anthonyramienski

[anthonyramienski]

MWH: Crisis in Ukraine

The situation in Ukraine is grave and chances for violence are great here are several key articles concerning this crisis: Foreign Affairs March 3, 2014 SNAPSHOT Russian Revisionism Putin's Plan For Overturning the European Order Ivan Krastev . Russia’s willingness to violate Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty is the gravest challenge to the European order in over half a century. The conflict pits a vast nuclear power against a state equal in size to France, an autocratic regime against a revolutionary government. The Russian intervention in Ukraine raises questions about the security guarantees that the West made to Ukraine after the country gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994, and it flies in the face of many Europeans’ belief that, in recent years, a continental war has become all but impossible. The end result may be the emergence of a third Russian empire or a failed Ukrainian state at the center of Europe. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine should not be understood as an opportunistic power grab. Rather, it is an attempt to politically, culturally, and militarily resist the West. Russia resorted to military force because it wanted to signal a game change, not because it had no other options. Indeed, it had plenty of other ways to put pressure on Kiev, including through the Russian Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol, the Ukrainian city in which the force is based; playing with gas prices; demanding that Ukraine start paying off its government debt to Russia; and drumming up anti-Ukrainian sentiment among Ukraine’s sizeable Russian population. Further, senior American figures [1] had already noted that the Ukrainian crisis could not be solved without Russia, and European leaders had expressed their unhappiness [2] about a new (and unfortunate) law that Ukraine’s transitional government passed soon after it was formed, which degraded the status of the Russian language. In other words, resorting to force was unnecessary. It was also dangerous: Ukraine is a big country, and its public, still in a revolutionary mood, is primed to fight for a patriotic cause. Moscow’s intervention will provoke strong anti-Russian sentiments in Ukraine and will perhaps bring what’s left of the country closer to the EU and NATO. Military intervention in Ukraine also risks unleashing a real humanitarian crisis within Russia. According to Russian sources, nearly 700,000 Ukrainians have fled to Russia over the last two months. Around 143,000 of them have asked for asylum. A war in Ukraine could triple these numbers. Finally, it is easy to foresee that Moscow’s use of force will increase Russia’s political isolation. It has already resulted in some economic and political sanctions [3], which could be a knockout punch to Russia’s stagnating economy. By some estimates [4], the direct costs to Russia of a war in Ukraine could reach over three percent of Russian GDP (over $60 billion). Yet Putin decided to throw caution to the wind. Anger is one of his reasons for doing so. Putin was defeated twice in Ukraine: first during the 2004 Orange revolution, which brought to power a pro-Western coalition led by Yulia Tymoshenko, and second during the recent protests, which booted President ViKtor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian politician, out of office. Moscow had bet on Yanukovych and had tried to hold him hostage to its own interests. For example, it pressed him to refuse to sign an Association Agreement with the EU (his failure to sign was what first sparked the protests in Ukraine) and loaned Ukraine nearly $15 billion, thus making the country dependent on Russia. But it was really Putin who became hostage to the increasingly unpopular Yanukovych and his hapless cronies. When Yanukovych lost power, Putin suddenly and unexpectedly lost his strategic partner. Putin’s escalation, at least in part, is an attempt to cover up the failures of his Ukraine policy. For now, Moscow wants to topple the new regime in Kiev, which it views as being made up of radicals who won’t survive more than several weeks in power. By pressuring the regime with an invasion and by heightening the fears of the Russian speakers in Ukraine’s south and the east, Putin will likely get what he wants. His strategic goal is not to cut off Crimea, as recent events might suggest, but to bring about a constitutional crisis that will remake Ukraine into a confederate state with a very weak center, the eastern part of which will be more integrated with Russia and the western part closer to Poland and the EU. Realizing that he has lost Kiev, in short, Putin seems to want to move Ukraine’s center of power elsewhere. The worst part of all this is that Putin knows that he can likely get away with it. “What can we do? [5]” asked Fiona Hill, a Brookings Institution scholar who was a top U.S. intelligence officer on Russia during the Georgia war, in a recent interview with The New York Times. “We’ll talk about sanctions. We’ll talk about red lines. We’ll basically drive ourselves into a frenzy. And he’ll stand back and just watch it. He just knows that none of the rest of us want a war.” But maybe the rest of us should. The Putin of 2014 is not the Putin of 2004, or even the Putin of 2008. He is no longer simply the ruthless operator who is interested in power and money, the one who dreams of getting Russia back on the global stage. He is interested in ideas. He presents his advisers with the writings of Ivan Ilyn, the Russian philosopher and ideologue of the Russian All-Military Union. He personally directs the writing of history textbooks. In the last few years, and particularly after the explosion of protests in Moscow in the winter of 2011–12, Putin has come to view himself as a last bastion of order and traditional values. He is convinced that liberalism is contagious and that Western mores and institutions present a real danger to Russian society and the Russian state. He surely dreams of the pre-1914 days, when Russia was autocratic but accepted, revolutions were not tolerated, and Russia could be part of Europe while preserving its distinctive culture and traditions. From that perspective, the Ukrainian revolution is a symbol of everything that is wrong with today’s Europe. It flirts with people power and moral relativism, it stirs passions, and it shows utter disregard for Russia’s geopolitical ambitions. And with his adventure across the border, Putin has signaled that he won’t stand for it. He is apparently ready to abandon all thoughts of Russia being a European nation in good standing -- far better for it to be a civilization of its own -- and has proved willing to sacrifice his country’s economic interests to achieve his goals. In other words, Putin’s march on Crimea is very different from Russia’s war in Georgia in 2008. During that debacle, Moscow used force to draw a red line that it insisted Western capitals not cross. In Crimea, Moscow has demonstrated its readiness to cross the red lines drawn by the West -- to question legal norms and the structure of the post¬–Cold War European order. His move is a challenge: Is the United States still ready to guarantee the security of European democracies, or does it prefer offshore balancing and pivoting to Asia? Is Germany powerful enough to deal with a Russia that is uninterested in being European? Whatever the answers, it will be hard to counter Putin. He has refused to play by Western rules. He seems not to fear political isolation; he invites it. He seems not worry about the closing of borders; he hopes for it. His foreign policy amounts to a deep rejection of modern Western values and an attempt to draw a clear line between Russia’s world and Europe’s. For Putin, Crimea is likely just the beginning. IVAN KRASTEV is Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna Copyright © 2002-2012 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. ________________________________________ Return to Article: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140990/ivan-krastev/russian-revisionism Published on Foreign Affairs (http://www.foreignaffairs.com) Links: [1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/02/28/283591672/secretary-of-state-kerry-says-ukraine-is-not-a-cold-war-story [2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/23/ukraine-crisis-western-nations-eu-russia [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/world/europe/top-russians-face-sanctions-by-us-for-crimea-crisis.html?hp&_r=0 [4] http://www.businessinsider.com/opening-bell-march-3-2014-3 [5] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/world/europe/russia-to-pay-not-so-simple.html?hpw&rref=world&_r=0 March 2, 2014 SNAPSHOT Putin's Search for Greatness Will Ukraine Bring Russia the Superpower Status It Seeks? Kathryn Stoner On Saturday, Russia invaded and effectively annexed Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea. In doing so, Russian President Vladimir Putin shrewdly took advantage of the political uncertainty that arose when Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s former kleptocratic president, took flight last week and was swiftly replaced by a hastily formed provisional government in Kiev. Russia might justify its behavior by speaking of a need to protect ethnic Russians but, in reality, the move was a thinly veiled attempt to forward Putin’s real agenda: re-establishing Russia as a resurrected great power. The official Russian explanation for flooding Crimea with troops, who, dressed in uniforms without insignia, first showed up to “guard” two airports in Crimea and then the Crimean regional legislature, was that Russia was concerned about the treatment of the ethnic Russian minority within Ukraine, particularly in Crimea. The thin pretext was a law that Ukraine’s provisional parliament speedily passed after Yanukovych’s departure that downgraded the status of the Russian language relative to the Ukrainian language. As U.S. President Barack Obama evidently mentioned during the 90-minute phone conversation he had with Putin after Russian troops first invaded Crimea, the Russian minority hardly constituted a reason to invade. After all, in 2008, when Putin sent forces to Georgia, another neighboring former Soviet state, he at least waited until a few houses were burned down in the ethnic Russian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. At that point, he dispatched thousands of troops to “liberate” the persecuted Russian minority and, incidentally, establish Russian sovereignty and a lasting military presence in the regions. In Crimea, however, tensions had not escalated beyond some pushing and shoving between ethnic Russians on the one side and ethnic Ukrainians and indigenous Crimean Tatars on the other. And the only people hurt in these skirmishes were ethnic Ukrainians. It makes little sense for Russia to squander the international goodwill it generated from the unexpectedly successful Sochi Olympics for a few million Russians living in Ukraine (only about 20 percent of the total Ukrainian population identify themselves as ethnic Russians), especially when there was little violence. Furthermore, it is especially hypocritical of Putin to cite Russian rights while he is busy persecuting gays and lesbians within Russia proper and imprisoning members of the Russian opposition, as he did earlier this week for the “crime” of standing outside a Moscow courthouse to hear the prison sentence of a group of Russian citizens who had legally protested Putin’s reelection in 2012. As most observers understood all along, Putin’s endgame in Ukraine is not to protect persecuted Russians. One alternative explanation is national security. The Crimean peninsula is home to the Sevastopol naval base, which houses Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. In 2010, Ukraine agreed to lease the base to Russia until 2042. Russia certainly wouldn’t want the new Ukrainian government to seize Sevastopol or threaten it in any way. But that probably wouldn’t have happened anyway: The base generates income for Ukraine and the country has almost no military. Ukraine’s new leaders know that its few thousand active duty troops would be no match for Russian regular troops or special forces. Russia knows that, too, and likely understands that Ukraine’s new government would never have made a move on Sevastopol. Protecting the Black Sea Fleet cannot be Putin’s main driver, either. Rather, as those who watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games must have realized, Putin wants everyone to know that Russia is back. Putin’s mission with the Olympics, as with his last-minute diplomatic intervention in Syria last year to prevent a U.S. attack, is to remind the world that Russia is a greater power than ever. It is entitled to international respect, he believes, and it isn’t getting enough. It is also entitled to dominate its neighbors both economically and now, evidently, militarily. Officials at all levels of the Russian Foreign Ministry and within the presidential administration truly believe that Russia has a natural sphere of political and economic influence. The media makes much of Putin’s infamous statement in 2001 that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the worst geopolitical catastrophe since WWII,” often misunderstanding that to mean that Putin would like to see the resurrection of the Soviet Union. But a revitalized Soviet Union is not the endgame in Ukraine (nor was it in Georgia). Rather than the revival of a particular political and economic system guided, if somewhat cynically, by a communist ideology, he wants to reestablish what Russians historically -- well before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 -- viewed as theirs. This includes Ukraine and Georgia but also the South Caucasus countries of Armenia, and possibly Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Moldova. Ukraine and Georgia are of particular importance to this mission because they sit on Europe’s borders. But there are risks to this way of thinking: Russian nationalists (and Putin has become one) will remind you that Russian civilization began in Kievan Rus, a confederation of East Slavic tribes across Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia from the late ninth to the mid-13th centuries. They will also tell you that half of Ukraine speaks Russian. That might be true, but it is only because the Soviet Union had an official language policy requiring the teaching of Russian language in all schools across the Soviet Union, not because Ukrainians are basically Russians. Russian nationalists might view Ukrainians as “little brothers,” but the affection is one-sided. Ukrainians don’t view Russia as a friendly, if over protective, older sibling; they view it as an invading state. Great powers assert themselves where they see their interests being threatened. If an independent Ukraine under a provisional, European-oriented government were to actually side with the West and leave Russia’s sphere of influence, then what would stop other nations from doing the same? And what would stop Western powers from gradually moving closer to Russia? From this perspective, the only thing to do was to act decisively to stop any further Western incursion. And there is little the West can do about it without risking a third World War. For now, the only force powerful enough to stop Putin might just be the Russian people. One of his administration’s greatest fears is that something like the Ukrainian Orange Revolution of 2004 or EuroMaidan of 2013-2014 could somehow infect Russia with democratic revolutionary fervor. Pesky calls for free and fair elections, rule of law, due process, and equality have gotten in the way of maintaining order, growing the economy, and pilfering from state coffers. But wars, especially wars fought to protect brother Russians in a neighboring state, play well at home. In invading Ukraine, then, Putin has perhaps convinced two audiences -- domestic and international -- of his power. KATHRYN STONER is Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford; Faculty Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law; and Faculty Director at the Susan Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies at Stanford University. Copyright © 2002-2012 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. Return to Article: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140986/kathryn-stoner/putins-search-for-greatness Published on Foreign Affairs (http://www.foreignaffairs.com) How to Respond to Ukraine’s Crisis? Interviewee: Richard N. Haass, President, Council on Foreign Relations Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor March 3, 2014 CFR President Richard N. Haass says it is crucial at this stage in the Ukraine crisis to avoid making a bad situation "worse and more dangerous." The preferred goal, he says, is for a Russian withdrawal of forces from Crimea, which might come in exchange for a role in an economic package for Ukraine and some protection for Russian speakers. In the absence of de-escalation, Haass suggests steps such as allowing the export of U.S. oil and natural gas to replace reliance on Russian imports; providing military assistance to Ukraine's neighbors, such as Poland; and stepped-up planning for a package to strengthen Ukraine, potentially in collaboration with Europe and NATO. We have an old-fashioned, sort of Cold War crisis right now in Ukraine, with Russian forces surrounding Ukrainian military outposts in Crimea. President Obama is sending Secretary of State John Kerry to Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, to boost the morale of the Ukrainian government. Where do you think we are right now? We don't know if Russian president Vladimir Putin's grab, if you will, of Crimea is meant as a face-saving compensation for the fact that he and former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich effectively "lost" the bulk of Ukraine. A second possibility is that he's using it as a bargaining chip as a way of trading the Russian position in Crimea for a chance to get back into the larger politics of Ukraine. A third possibility would be that he sees the situation in Crimea as a stepping stone, and he is prepared to either take advantage of possible violence or even foment it to use it as an excuse to expand Russia's foothold throughout the country. So at this point, the situation could play any one of those three ways. Obviously, from the point of view of the United States and most of the world, the preferred goal is to see the Russians be persuaded to leave Crimea in exchange, say, for some participation in an economic package and some protection for Russian speakers. Failing that, the option would become one of trying to limit the Russian hold on Ukraine to Crimea, where by treaty they already have their Black Sea naval base. What we want to obviously avoid is something that takes this already bad situation and makes it both worse and more dangerous. Putin has said that the breakup of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century. Do you think Putin is looking to get back some of the lost Soviet republics? It would seem that there is something of a Putin doctrine, which is to intervene where Russian speakers believe they are in a vulnerable position. He did it in Georgia, and he's done it again in Crimea. It's not the full reconstitution of the old Soviet Union, but it represents more than acceptance of a small Russia. What we don't know is how much is simply tactical or how much may be strategic; and again, he does have the advantages of proximity. And for the United States and the West, it complicates fashioning a response, as does the internal disarray in places like Georgia or Ukraine. One of the things we need to do now is fashion a generous economic package for Ukraine. Fleshing out the details and then having confidence that the terms of such a package will actually be implemented is no easy thing. In a way, the Americans rely on the Russian government for help in other parts of the world: for the ongoing P5+1 (United States, Britain, Russia, China, France, and Germany) negotiations on Iran's nuclear program, and also efforts to bring about peace in Syria, or at least getting chemical weapons out of Syria. And the United States would like Russian help in getting North Korea back to the negotiating table. It's a very complicated situation, isn't it? "Whenever you have a crisis like this, it's important to take a step back and recognize that you're dealing with a square on a chessboard and not the entire board." You're exactly right. Whenever you have a crisis like this, it's important to take a step back and recognize that you're dealing with a square on a chessboard and not the entire board. And it's simply a consideration. So when the United States understandably reaches for political and economic sanctions against Russia, or simply responds to what it's done in Ukraine, we have to keep in mind two things: One is that, as you suggest, we have other interests and equities out there in the world, which, for better or worse, Russia can affect. You mentioned Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Secondly, we have to balance our desire to see a rollback of the Russian position with our desire not to see the situation escalate. And this, to some extent, constrains U.S. freedom of action. President Obama is really constrained, isn't he? No one is really asking him to use military force? For good reason, no one is asking the president to do that. But there are things the United States can and should consider doing beyond, say, suspending Russia from the G8 or sending the secretary of state to Kiev. Let me suggest a few. One thing we ought to do is allow the export of American crude oil, as well as expand the export of American natural gas. In particular, we should make gas available to countries such as Ukraine that we want to see weaned from their dependence on Russia. The U.S. energy transformation of recent years gives us options we didn't have several years ago. So we ought to explore using those options. Secondly, there's a lot of sense to proposals that the United States provide certain types of military assistance to some of Ukraine's neighbors, such as Poland, in the form of missile defenses. Thirdly, I would at least do the thinking and the planning for what a package of intelligence and military help to Ukraine might be. If it looks like the Russians are tempted to expand their foothold in Ukraine beyond Crimea, in particular, beyond the south and east of the country, what might the U.S.—or more broadly, European and NATO—options be to strengthen Ukraine? That's something we ought to be looking at as well. NATO itself hasn't really done anything. They have only issued a statement by the secretary general. "To what extent is this a plan, and to what extent is this an improvisation and largely a reaction to the rapid deterioration of the Russian position in Ukraine?" There's an argument for not inserting NATO in the middle of this. Obviously, Ukraine is not a member of NATO, and by putting NATO in the middle of this, we would be in some ways reinforcing the notion that that's where this crisis is heading, and that's in no one's interest. Such mechanisms as the OECD and the Partnership for Peace ought to be used far more prominently than they have been. Thus far, Ukraine is a member of the Partnership for Peace, and there are things that we can and should do with it, without bringing in all the symbolism and the obligations of NATO. Putin himself has not yet said much publicly. Everything has been done through his spokesmen. He's spoken privately to many officials, but has not made any major speeches. That is a good point, and it reinforces my sense that we don't know what his tactics are or what his strategy is. To what extent is this a plan, and to what extent is this an improvisation and largely a reaction to the rapid deterioration of the Russian position in Ukraine? The fact that he hasn't said things that have locked him in is, to me, a glimmer of hope. And again, one thing it suggests is we shouldn't give up on—however skeptical we are—the idea of negotiating something of a return to the status quo ante, where Russian troops would leave and you would have some kind of a joint Russian, EU, U.S., IMF economic package for Ukraine, which among other things would include some protections for the Russian speakers in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. That might be a long shot given where we now are, but I certainly would not give up on that kind of an outcome at this point. http://www.cfr.org/ukraine/respond-ukraines-crisis/p32522?cid=rss-analysisbriefbackgroundersexp-how_to_respond_to_ukraineâs_cr-030314

