police is absolutely necessary – but it will require more than just ending one surplus equipment program.
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How the Saudi, the Qataris, and the Emiratis Took Washington |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54633"><span class="small">Morgan Palumbo and Jessica Draper, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Tuesday, 09 June 2020 12:23 |
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Excerpt: "It was a bare-knuckle brawl of the first order. It took place in Washington, D.C., and it resulted in a KO. The winners? Lobbyists and the defense industry."
The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, left, with Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, center, and King Salman. (photo: Bandar Algaloud/Saudi Royal Council/Getty Images)
How the Saudi, the Qataris, and the Emiratis Took Washington
By Morgan Palumbo and Jessica Draper, TomDispatch
09 June 20
In the Oval Office (or the White House underground bunker) is a president who does just what he wants. Not long ago, for instance, his administration sent two million doses of his much-favored anti-malarial drug of the moment, hydroxychloroquine, to Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil where Covid-19 is raging. Bolsonaro, recently spotted wearing a tie with an assault-rifle design, is, of course, another head of state with an ultra-loyal “base.” He may, in fact, be the only leader on earth who makes Donald Trump look almost sane when it comes to the global pandemic. In the process, our president is providing a potentially dangerous drug to Brazilians suffering from the coronavirus even as he denies it to patients in the U.S. who actually need it for other diseases.
To cite another example of Donald Trump doing just what he wants, consider the weapons version of those anti-malarial drugs. After all, at a moment when you might think they’d have a few other things on their minds, the president and his men are at it again when it comes to selling yet more weaponry to Saudi Arabia! From the beginning of his presidency, when the Saudi royals, led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, wined him, dined him, and sword-danced with him in Riyadh, he’s been desperate to peddle the products of major American arms makers to the kingdom and so (supposedly) create more jobs here at home.
Last year, Trump clashed with Congress over $8.1 billion in such sales and his administration declared an “emergency” to ink those deals without congressional approval. Now, add another half-billion-dollar deal for 7,500 Raytheon-made Paveway IV precision-guided munitions to the 60,000 of those weapons sold to that country in 2019. (And speaking of jobs, part of the agreement evidently is that Raytheon will produce ever more of those weapons in Saudi Arabia. Brilliant!) Such “precision” missiles have, of course, been used for years by the Saudis to take out Yemeni civilians -- in a country now hit by Covid-19 as well -- in what undoubtedly is the most devastating war on Planet Earth for a civilian population at this moment.
In that grim context, consider how what’s still officially labeled “U.S. foreign policy” in the Persian Gulf is actually being made. In today’s TomDispatch post, Morgan Palumbo and Jessica Draper, who work for the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative and the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, dramatically lay out the twenty-first-century version of such policy-making, move by move, blow by blow, PR firm by PR firm. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
t was a bare-knuckle brawl of the first order. It took place in Washington, D.C., and it resulted in a KO. The winners? Lobbyists and the defense industry. The losers? Us. And odds on, you didn’t even know that it happened. Few Americans did, which is why it’s worth telling the story of how Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari money flooded the nation’s capital and, in the process, American policy went down for the count.
The fight began three years ago this month. Sure, the pugilists hadn’t really liked each other that much before then, but what happened in 2017 was the foreign-policy equivalent of a sucker punch. On the morning of June 5th, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, and Bahrain announced that they were severing diplomatic ties with Qatar, the small but wealthy emirate in the Persian Gulf, and establishing a land, air, and sea blockade of their regional rival, purportedly because of its ties to terrorism.
The move stunned the Qataris, who responded in ways that would later become familiar during the Covid-19 pandemic -- by emptying supermarket shelves and hoarding essentials they worried would quickly run out. Their initial fears were not unwarranted, as their neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, were even reported to be planning to launch a military invasion of Qatar in the weeks to come (one that would be thwarted only by the strong objections of Donald Trump’s then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson).
To make sense of this now three-year-old conflict, which turned aspects of American policy in the Middle East ranging from the war in Yemen to the more than 10,000 American military personnel stationed in Qatar into political footballs, means refocusing on Washington and the extraordinary influence operations the Saudis, Emiratis, and Qataris ran there. That, in turn, means analyzing Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) documents filed by firms representing all three countries since the spat began. Do that and you’ll come across a no-punches-barred bout of lobbying in the U.S. capital that would have made Rocky envious.
The Saudis Come Out Swinging
The stage had been set for the blockade of Qatar seven months before it began when Donald Trump was elected president. Just as his victory shocked the American public, so it caught many foreign governments off guard. In response, they quickly sought out the services of anyone with ties to the incoming administration and the Republican-controlled Congress. The Saudis and Emiratis were no exception. In 2016, both countries had reported spending a little more than $10 million on FARA registered lobbying firms. By the end of 2017, UAE spending had nearly doubled to $19.5 million, while the Saudi’s had soared to $27.3 million.
In the months following Donald Trump’s November triumph, the Saudis, for instance, added several firms with ties to him or the Republicans to an already sizeable list of companies registered under FARA as representing their interests. For example, they brought on the CGCN Group whose president and chief policy officer, Michael Catanzaro, was on Trump’s transition team and then served in his administration. To court the Republican Congress, they hired the McKeon Group, run by former Republican Representative Buck McKeon, who had previously served as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
And that was just registered foreign agents. A number of actors who had not registered under FARA were actively pushing the Saudi and Emirati agendas, chief among them Elliott Broidy and George Nader. Broidy, a top fundraiser for Trump’s campaign, and Nader, his business partner, already had a wide range of interests in both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. To help secure them, the two men embarked on a campaign to turn the new president and the Republican establishment against Qatar. One result was a Broidy-inspired, UAE-funded anti-Qatar conference hosted in May 2017 by a prominent Washington think tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. It conveniently offered Representative Ed Royce (R-CA) a platform to discuss his plans to introduce a bill, HR 2712, that would label Qatar a state sponsor of terrorism. It was to be introduced in the House of Representatives just two days after the conference ended.
Qatar, mind you, had been a U.S. ally in the Middle East and was the home of Al Udeid Air Base, where more than 10,000 American soldiers are still stationed. So that bill represented a striking development in American-Qatari relations and was a clearly traceable result of Saudi and UAE lobbying efforts.
The unregistered influence of players like Broidy and Nader was evidently backed by other FARA-registered Saudi and UAE foreign agents actively pushing the bill. For example, Qorvis Communications, a long-time public relations mouthpiece for the Saudis, circulated a document titled “Qatar's History of Funding Terrorism and Extremism,” claiming that country was funding Al-Nusra, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other groups. (Not surprisingly, it included a supportive quote from David Weinberg, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.)
While that anti-Qatar crusade was ramping up in Washington, the president himself was being wooed by the Saudi royals in Riyadh on his first official trip abroad. They gave him the literal royal treatment and their efforts appeared to pay off when, just a day after the blockade began, Trump tweeted, "During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar -- look!"
A week after the imposition of the blockade, the Emirati ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for Al Udeid Air Base to be moved to the UAE, a development the Qataris feared could open the door for an eventual invasion of their country.
However, this Saudi and Emirati onslaught did not go unanswered.
Qatar Strikes Back
Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, was caught flat-footed by the influence operations of the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates. The year before Donald Trump became president, the Qataris had spent just $2.7 million on lobbying and public relations firms, less than a third of what the Saudis and UAE paid out, according to FARA records. But they now moved swiftly to shore up their country’s image as a crucial American ally. They went on an instant hiring spree, scooping up lobbying and public-relations firms with close ties to Trump and congressional Republicans. Just two days after the blockade began, for instance, they inked a deal with the law firm of former Attorney General John Ashcroft, paying $2.5 million for just its first 90 days of work.
They also quickly obtained the services of Stonington Strategies. Headed by Nick Muzin, who had worked on Trump’s election campaign, the firm promptly set out to court 250 Trump “influencers,” as Julie Bykowicz of the Wall Street Journal reported. Among others, Stonington’s campaign sought to woo prominent Fox News personalities Trump paid special attention to like former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. He was paid $50,000 to travel to Qatar just months later.