#US Foreign Policy #Ukraine #Russia #War #Crimea

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By block, by student, by test Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 2 Mon- English Bergson Ryan AM A220 Comp Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Mon- English Clark Ethan AM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Mon- English Dia Samba PM A220 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Mon- English Hawkins Ayanna AM A273 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Mon- English Hernandez Huaman AdriannaPM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Mon- English Jones Tyavia AM A273 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Mon- English Luna Jacob AM A273 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Mon- English Shugarts Stephen AM Library Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Mon- English Wal Ethan PM Library Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Mon- English West Kimani PM Library Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Tues - Gov Munoz Keila PM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology Bonanno Ryan PM A220 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology Cerrato Astrid PM A220 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology Furman Logan AM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology Hawkins Ayanna PM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology Hill Adrianna PM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology King Jay AM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology Kosenski Erin AM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology Lanier Taja AM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology Lunn Nikki PM A273 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology Mays Cidne AM A273 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology Miller Gabrielle AM A273 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology Munoz Keila PM A273 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology Musso Shane PM A273 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology Pearre Lillie AM A273 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology Perez Noelle PM A273 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology Porterfield Matthew AM A273 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology Via Rebecca AM Library Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Wed - Biology West Kimani AM Library Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Thurs - Algebra Hernandez Huaman AdriannaAM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 3 Thurs - Algebra Lanier Taja PM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Mon- English Ali Arsalaan AM A220 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Mon- English Amin Dhruvesh AM A220 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Mon- English Bortz Gregg PM A220 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Mon- English Edwards Kaleigh AM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Mon- English Hurley Dylan PM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Mon- English Jurvelin Dylan PM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Mon- English Kamdem Stephane AM A273 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Mon- English Kinsey Reagan PM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Mon- English Larkin Jeffrey PM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Mon- English Majett Vershonn AM A273 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Mon- English Orton Annalise PM A273 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Mon- English Zolotukhin Stephen PM Library Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Tues - Gov Dieguez Tatiana PM A220 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Wed - Biology Behal Sara AM A220 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Wed - Biology Broberg William PM A220 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Wed - Biology Fitzgerald Cayton AM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Wed - Biology Jackson Cheyanne AM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Wed - Biology Jurvelin Dylan AM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Wed - Biology Kinsey Reagan AM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Wed - Biology Larkin Jeffrey AM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Wed - Biology Lizambri Dominic AM B207 Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Wed - Biology Smith Sean AM Library Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Wed - Biology Vazquez Alyssa PM Library Ramienski,Anthony Joseph 4 Wed - Biology Zolotukhin Stephen AM Library

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Mon- English Malloy Kayla PM A273 Thompson,Jeffrey 3 Mon- English McGeehan Kate PM A273 Thompson,Jeffrey 3 Mon- English Paddison Evan PM A273 Thompson,Jeffrey 3 Mon- English Schmitt Jenna PM Library Thompson,Jeffrey 3 Mon- English Sewell Emily PM Library Thompson,Jeffrey 3 Mon- English Sheron Sunni PM Library Thompson,Jeffrey 3 Mon- English Sierra III Edwin PM Library Thompson,Jeffrey 3 Mon- English Snyder Amber PM Library Thompson,Jeffrey 3 Mon- English Solomon Lydia PM Library Thompson,Jeffrey 3 Mon- English Thomas Davon PM Library Thompson,Jeffrey 3 Mon- English Upson Stephanie PM Library Thompson,Jeffrey 3 Mon- English Willis Morgan PM Library Thompson,Jeffrey 3 Mon- English Young Tyler PM Library Thompson,Jeffrey 3 Mon- English Zambrano Lee Maya PM Library Wagner,Daniel 3 Mon- English Rosario Nichael PM A273 Wagner,Daniel 3 Mon- English Ryan Cody PM Library

[anthonyramienski]

MWH The Possible Wars of 2014

This Year’s -2014s-Wars A good overview from Foreign Policy Magazine concerning potential world conflict areas Foreign Policy Next Year’s Wars From Sochi to Sudan, 10 conflicts that will threaten global stability in 2014. BY Louise Arbour Louise Arbour is president of the International Crisis Group. DECEMBER 30, 2013 Before we dive into next year's list of conflicts to watch, some thoughts on the year we are about to conclude are in order. In short, 2013 was not a good year for our collective ability to prevent or end conflict. For sure, there were bright moments. Colombia appears closer than ever to ending a civil war which next year will mark its 60th birthday. Myanmar, too, could bring down the curtain on its decades-long internal ethnic conflicts, though many hurdles remain. The deal struck over Iran's nuclear program was a welcome fillip for diplomacy, even dynamism. The U.N. Security Council finally broke its deadlock over Syria, at least with regards to the regime's chemical weapons, and committed to more robust interventions in Eastern Congo and the Central African Republic. Turkey's talks with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) continue in fits and starts, but the ceasefire looks reasonably durable. Pakistan enjoyed its first-ever democratic handover of power. As important as these achievements are, still more important is to keep them in perspective. Colombia's peace process remains vulnerable to messy domestic politics in the election year ahead. Myanmar's positive trajectory could derail if the bigotry unleashed on Muslim communities continues unchecked. Moving towards a final settlement with Iran amidst a sea of red lines and potential spoilers -- in Washington, Tehran, and the region -- is undoubtedly a more perilous challenge than reaching the interim deal in Geneva, welcome step though it was. And that Turkey and Pakistan, both entries on last year's "top 10" list, don't make it onto this year's list is hardly a clean bill of health, given the spillover of Syria's conflict into Turkey, and the ongoing dangers of extremism and urban violence in Pakistan. But it is Syria and the recent muscular interventions in Central Africa that best illustrate alarming deficiencies in our collective ability to manage conflict. In Syria, the speed and decisiveness with which the international community acted to eliminate Bashar al-Assad's chemical weapons can't help but underscore its failure to act with equal determination to end the fighting; even concerted humanitarian action remains elusive. As the conflict in Syria enters its third winter, there is little indication it will stop any time soon, whatever hopes are centered around the Geneva talks scheduled for January. If the Security Council's role is to maintain international peace and security, then as Syria's conflict claims ever more lives and threatens to suck in Lebanon and Iraq, how else can one judge its impact than as an abject failure? In the Central African Republic, meanwhile, the international community was apparently taken by surprise by the collapse into violence. There is no excuse for this: Decades of misrule, under-development, and economic mismanagement had left behind a phantom state long before this year's coup unleashed turmoil and now escalating confessional violence. France's robust support for the African Union (AU) in a full-fledged humanitarian intervention was commendable. But without concerted, sustained commitment to rebuilding the Central African Republic (CAR), it is unlikely to make much difference in the long run. So how does this list compared with that of last year? Five entries are new: Bangladesh, Central African Republic, Honduras, Libya, and North Caucasus. Five remain: Central Asia, Iraq, the Sahel, Sudan, and Syria/Lebanon. Of course, by their nature, lists beget lists. It would not have been too difficult to draw up a completely different one. In addition to Pakistan and Turkey, Afghanistan, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have been omitted, though all could have easily merited a place. Nor did South Sudan, apparently on the cusp of civil war, make it onto this year's list. In Afghanistan, next year's elections, coupled with the Taliban's continued insurgency in the face of unsettled international support for a still nascent national army, make 2014 a crucial year for the country -- and a potentially ominous one for Afghan women. In Somalia, despite some gains by an AU mission and a new "provisional" government, al-Shabab militants have shown their continued ability to strike -- both at home and abroad -- and many of Somalia's clans remain in conflict with each other. Finally, the sheer absence of the state and the rule of law in the DRC could have justified an entry on this year's list, despite the recent welcome defeat of the M23 rebel movement and signs that, finally, the international community can no longer ignore the conflict's regional dimensions. But ultimately, this list seeks to focus not just on crises in the international spotlight -- CAR, Syria, the Sahel, and Sudan -- but also on some that are less visible or slower-burning. Thus Honduras -- estimated to be the world's most violent country outside those facing conventional conflict -- is included, as is Central Asia, which totters ever closer to a political and security implosion. The list illustrates the remarkable range of factors that can cause instability: organized crime in Central America; the stresses of the political competition around elections, as in Bangladesh; the threat of insurgency -- in the North Caucasus, for example -- or the dangers of regional spillover, as in Lebanon or the Sahel. Then there are the perils of authoritarian rule and an overly securitized response to opposition: in Syria, of course, but also in Iraq and Russia's North Caucasus. An alarming rise in communal or identity-based violence is likewise contributing to instability in Iraq, Syria, and CAR (and Myanmar and Sri Lanka, for that matter). Finally, center/periphery tensions cut across a range of countries on the list. Mali, Libya, Sudan, and Iraq -- plus Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and others -- all wrestle with notions of strong, centralized governance that appear unworkable, yet struggle to find alternatives that don't atomize the state or feed secessionism. Above all, however, the list highlights that deadly conflict rarely springs up out of nowhere or is entirely unanticipated. It usually has long roots: in underdevelopment; states' inability to provide all their citizens with basic public goods; inequality; and divisive or predatory rule. It shows, too, that reducing the fragility of the most vulnerable countries -- arguably among the greatest moral and political challenge of our era -- takes time, commitment, and resources. Three things that, sadly, too often are lacking. Syria and Lebanon The diplomatic breakthrough in September on Syria's chemical weapons -- and subsequent progress in dismantling them -- has had little noticeable impact on the battlefield. Violence continues, with ever-worsening humanitarian consequences. Having avoided a U.S. military intervention, the Bashar al-Assad regime has displayed increasing confidence, re-escalating its campaign to drive rebels from strongholds around the capital, Aleppo, and the Lebanese border. The regime, with some success, has also sought to market itself to Western governments as a counterterrorism partner -- ironically so, given that its brutal tactics and reliance on sectarian militias helped fuel the rise of its extremist adversaries in the first place. In part, the regime's momentum -- however limited -- can be attributed to disarray among rebel forces. The opposition's primary political umbrella, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, has no real control of military operations on the ground. The opposition's regional backers -- principally Saudi Arabia and Qatar -- support competing blocs within the coalition, as well as separate armed groups outside it, contributing to rifts that jihadi groups have exploited. The al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is now the strongest rebel faction in much of the north, but its aggressive tactics have alienated fellow militants and the opposition's base. In response, other leading rebel groups formed the "Islamic Front," potentially the largest and most coherent opposition alliance to date. Its Islamist platform, however, has raised concerns among some of the opposition's external backers, and coordination issues remain a persistent problem. Meanwhile, Syria is slowly but surely dragging Lebanon down with it. Lebanon's population has swelled by at least 25 percent as a result of Syrian spillover. Meanwhile, Hezbollah's growing involvement on the regime's behalf, allegedly in a "pre-emptive war" to keep its jihadist enemies at bay, is in fact luring them to take the fight to the Shiite militant group at home. Other attacks have targeted Sunni mosques in Tripoli, where sectarian strife has pushed the army to take control. International attention is currently focused on the renewed push to hold talks between the regime and opposition, scheduled for Jan. 22 in Geneva. But both sides see it as little more than a venue for the other to formalize its capitulation. The opposition coalition accepts the premise of the talks -- the June 2012 Geneva communiqué calling for establishment of a mutually agreed transitional body with full executive authority -- but has struggled to make a final decision about whether to participate under current conditions. The regime, by contrast, has readily agreed to join talks, but rejects the ostensible goal of the process: the formation of a transitional government. The positions of each side's external backers will be critical in bringing the parties toward agreement in any political process, but here, too, signs of willingness to compromise are few, if any. Iraq Since April 2013, when Nouri al-Maliki's Shiite-led government intensified its violent crackdown on a peaceful Sunni protest movement, the tide of attacks, arrests, and executions has gradually swelled. Sunni distrust of the central government is greater than ever, providing an opening for al Qaeda in Iraq after years of decline. Over 7,000 civilians have fallen victim to this destructive cycle already this year, but still the government has shown no appetite for compromise. Iraq's Sunnis, therefore, have turned to Syria, hoping a victory by the opposition there will enable a political comeback at home. The coming year is likely to see further intertwining of the Iraqi and Syrian conflicts. As the Iraqi state weakens, its frontier with Syria erodes. Baghdad, more overtly than ever, is aiding Damascus in order to stave off the Sunni wave it fears at home -- though its support for the Syrian regime is encouraging precisely that, as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), an al Qaeda offshoot, has become the biggest player in northern Syria. To halt the violence, the Iraqi government should change its approach radically: It must win Iraqi Sunnis back to its side, re-engage them in the political process and in the fight against al Qaeda, and use its improved domestic support base to secure its own borders. Only an inclusive state can save Iraq from fragmenting. The coming year's parliamentary elections are unlikely to produce solutions. On the contrary, they risk exacerbating violence and attracting foreign interference. Maliki's ambition to run for a third term pits his coalition against other Shiite groups, encouraging Iran to weigh in. At the same time, the political scene is fragmenting into a variety of political entities, the culmination of eight years of Maliki's divide-and-rule strategy. The prime minister's base has dwindled as well, so absent an unexpectedly dominant candidate or coalition, one can expect the elections to yield an excruciating period of bargaining and political paralysis. Libya Beset with myriad security concerns and mired in political deadlock, Libya's post-Qaddafi transition is threatening to go off the rails. The General National Congress' mandate is set to expire on Feb. 7, 2014, and the formation of a constitution-writing body is already over a year late. Ali Zeidan, the current prime minister, has been the target of several attacks -- and a brief kidnapping -- and calls for his dismissal are rising. Meanwhile, public confidence in state institutions is fast waning, and with it confidence in a transition process that was supposed to create the framework for a new democracy. Like other Arab countries in transition, Libya has become increasingly divided along several different axes -- Islamist vs. liberal, conservative vs. revolutionary, and center vs. periphery -- all of which are contributing to instability on the ground. Following the collapse of Muammar al-Qaddafi's regime, militias largely took over from the official military and police force, and the country is awash in weapons. The coalition that brought Qaddafi's former allies together with liberal exiles and long-imprisoned Islamists has collapsed, leaving in its wake a fragmented polity. In Libya's east, almost daily targeted assassinations of security officials -- for which residents blame radical Islamists -- is fuelling belligerent anti-Islamist attitudes. Overwhelmed, the government has been obliged, paradoxically, to bribe and cajole militias in an attempt to rebuild the state's monopoly on force. So far, it has had little success: Armed groups have blocked gas pipelines and besieged crude oil facilities, reducing exports to around 20 percent of the pre-uprising level. The loss of revenues is crippling the national budget. There are no easy answers to these problems. At a minimum, local militias and the proliferation of small arms will plague Libya (and its neighbors) for years to come, frustrating the government's efforts to rebuild the country's security forces and secure its borders. But it remains an open question whether Libya's leaders can build sufficient consensus to keep the process moving in the right direction. Honduras Honduras is the world's murder capital, with more than 80 homicides reported for every 100,000 citizens in 2013. A weak, often compromised justice and law enforcement system means that most serious crimes are never prosecuted. One of the two poorest countries in the region -- half the population lives in extreme poverty -- Honduras is also among the 10 most unequal countries in the world. Much of the country is plagued by criminal violence, and most Hondurans cannot access state services or enjoy the protection of law enforcement. Democracy and rule of law -- never strong -- were further undermined by a coup in 2009. The United Nations and human rights groups have reported that members of the Honduran National Police have engaged in criminal activity, including murder. Weak, corrupt security forces have turned Honduras into an ideal way-station for drugs heading from the Andes to U.S. markets. An estimated 87 percent of all airborne cocaine headed north stops first in Honduras. Organized criminal activity ranges from drug and human trafficking to kidnapping and extortion. Criminal groups have become strong enough that the state has effectively lost control over parts of the country. Compounding these security threats are street gangs, led by the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 (M18), which together boast an estimated 12,000 members. For the most part, these gangs terrorize the poor, urban neighborhoods in the capital city, Tegucigalpa, and the port of San Pedro Sula. Violence in Honduras spiked upward in 2009, when President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in a coup. The International Criminal Court is currently investigating crimes committed in the aftermath of that coup, while an official truth commission revealed that the military killed at least 20 people. Since 2009, 10 human rights activists, 29 journalists, 63 lawyers, and some 20 political candidates have been killed. In almost all of these instances, no one has been held accountable. Newly elected President Juan Orlando Hernandez campaigned on an "iron fist" response to crime, proposing to create a militarized police force. Given ongoing complaints of human rights abuses by security forces -- including allegations of involvement in disappearances and kidnappings for ransom -- it is little surprise that his proposal has been met with vocal opposition by civil society organizations and the diplomatic community. Such an overly securitized response, built on corrupt or predatory institutions, is unlikely to resolve the problem. Absent concerted efforts to strengthen the rule of law, Honduras' plight looks set to continue -- even intensify -- in the coming year. Central African Republic Months of deadly clashes in the Central African Republic (CAR) have brought an already perilously weak state to the brink of collapse, with 400,000 people displaced and untold thousands terrorized into hiding. Nearly half of the population is in need of some form of assistance, and state services, including the police and the army, no longer exist. It was just a year ago that a transition of power from then-President François Bozizé appeared to be in on track. But that agreement fell apart and in March, Seleka rebels -- a loose alliance of Muslim fighters from the CAR, Chad, and Sudan -- staged a coup to oust Bozizé and replace him with their leader, Michel Djotodia. In September, Djotodia disbanded Seleka, triggering a wave of widespread violence with no effective national army in place to stop it. The United Nations and Western powers were slow to respond, in part because they thought Djotodia could control Seleka fighters and that the African Union-led International Support Mission in the CAR (MISCA) could secure the capital, Bangui. They were wrong on both counts. The transitional government and the regional security force have failed to prevent a free fall into chaos. The "wait and see" approach of the United Nations and Western powers now has them breathlessly trying to catch up. The Seleka have since splintered into leaderless factions that clash regularly with armed groups made up of villagers and national security services alike. Eyewitnesses report daily attacks on civilians and massacres carried out with machetes and semi-automatic weapons. More worryingly still, the conflict has taken on a religious undercurrent, with the Seleka pitted against newly formed Christian self-defense groups. The process of radicalization is well underway. If the violence continues and religious tensions escalate, large-scale confessionally-driven violence is frighteningly possible. The conflict could also easily spread to other neighboring countries -- insecurity is already rife on the border with Cameroon -- although help appears to be belatedly at hand. Following French warnings of potential regional destabilization, the United Nations authorized France to send 1,600 troops to bolster MISCA's operations and restore law and order. For now, the future of the CAR is in their hands. Challenges ahead include disarming militiamen in Bangui and preventing fighting between Christian and Muslim communities. Only then can the process of state-building begin. Sudan A hotbed of instability and violence for years, conditions remain dire across much of Sudan. Political restlessness in Khartoum, economic fragility, and multiple center-periphery tensions all pose major conflict risks for 2014. In November, Sudan's defense minister announced a new offensive against Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF) rebels in South Kordofan, Darfur, and Blue Nile, aimed at "ending the rebellion." The rebel alliance, which is fighting for a more representative government, responded in kind, leveling attacks against strategic roads and army facilities in North and South Kordofan. Khartoum has since backpedaled, downplaying the significance of the campaign and saying the government is ready to resume talks. But African Union mediators still need Khartoum's consent to start a comprehensive, national dialogue that includes the SRF. In Darfur, the violence that began a decade ago has now mostly given way to fighting between Arab tribes, once the government's main proxies against non-Arab rebels and communities. Since the beginning of 2013, inter-tribal violence has displaced an additional 450,000 people. One of the most violent conflicts in the region -- involving the Salamat, Missiriya, and Ta'aisha tribes at the Sudan-Chad-CAR tri-border -- has forced 50,000 more refugees into Chad. In the east of Sudan, lack of implementation of a 2006 peace deal backed by Eritrea is also threatening to reignite conflict. Poor governance is also inching the country closer to disaster. Nationwide protests in late September against ending fuel subsidies sparked much deeper levels of discontent among urban populations, once reliable government supporters. The growth of militant Islamist groups -- independent of the governing National Congress Party or the Islamist Movement -- also points to a government losing control on all fronts. The solution to all of these challenges remains the same as ever: The relationship between Khartoum and the rest of the country must be fundamentally redefined. Otherwise, regional grievances will continue to fester, Khartoum will continue to be consumed with crisis management, and the international community will continue to spend billions each year to manage the consequences. One of several obstacles that could stand in the way of reforming Sudan's centre-periphery troubles is President Omar al-Bashir's indictment for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Without some incentive, Bashir could well block all but cosmetic change for fear of losing power and ending up at the court. But if the international community confirms that credible reform is underway -- and that the only thing standing in the way of further, comprehensive progress is the indictment -- the Security Council could request that the ICC defer prosecution of Bashir for a year with no obligation to extend. The Sahel and Northern Nigeria The Sahel region and Northern Nigeria have emerged as major sources of instability for parts of West and Central Africa, as last year's watchlist foretold. In 2014, expect separatist movements, Islamist terrorism, and north-south tensions to continue to spark violence, which the region's weak or stressed governments are ill-equipped to address. In Mali, a French military intervention in early 2013 successfully wrested control of northern cities from a coalition of Islamist militant groups. Subsequently, presidential and parliamentary elections were held without major incident. Still, the country is far from stable today. Terror attacks, inter-communal clashes and bouts of fighting between armed Tuareg groups and the Malian army have continued, while representatives of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), the primary Tuareg separatist group, have repeatedly threatened to withdraw from peace talks. A U.N. mission has deployed to the country, but still lacks adequate resources and personnel. To escape further conflict, Mali must look beyond immediate security concerns and provide its diverse population with essential services, impartial justice, and inclusive politics. The government in Bamako cannot be seen as imposing its own vision for stability on the north -- or the roots of the conflict will remain untouched. Next door, Niger may seem comparatively tranquil, but it is subject to many of the same pressures that tipped Mali into chaos. President Mahamadou Issoufou has pursued a security agenda focused on external threats, while his government is failing to deliver long promised and vital social goods at home. Tensions surrounding a government shuffle last summer revealed how fragile Niger's democracy remains. Add to the equation suspected criminal infiltration of the state and security services, the acute misery of most of the population, and you have a decidedly combustible mix. Finally, Nigeria's Boko Haram continues to wage a bloody insurgency in the north of Africa's most populous country. Despite a year-long and often harsh government campaign, the group still mounts regular attacks on military and police installations, and civilians -- often from safe havens in the mountains, as well as from neighboring Niger and Cameroon. Fighting will claim further thousands of lives in 2014 unless the government adopts significant reforms, including addressing impunity, tackling systemic corruption, and promoting development. This will be made even more difficult as the country prepares for what could be fiercely contested general elections in 2015. Bangladesh Bangladesh enters 2014 amid escalating political violence. Scores of people died and hundreds were injured in clashes between the opposition and security forces ahead of general elections scheduled for January, the former embracing a growing campaign of violent nationwide shutdowns, or hartals. The opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP) has said it will boycott the elections, accusing the ruling Awami League (AL) of authoritarian rule and plans to rig the polls. A boycott would deepen the crisis and lead to more deadly violence. Merely postponing polls -- as some have suggested -- without a roadmap for how to hold credible elections in the future is also not the solution. There is deep animosity between the heads of the AL and BNP, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia, who have been swapping power since 1991. A phone call between them in October 2013 -- reportedly their first conversation in over a decade -- quickly deteriorated into barbs about each other's mental health. The roots of Bangladeshi political polarization run deep. Over the past two years, a government-appointed tribunal has carried out profoundly flawed trials for war crimes committed during the country's 1971 war of liberation from Pakistan. To date, everyone on trial is a Bangladeshi citizen. No one from the Pakistani military, the main force resisting the liberation of what was then East Pakistan, has been indicted. Making matters worse, the sentencing to death of six members of the BNP and Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami parties -- for allegedly trying to sabotage the country's formation -- has inflated religious-versus-secular social divisions and spawned the radicalization of newer groups like Hefajat-e-Islam. The only way out is via credible elections and a stable, responsive government. For that, Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia must overcome their mutual loathing and negotiate an inclusive roadmap. The risks are manifold. Since 1971, the military has attempted some 30 coups, about a fifth of them successful. In two, prime ministers were assassinated, including Sheikh Hasina's father, Mujibur Rahman. Today, the military remains a risk. Finally, the potential radicalization of Rohingya refugees, human rights concerns, and Bangladesh's complicated economic trajectory all make for an explosive mix. Central Asia The 2014 Afghanistan drawdown is not the only thing to worry about in Central Asia. Most countries in this region are governed by aging leaders and have no succession mechanisms -- in itself potentially a recipe for chaos. All have young, alienated populations and decaying infrastructure. Uzbekistan, a perpetually difficult neighbor, squabbles with Kyrgyzstan over borders and with Tajikistan over water. Moscow is warning of a buildup of Central Asian guerrillas on the Afghan side of the border, and is ramping up military assistance. Tajikistan, the main frontline state, is also deeply vulnerable -- with low governance capacity, high corruption, barely functional security forces, and limited control over some strategically sensitive regions. It is also a key transit route for opiates destined for Russia and beyond. In Kyrgyzstan, extreme nationalist politics threaten not just the country's social fabric, but its economy too, as some politicians seek political and possibly financial gain by hounding foreign investors in the crucial mining sector. Crime and corruption are endemic. The harshly authoritarian state of Uzbekistan is Moscow's biggest irritant and the United States' closest ally in the region. And yet its president, Islam Karimov, may have lost control over his own family: His eldest daughter, Gulnara, is suspected of having her own presidential ambitions and has lashed out against her mother as well as Uzbekistan's security chief, probably the country's second most powerful figure. Neighbors fear post-Karimov instability could trigger waves of refugees, a further pressure on their poorly defined borders. Resource-rich Kazakhstan, meanwhile, has ambitions of regional leadership, but it could just as easily be undone by a host of internal problems. Investors like China worry that the Kazakhs have made heavy weather of handling even very modest insurgency problems. The country also suffers from a serious lack of transparency for foreign investment, enormous income disparities, a poor human rights record, and increasing pressure from Moscow. It also needs to design a smooth transition mechanism for its long-time leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Finally, Turkmenistan, generously endowed with hydrocarbons but weak in governance, hopes to withstand any post Afghanistan spillover by doing a deal with its new leaders. This has worked in the past, but there is no guarantee it will in the future. While Afghanistan will undoubtedly be the focus of the international community again in 2014, Central Asia's states will continue to grapple with their own individual and unique circumstances in a corner of the world too long cast as a pawn in someone else's game. North Caucasus (Sochi) This February, Russia will host the Winter Olympics -- at $47 billion, the most expensive ever -- in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. But security is even more of a problem than cost: Europe's most active ongoing conflict is taking place nearby in the North Caucasus. If the Olympics motto is "faster, higher, stronger," Putin's motto in approaching the North Caucasus insurgency appears to be "meaner, tougher, stronger." The leader of the North Caucasus Islamist insurgency, Doku Umarov, has threatened to disrupt the Olympics and urged militants to use all available means to commit terrorist attacks across Russia. His efforts appear to have paid off: In 2013, there were at least 30 terrorist attacks in southern Russia, according to independent media sources. Twin bombings on Monday, Dec. 30, that killed dozens in Volgograd -- responsibility for which is as yet unclaimed -- speak to the nature of the terrorist threat. In response, the Russian government has rolled out unprecedented security measures in Sochi, and strengthened border controls to prevent infiltration of fighters from abroad and minimize the risk emanating from the North Caucasus, especially its most restive republic, Dagestan. Unfortunately, some of these measures could worsen the situation. In Jan. 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin replaced Dagestan's president and overhauled the republic's nuanced security strategy, which had been showing signs of success. Along with vigorous anti-corruption measures, the new president, Ramazan Abdulatipov, backed a wave of repression against the Dagestan's vibrant Salafi community. Security forces conducted mop-up operations in villages, arrested large groups of believers from cafes, madrassas, and homes, and intimidated moderate Salafi leaders, civic organizations, and businesses. Modest initiatives at inter-sectarian dialogue have ceased. Abdulatipov also closed the commission for rehabilitation of fighters and encouraged the creation of people's militias, supposedly to combat extremism. These, however, have already been involved in intra-confessional violence. Equally troubling was the announcement in September by Yunus-bek Yevkurov, president of another North Caucasus republic, Ingushetia, that the homes of insurgents' families will be demolished and their land seized. In nearby Kabardino-Balkariya, the civilian president, Arsen Kanokov, was replaced by the former chief of the Interior Ministry's Department for Combating Extremism -- not exactly known for its subtle approach to security. Sochi must be secure for the Games. But the return to harsh and heavy-handed policies is likely to intensify the conflict once the Games have ended, suggesting that 2014 will be another bloody year for southern Russia. DMITRY KOSTYUKOV/AFP/Getty Images; STR/AFP/Getty Images; AZHAR SHALLAL/AFP/Getty Images; ABDULLAH DOMA/AFP/Getty Images; ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty Images; MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP/Getty Images; SAMIR BOL/AFP/Getty Images; PHILIPPE DESMAZES/AFP/Getty Images; FAROOQ NAEEM/AFP/Getty Images; VYACHESLAV OSELEDKO/AFP/Getty Images; STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images Source: Foreign Policy, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/12/30/next_year_s_wars#sthash.aTQWdpdp.dpbs

#MWH Modern World History #Sudan #checneya #US History 1945 to the present #us foreign policy #bangledesh #Central African Republic #Africa #Asia #Honduras #Latin america #Drugs #South America #Central america

[anthonyramienski]

MWH Why Thanksgiving is today

A quick overview of how this holiday came to be PENN Program on Regulation RegBlog Why Thanksgiving is Today Lauren-Kelly Devine | Nov 28, 2013 | Analysis Though farmers have celebrated their bounties during the autumn harvest for generations, President George Washington first called for a national day of thanks, encouraging the new republic to “to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God” in 1789. While earlier American leaders proclaimed holidays to express appreciation for military victories, President Washington was the first to devote a holiday to the appreciation of health, security, and material blessings. President Abraham Lincoln was the first to declare Thanksgiving a unified national holiday through a proclamation issued during the Civil War, encouraging Americans to observe an annual “day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.” While communities celebrated independently prior to the announcement, the Thanksgiving Proclamation identified Thanksgiving as a national holiday to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November each year by all Americans. Some accounts attribute the Thanksgiving Proclamation to the efforts of Sarah Josepha Hale, the prominent editor of a popular women’s magazine at the time who wrote a series of letters to the President over several decades urging the declaration of a national day of thanks. Americans continued to commemorate Thanksgiving as prescribed by President Lincoln until 1939, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a proclamation aimed at permanently rescheduling the holiday to the second to last Thursday of November each year. The President’s action was motivated by concerns that, as Thanksgiving would be celebrated on the last day of November in 1939, such a late observance would curtail holiday shopping and hamper the economic recovery. Many states, however, declined to follow the President’s invitation to observe Thanksgiving on an earlier date. As a result, for two years following President Roosevelt’s proclamation, the American people celebrated Thanksgiving on two separate dates! Finally, to resolve this controversy, the House passed a joint resolution declaring Thanksgiving to be commemorated annually on President Lincoln’s selected date—the last Thursday of November. The Senate, concerned about years in which November contained five Thursdays—amended the proposal. Ultimately, in 1941 both houses of Congress signed onto the Senate’s version and determined that Thanksgiving shall be held on the fourth November of each month—the day on which we continue to observe the holiday today. http://www.regblog.org/2013/11/28-devine-thanksgiving.html

#MWH #American History #Lincoln #Thanksgiving

[anthonyramienski]

JFK's Grave

Digging JFK grave An interesting piece from Jimmy Breslin one of the 20th Century's great journalists... Newsday Breslin: Digging JFK grave was his honor November 22, 2013 by JIMMY BRESLIN, New York Herald Tribune The incomparable Jimmy Breslin wrote this signature column for The New York Herald Tribune in November 1963. Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting. It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living. "Polly, could you please be here by eleven o'clock this morning?" Kawalchik asked. "I guess you know what it's for." Pollard did. He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy. When Pollard got to the row of yellow wooden garages where the cemetery equipment is stored, Kawalchik and John Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, were waiting for him. "Sorry to pull you out like this on a Sunday," Metzler said. "Oh, don't say that," Pollard said. "Why, it's an honor for me to be here." Pollard got behind the wheel of a machine called a reverse hoe. Gravedigging is not done with men and shovels at Arlington. The reverse hoe is a green machine with a yellow bucket that scoops the earth toward the operator, not away from it as a crane does. At the bottom of the hill in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Pollard started the digging. Leaves covered the grass. When the yellow teeth of the reverse hoe first bit into the ground, the leaves made a threshing sound which could be heard above the motor of the machine. When the bucket came up with its first scoop of dirt, Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, walked over and looked at it. "That's nice soil," Metzler said. "I'd like to save a little of it," Pollard said. "The machine made some tracks in the grass over here and I'd like to sort of fill them in and get some good grass growing there, I'd like to have everything, you know, nice." James Winners, another gravedigger, nodded. He said he would fill a couple of carts with this extra-good soil and take it back to the garage and grow good turf on it. "He was a good man," Pollard said. "Yes, he was," Metzler said. "Now they're going to come and put him right here in this grave I'm making up," Pollard said. "You know, it's an honor just for me to do this." Pollard is 42. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II. He is an equipment operator, grade 10, which means he gets $3.01 an hour. One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the thirty-fifth President of this country, was a working man who earns $3.01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave. Yesterday morning, at 11:15, Jacqueline Kennedy started toward the grave. She came out from under the north portico of the White House and slowly followed the body of her husband, which was in a flag-covered coffin that was strapped with two black leather belts to a black caisson that had polished brass axles. She walked straight and her head was high. She walked down the bluestone and blacktop driveway and through shadows thrown by the branches of seven leafless oak trees. She walked slowly past the sailors who held up flags of the states of this country. She walked past silent people who strained to see her and then, seeing her, dropped their heads and put their hands over their eyes. She walked out the northwest gate and into the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. She walked with tight steps and her head was high and she followed the body of her murdered husband through the streets of Washington. Everybody watched her while she walked. She is the mother of two fatherless children and she was walking into the history of this country because she was showing everybody who felt old and helpless and without hope that she had this terrible strength that everybody needed so badly. Even though they had killed her husband and his blood ran onto her lap while he died, she could walk through the streets and to his grave and help us all while she walked. There was mass, and then the procession to Arlington. When she came up to the grave at the cemetery, the casket already was in place. It was set between brass railings and it was ready to be lowered into the ground. This must be the worst time of all, when a woman sees the coffin with her husband inside and it is in place to be buried under the earth. Now she knows that it is forever. Now there is nothing. There is no casket to kiss or hold with your hands. Nothing material to cling to. But she walked up to the burial area and stood in front of a row of six green-covered chairs and she started to sit down, but then she got up quickly and stood straight because she was not going to sit down until the man directing the funeral told her what seat he wanted her to take. The ceremonies began, with jet planes roaring overhead and leaves falling from the sky. On this hill behind the coffin, people prayed aloud. They were cameramen and writers and soldiers and Secret Service men and they were saying prayers out loud and choking. In front of the grave, Lyndon Johnson kept his head turned to his right. He is president and he had to remain composed. It was better that he did not look at the casket and grave of John Fitzgerald Kennedy too often. Then it was over and black limousines rushed under the cemetery trees and out onto the boulevard toward the White House. "What time is it?" a man standing on the hill was asked. He looked at his watch. "Twenty minutes past three," he said. Clifton Pollard wasn't at the funeral. He was over behind the hill, digging graves for $3.01 an hour in another section of the cemetery. He didn't know who the graves were for. He was just digging them and then covering them with boards. "They'll be used," he said. "We just don't know when. I tried to go over to see the grave," he said. "But it was so crowded a soldier told me I couldn't get through. So I just stayed here and worked, sir. But I'll get over there later a little bit. Just sort of look around and see how it is, you know. Like I told you, it's an honor." Source: Newsday: http://www.newsday.com/opinion/breslin-digging-jfk-grave-was-his-honor-1.6481560

#MWH #JFK #assassination #US History #US History 1945 to the Present

[anthonyramienski]