In September 2017, the Qataris also hired Bluefront Strategies to craft a comprehensive multimedia operation, which was to include commercials on all the major news networks, as well as digital and printed ads in an array of prominent publications, and a “Lift the Blockade” campaign on social media. Meanwhile, ads on Google and YouTube were to highlight the illegality of the blockade and the country’s contributions to fighting terrorism. Bluefront Strategies was to influence public opinion before the next session of the U.N. General Assembly that month. Qatar and its proxies then used the campaign "to target key decision-makers attending the General Assembly, including Trump" to gain support on that most global of stages.
Its agents weren’t just playing defense, either. They actively attacked the Saudi lobby. For example, Barry Bennett of Avenue Strategies, a PR firm they hired, sent a letter to the assistant attorney general for national security accusing Saudi Arabia and the Saudi American Public Relation Affairs Committee (SAPRAC) of FARA violations in their funding of an expensive media campaign meant to connect Qatar’s leaders with violent extremism and acts of terror.
Such counterpunches proved remarkably successful. SAPRAC eventually felt obliged to register with FARA. Meanwhile, Huckabee tweeted, “Just back from a few days in surprisingly beautiful, modern, and hospitable Doha, Qatar.” Finally, at that U.N. meeting, President Trump actually sat down with Emir al-Thani of Qatar and said, “We’ve been friends a long time... I have a very strong feeling [the Qatar diplomatic crisis] will be solved quickly.” They both then emphasized the “tremendous” and “strong” relationship between their countries.
The Qataris next mounted a concerted defense against HR 2712. Lobbying firms they hired, particularly Avenue Strategies and Husch Blackwell, launched a multifaceted campaign to prevent that legislation from passing. Elliott Broidy even claimed in a lawsuit that the Qatari government and several of its lobbyists had hacked his email account and distributed private emails of his to members of Congress in an attempt to discredit his work for the Saudis.
In November 2017, Barry Bennett from Avenue Strategies went on the attack, using a powerful weapon in Washington politics: Israel. He distributed a letter to members of Congress written by a former high-ranking official in the Israeli national security establishment explicitly stating that Qatar had not provided military support to Hamas, as HR 2712 claimed it had.
Three months later, Husch Blackwell all but threatened Congress and the Trump administration with the cancellation of a $6.2 billion Boeing contract to sell F-15 fighters to the Qatari military (and the potential loss of thousands of associated jobs) if the bill passed and sanctions were imposed on that country. All of this was linked to a concerted effort by Qatari agents to contact “nearly two dozen House offices, including then House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy,” to prevent the bill's passage, according to a report by the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy where we work. Ultimately, HR 2712 died a slow death in Congress and never became law.
The Saudi Bloc’s Battle for the War in Yemen
Just as Qatar started to turn the tide in the fight for influence in Washington, the Saudis and their allies faced another problem: Congress began moving to sever support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. On February 28, 2018, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a joint resolution to withdraw U.S. support for that war. According to FARA filings, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, LLP, representing the Saudi ministry of foreign affairs, contacted several members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, particularly Democrats, presumably to persuade them to vote against the measure.
That March, the firm sent out dozens of emails to members of Congress inviting them to a gala dinner with the key Saudi royal, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself. According to the invitation from the CGCN Group, another FARA-registered firm representing the Saudis, the “KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia]-USA Partnership Gala Dinner” was to emphasize the “enduring defense and counter-terrorism cooperation” and “historic alliance” between the two countries. It would end up taking place just two days after the Senate voted to table Sanders’s bill.
Emirati lobbyists similarly reached out to Congress to maintain support for their role in that war. Hagir Elawad & Associates, for example, distributed an op-ed written by the UAE minister of state for foreign affairs justifying the war, as well as a letter written by that country’s ambassador, Yousef al-Otaiba, to 50 congressional contacts defending the Saudi-led coalition’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties and arguing that “the United States has a clear stake in the coalition’s success in Yemen.”