JFK's Legacy

JFK Legacy I was 9 years old when John Kennedy died...remember every detail-or so I think...memory does play tricks on you... What is Kennedy's legacy? See one interpretation below... US News and World Report Special Report Assessing a Legacy Still in Progress President Kennedy’s tragic death moved others to carry forth his vision for the nation By Susan Milligan Following John F. Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, legions of young people felt called to join the Peace Corps he had founded. Harvard student (now Harvard professor) Marshall Ganz quit school and went down Southto register African-Americans to vote. Boston kiddie show host Rex Trailer, who called his fictional “Boomtown” “thefriendliest Western town on TV,’’ banished his beloved guns from his program. All were moved by JFK’s death a half century ago, less than three years into his presidency. Arguably,Kennedy’s passing had a more enduring impact on the nation than his brief service in the White House. The assassination robbed a nation of its innocence and represented to many Americans the death not just of a manbut of an idea. And since Kennedy had only begun to advance an agenda whose potential success or trajectoryno one can know, the last 50 years, for his admirers, have been about continuing a legacy that had barely gotten started. The what-could-have-been factor has been a driving force behind the battles waged on civil rights, voting rights and a slew of other missions and programs that the young president championed. “Some people said we mourn Kennedy not for what he did, but for what he was about to do,’’ says Allan A. Saxe, a political science professor at the University of Texas in Arlington and a JFK expert. Kennedy’s staff and family “wanted him so much to be known as a great president, that they reworked it so much.’’ Some of JFK’s missions have not merely advanced but have blossomed in the 50 years since his death,as activists and lawmakers (most notably the late Sen. Ted Kennedy) have battled to solidify his legacy on everything from disability rights to national service. Some initiatives – like JFK’s focus on physical fitness foryoung people, a goal first lady Michelle Obama continues to press for today – are still works in progress. Other goals and programs JFK pursued, advocates complain, have not fared so well. Advances in civil rights are often associated with the late president, but in reality he was slow to push Congress on it, historians note. Kennedy’s administration proposed a comprehensive civil rights bill; he strengthened the Civil Rights Commission; and, perhaps most provocatively, he federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect African-American students attempting to enroll at the University of Alabama against the wishes of segregationist Gov. George Wallace. But JFK was initially nervous about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington in 1963, worried it could become chaotic (his administration eventually stepped in to help organize it). And Kennedy was less aggressive about pushing a sweeping civil rights bill through Congress in his first term, concerned it would alienate Southern senators and imperil other parts of his agenda. It was President into passing the landmark act. LBJ had Kennedy’s tragic death to help make his case, says Jeffrey Engel, a history professor at Southern Methodist University. “Johnson was able to get some of these bills passed because he was able to use Kennedy’s legacy as a means of motivating legislators,’’ Engel says. “He was really wonderful not only at personal persuasion, but at saying, ‘we have to do this as a tribute to our fallen president.’” LBJ also won passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, furthering a goal Kennedy outlined in his civil rights speeches. Later, Ted Kennedy would succeed in getting the voting age lowered to 18 with the Vietnam-era slogan“ old enough to fight, old enough to vote.’’ But decades later, advocates fear there is a modern retrenchment of those protections. A recent Supreme Court decision struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act – the map that dictated which states must get advance permission before changing voting laws. Now a number of jurisdictions have approved or proposed voter ID laws, limited early voting, and shrunk the number of voting sites – all moves critics say are intended to suppress the vote, especially the minority vote. “We had a framework in place for solving the problem’’ of discriminatory voting rules, says Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice in New York City. “We’ve really eroded that significantly.’’ Also under threat is one of Kennedy’s signature programs, the Peace Corps. The program, which sends Americans abroad to help locals build and maintain their own communities, is now a fraction of its size in its heyday. Peace Corps advocates often grumble that the U.S. government spends more money on military marching bands than it does on the volunteer agency. The program has evolved over the decades – it doesn’t just accept recent college graduates anymore, for example; Bernie Cherrif completed a 27-month stint as a volunteer in Ukraine last year at the age of 81. For the first time in 2005, Peace Corps volunteers were deployed domestically, helping Hurricane Katrina victims. And volunteers now have more technology available to them, notes Rep. Mike Honda, a California Democrat and returned Peace Corps volunteer. Honda says advocates may simply have to wait for a change in party control of the House so “we have a Congress that is going to be favorable to the idea that the Peace Corps is a valuable diplomatic tool.’’ The program, which boasted some 15,000 volunteers in 1966, now has just roughly 8,100 volunteers. The space program – one of the initiatives most identified with Kennedy – also has evolved and shrunk over the years, as a percentage of the federal budget. Kennedy’s dream of getting to the moon was realized in 1969, well after his death. But the space program was a defining part of his legacy – not simply because of the scientific advances the missions produced, but also because getting to the moon was a dramatic way of winning the space race against the Soviets during the Cold War, says John M. Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and a current member of the NASA Advisory Council. “Kennedy was not a space visionary. He wanted to use the space program as an instrument of the Cold War, and he stayed with it,’’ Logsdon says, noting that JFK increased the budget dramatically during his years in office. “He was willing to use the resources to get the job done, unlike subsequent presidents,’’ Logsdon notes. But part of the scale-back NASA experienced in later years was due to JFK’s singular, Cold War-driven focus on the moon, he observes. “Kennedy, by casting the space program in terms of a race, did not provide any rationale for sustaining it. Once you win the race, there’s no need to keep racing,’’ Logsdon says. “Once you’ve been to the moon, what do you do next? His administration never answered that question with regard to human spaceflight, and it remains unanswered today. We’ve kind of muddled through on a program-by-program basis.’’ The NASA budget, once 4 percent of the federal budget, is now 0.4 percent, Logsdon says. But the scope and rationale for the program has indeed evolved over the decades. With the absence of gravity in space, researchers can do work they are unable to do on Earth. And competition has given way to international cooperation among former enemies: Earlier this month, a new crew (American, Russian and Japanese) arrived at the space station to work together. Some of JFK’s most enduring legacies can be seen in programs not immediately identified with him. Kennedy began the Green Berets, for example, as well as, in 1962, the Navy SEALs, the special forces team that 49 years later would kill Osama bin Laden. A man who loved physical activity, Kennedy also inaugurated the JFK 50 Mile ultra-marathon, a race primarily for military officers. Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!’’ program has taken Kennedy’s concern with fitness and refocused it on reducing obesity and diabetes in America’s children. The president spoke passionately about furthering the physical and mental health of Americans and protecting the rights of the disabled, but it was LBJ who in 1966 created the President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities (formerly called the President’s Committee on Mental Retardation). JFK’s sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, began the Special Olympics, and his brother Ted played a critical role in securing the passage of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires equal access in public spaces for people with disabilities. Kennedy’s unfinished legacy, then, serves as an ongoing challenge to those who survived and admired him to prove that his vision for America did not die with him, Engel says. “I’m of the belief that this is the greatest lesson of Kennedy’s death, that it was the death of unbridled hope. When he died, it was a whole splash of water on an entire generation,’’ Engel observes. Those who believed in JFK’s vision are still fighting to reanimate it a half-century later. For more stories on John Kennedy’s presidency and death, go to www.usnews.com/JFK. Source: U.S.NEWS WEEKLY | November 22, 2013 |

#MWH #JFK #Legacy #US History #US History 1945 to the present

[anthonyramienski]

MWH The End of OPEC?

Foreign Policy The End of OPEC Forty years after the Arab oil embargo, new technologies are dramatically reshaping the geopolitics of the Middle East. BY AMY MYERS JAFFE, ED MORSE | OCTOBER 16, 2013 MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images Forty years have passed since the Arab oil embargo went into effect on Oct. 16, 1973, triggering a period of incredible change and turmoil. After the United States provided support to Israel during the Yom Kippur War, a cartel of developing-world countries (via the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC) banned the sale of their oil to Israel's allies and thereby set in motion geopolitical circumstances that eventually allowed them to wrest control over global oil production and pricing from the giant international oil companies -- ushering in an era of significantly higher oil prices. The event was hailed at the time as the first major victory of "Third World" powers to bring the West to its knees. Designed in part to bring Arab populations their due after decades of colonialism, the embargo opened the floodgates for an unprecedented transfer of wealth out of America and Europe to the Middle East. Overnight, the largest segment of the global economy, the oil market, became politicized as never before in history. But four decades later, the shoe may finally be on the other foot. Now, on the 40th anniversary of the 1973 embargo, the United States has a historic opportunity to lead a counterrevolution against the energy world created by OPEC as innovation in the U.S. energy industry looks poised to end the decades-long, precarious "dependence on foreign oil." Washington should seize the opportunity and push to democratize energy globally, just as its Silicon Valley giants have democratized information. In the run-up to 1973, two-thirds of global ownership of oil moved from the private sector of American and European companies to public-sector national oil companies. Rather than let the forces of supply and demand determine prices, post-1973, the lowest-cost oil producers, such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran, artificially shut production and discouraged capital investment, creating a lasting wedge of rents or financial profitability that market conditions never warranted. (Today, oil prices in real terms are more than four times higher than in 1972.) A massive industrial restructuring occurred over the course of a half-decade, as state-owned enterprises, with limited project-management skills and bloated workforces, surpassed the oil majors like Chevron and Shell in both capitalization and size. The 1970s witnessed a profound and unprecedented transfer of wealth to the Middle East that continues to have significant repercussions today -- from democracy movements to terrorism to civil wars. The region's leaders failed to set up long-term mechanisms to distribute the benefits of that wealth transfer broadly to their populations and to establish an equitable stake in governance of resource proceeds that would have brought a newfound stability to the region. Instead, they bought lavishly, gilding their palaces and buying fleets of luxury autos. For decades, they squandered the opportunity to use oil wealth to modernize their societies and train their populations for future global economic competition. The result -- unfolding not just in the Middle East but in other oil-producing countries as well -- is a crisis of governance that is itself triggering a round of oil-supply disruptions. Massive petrodollar inflows brought with them a new political paradigm of "rentier" patronage, characterized by financial excesses, corruption, repression, and billions of dollars in accumulated weapons purchases. Populations of oil-producing states, for the most part, are little better off today than in 1973. Many of the countries have been war-ravaged or riven by sectarian hatreds. And, even with decades of relatively high oil prices and associated worker remittances, most countries of the Middle East still see modest GDP per capita, below $30,000 person on a purchasing-power-parity basis. Deep income inequality means that much of the region's population is in fact still living in poverty, even in places like Saudi Arabia. So it should be no surprise that 40 years after the 1973 embargo, citizens of the region are rising up against those who squandered their futures. Tired of waiting for the day when rising oil revenues would somehow magically bring back the promise of prosperity, youth are taking to the streets; port and oil workers are mounting strikes; and jihadists are taking up arms to end the oil curse once and for all. Their frustrations do not unfold in a vacuum. High oil prices associated with all this unrest is propelling energy investment elsewhere to great success. Energy efficiency is also getting a boost, shrinking the long-term market for Middle East oil. The upshot will be that it will be harder and harder over time for Arab rulers to count on oil money to keep them in power. And that has a trickle-down effect to the populations they've been keeping quiescent with handouts for decades. Ironically, just when political revolutions were gaining momentum across the Middle East, a different kind of revolution was emerging that looks likely to bring a new epoch of dislocation and distortion to prevailing oil and gas structures. This second energy revolution is also ameliorating the impact of the first. Since January 2011, at the dawn of the rebellions against dictatorial governments in North Africa, the amount of oil "offline" or being blocked from production by either domestic turmoil (in Iraq, Nigeria, Sudan, Syria, Yemen) or international sanctions (in Iran) has generally been above 2 million barrels per day (m b/d), four times the average level of supply outages before the so-called Arab Spring. Then Libya erupted once again this past summer, taking another 1.2 m b/d, or more, offline. But the impact of these disruptions has been relatively mild, given that over the same period, production in North America, the heartland of the three revolutionary changes in unconventional hydrocarbon production (shale, deep water, and oil sands), has grown by more than 2.5 m b/d. And more is on the way. Growth in renewable energy has also been significant in recent years in the United States and beyond, and rising fossil fuel costs and strong government intervention have created new market opportunities. World biofuels production has doubled to over 1.2 m b/d since 2006, but wind power has grown in oil-equivalent terms from 1 m b/d to 2 m b/d since 2008 (and is accelerating at about a 20 percent annualized clip). Solar power, meanwhile, grew from 20,000 b/d of oil-equivalent energy in 2008 to 400,000 b/d last year. But the impact of all this change in the energy world will go far beyond just replacing continuing Arab Spring outages. Unconventional oil and gas and the clean-tech booms are spawning a host of new, smaller oil and gas exploration companies committed to innovation and willing to take on risk. They have no stake in the multibillion-dollar megaproject world of the international majors and national oil companies, and as such, they have fewer concerns about sustaining high profits from giant assets found decades ago. They are enabling the United States the opportunity to take a lead in changing the way energy is bought and sold -- not just in the United States, but globally. Energy innovation is taking many forms in the United States, creating major export opportunities and giving Washington the tools it needs to ensure that the conditions of a 1973-style oil embargo will not repeat themselves. The oil embargo was so devastating because strong economic growth throughout the 1960s had taken up the margin of spare oil-productive capacity in the United States and across the world, leaving the Middle East's oil producers with undue monopoly power. Similar razor-thin extra productive capacity left markets highly vulnerable in 2006 and 2007, when OPEC made contraseasonal cuts in output to increase prices, instead of considering the risks to global economic growth. But as oil and gas production from U.S. and Canadian shale formations rises, the ability of oil producers like Russia to use an "energy weapon" to gain extra benefits from consuming countries is diminishing. U.S.-led innovation in alternative fuels (including natural gas-vehicle fueling technology and electric vehicles), energy-efficiency technologies, battery storage, and smart-grid solutions, working together with and complementing the supply surge in unconventional oil and gas, should also change the face of demand, giving consumers around the world more freedom of choice. And as the United States becomes an energy exporter -- at competitive prices -- that should seal the deal. By providing ready alternatives to politicized energy supplies, the United States can use its influence to democratize global energy markets, much the way smartphone and social media technologies have ended the lock on information and communications by repressive governments and large multinational or state-run corporations. Abundant U.S. natural gas is just the first step. Booming domestic natural gas supplies have already displaced and defanged Russia's and Iran's grip on natural gas buyers. By significantly reducing American domestic requirements for imported liquefied natural gas (LNG), rising U.S. shale gas production has had the knock-on effect of increasing alternative LNG supplies to Europe, breaking down fixed pricing from entrenched monopolies. But this is just the beginning: Over the coming decade, the United States looks likely to overtake Russia and rival Qatar as a leading supplier of natural gas to international markets. The geopolitical role of U.S. natural gas surpluses in constraining Russia's ability to use its energy as a wedge between the United States and its European and Asian allies should strengthen over time, to the extent that Barack Obama's administration stays the course with approving the construction of LNG export terminals. American unconventional oil and gas plays from Texas to Pennsylvania are also generating new surpluses of natural gas liquids, which are increasingly exported as transportation fuel or petrochemical feedstock to Europe, Asia, and elsewhere -- reducing demand growth for oil from the Middle East. And U.S. crude oil exports might also be possible some day, strengthening America's lead in market-related pricing for kingpin crude oil, much the way rising North Sea production did in the 1980s. As an increasing number of companies and investors flock to North America to develop prolific unconventional resources, Middle East heavyweights like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran are losing their lock on remaining exploitable reserves, reducing their ability to band together and create artificial shortages. Already, Mexico and Argentina are reading the tea leaves and reversing protectionist resource nationalism policies, instead pushing through reforms to attract capital investment to their doorsteps. Abundant U.S. natural gas is also spawning new American-designed engine and modular fueling station technologies to readily use natural gas as a fuel in trucks, trains, and ships, ending oil's monopoly in transport. Some 40 m b/d of the global 85 m b/d oil market is open for competition from natural gas -- in the form of compressed natural gas for cars and buses, and LNG for heavy-duty vehicles and marine transportation. We conservatively expect at least 2 m b/d of currently projected oil demand to cede to natural gas by 2020, further weakening perspectives on future global oil-demand growth and once again chipping away at Middle Eastern influence. American innovation and exports of energy supply and technology will open global energy markets to competitive investments and consumer choice. But Washington needs to embrace this choice by resisting the call to continue to ban energy exports to protect vested business interests or for resource nationalistic reasons. Indeed, we need to reverse the mindset of the oil embargo years -- a mindset of supply shortages and husbanding of resources -- and move back to a more traditional promotion of free markets. The energy sector has done this in the trade of petroleum products, where the United States is simultaneously the world's largest importer and exporter. The United States is heading in this same direction for trade in natural gas, whether by pipeline to Mexico and eastern Canada or the export of LNG. And it should move in the same direction with crude oil exports as pressures mount from growing surpluses midcontinent and on the U.S. Gulf Coast. The expanding wind and solar businesses in California and Texas are encouraging new complementary battery-storage options and smarter networks, laying the groundwork for greater consumer choice and control. The move to distributed energy, right now focused mainly on affluent customers who can afford private backup generation, may spread to broader applications. Some day soon, it will enable increased remote energy solutions for villages in sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia. The U.S. government needs to support the reform of the electricity utilities to enable this transition, which will entail more-efficient technologies, locally produced and distributed generation, time-of-day pricing and peak-demand shaving. Such reforms are critical to the integration of renewable energy whose output varies widely over the course of a day. By leading the charge to these new energy technologies, the United States can fashion a global energy world more to its liking, where petropowers can no longer hold car owners hostage or turn off the heat and lights to millions of consumers to further geopolitical ends. Just as it was difficult to predict the impact of Apple computers on future global social trends, it may now seem hard to depict the exact time and place that America's unconventional resources and smart-grid innovation will democratize energy markets. But Apple did reset the way we think about computing and changed the world. Similarly, the dislocations currently unfolding in the energy sector are pointing to markets taking back pride of place over government control and consumer choice winning over supplier monopolies. The pace of change may be slow in coming at first, but eventually it will be no less stunning than Oct. 16, 1973, a day that sent shock waves into the global economy, the ripples of which are still visible today. Authors: Amy Myers Jaffe is the executive director for energy and sustainability at University of California, Davis. Ed Morse is global head of commodities research at Citigroup. Source: Foreign Policy http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/10/16/the_end_of_opec_america_energy_oil?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full

#MWH #OPEC #OIL #US #Middle East #Fracking #LNG #Natural Gas #Energy

[anthonyramienski]

MWH Iran Air Flight 655

The downing of Flight 655 marked a critical moment in the late 20th century histories of the Gulf and to the shifting relationship between energy, the global political economy, and modern war. The attack ushered in the beginning of the end of what had been a long and bloody war between Iran and Iraq See the following articles for the details: Iran Air Flight 655 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Iran Air Flight 655 was an Iran Air flight from Tehran, Iran, to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, via Bandar Abbas, Iran. On 3 July 1988, at the end of the Iran–Iraq War, the aircraft serving the flight, an Airbus A300B2-203, was shot down by SM-2MR surface-to-air missiles fired by the United States Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes as it flew over the Strait of Hormuz. The aircraft, which had been flying in Iranian airspace over Iran's territorial waters in the Persian Gulf on its usual flight path, was destroyed. All 290 on board, including 66 children and 16 crew, perished.[1] Ranking seventh among the deadliest disasters in aviation history, the incident retains the highest death toll of any aviation incident in the Indian Ocean and the highest death toll of any incident involving an Airbus A300 anywhere in the world.[2] The Vincennes had entered Iranian territorial waters after one of its helicopters drew warning fire from Iranian speedboats operating within Iranian territorial limits.[3] According to the United States Government, the crew incorrectly identified the Iranian Airbus A300 as an attacking F-14 Tomcat fighter (a plane made in the United States and operated at that time by only two forces worldwide, the United States Navy and the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force). Contributing to the error was the fact that the airliner did not respond to several inquiries to change course and did not identify itself clearly as civilian. This was because Vincennes was signaling warnings on a military channel and the civilian plane could not technically receive it.[4] The Iranian government maintains that Vincennes negligently shot down the civilian aircraft. The event generated a great deal of controversy and criticism of the United States. Some analysts have blamed U.S. military commanders and the captain of Vincennes for reckless and aggressive behavior in a tense and dangerous environment.[5][6] In 1996, the United States and Iran reached "an agreement in full and final settlement of all disputes, differences, claims, counterclaims" relating to the incident at the International Court of Justice.[7] As part of the settlement, the United States agreed to pay US$61.8 million, an average of $213,103.45 per passenger, in compensation to the families of the Iranian victims. However, the United States has never admitted responsibility, nor apologized to Iran.[8] As of January 2012, Iran Air was still using flight number IR655 on the Tehran–Dubai route as a memorial to the victims, contrary to the informal convention amongst many other airlines that discontinue flight numbers associated with accidents. Source: Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 Iran Air Flight 655 The New York Times What Iran Air Flight 655 says about America’s role in the Middle East By Max Fisher October 17, 2013 at 4:52 pm In 1988, the U.S. Navy ship Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian flight, Iran Air 655, killing all 290 passengers and crew on board. The incident has hung over U.S.-Iranian relations for 25 years and remains extremely sensitive. Toby Craig Jones, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University who focuses on U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf, argues that the incident is a symbol and product of the U.S. strategy in the Gulf, where militarization and energy policies can often blur. What follows is an edited excerpt on the Vincennes and Flight 655 from Jones's forthcoming book, "America's Oil Wars," to be published by Harvard University Press. Seven minutes after takeoff on July 3, 1988, Iran Air Flight 655 plunged into the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people on board. The flight was to be a routine “milk run,” a regularly scheduled transit ferrying business people and families from Bandar Abbas in Iran to Dubai. Instead, on a clear mid summer morning, the plane was torn from the sky, brought down by two American anti-aircraft missiles. The USS Vincennes, a high-tech missile cruiser that had been dispatched to the Gulf only weeks before, delivered the fatal blow. The first missile cut the plane in two and severed its left wing. The second shredded it and passengers with searing shrapnel. (See Lee Allen Zatarain's The Tanker War, page 326.) Those not killed immediately plunged over 14,000 feet, where they died on impact. A little over six weeks after the attack, the U.S. Department of Defense released a 150-page incident report that remarked [that] the downing of Flight 655 was “a tragic and regrettable accident,” the unfortunate outcome of a complicated “combat environment.” American military and political leaders argued it was a series of inadvertent mistakes, “the fog of war,” and especially Iranian aggression that led to catastrophe. The Vincennes, captained by William C. Rogers and managed by an inexperienced crew, was outfitted with a sophisticated new computerized command and control system known as Aegis that was untested in battle. At the time of the attack, Rogers had ordered the Vincennes and his ship’s helicopter to pursue and fire on several Iranian gunboats, which had reportedly been harassing merchant shipping moments earlier. Flight 655 departed from Bandar Abbas on a flight-path that would have taken it directly over the battle being waged below. While gunning at Iranian speedboats on the surface waters of the Gulf, the crew of the Vincennes tracked Flight 655 above. Almost immediately, they wrongly identified it as an F-14 fighter. Their confusion was partly because the passenger jet had taken off from a dual-use military and civilian airfield. In the midst of battle, they assumed Iran had scrambled a single fighter jet in defense of the small naval craft. Compounding the original error, they made even more crucial mistakes. Most importantly, the crew wrongly determined that the flight was descending toward the ship, as if to launch a bombing run, when in fact it was climbing. It was a perplexing mistake. With data from the ship’s computer clearly showing Flight 655 as gaining altitude, it remains a mystery why the ships’ technicians claimed otherwise. Investigators determined the misreading of the ship’s data and the “tragic” decision to fire had been the product of combat stress brought on by Iranian aggression. Those later looking to deflect American responsibility honed in on Iran’s alleged bad behavior. In hearings held before the U.S. Senate in September Admiral Robert Kelly, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued that Iran “must share some responsibility for this tragedy,” a sentiment that drew broad support from those present as well as from the American public. In its initial report, the Pentagon withheld key details of the incident, particularly the chain of events that led to it. Newsweek magazine later alleged that the military, protecting itself, engaged in a fraudulent cover-up. They wrote that while the Iranian gunboats may have been harassing merchant shipping, they had then disengaged and were in full retreat in the face of superior American firepower. After the gunboats began their initial withdrawal, the American commander in Bahrain ordered U.S. forces to break off their pursuit. Captain Rogers, according to Newsweek's story, ignored the order. He also ignored the military’s standing rules of engagement that limited the American use of deadly force to defensive measures. It was the Vincennes, not the Iranian gunboats that provoked the clash between them. Rogers had the Vincennes pursue the gunboats into Iranian sovereign waters, from which it launched the two missiles that felled Flight 655. David Carlson, who commanded the cruiser USS Sides, and was in supporting role of and less than 20 nautical miles from Vincennes when it launched its attack, denied that the Iranians had been especially aggressive. Carlson later remarked that there “was no coordinated attack involving” the Iranian gunboats. He even challenged the prevailing assumption that the Iranian posture in the Gulf was threatening more generally. He reflected, “my experience was that the conduct of the Iranian military forces in the month preceding the incident was pointedly non-threatening.” While Carlson conceded that he thought the flight might have been an F-14 at the time, several of his crew rightly identified it as a civilian aircraft. Either way, Carlson never believed Flight 655 posed a risk and watched in horror as the Vincennes launched its missiles. In disputing more apologetic accounts that sought to justify the Vincennes’s choices, the Sides’ commander offered a much less flattering analysis. “Having watched the performance of the Vincennes for a month before the incident,” he recalled that his “impression was clearly that an atmosphere of restraint was not her strong suit.” Revealing that his colleagues had taken to calling the Vincennes “Robo Cruiser” well before July 3, Carlson suggested that his “guess was that the crew of the Vincennes felt a need to prove the viability of Aegis [the ship’s new computerized system] ... and that they hankered for an opportunity to show their stuff.” Carlson’s was a damning account, although perhaps it was one that could be dismissed as the product of competing egos among rival commanders in the Gulf. Whatever happened on the bridge of the Vincennes that led Rogers to make a terrible choice, the significance of Flight 655’s fate had as much to do with the broader political and political economic forces at work in the region and in the moment that made the tragedy possible in the first place. The downing of Flight 655 marked a critical moment in the late 20th century histories of the Gulf and to the shifting relationship between energy, the global political economy, and modern war. The attack ushered in the beginning of the end of what had been a long and bloody war between Iran and Iraq. Convinced that the U.S., which had ramped up its military presence in the region in 1986, was committed to their defeat, and with Iraq having fully embraced the use of chemical weapons, Iranian leaders agreed to a United Nations-backed ceasefire in late July, just three weeks after the incident. While U.S. officials sought to deflect criticism and minimize their responsibility, the reality was that the tragedy helped serve American interests. The United States threw its support behind the Ba’ath regime in Baghdad and over the course of the 1980s its levels of support for the Iraq war machine, including the direct projection of American military might, deepened considerably. By the summer of 1988, the U.S. Navy was patrolling the Gulf, shepherding oil tankers as they passed through the Strait of Hormuz, had established an elaborate anti-Iranian surveillance and policing network, and was trading shots with the Iranian Navy. Little reported at the time, just months before the July attack the U.S. staged its largest Naval confrontation since World War II against Iran. American antagonisms and work to thwart Iranian mobility in the Gulf have remained in place ever since. After the war was over, and after the United States turned on its former Iraqi partners, the American commitment to maintaining a large military in the Middle East further intensified. So too would the commitment to its use of force and to what should be understood as the genesis of one long American war in the Middle East. The attack on Flight 655 also reflected something more complex and uncertain about the character of the broader conflict that was settling in. While the U.S. and its allies would go on to wage conventional campaigns in Kuwait in 1991 and again in Iraq in 2003, the moments in between and after can better be understand as a kind of permanent quasi-war – not war, but also not its absence. The condition of almost war, in which the military was engaged in hostilities that aimed to “contain” Iran, was already in place in the late 1980s. Indeed, the lack of certainty around the United States’ strategic objectives, and ambiguity about the US Navy’s mission in 1988 in particular, are crucial to understanding what was going on when the Vincennes shot down Flight 655. Much of the hand-wringing inside the United States government around that incident was framed around that claim that “war begets accidents.” Commander Carlson’s remarks in rebuttal to such thinking – “that is axiomatic, but we were not at war" – reflected both the uncertainty of the moment and also drew attention to the exceptionally high human stakes of strategic uncertainty. In addition to uncertainties about the U.S. mission and how it should behave were broader questions about how it arrived at precisely that point and how we should think about the character of the region’s emerging political order, one in which violence steadily intensified and in which war was not exceptional, but a permanent structural feature of the order of things. The downing of Flight 655 was rooted in a shifting politics around energy, and, in the making of a regional order in the 1980s in which “energy” and “war” became increasingly interdependent. The argument here is that the expansion of both the American presence and its use of violence resulted in the fundamental transformation of the relationship between energy and war, one in which the distinction between them was erased. The United States had intensified its military presence in the mid-1980s, ostensibly to protect the flow of oil from the Northern Gulf, where the Iran-Iraq war had intensified, to global markets. A year before the downing of Flight 655, Richard W. Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and the Reagan administration’s most visible spokesperson for its military policy in the Gulf, remarked in prepared testimony to Congress that “ready access to Gulf oil is critical to the economic well-being of the West.” He continued that the Middle East “is strategically important to the United States. We would suffer a major strategic defeat should a power hostile to the United States sharply increase its power and influence in the region... The administration like its predecessors, is committed to maintaining the free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz and supporting the individual and collective self-defense of the Arab Gulf states.” Ensuring the flow of oil, or stated otherwise, providing security for oil, was and remains a central tenant of the American case for its role in the Gulf. But the now-common idea of "energy security" is an articulation that obscures more than it reveals. The neat division of energy and security into related but still separate categories misses the more important ways in which the two have become inextricably connected, physically and technologically built into one another. In creating a new techno-political order around energy and war starting in the mid-1980s, the United States and its allies engaged in a struggle to make and unmake space and movement in the Gulf, to create both a system of surveillance and control that privileged themselves as well as in a struggle to refashion the political geography of the region. The fluidity of the Gulf, the fact that both the seascape and the objects moving on it were always in motion, gave rise to a corresponding fluidity in the techno-political and geopolitical order in the region. The system was leaky and uncertain and mobility both on the sea and in the air was precarious. The result was the system was, according to those who sought to control, always in crisis and, thus, always at war. It has been ever since. Max Fisher is the Post's foreign affairs blogger. He has a master's degree in security studies from Johns Hopkins University. Sign up for his daily newsletter here. Also, follow him on Twitter or Facebook. Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/17/what-iran-air-flight-655-says-about-americas-role-in-the-middle-east/?wpisrc=nl_wv The New York Times The forgotten story of Iran Air Flight 655 By Max Fisher, Updated: October 16 at 7:00 am If you walked into any high school classroom in the United States and asked the students to describe their country's relationship with Iran, you'd probably hear words like "enemy" and "threat," maybe "distrust" and "nuclear." But ask them what the number 655 has to do with it, and you'd be met with silence. Try the same thing in an Iranian classroom, asking about the United States, and you'd probably hear some of the same words. Mention the number 655, though, it's a safe bet that at least a few of the students would immediately know what you were talking about. The number, 655, is a flight number: Iran Air 655. If you've never heard of it, you're far from alone. But you should know the story if you want to better understand why the United States and Iran so badly distrust one another and why it will be so difficult to strike a nuclear deal, as they're attempting to do at a summit in Switzerland this week. The story of Iran Air 655 begins, like so much of the U.S.-Iran struggle, with the 1979 Islamic revolution. When Iraq invaded Iran the following year, the United States supported Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein against the two countries' mutual Iranian enemy. The war dragged on for eight awful years, claiming perhaps a million lives. Toward the end of the war, on July 3, 1988, a U.S. Navy ship called the Vincennes was exchanging fire with small Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf. The U.S. Navy kept ships there, and still does, to protect oil trade routes. As the American and Iranian ships skirmished, Iran Air Flight 655 took off from nearby Bandar Abbas International Airport, bound for Dubai. The airport was used by both civilian and military aircraft. The Vincennes mistook the lumbering Airbus A300 civilian airliner for a much smaller and faster F-14 fighter jet, perhaps in the heat of battle or perhaps because the flight allegedly did not identify itself. It fired two surface-to-air missiles, killing all 290 passengers and crew members on board. The horrible incident brought Tehran closer to ending the war, but its effects have lingered much longer than that. "The shoot-down of Iran Air flight 655 was an accident, but that is not how it was seen in Tehran," former CIA analyst and current Brookings scholar Kenneth Pollack wrote in his 2004 history of U.S.-Iran enmity, "The Persian Puzzle." "The Iranian government assumed that the attack had been purposeful. ... Tehran convinced itself that Washington was trying to signal that the United States had decided to openly enter the war on Iraq's side." That belief, along with Iraq's increased use of chemical weapons against Iran, led Tehran to accept a United Nations cease-fire two months later. But it also helped cement a view in Iran, still common among hard-liners in the government, that the United States is absolutely committed to the destruction of the Islamic Republic and will stop at almost nothing to accomplish this. It is, as Time's Michael Crowley points out in an important piece, one of several reasons that Iran has a hard time believing it can trust the United States to ever stop short of its complete destruction. This is not just an issue of historical grievance: It matters in immediate geopolitical terms to the efforts by President Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to find their way to a nuclear deal and perhaps a first step toward detente. For any deal to work, both countries will have to trust that the other is sincere about its willingness to follow through on its promises. For the United States, that means trusting that Iran is really willing to give up any nuclear weapons ambitions and ramp down the program as promised (Washington has real, legitimate grounds to worry about this; Iran has its own history of misdeeds). For Iran, it means trusting that the United States will actually accept the Islamic Republic and coexist peacefully with it. The eight-year war with Iraq, which is widely seen in Iran as a war against not just Hussein but his Western backers, and the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 that came near its conclusion, have convinced many in Iran that the United States simply cannot be trusted to let Iran be. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Rouhani's boss, often appears to share this deep distrust. Khamenei and other hard-liners could scuttle any deal; a similar drama will likely play out in Washington. If Iran believes that the United States is so committed to its destruction that it would willingly shoot down a plane full of Iranian civilians, then Tehran has every incentive to assume we're lying in negotiations. It also has strong incentives to try to build a nuclear weapon, or at least get close enough to deter the American invasion that it feared was coming in 1988 and perhaps again in 2002 with President George W. Bush's "axis of evil" speech. Americans might not know about Flight 655. But Iranians surely do -- they can hardly forget about it. © The Washington Post Company http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/16/the-forgotten-story-of-iran-air-flight-655/ Iran Time Four Good Reasons Why Iran Doesn’t Trust America A brief survey of justifiable Iranian resentment By Michael Crowley @CrowleyTIME Oct. 15, 2013 One basic obstacle for the new round of talks over Iran’s nuclear program that open today will be America’s basic distrust of the Iranian regime. Before striking any deal with Tehran, the Obama Administration will have to gauge whether a country where hostility toward the U.S. has been a core political theme since 1979 is acting in good faith. That could be a hard notion to swallow, given that some Iranian leaders still call America the Great Satan, and that Iran still celebrates the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran with a national holiday. But as Iran and Western negotiators sit down in Geneva today, it’s worth considering some of the reasons why Iran bears such animus toward America, and why cutting a deal with the U.S. won’t be easy for Tehran either. Many of those reasons have to do with the basic Islamic fundamentalist philosophy of Iran’s clerical leaders, to be sure. But as the nuclear talks move forward, it’s worth remembering that the U.S. bears some blame for the poisoned state of the relationship between the two countries. Consider the way Bill Clinton — then seeking a thaw with Iran — once put it. “It may be that the Iranian people have been taught to hate or distrust the United States or the West on the grounds that we are infidels and outside the faith,” Clinton said in April 1999. “I think it is important to recognize, however, that Iran … has been the subject of quite a lot of abuse from various Western nations. And I think sometimes it’s quite important to tell people, ‘Look, you have a right to be angry’” at things the U.S. has done. Here are four of them: 1. The Coup and the Shah Iran’s 1979 revolution overthrew a monarch who had become despised for his corruption and political repression. The Iranian Shah was also known as a puppet of the U.S., thanks in part to his installation by a 1953 coup widely believed to be the handiwork of the CIA, after the Eisenhower Administration grew alarmed that Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was drifting into the Soviet orbit. “It it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright conceded in a 2000 address, which also acknowledged that the U.S. gave “sustained backing” to the Shah’s regime, which, she admitted, “brutally repressed political dissent.” In what may have been a gesture of contrition, the CIA finally admitted to its role on the coup’s 60th anniversary this summer. But all is not yet forgiven in Tehran, where Iran’s parliament recently gave preliminary approval for suing the U.S. in international court for staging the coup. 2. Iraq and Chemical Weapons When Iran fought a brutal eight-year war against Iraq from 1980 to 1988, Tehran felt that it was also fighting a shadow enemy: the U.S. Saddam Hussein was sustained for much of the war by arms, money and intelligence assistance that flowed from Washington. Most infuriating for some Iranians, the U.S. tolerated and even aided Saddam’s repeated large-scale chemical attacks on Iranian forces using sarin and mustard gas. By some accounts, America actually assisted Iraq with intelligence like satellite imagery and maps in advance of what Washington knew would be gas attacks. (To Iranians aware of that history, Barack Obama’s outrage over his “red line” in Syria had a hypocritical ring.) “Aspects of U.S. policy toward Iraq during its conflict with Iran appear now to have been regrettably shortsighted,” Albright said in 2000. 3. Iran Air 655 In the summer of 1988, American warships were patrolling the Strait of Hormuz to protect commercial shipping, including oil tankers, during the Iran-Iraq conflict. It was perilous duty: a year earlier, an Iraqi jet had mistakenly fired a missile into a U.S. Navy ship, killing 37 Americans. And on the morning of July 3, a helicopter from the Navy guided-missile cruiser U.S.S. Vincennes came under fire from Iranian patrol boats. With the Vincennes in pursuit of the Iranians, Iran Air flight 655 departed from Bandar Abbas in southern Iran, en route to Dubai. As the Airbus jet headed toward the Vincennes, the Americans misidentified the Iranian jet as a hostile fighter — Iranian fighter jets sometimes also took off from Bandar Abbas — and the Vincennes fired two surface-to-air missiles that destroyed the plane. Two hundred and seventy four passengers and 16 crew were killed, nearly all of them Iranians. The U.S. paid $61.8 million to the Iranian victims’ families. But America has never admitted responsibility or apologized. And Iran has not forgotten: Iranian state television aired a documentary on the 25th anniversary of the tragedy this summer. An official Iranian government Twitter account noted, “Our civilian plane was shot down by U.S. warship in Persian Gulf, killing all 300. They awarded its captain medal of honor.” (Two top officers on the Vincennes were later awarded medals, though not for the Iran Air incident.) And an official Facebook page for Iran’s Supreme Leader posted this hard-to-forget image. 4. The ‘Axis of Evil’ and Regime Change In the late 1990s Iran and the U.S. made efforts at a diplomatic thaw. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the two countries cooperated against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and some diplomats saw a chance for a breakthrough. But in his January 2002 State of the Union address, George W. Bush described Iran as a member — along with Iraq and North Korea — of an “axis of evil” that threatened the civilized world. The line surprised and outraged Iran. According to Ryan Crocker, then a U.S. diplomat in Kabul who was engaged in talks with Iranian officials, it crushed momentum toward a rapprochement. “We were just that close,” Crocker recently told the New Yorker. “One word in one speech changed history.” Some current and former U.S. officials call that an overstatement. But more serious for Iran than Bush’s “evil” insult is the belief that Washington’s goal is not simply to stop Iran’s nuclear program, but to replace the country’s Islamist regime entirely. Prominent figures like GOP Senator John McCain have openly called for a U.S.