When that conflict began, Qatar was still a member of the coalition, but the imposition of the blockade led it to withdraw its forces from Yemen. Qatari officials then used the country’s media empire, centered on the broadcaster Al Jazeera, to highlight the disastrous aspects of the ongoing war. In doing so, they provided the Saudis and Emiratis with yet another reason to focus their own influence machines on both Qatar’s and Al Jazeera’s destruction. (That network's closure was, in fact, one of the original 13 demands the Saudis and Emiratis had made for lifting the blockade.)
From the moment it was founded in 1996, Al Jazeera had been an instrument of Qatari soft power, so it was hardly surprising that the UAE had long pressured members of Congress to force the network to register under FARA as a foreign agent. And Emirati lobbying efforts were not in vain. In early March 2018, 19 members of Congress signed and sent a letter to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions urging the Justice Department to demand that Al Jazeera be registered under FARA. Another such letter sent to the Justice Department in June 2019 by six senators and two representatives asked “why Al Jazeera and its employees have not been required to register.” According to FARA filings, all but one of those representatives had either received campaign contributions from or been contacted by a Saudi or Emirati lobbying firm. Al Jazeera, however, has yet to register.
The Murder of Jamal Khashoggi
Despite the efforts of Saudi and Emirati lobbyists in the early months of 2018, the emir of Qatar still managed to land an invitation to the Oval Office. At their meeting that April 10th, President Trump again described al-Thani as a “friend” and a “great gentleman” as well. The emir, in turn, thanked the president for “supporting us during this blockade.”
If Trump’s cozying up to him was a setback for the Saudis, the murder of critic and Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi nearly did in the Saudi lobbying juggernaut as well. The CIA later confirmed that the crown prince himself had ordered that Saudi citizen’s assassination at the country’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.
As a result, some lobbying firms cut ties with the kingdom and its influence on Capitol Hill waned, as did positive public opinion about Saudi Arabia. In December 2018, the Senate passed the Sanders bill to end support for the war in Yemen. Both houses of Congress also passed a War Powers resolution to end involvement in that conflict, a historic congressional move in this century, even if later vetoed by President Trump (as were a series of attempts to block his treasured arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates).
Given the president’s unyielding support for the Saudis and Emiratis as especially lucrative customers for this country’s defense industry, the Qataris have clearly decided to crib the Saudi playbook. In May, that country purchased 24 Apache helicopters for $3 billion and, a few months later, agreed to pay for and manage a $1.8 billion expansion of Al Udeid Air Base to ensure the American military’s continued presence for the foreseeable future. In doing so, Qatar was visibly at work coopting two of the most powerful lobbies in Washington: the military and the weapons makers.
And the Winners Are...
Though Qatar faced a near-existential threat to its survival when the blockade began, three years later it’s not only surviving, but thriving thanks significantly to its influence operations in Washington. They have helped immeasurably to deepen economic, diplomatic, and military relations between the two countries.
Meanwhile, the emir’s rivals in Riyadh not only failed to make their blockade a success, but saw their influence wane appreciably in the U.S. as they stumbled from one public relations fiasco to the next. Even their staunchest defender, Donald Trump, recently threatened to sever U.S. military support for the Kingdom if the Saudi royals didn’t end their oil war with Russia (which they promptly did).
In truth, however, the real loser in this struggle for influence hasn’t been Saudi Arabia or the Emiratis, it’s been America. After all, the efforts of both sides to deepen their ties with the military-industrial complex (reinforcing the hyper-militarization of U.S. foreign policy) and increase their sway in Congress have ensured that the real interests of this country played second fiddle to those of Middle Eastern despots. Certainly, their acts helped ensure near historic levels of arms sales to the region, while prolonging the wars in Yemen and Syria, and so contributing to death and devastation on an almost unimaginable scale.
None of this had anything to do with the real interests of Americans, unless you mean the arms industry and K Street lobbyists who have been the only clear American winners in this never-ending PR war in Washington. In the process, those three Persian Gulf states have delivered a genuine knockout blow to the very idea that U.S. foreign policy should be driven by national -- not special -- interests.
Morgan Palumbo is a researcher with the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy.
Jessica Draper is a researcher with the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative and Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.
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