-backed regime change, an idea that President Obama felt compelled to address in his Sept. 24 speech to the U.N.: “We are not seeking regime change” Obama assured. Whether Iran buys that assurance is critical to whether a nuclear deal can be struck. Iran’s leaders are well aware, after all, that Saddam might still be in power if he’d had a bomb. Time, http://swampland.time.com/2013/10/15/four-good-reasons-why-iran-doesnt-trust-america/#ixzz2iBuWuxXH NEWSWEEK SEA OF LIES The inside story of how an America naval vessel blundered into an attack on Iran Air 655 at the height of tensions during the Iran-Iraq War, and how the Pentagon tried to cover its tracks after 290 innocent civilians died. Newsweek, July 13, 1992 Exclusive -- On July 3, 1988, and American warship shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 290 civilians. This is the true story of how it happened -- and how the Pentagon tried to cover up the tragic blunder. The modern navy has many ladders. Its officers can earn their stripes at sea or in the air. They can prosper by navigating the shoals of technocracy. But the one sure path to glory is the same as in the Roman times: victory at sea. Sailing in harm's way is a matter of vocation. Capt. Will Rogers III, USN, spent his career preparing for combat. Winning his commission in December 1965 at the age of 27, Rogers came late to the navy, but he made up for lost time with a gung-ho attitude and - after a spell on the staff of the chief of naval operations - friends in high places. In 1987, Rogers won command of the navy's most prized high-tech warship, an Aegis cruiser. The billion-dollar Vincennes seemed a sure ticket to flag rank. But Rogers, who like many peacetime naval officers had never been under fire, longed to see action. On July 3, 1988 Captain Rogers got his wish. He sought out and engaged the enemy in a sea battle in the Persian Gulf. From the captain's chair of a warship combat information center, he made life-and -death decisions in the heat of conflict. It was the moment he had yearned and trained for, and it should have been the apex of his life in the service. Only it wasn't much of a battle. Rogers had blundered into a murky, half-secret confrontation between the United States and Iran that the politicians did not want to declare and the top brass was not eager to wage. The enemy was not a disciplined naval force but ragtag irregulars in lightly armed speedboats. Fighting them with an Aegis cruiser was like shooting at rabbits with a radar-guided missile. And when it was over, the only confirmed casualties were innocent civilians: 290 passengers and crew in an Iranian Airbus that Captain Rogers's men mistook for an enemy warplane. The destruction Iran Air Flight 655 was an appalling human tragedy. It damaged America's world standing. It almost surely caused Iran to delay the release of the American hostages in Lebanon. It may have given the mullahs a motive for revenge and provoked Tehran into playing a role in the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103. For the navy, it was a professional disgrace. The navy's most expensive surface warship, designed to track and shoot down as many as 200 incoming missiles at once, had blown apart an innocent civilian airliner in its first time in combat. What's more, NEWSWEEK has learned , the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters a the time of the shoot-down - in clear violation of international law. The top Pentagon brass understood from the beginning that if the whole truth about the Vincennes came out, it would means months of humiliating headlines. So the U.S. Navy did what all navies do after terrible blunders at sea: it told lies and handed out medals. This is the story of a naval fiasco, of an overeager captain, panicked crewmen, and the cover-up that followed. A NEWSWEEK investigation, joined by ABC News's "Nightline," encountered months of stone-walling by senior naval officers. Some of the evasions were products of simple denial; a number of the seamen and officers aboard the Vincennes that morning in July 1988 are still in therapy today, wrestling with guilt. But the Pentagon's official investigation into the incident, the Fogarty Report, is a pastiche of omissions, half-truths and outright deceptions. It was a cover-up approved at the top, by Adm. William Crowe, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Captain Rogers insisted to "Nightline" last week that he had made the "proper decision." He had opened fire only to protect his ship and crew, he said. But drawing on declassified documents, videotapes and audiotapes from the ships involved in the incident, and well over 100 interviews, NEWSWEEK has pieced together an account that belies the skipper's stoic defense. It is almost a parable for an era of "limited" warfare, with its blurry rules of engagement and its lethal technology in frightened young hands. It is as well an age-old story of hubris, of a warrior who wanted war too much. A MURKY MORNING At 6:33 local time on the Vincennes, on the morning of July 2, the phone buzzed in Will Rogers's cramped sleeping quarters. The captain was shaving. Already, just two hours after the sunrise, the 100-degree heat of the sun was overwhelming the ship's air- conditioning systems. Fine-grained sand whipped across the gulf from the Arabian Desert, creating a yellowish haze. Rogers picked up the phone. It was the duty officer in the ship's combat information center, the nerve center two decks below Rogers's sea cabin: "Skipper, you better come down. It sounds like the Montgomery has her nose in a beehive." Some 50 miles to the northeast, the U.S. Navy frigate Montgomery was coming through the western entrance of the Strait of Hormuz. Everyday, tankers bearing half the world's imported oil wend their way through the strait, only 32 miles wide at its choke point. The Iran-Iraq War had turned the strait into a gauntlet. Gunboats of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, based on the islands of Hengam and Abu Musa, had been attacking tankers and merchantmen bound to and from Kuwait, Iraq's main ally in the war. Anxious to keep Kuwait's oil flowing, the United States had agreed to provide escort to Kuwait tankers registered under the U.S. flag. On this July morning, the Montgomery spotted a half-dozen Revolutionary Guard launches venturing out from the island hideouts. On this own, Rogers decided to enter the fray. At 6:33 the Vincennes log records, he ordered "all ahead flank." The cruiser's four massive gas-turbine engines cranked up to 80,000 horsepower and sent the warship smashing through the waves at 30 knots. By 6:50 - according to the official version of events later offered by the navy - the Montgomery had spotted 13 Iranians gunboats in the strait. Several were said be milling about near a Liberian tanker called the Stoval. At 7:11, the Montgomery reported hearing "five to seven" explosions coming from the vicinity of the tanker. It was only when the radio crackled with the report of these mysterious explosions that the fleet headquarters in Bahrain thought to call the Vincennes. Rear Admiral Anthony Less, the commander of the Joint Taskforce-Middle East, ordered the cruiser northeast to support the Montgomery. The Bahrain command wasn't interested in drawing the Vincennes into action, however. Admiral Less merely wanted to dispatch the Vincennes's helicopter on a reconnaissance mission. So Capt. Richard McKenna, Less's chief of surface warfare, relayed what he thought were clear orders to Rogers: send your helo north to investigate, but keep your ship farther south, in case more boats emerge from the Revolutionary Guard base on Abu Musa. At 7:22, the Vincennes's SH-60B Seahawk helicopter lifted off and sped north; within 20 minutes it was circling over the Iranian gunboats. The pilot of Ocean Lord 25, Lt. Mark Collier, found the gunboats hovering around a German cargo vessel, the Dhaulagiri. They weren't shooting. It was a common harassment tactic. In Bahrain, as he listened to the radio traffic, Capt. Richard Watkins, Admiral Lee's chief of staff, decided that the situation was, as he later put it, "defusing." He left the flag plot to do some paperwork. But aboard the Vincennes, things were just heating up. With a blast of the klaxon, Rogers sent his crew to battle stations and ordered the small arms stations along the sides of his ship into readiness against small-craft attack. The Vincennes had a dubious reputation inside the U.S. fleet in the gulf. Officers on other ships sarcastically referred to the ship as "Robocruiser." In deskbound war games in San Diego, just before the Vincennes left for the gulf, Rogers consistently pushed beyond the exercise's rules of engagement, according to another participant. At a Subic Bay, Philippines, briefing on the rules of engagement in the Persian Gulf, the most senior officer attending from the Vincennes was a lieutenant. In early June, Rogers infuriated Capt. Roger Hattan, the commander of the frigate USS Sides, by ordering him to close in on an Iranian warship in a way he deemed provocative. Hattan refused - and fleet headquarters in Bahrain backed him up. By early July, Rogers was widely regarded as "trigger happy," according to several high-ranking officers. He was unquestionably eager to get at the gunboats trailing after the Mongtomery, Onward the Vincennes charges, past the German merchantman (which nonchalantly flashed an "A-OK" signal) until it drew abreast of the Montgomery at 8:38. By now Oman's coast guard was on the radio, ordering the Revolutionary Guard boats to head home. The Omanis wanted the Vincennes to leave, too. "U.S. Navy warship," an Omani officer intoned over the radio, "maneuvering at speeds up to 30 knots are not in accordance with innocent passage. Please leave Omani water." By chance, a navy cameraman named Rudy Pahoyo was aboard the Vincennes that day, shooting videotape on the bridge. His video captures the officers' response to the Omani request. They smirked at each other, and did not bother to reply. The Omanis weren't the only ones who wanted the Vincennes out of the area. At 8:40, Captain McKenna in Bahrain returned to his command center and was startled to see that the Vincennes was on the top of the Omani peninsula - about 40 miles north from where he believed he had ordered Rogers to remain. In some irritation, McKena called Rogers and asked what he was doing. Rogers reported that he was supporting his helo, and that he'd been having communication problems. Unimpressed, McKenna told him to head back toward Abu Musa. "You want me to what?" Rogers bristled over the circuit, McKenna could hear chortles of laughter from the Vincennes combat information center. Now angry, McKenna delivered a flat order: the Vincennes must come south - and the Montgomery too. He was furious at the attitude of the captain and officers of the hotshot billion-dollar cruiser. "Aegis arrogance," he muttered to himself. Rogers grudgingly obeyed the order - but he left his helo behind to watch the Iranian boats. It was to be a fatal mistake. In the cockpit of Ocean Lord 25, pilot Mark Collier could not resist the temptation to follow the gunboats north, as they retreated toward their island lair. He later explained that he wanted to drop down and see how many men were aboard the launches, and how they were armed. He almost found out the hard way. As he banked around them, Collier saw what he later describes as "eight to 10 bursts of light" and "sparks...just a big spark" in the sky 100 yards from his helo. He though for a moment it was the sun glinting off of a boat, but then he saw puffs of smoke. "Did you see that?" Collier, called out to Petty Officer Scott Zilge. "Yeah," Zilge replied. "Let's get out of here. That was an airburst - antiaircraft fire." As Colier dropped the helo to the safety of 100 feet, the aircraft's commander, Lt. Roger Huff, sitting in the co-pilot's seat, radioed the Vincennes: "Trinity Sword. This is Ocean Lord 25. We're taking fire. Executing evasion." In the combat information center, this was all Rogers needed. At last the gunboats had committed a hostile act. Under the navy's rules of engagement in the gulf, Rogers could order hot pursuit. "General Quarters," he snapped. "Full power." Once again, the Vincennes forged north at 30 knots. Meanwhile, some 200 miles to the southeast, on station just inside the mouth of the Gulf of Oman, lay the aircraft carrier USS Forestall. In his flag plot, Rear Admiral Leighton (Snuffy) Smith, commander of Carrier Battle Group 6, heard the Vincennes's breathless news that its helo had been fired upon, and that the cruiser was pursuing the attackers. At 9:14, Smith ordered the launch of two F-14 fighters and two A-7 attack planes. By 9:28, they had blasted off from the carrier deck. The planes were not to jump onto the fight: that was a sure recipe for "blue on blue" as the navy terms U.S. warships shooting down U.S. aircraft. Rather the warplanes headed for Point Alpha, a rendezvous point 50 miles outside the Strait of Hormuz. Once there, they would be less than 80 miles - seven minutes flying time - from the Vincennes. But Rogers was not thinking about air support at that moment. He was intent on the Iranian gunboats swirling ahead. The task as not easy. Aegis cruisers were not designed for small-craft battles. They were built to take on the Soviet Navy in the North Atlantic. The Aegis's ultra-high tech radar system is designed to track scores of incoming missiles and aircraft in a major sea battle. The Iranian launches were so small that as they bobbed on the swell, they flickered in and out of the Vincennes's surface search radar, showing up not as separate targets but as a single symbol on the radar screen. Impatiently, Rogers turned to his tactical action officer, Lt. Cmdr. Victor Guillory. "Can the bridge see anything?" he demand. The bridge reported that it could occasionally glimpse the wakes of a few boats as flashes through the haze. At 9:39, still lacking a clear target, Rogers radioed fleet headquarters and announced his intention to open fire. In Bahrain, Admiral Lee's staff was uneasy. Captain Watkins quizzed Rogers on his position and the bearing of the gunboats. Finally, he asked "Are the contacts clearing the area?" The question could have been a show stopper. Judging from later testimony, few in the Vincennes CIC that day believed that the ship was under attack. In fact, the gunboats were just slowly milling about - evidently under the impression that they were safe in their own territorial waters. Through the haze, it is doubtful that the low-slung launches could have seen the Vincennes. Rogers, however, continued to argue for permission to shoot. On the bridge, the lookouts reported that though their giant "Big Eyes" - they could see the launches' wake more clearly now, turning randomly this way and that. A couple seemed to be heading in the direction of the Vincennes. For Rogers, that was enough. He reported to Bahrain that he gunboats were gathering speed and showing hostile intent. Again, he announced his intention to open fire. Aboard his command ship, Less finally concurred. The time was 9:41. On the bridge, the chief quartermaster had just called out that the Vincennes had now crossed the 12- mile limit off the coast - into Iranians waters. the Vincennes was operating in violation of international law, but Rogers was not paying attention to juridical niceties. Commander Guillory ordered the Vincennes's guns to fire when ready. Two minutes later the ship's five-inch gun opened up on its first target, a launch 8,000 yards away. Some 25 miles to the east, aboard the frigate USS Sides, Capt. David Carlson listened and watched Rogers's maneuvering with mounting incredulity. "Why doesn't he just push his rudder over and get his ass out of there?" muttered one of the frigate's officers. When Carlson heard Less assent to Rogers's request to open fire, Carlson turned to his number two, Lt. Commander Gary Erickson, and gave two thumbs down. Carlson thought there was going to be a massacre. He had no idea. FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDER Some 55 miles to the northeast, at precisely 9:45:30, Iran Air Capt. Mohsen Rezaian announced to the tower at Bandar Abbas airport that his A300B2 Airbus was ready for takeoff. A minute later, he throttled up his two General Electric CF6 engines and lifted the airline into the haze. His course would take the plane and its human cargo southwest to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. Though Rezaian could not know it, his flight path would also go almost directly over the USS Vincennes. At that moment Captain Rogers was sitting in his own cockpit - the darkened, windowless combat information center of the Vincennes, directing a sea battle by remote control. To the uninitiated, the CIC of an Aegis cruiser looks like a luxury video arcade. Rows of operators hunch over radio consoles, each monitoring one element of the battle. All the information from their screens is then integrated by the mighty Aegis computer into, literally, the "big picture" - thrown up as symbols on maps displayed on four giant 42-inch-by-42-inch screens at the head of the room where the captain and his two "battle mangers" sit. The $400 million Aegis system can track every aircraft within 300 miles. Its computers tag each contact with the symbol for "friendly," "hostile" or "unidentified" (chart, page 32). In war at sea, Aegis is expected to seek and identify all airborne threats to an entire carrier battle group, to display the speed and direction of each, and to rank them by the danger they present. Aegis is so powerful that it can not only track up to 200 incoming enemy aircraft or missiles, but also command missiles to shoot them down . In the full-scale war against the Soviet Union for which Aegis was designed, the captain and the crew would have had little choice but to switch the system to automatic - and duck. In the cramped and ambiguous environment of the Persian gulf, however, Rogers chose to rely on his own judgment and the combat skills of his crew. Those skills had never been tested. Indeed, some experts question whether even the best-trained crew could handle, under stress, the torrent of data that Aegis would pour on them. A 1988 Government Accounting Office report accused the navy of rigging Aegis sea trials by tipping the crews off to the precise nature the "threats" they were to face. The navy could not afford to risk failure in the trails for fear that Congress would stop funding the Aegis program. Some of the Vincennes's most senior officers were less than adept at computerized warfare. Under normal procedures, Captain Rogers rarely touched his console. He could have delegated the battle against the launches to Guillory, his tactical officer for surface warfare. But Rogers didn't entirely trust Guillory, a former personnel officer who was uncomfortable with computers (His fellow officers in personnel snickered because , one said, instead of plotting job changes by computer spreadsheet, he used his computer screen as a surface for "self-stick" notes.) In essence, the skipper pushed Guillory aside and ran the battle himself. Rogers set the range on the "big picture" display screen in front of him to 16 miles, to focus on the gunboats. He was oblivious to anything beyond. At 9:47, the Vincennes's powerful Spy radar picked up a distant blip - a plane lifting off from the airport at Bander Abbas. The blip was in fact Iran Air's Flight 655 on its twice-a-week milk run to Dubai. But since Bander Abbas is a military as well as a civilian airport, any flights out over the gulf was automatically "tagged" by the navy ships as "assumed hostile." At his computer console in the Vincennes's CIC, Petty Office Andrew Anderson saw the blip for an incoming bogey go up on one side of the big blue screens. Anderson's job in "Air Alley," the row of operators who handled air warfare, was to identify any air traffic within range of the ship. He told the Aegis system to query the incoming plane: Identify, Friend or Foe? By standard practice, all planes carry a transponder that automatically answers the IFF query with Mode 1 or 2 (military), or Mode 3 (civilian). Anderson got a Mode 3. "Commair" (commercial airliner) he figured. He reached beside his console for the navy's listing of commercial flights over the gulf. But as he scanned the schedule, he missed Flight 655. Apparently, in the darkness of the CIC, its arc lights flickered every time the Vincennes's five-inch gun fired off another round at the hapless Iranian gunboats, he was confused by the gulf's four different time zones. Anderson turned to the petty officer next to him in Air Alley, John Leach, and wondered aloud if the blip could be an Iranian warplane - an F-4 or F-14 perhaps? Their boss in Air Alley, Lt. Clay Zocher, overheard the two enlisted men talking, Zocher was already nervous. He had stood on this watch only twice before during General Quarters and he'd never mastered the computer routines for his console. He was worrying at the moment about an Iranian P-3 patrol plane that was making its way down the Iranian coastline. Could the P-3 be coordinating an attack on the Vincennes with the unidentified bogey? Zocher decided to pass the chatter in Air Alley up the chain of command to his boss, Lt. Cmdr. Scott Lustig, the Vincennes' tactical commander for air warfare. Lustig ordered Zocher to flash the incoming plane a warning: "Unidentified aircraft...You are approaching a United States naval warship in international waters." It was the standard challenge, broadcast over the international distress frequencies routinely monitored by military and commercial aircraft. Briefly, Lustig considered another option. On the display screen in front of him Lustig could see that the Forestall's F-14s where circling just five minutes away. There was enough time - barely - to call them in to check out the bogey. The Forestall, too, had seen the blip on its radar screens. In the air, the F-14 pilots were itching to close in; a bogey out of Iran, heading for an American warship, are a rare opportunity for combat-hungry aviators. Aboard the carrier, Admiral Smith held them off. His staff was telling him that the blip was most likely a commercial airliner. But Smith stuck to the navy rule that the captain on the spot makes the decisions. He decided to let Rogers fight his own battle. Aboard the Vincennes, it was now 9:49. Rogers was totally consumed with his fire fight against the gunboats. He was shouting for the five-inch-gun crew to load faster, and ordered hard-right rudder to bring his stern gun to bear. The ship shuddered and heeled to starboard. Military theorists write about "friction", the inevitability of error, accident and miscalculation in the stress of combat. The architects of modern warfare have tried to use the technology to minimize battlefield blindness. But the electronic babble in a combat information center can be just as confusing. Officers and men communicate by headphones over several channels, with left and right ears usually listening to different circuits. Rogers and his key officers in the CIC were all on the same circuit - but so was half of the ship. Ingenious crewmen had discovered they could tap into the "command net" to hear the action over their Sony Walkmans. But in so doing, they drained power and the volume faded. Whenever it got too low, Lustig had to yell "Switch" so everyone could turn to an alternate command circuit. Then the hackers would switch to that channel, too. Over this erratic "net," a few seconds after 9:50, someone called out that the incoming plane was a "possible Astro" - the code word for an F-14. No one was ever able to find out who. In Air Alley, the operators thought the word came from the technicians in the ship's electronic-warfare suite. The technicians thought the warning came from Air Alley. Galvanized by this warning, Petty Officer Anderson again beamed out an IFF query. Ominously, the response he know got back was different. Upon his console flashed Mode 2: military aircraft. Only much later did the investigators figure out that Anderson had forgotten to reset the range on his IFF device. The Mode 2 did not come from the Airbus, climbing peacefully above the gulf, but from an Iranian military plane, probably a military transport, still on the runway back in Bander Abbas. "Possible Astro!" Anderson sang out, at a moment of near chaos in the CIC. It was 9:51. Having swung full circle, Rogers was now bringing his reloaded forward gun to bear on the Iranian launches. The gun fired off 11 rounds - and jammed. The skipper again ordered the rudder hard over. The stern swung around, and in the CIC, papers and books toppled of consoles as the ship heeled over. At his station to Rogers's left, Lustig looked at his screen. The incoming plane was 32 miles away. What do we do? he asked Rogers. His commanding officer was not too overwhelmed by the Iranian speedboats to forget the woeful example of Capt. Glenn Brindel, the skipper of the USS Stark. A year earlier, Brindel had been in the head when his ship was struck and almost sunk by a pair of anti-ship missiles fired by the pilot of a lone Iraqi Mirage F-1. Rogers decided that the Vincennes fire control radar would "paint" any possible hostile plane that got within 30 miles. At 20 miles, the Vincennes would shoot it down. Rogers was not absolutely sure that his ship did face an enemy warplane . The plane seemed too high - some 7,000 feet - for an attack approach. At his rear, another officer, Lt. William Mountford, warned "possible commair." Three more times, the warnings went out: "Iranian fighter...you are steering into danger and are subject to United States naval defensive measures." Then something happened that psychologists call "scenario fulfillment" - you see what you expect. Petty Officers Anderson and Leach both began singing out that the aircraft, now definitively tagged on the big screen as an F-14, was descending and picking up speed. The tapes of the CIC's data later showed no such thing. Anderson's screen showed that the plane was travelling 380 knots at 12,000 feet and climbing. Yet Anderson was shouting out that the speed was 455 knots, the altitude 7,800 feet and descending. Rogers had to make a decision. An F-14 could do little damage to the Vincennes. The version that Washington sold to its ally the Shah of Iran in the early 1970's was purely a fighter plane, not configured to strike surface targets. Still, if Rogers meant to attack it with a missile, he had to fire before the aircraft closed much within 10 miles. At 9:54:05, with the plane 11 miles away, Rogers reached up and switched the firing key to "free" the ship's SM-2 antiaircraft missiles. In Air Alley, Zocher had been given the green light to fire. The young lieutenant was so undone, however, that he pressed the wrong keys on his console 23 times. A veteran petty officer had to lean over and hit the right ones. In the CIC, the lights dimmed momentarily, like a prison's during an electrocution. Some 10 miles away, Captain Rezaian of Iran Air was calmly reporting to Bander Abbas that he had reached his first check-point crossing the gulf. He heard none of the Vincennes warnings. His four radio bandwidths were taken up with air-control chatter. "Have a nice day," the tower radioed. "Thank you, good day," replied the pilot. Thirty seconds later, the first missile blew the left wing off his aircraft. On the Vincennes's bridge, cameraman Rudy Pahayo was still filming. His audio captured a babble of voices: "Oh, dead!" "Coming down!" "We had him dead on!" One voice commanded: "Hold the noise down, knock it off!" Another shouted, "Direct hit!" then a lookout came in from the wing of the bridge. The target couldn't have been an F-14, he said. The wreckage falling from the sky, he murmured to the Vincennes's executive officer, Cmdr. Richard Foster, is bigger than that. A few miles away, on the bridge of the Montgomery, crewmen gaped as a large wing of a commercial airliner, with an engine pod still attached, plummeted into the sea. Aboard the USS Sides, 19 miles away, Captain Carlson was told that his top radar man reckoned the plane had been a commercial airliner. Carlson almost vomited, he said later. On the Vincennes, there was an eerie silence. The five-inch guns ceased their pounding. None of the Revolutionary Guard boats had come within 5,000 yards of the cruiser. No one was sure how many had been hit; perhaps one, perhaps more. Rogers gave the order to head south, out of Iranian waters. ANATOMY OF A COVER-UP In Washington, almost 11 hours later, at 1:30 pm EST, Adm. William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stepped to the podium in the Pentagon press room. Formal in his summer whites, the admiral told reporters there had been a terrible accident. Stressing that the information was incomplete, relying on what he had been told by Captain Rogers, Crowe said that the Iranian airliner was flying outside the commercial air corridor and had failed to respond to repeated warnings. The plane had been descending and picking up speed when it closed in on the Vincennes. Rogers had only been protecting his ship. A large map showed the position of the Vincennes at the time of the shoot-down. It was well within international waters. At the United Nations, the Iranians compared the tragedy to the Soviet shoot-down of Korea Air Lines 007 in 1983. The White House decided that Vice President George Bush should defend the United States before the U.N. Security Council. The job of preparing the case fell to Richard Williamson, the assistant secretary of state for international organizations. He found it exceedingly difficult to get answers out of Crowe's staff, who were handling the affair at the Pentagon. Suspicious, he warned the vice president's chief of staff, Craig Fuller, to be very careful about committing Bush to any facts. Fuller's reaction was that he never trusted the Pentagon anyway. Bush's speech focused on the need to end the Iran-Iraq War. But what facts it did include were wrong. The vice-president claimed that the Vincennes had rushed to defend a merchantman under attack by Iran. By July 14, the day of Bush's speech, the Pentagon knew the truth but failed to share it with the vice president. The tapes of the Vincennes Aegis system, with its combat and navigational data reached the United States on July 5 and what they showed was reported to the Pentagon on July 10. The Vincennes had been in Iranian territorial waters. The Iranian airliner was well within the commercial air corridor and had been ascending, not descending. There was no beleaguered merchant vessel. The cover-up was compounded by the official report on the incident. On July 3, Crowe chose Rear Adm. William Fogarty , a senior officer on the staff of Central Command, which controls military operations in the Middle East, to investigate. Crowe sent his own legal advisor, Capt. Richard DeBobes, to sit at Fogarty's side at Centcom headquarters in Tampa as he prepared his report. The investigation was notable for the questions it failed to ask. The commanders on the carrier Forestall were never interviewed; nor was Captain McKenna, the surface warfare commander in Bahrain whose orders Rogers ignored. McKenna's staff mailed a tape of his tense exchange with Rogers before the sea battle, but never received a response. The report released to the public did not include any chart of navigational data to show the Vincennes' position at the time of the shoot-down. The map displayed by Fogarty when he briefed Congress in September placed the Vincennes and its helicopters well clear of Iranian waters and erroneously reported the position of the Montgomery. Fogarty produced stills from the Aegis-generated map of events displayed in the Vincennes's CIC. According to three sources on board the Vincennes that day, the real map had shown Hengam Island, Iranian territory less than nine miles from the Vincennes at the time of the shootdown. On the frames shown by Fogarty, the island was simply deleted - miraculously placing the Vincennes safely in international waters once more. Asked about the Forestall's aircraft by inquiring lawmakers, Fogarty put them 180 miles, then 250 miles away, even though those same Aegis stills show them clearly tagged only 75 miles from the Vincennes. Most mysteriously, Fogarty told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Vincennes had been racing to rescue a Liberian tanker, the Stoval, that morning. There is no such tanker reported in any ship registry. According to two sources, including a naval officer involved in the investigation, the Stoval was a decoy, a phantom conjured up by fake radio messages to lure out the Iranian gunboats. According to these sources, the Iranian aggression that Vice President Bush had so vigorously decried at the United Nations had in fact been in the trial run for an American sting operation. The navy might have gotten away with all of these deceptions had it not been for the slow grinding of international law. A lawsuit by the Iranian government has now forced Washington to admit, grudgingly, that the Vincennes was actually in Iranian waters - although Justice Department pleadings still claim the cruiser was forced there in self- defense. The admission is contained in fine print in legal briefs; it has never received public attention until Crowe, confronted with the evidence, conceded the truth last week on "Nightline." Crowe denies any cover-up; if mistakes were made, he told NEWSWEEK, they were "below my pay grade." Rogers continues to insist that his ship was in international waters. In the end, of course, Will Rogers will not get an admiral's two-inch gold stripe. He instructed navy captains in San Diego for two years before retiring honorably in August 1991. The men of the Vincennes were all awarded combat-action ribbons. Commander Lustig, the air-warfare coordinator, even won the navy's Commendation Medal for "heroic achievement," his "ability to maintain his poise and confidence under fire," enabled him to "quickly and precisely complete the firing procedure." Given the target he was firing at, the commendation seems rather surreal. But so was the atmosphere in the Vincennes CIC that July morning, and the attempt, in months and years that followed, to cover up what happened there. John Barry is NEWSWEEK's national security correspondent. Roger Charles is a retired Marine colonel and military intelligence officer who is now a freelance writer in Washington. Also reporting were Daniel Pederson in London, Christopher Dickey in Paris, Theresa Waldrop in Bonn, Donna Foote in Los Angeles, Tony Clifton in New York and Peter Annin in Houston. Source Newsweek http://alt-f4.org/img/seaoflies.html

#MWH #Middle East #Iran #Iran Iraq War #Oil #Flight665

[anthonyramienski]

MWH The Coming US China War?

A war between the US and China -absolutely crazy? Right? Read on-it not as crazy as it sounds...and that's scary!! The US China War? Foreign AffairsSeptember/October 2013 ESSAY China’s Real and Present Danger Now Is the Time for Washington to Worry Avery Goldstein Much of the debate about China’s rise in recent years has focused on the potential dangers China could pose as an eventual peer competitor to the United States bent on challenging the existing international order. But another issue is far more pressing. For at least the next decade, while China remains relatively weak compared to the United States, there is a real danger that Beijing and Washington will find themselves in a crisis that could quickly escalate to military conflict. Unlike a long-term great-power strategic rivalry that might or might not develop down the road, the danger of a crisis involving the two nuclear-armed countries is a tangible, near-term concern -- and the events of the past few years suggest the risk might be increasing. Since the end of the Cold War, Beijing and Washington have managed to avoid perilous showdowns on several occasions: in 1995–96, when the United States responded to Chinese missile tests intended to warn Taiwanese voters about the danger of pushing for independence; in 1999, when U.S. warplanes accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the NATO air assault on Serbia; and in 2001, when a U.S. spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet, leading to the death of the Chinese pilot and Beijing’s detention of the U.S. plane and crew. But the lack of serious escalation during those episodes should not breed complacency. None of them met the definition of a genuine crisis: a confrontation that threatens vital interests on both sides and thus sharply increases the risk of war. If Beijing and Washington were to find themselves in that sort of showdown in the near future, they would both have strong incentives to resort to force. Moreover, the temptations and pressures to escalate would likely be highest in the early stages of the face-off, making it harder for diplomacy to prevent war. THIN RED LINES It might seem that the prospects for a crisis of this sort in U.S.-Chinese relations have diminished in recent years as tensions over Taiwan have cooled, defusing the powder keg that has driven much Chinese and U.S. military planning in East Asia since the mid-1990s. But other potential flash points have emerged. As China and its neighbors squabble over islands and maritime rights in the East China and South China seas, the United States has reiterated its treaty commitments to defend two of the countries that are contesting China’s claims (Japan and the Philippines) and has nurtured increasingly close ties with a third (Vietnam). Moreover, the Obama administration’s “pivot,” or “rebalancing,” to Asia, a diplomatic turn matched by planned military redeployments, has signaled that Washington is prepared to get involved in the event of a regional conflict. Also, the United States insists that international law affords it freedom of navigation in international waters and airspace, defined as lying beyond a country’s 12-mile territorial limit. China, by contrast, asserts that other countries’ military vessels and aircraft are not free to enter its roughly 200-mile-wide “exclusive economic zone” without express permission -- a prohibition that, given Beijing’s territorial claims, could place much of the South China Sea and the airspace above it off-limits to U.S. military ships and planes. Disputes over freedom of navigation have already caused confrontations between China and the United States, and they remain a possible trigger for a serious crisis. It is true that China and the United States are not currently adversaries -- certainly not in the way that the Soviet Union and the United States were during the Cold War. But the risk of a U.S.-Chinese crisis might actually be greater than it would be if Beijing and Washington were locked in a zero-sum, life-and-death struggle. As armed adversaries on hair-trigger alert, the Soviet Union and the United States understood that their fundamentally opposed interests might bring about a war. After going through several nerve-racking confrontations over Berlin and Cuba, they gained an understanding of each other’s vital interests -- not to be challenged without risking a crisis -- and developed mechanisms to avoid escalation. China and the United States have yet to reach a similar shared understanding about vital interests or to develop reliable means for crisis management. Neither China nor the United States has clearly defined its vital interests across broad areas of the western Pacific. In recent years, China has issued various unofficial statements about its “core interests” that have sometimes gone beyond simply ensuring the territorial and political integrity of the mainland and its claim to sovereignty over Taiwan. Beijing has suggested, for example, that it might consider the disputed areas of the East China and South China seas to be core interests. Washington has also been vague about what it sees as its vital interests in the region. The United States hedges on the question of whether Taiwan falls under a U.S. security umbrella. And the United States’ stance on the maritime disputes involving China and its neighbors is somewhat confusing: Washington has remained neutral on the rival sovereignty claims and insisted that the disputes be resolved peacefully but has also reaffirmed its commitment to stand by its allies in the event that a conflict erupts. Such Chinese and U.S. ambiguity about the “redlines” that cannot be crossed without risking conflict increases the chances that either side could take steps that it believes are safe but that turn out to be unexpectedly provocative. MORE DANGEROUS THAN THE COLD WAR? Uncertainty about what could lead either Beijing or Washington to risk war makes a crisis far more likely, since neither side knows when, where, or just how hard it can push without the other side pushing back. This situation bears some resemblance to that of the early Cold War, when it took a number of serious crises for the two sides to feel each other out and learn the rules of the road. But today’s environment might be even more dangerous. The balance of nuclear and conventional military power between China and the United States, for example, is much more lopsided than the one that existed between the Soviet Union and the United States. Should Beijing and Washington find themselves in a conflict, the huge U.S. advantage in conventional forces would increase the temptation for Washington to threaten to or actually use force. Recognizing the temptation facing Washington, Beijing might in turn feel pressure to use its conventional forces before they are destroyed. Although China could not reverse the military imbalance, it might believe that quickly imposing high costs on the United States would be the best way to get it to back off. The fact that both sides have nuclear arsenals would help keep the situation in check, because both sides would want to avoid actions that would invite nuclear retaliation. Indeed, if only nuclear considerations mattered, U.S.-Chinese crises would be very stable and not worth worrying about too much. But the two sides’ conventional forces complicate matters and undermine the stability provided by nuclear deterrence. During a crisis, either side might believe that using its conventional forces would confer bargaining leverage, manipulating the other side’s fear of escalation through what the economist Thomas Schelling calls a “competition in risk-taking.” In a crisis, China or the United States might believe that it valued what was at stake more than the other and would therefore be willing to tolerate a higher level of risk. But because using conventional forces would be only the first step in an unpredictable process subject to misperception, missteps, and miscalculation, there is no guarantee that brinkmanship would end before it led to an unanticipated nuclear catastrophe. China, moreover, apparently believes that nuclear deterrence opens the door to the safe use of conventional force. Since both countries would fear a potential nuclear exchange, the Chinese seem to think that neither they nor the Americans would allow a military conflict to escalate too far. Soviet leaders, by contrast, indicated that they would use whatever military means were necessary if war came -- which is one reason why war never came. In addition, China’s official “no first use” nuclear policy, which guides the Chinese military’s preparation and training for conflict, might reinforce Beijing’s confidence that limited war with the United States would not mean courting nuclear escalation. As a result of its beliefs, Beijing might be less cautious about taking steps that would risk triggering a crisis. And if a crisis ensued, China might also be less cautious about firing the first shot. Such beliefs are particularly worrisome given recent developments in technology that have dramatically improved the precision and effectiveness of conventional military capabilities. Their lethality might confer a dramatic advantage to the side that attacks first, something that was generally not true of conventional military operations in the main European theater of U.S.-Soviet confrontation. Moreover, because the sophisticated computer and satellite systems that guide contemporary weapons are highly vulnerable to conventional military strikes or cyberattacks, today’s more precise weapons might be effective only if they are used before an adversary has struck or adopted countermeasures. If peacetime restraint were to give way to a search for advantage in a crisis, neither China nor the United States could be confident about the durability of the systems managing its advanced conventional weapons. Under such circumstances, both Beijing and Washington would have incentives to initiate an attack. China would feel particularly strong pressure, since its advanced conventional weapons are more fully dependent on vulnerable computer networks, fixed radar sites, and satellites. The effectiveness of U.S. advanced forces is less dependent on these most vulnerable systems. The advantage held by the United States, however, might increase its temptation to strike first, especially against China’s satellites, since it would be able to cope with Chinese retaliation in kind. COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN A U.S.-Chinese crisis might also be more dangerous than Cold War showdowns because of the unreliability of the existing channels of communication between Beijing and Washington. After the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviet Union and the United States recognized the importance of direct communication between their top leaders and set up the Moscow–Washington hot line. In 1998, China and the United States also set up a hot line for direct communication between their presidents. But despite the hot line’s availability, the White House was not able to contact China’s top leaders in a timely fashion following the 1999 Belgrade embassy bombing or the 2001 spy-plane incident. China’s failure to use the hot line as intended might have reflected the reluctance of its leaders to respond until they had reached an internal consensus or until they had consulted widely with their military. The delay might also have reflected China’s difficulties in coordinating policy, since China lacks a dependable counterpart to the U.S. National Security Council. Whatever the reason, experience suggests that frustrating delays in direct communication are likely during what would be the crucial early moments of an unfolding U.S.-Chinese crisis. Instead, communication between the two countries might initially be limited to either public statements or tacit signals sent through actions. But public statements are aimed at multiple audiences, and nationalist passions in either China or the United States, as well as pressure from allies, might force either side to take a more aggressive public stance than it actually felt was warranted. Absent direct and confidential communication, the two countries might be unable to discuss politically sensitive proposals. They might also be unable to share information that could help head off a disastrous escalation, such as classified details about military capabilities or military maneuvers already under way. Communicating through actions is also problematic, with many possibilities for distortion in sending messages and for misinterpretation in receiving them. Chinese analysts seem to overestimate how easy it is to send signals through military actions and underestimate the risks of escalation resulting from miscommunication. For example, the analysts Andrew Erickson and David Yang have drawn attention to Chinese military writings that propose using China’s antiship ballistic missile system, designed for targeting U.S. aircraft carriers, to convey Beijing’s resolve during a crisis. Some Chinese military thinkers have suggested that China could send a signal by firing warning shots intended to land near a moving U.S. aircraft carrier or even by carefully aiming strikes at the command tower of the U.S. carrier while sparing the rest of the vessel. But as the political scientist Owen Coté has noted, even a very accurate antiship ballistic missile system will inevitably have some margin of error. Consequently, even the smallest salvo of this kind would entail a risk of inadvertent serious damage and thus unintended escalation. A final important factor that could make a U.S.-Chinese crisis more dangerous than those during the Cold War is geography. The focus of Cold War confrontations was primarily on land, especially in central Europe, whereas a future confrontation between China and the United States would almost certainly begin at sea. This difference would shape a U.S.-Chinese crisis in a number of ways, especially by requiring both sides to make some fateful choices early on. China’s small fleet of nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) and its much larger fleet of conventionally armed attack submarines are most secure when they remain in the shallow waters near the Chinese mainland, where poor acoustics compromise the effectiveness of U.S. undersea antisubmarine operations. Their proximity to Chinese land-based aircraft and air defenses also limits Washington’s ability to rely on its airpower and surface ships to counter them. For China’s submarine forces to play a role in a showdown with the United States, however, they would have to move out of those safer waters. The prospect of China’s submarines breaking out would dramatically increase the instability of a crisis. Although U.S. antisubmarine warfare technology would be more effective against China’s submarines operating in less noisy open waters (where the United States also enjoys air superiority), it would not be perfect: some U.S. naval assets that came within range of surviving Chinese submarines would be at risk. Early in a crisis, therefore, the United States would be tempted to minimize this risk by sinking Chinese attack submarines as they tried to leave their home waters. Especially because there are only a few narrow routes through which Chinese submarines can reach deeper waters, the United States would be tempted to strike early rather than accept an increased risk to U.S. naval forces. Regardless of the U.S. decision, any Chinese attack submarines that managed to reach distant deeper waters would face a “use them or lose them” dilemma, thanks to their greater vulnerability to U.S. antisubmarine forces -- one more potential trigger for escalation. China’s nuclear-armed SSBNs present other risks. Under its no-first-use policy, China has clearly stated that any attack on its strategic nuclear forces would justify nuclear retaliation, making a U.S. strike against its SSBNs seem unlikely. Early in a crisis, therefore, Beijing would probably believe that it could safely deploy its SSBNs to distant, deeper waters, where they would be best positioned to execute their launch orders. Such a deep-water deployment, however, would introduce new dangers. One is the possibility that U.S. naval forces might mistake a Chinese SSBN for a conventional attack submarine and fire on it, inviting Chinese nuclear retaliation. Another is the danger that a Chinese SSBN could escalate the conflict without explicit orders from Beijing, owing to the limited communication such submarines maintain with the mainland in order to avoid detection. MANAGING THE RISK The chances of a U.S.-Chinese crisis in the coming years are low, but they are not negligible, and they are made more troubling by the risk of such a confrontation escalating. The most important steps Beijing and Washington can take are those that might help prevent crises from developing in the first place. Since uncertainty about the scope of each side’s vital interests would be a trigger for such crises, the two countries should deepen political and military exchanges that focus closely on this problem. Even if they cannot achieve full clarity, discussions can help draw attention to what each side believes poses the greatest risks. Although it will be difficult to eliminate the possibility of U.S.-Chinese confrontations, both countries can do more to address the sources of potential instability and improve their ability to manage the risks they would face during a crisis. Leaders in Washington could share their rich experience in crisis management with their Chinese counterparts, emphasizing the importance of policy coordination. In addition, the United States should stress the need for China to use the existing hot line for prompt, direct communication between the countries’ top leaders during a crisis. China and the United States should also deepen their currently modest military-to-military exchanges. Without compromising essential secrets, increasing familiarity with each other’s military systems and practices would reduce the risk of inadvertent escalation during a showdown. Both sides would be wise to foster greater personal familiarity among the two countries’ commanding officers, which, in the event of a crisis, would establish a modicum of trust that would be helpful if political leaders sought to de-escalate the conflict. Getting Beijing and Washington to tackle the difficult task of containing a future crisis will not be easy. In the end, it might take the experience of living through a terrifying showdown of the kind that defined the early Cold War. But it should not have to come to that. Author:AVERY GOLDSTEIN is David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations and Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania. This essay is adapted from his article “First Things First: The Pressing Danger of Crisis Instability in U.S.-China Relations,” International Security, Spring 2013. Source: Published on Foreign Affairs (http://www.foreignaffairs.com) Copyright © 2002-2012 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139651/avery-goldstein/chinas-real-and-present-danger

#MWH #China #US #China US War #Nuclear War

[anthonyramienski]

‘The shutdown is exactly what we wanted. We got what we wanted.’ A good day for the tea party is when government is having a bad day.”

Michele Bachmann as quoted in Republicans to investigate why their shutdown caused memorials to be shut down, Daily Kos, Thu Oct 03, 2013 at 07:06 AM PDT

#Shutdown #michele bachmann #Veterans

[anthonyramienski]

America's (Screwed up) Security Clearance System

Twice within several months serious concern has been raised about how the US Government grants security clearances...This article from Foreign Policy magazine highlights the essence of these failures... How Congress Screwed Up America's Security Clearance System Blame profits, politics -- and a huge growth in secrecy-obsessed institutions. BY REBECCA LAFLURE | OCTOBER 1, 2013 Sometimes, the cure is worse than the disease. Especially when it's the government that's doling out the medicine. This is what happened when Washington attempted to improve the way its security agencies vetted hundreds of thousands of workers needed suddenly after the 9/11 attacks to pursue counterterror tasks and oversee heightened secrecy requirements. Soon after its hiring binge began, the government's ambitions collided with a creaky system for conducting the background checks needed to approve job applicants for security clearances. By 2004, the backlog of contractors awaiting approval had reached the size of a small city: at least 188,000. Complaints by federal agencies and job-seekers alike grew so intense that policymakers and legislators in Washington became fixated on finding a solution. Some additional personnel were added to the review process, but Washington largely chose a different path that promised to be cheaper and quicker -- shortening the time allowed for the reviews, by law. In its wisdom, Congress passed the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which required that by 2009, agencies must process 90 percent of clearance applications within an average of 60 days -- less than a sixth of the average 375-day wait in 2003. The government also chose to farm the bulk of its vetting work out to contractors, which generally are more nimble than federal agencies in growing or shrinking and are practiced at luring federal funds by promising to cut costs. It relied in particular on U.S. Investigations Services (USIS), a firm that in 1996 was calved off an independent agency known as the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and quickly got most of the background investigation business before being snapped up by a private equity investment firm in 2003. Nearly a decade later, the entire clearance system has been convulsed by two particularly notorious security checks by USIS. The first led to a renewed clearance of National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, the leaker of tens of thousands of highly sensitive classified documents. The other gave access to Navy Yard contractor Aaron Alexis, whose shooting spree there on Sept. 16 killed 12 other people. It's clear, however, that the problems are much more widespread and that their repair will involve somehow fixing an investigative culture -- created by Congress and contractors, as well as the executive branch -- that heedlessly prized speed over quality. USIS, which is based in Falls Church, Va., but owned by the Rhode Island-based investment company Providence Equity Partners, is the target of a criminal investigation on charges unrelated to those clearances, according to a statement by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) at a June 20 congressional hearing. It stands accused, she said, of "systemic failure to adequately conduct investigations under its contract." Michelle Schmitz, OPM's assistant inspector general for investigations, said at the June hearing that it began to investigate USIS in late 2011 on a "complicated contract fraud case." A federal grand jury launched a criminal probe and issued subpoenas to former USIS executives this summer, the Wall Street Journal first reported. A spokesman for USIS, Ray Howell, declined to comment on the allegations. But several former employees said in interviews that OPM's contract with the firm -- which OPM so far has refused to make public -- was structured to place a premium on speed. They said the firm's income depended on how many cases it processed and that it incurred financial penalties for failing to meet deadlines. But responsibility for any clearance investigation mistakes would hardly be USIS's alone. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), a former White House aide who is now the ranking member on a subcommittee devoted to increasing the efficiency of federal programs, said at a June 20 congressional hearing that while problems persist in the clearance process, "most troubling, I think, is the pressure to meet timeliness metrics impacting the quality of investigations." Some of this history is likely to be aired at a hearing -- postponed temporarily due to the government shutdown -- by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, at which top officials from OPM, the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Defense Department are slated to testify. OPM has overseen all clearance investigations for defense personnel since 2005, giving it a huge workload. This summer, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), a committee member, introduced the Security Clearance Oversight and Reform Enhancement Act, which, among various reforms, would require OPM to fire or debar any employee or contractor who falsifies or fails to review background investigation reports. Since 2007, 20 employees have been convicted of such crimes, and one more pleaded guilty, according to OPM, but the agency's inspector general, Patrick McFarland, said at the June hearing that he does not "believe that we have caught it all by any stretch." Reforming the process is now considered urgent, not only because of the Snowden and Alexis debacles, but also because the government is struggling to monitor the 4.9 million people who hold clearances, an increase of roughly 1.7 million people since 1993. Even as the United States winds down its wars overseas, the number of people with access to classified information has stayed steady. The government is still in the process of drafting uniform standards to determine whether positions require a clearance, opening the possibility that many individuals hold clearances who don't need them. "Everyone with clearances has to undergo a periodic reinvestigation. The more in the system means the workload multiplies, becomes more expensive, and creates the possibility of flawed investigations," said Steven Aftergood, who studies security classification issues for the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit research and advocacy group in Washington. Clearing the backlog Although the problems are seen as acute now, they have deep roots. Even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Department of Defense was experiencing backlogs in clearance investigations, largely caused by inadequate resources and changing government standards. But after 9/11, "the intelligence budget doubled in size," Aftergood said. "To spend the money, the government needed more cleared people, including more cleared contractors." Brenda Farrell, director of defense capabilities and management at the Government Accountability Office, which has published many reports on clearance problems over the past decade, said "the contractor workforce was waiting, in some cases, more than a year for a clearance. You had a situation where you had people waiting to work, but they couldn't work. And the backlog kept growing." Bill Henderson, president of the Federal Clearance Assistance Service who until 2007 worked as a field agent and supervisor in DOD and OPM investigations, noted that contractors began to adapt in troublesome ways - they overstated how many employees they needed in an attempt to stock up on cleared employees, knowing it could take more than year to get clearances. Tom Davis, former Virginia congressman who chaired the House committee that helped write the new clearance deadlines for federal security agencies, recalled that because of the backlog, defense contractors were paying a premium for cleared workers, which boosted government contract costs. "You had to do something," Davis said, whose district was the home for many contracting firms. Government agencies "didn't have their act together. I think everybody was frustrated," he added. The bill his committee put forward imposed the deadlines in stages. By 2007, agencies had to make a decision on 80 percent of applicants within 120 days, but two years later, it had to grant 90 percent of clearance cases within an average of 60 days-40 days for the background investigation and 20 days for agencies to make their decision. The act did not put deadlines in place for periodic rechecks of clearances, like the one USIS conducted on Snowden in 2011, but agencies pushed their reviewers to speed up those cases as well. The workforce assigned to the clearance task expanded somewhat, growing from 7,819 in March 2005 to 9,421 in January 2008, according to a 2008 report by the Security Clearance Oversight Group, which includes officials from OPM and OMB. Most of these investigators worked for USIS and a few other private firms, rather than OPM. It looked to many in Washington like a great success -- a problem solved. By 2012, the backlog had disappeared and the average initial investigation was completed within 36 days. "We have no backlogs, are meeting timeliness mandates, and have increased automation," Merton Miller, associate director of OPM's investigations unit, said at the June congressional hearing. But the obsession with cranking out cases had some negative consequences. According to a May 2009 GAO report, an estimated 87 percent of the 3,500 background reports DOD officials used to make security clearance decisions were incomplete. Miller said this was largely due to the difficulty of interviewing military service members deployed in war zones. The law's 40-day investigative deadline "must be met" nonetheless, he said, so all probes "must be accomplished within that period of time, and then the case is closed." OPM gauged whether investigators were performing adequately partly based on the speed of their work, and partly by how often the agencies sent reports back for additional work to fill in missing information. Miller said the agencies sent less than 1 percent of all the cases that OPM oversaw back to investigators. But the reason the figure was so low, Farrell said, is that many agencies were afraid of missing the deadline Congress had set. "You send it back, there goes another week, two weeks, and everybody was focused on this 60-day goal," Farrell said. "Often the adjudicators, we were told, would just go ahead and complete the investigation themselves. Or [they would] think it wasn't important enough...and skip over it." GAO recommended in 2009 that the OPM investigations unit measure how often the background checks met federal standards, so they could figure out how to fix the problem of incomplete investigations. But OPM, as of August, had not implemented that recommendation. "They do not have a systematic way to help ensure the investigations are complete," Farrell said. "That's what's missing." Privatizing investigations Congress and government agencies were not alone in pressing for faster clearance checks. The managers at USIS, which was formed by privatizing a unit within OPM in the mid-1990s and instantly became one of the country's largest security firms, became increasingly devoted to profits as the firm was shuttled from one private owner to another over the years, according to its former employees. That concern was first articulated in 1995 at a congressional hearing on the agency's transformation by Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA), whose Northern Virginia district included many rattled OPM employees. "I just hope we don't find ourselves in a situation where we become dependent upon firms that don't have the commitment that federal employees have to getting the job done, really whose principal objective is making profit," he said at the time. The shift to private sector control eventually proved to be a financial boon for many who had been at OPM, however, particularly those with the highest salaries. Employees accrued shares in the new company based on how much they were paid every year by OPM, and some reaped substantial benefits when a private equity giant, the Carlyle Group -- known for its investments in the defense industry -- bought a quarter of the company in 1999. They reaped additional sums when private equity firm Welsh Carson Anderson and Stowe, which focuses on investments in the healthcare and business and information services industries, agreed to pay $545 million for a majority stake in the company in 2003. News reports at the time stated that $500 million was distributed among 4,000 current and former employees and the other $45 million went to buy outside shareholders. Carlyle and senior USIS managers reinvested another $172 million in the company, according to the firms. "There were some who got in the millions of dollars, and some who got in the thousands or hundreds of thousands," said Mike Clancey, an OPM investigations manager who moved over to USIS as head of quality control in 1996 and later the security policy division until 2007. "I doubt there were any two checks the same." In the years following the company's formation, OPM and USIS officials trumpeted the privatization as a great success. Philip Harper, USIS's first CEO, said in April 1997 that the company was doing 40 percent more work with 10 percent fewer employees. In its application for a Harvard University Innovations in American Government Award, OPM officials boasted that by 1999, the effort already saved taxpayers $65 million. Harvard named OPM a 2000 finalist for the effort. Authoritative, long-term evidence of cost savings is more elusive, however. OPM, its inspector general, and the GAO have never conducted follow-up studies assessing long-term financial benefits from the privatization, their officials say. Moreover, the company's takeover by private investors in 2003 had significant consequences for its work, according to former USIS employees. They said its culture became more corporate and numbers-based, a development that some said had brought a needed discipline while others decried as undermining their values. Phil Gasiewicz, who headed USIS operations from 1996 to 2004, said for example, that after the buyout in 2003, he sensed that the company's new private equity owners wanted to flip it to a new buyer. The firm had little experience in the industry, he said in an interview with CPI. As the company scrambled to hire and train new, often less-experienced, investigators to help with the rapid increase in clearance cases, some of its original employees began to exit, buyout checks in hand, to retire or go back to working for the federal government, he and other former employees said. "You could imagine that these (new owners) were very much nervous nellies about owning us," Gasiewicz said. "When I would go to board meetings and give presentations on how long it would take to train an investigator or a reviewer, oh they didn't want to hear that. What they wanted to hear was: Can we produce more cases?" He said the pressures came from the government as well as the company. Another former senior USIS manager, who retired in 2008 and asked not to be named, recalled the motto in USIS's original employee handbook: "Do the right thing the right way." After the private equity firm's takeover, he saw an emphasis on streamlining the investigations process and "losing concern of what's the quality of the investigation....As time went on, the pressures got greater to produce, that underlying philosophy got thrown to the side," he said. Clancey said financial pressures were a reality from the beginning. But at the time of the 2003 buyout, he saw the push to cut costs and drive revenue increase. The company's new executive team "focused more on productivity, cutting down time, how do we get through review faster. Some might say cutting corners. You could argue that," he said. Clancey, who said he never saw the company violate contract requirements while he was there, left the company in the spring of 2007 after the company stopped funding his position. The company's listed public contacts, including its head of investor relations Fran Higgins and its general partner and chief financial officer Jonathan M. Rather, did not respond to telephoned and emailed requests for comment. Later in 2007, USIS was sold to another private equity firm, Providence Equity Partners, and by the accounts of other former employees, the company's pressure for profits intensified. One, who worked on quality control issues but asked not to be named, said that roughly a year after the sale, senior managers started pressuring certain employees to work so quickly that they had to skip reviews required under their contract with OPM, which were meant to ensure that the investigations were complete. "They were knowingly not doing their job," the former employee said. "They skipped the review and hoped OPM didn't look at them." The former employee said USIS feared losing money if it missed its government-set deadline. Employees would be particularly pressed to close cases before the end of every quarter, so the company could get paid and report higher revenues, the employee said. The managers called it "flushing" the background check reports, he said. Two spokesmen for Providence Equity Partners did not respond to emailed and telephoned requests for comment on these specific allegations. Other media have quoted unnamed former employees describing the same "flushing" practice, and the New York Times on Sept. 27 reported that the company had dismissed some top executives after a federal investigation into the practice began. Gasiewicz pointed out, however, that USIS wouldn't be solely responsible for any shortcuts. OPM is supposed to review investigation reports before sending them on to government agencies, which review them a second time before deciding whether to grant a clearance. OPM collects fees from other federal agencies for its security investigations oversight work, he pointed out. "How can they possibly allege [now] that for 3-4 years USIS was turning in improper background investigations and they didn't catch it?" Gasiewicz said. OPM declined comment on its review process. Pressured investigators This push for speed and volumes at all costs made an inherently difficult job almost unbearable, according to some investigators. Tom Wilson, a retired fire chief and police officer in California who worked as a USIS investigator from 2010 to 2012, said the pressure to make money outweighed the company's efforts to conduct complete, accurate investigations. In a phone interview with CPI, Wilson said USIS supervisors wanted investigators to churn out background checks quickly. Wilson said for example that he typically worked on 15 to 20 investigations at once, of varying complexity. He was expected to complete each one in five to 10 days, and reprimanded if he tried to go beyond minimum government standards for background checks, Wilson said. "That's when the pressure came in. They kept giving them to me and giving them to me," he said. "When you throw a profit motive in there, it deteriorates into a mill. Get them out, get them out," he said. It got to the point where he felt he only had two options: Work overtime without compensation or cut corners. Wilson chose to work long hours, clocking in an average of 60 hours a week, but quickly felt burned out and began complaining to his superiors. He was fired by email on May 30, 2012, without being given a reason, he said. Wilson is the lead plaintiff in a proposed class action lawsuit filed in 2012 alleging, among other things, that the company didn't pay him overtime hours and retaliated against him for his concerns about work conditions. In a court pleading, the company denied any wrongdoing and said Wilson was not entitled to any relief. Another former USIS employee, who worked as a team leader from 2001 to 2011, described the work environment as "hectic" and said upper management had "expectations very few people could meet." He said USIS would take on government workloads that were "nearly impossible" to do. "Expectations were high but you didn't fear losing your job if you didn't meet all the deadlines. ... I tended to protect my people from upper management, but that became more difficult," he said. "They just wanted us to stay on their butts and fire them if they couldn't (meet deadlines)." Another USIS veteran, who was at the company for more than seven years and is also a participant in the proposed class action lawsuit, said the workplace became particularly tumultuous after Providence Equity Partners took over the company. The investigator, who said she was fired last month for allegedly not meeting deadlines, said she was reprimanded for going beyond the minimum requirements for background checks. "I now have high blood pressure; I have to take medication," the investigator said. "I wouldn't recommend it to my worst enemy." Even when she had difficulty tracking down military service members for interviews, she said, the company refused to change the cases' due dates. She recalled one month when she received more than 100 case assignments, which she described as 6 months-worth of work. "All they look at are those numbers," the employee said, on condition she not be named. "That's all they care about." USIS, which vetted Snowden and Alexis, said in a statement released at the June congressional hearing that OPM had informed the company its investigation met all standards, and that the government did not request for additional information or interviews. On September 23, however, Navy officials revealed that USIS's 2007 clearance check on Alexis, a contractor with an arrest record and history of mental illness, downplayed his prior arrest for alleged malicious mischief. According to a Seattle Police Department arrest report, Alexis aimed his .45 caliber pistol at a construction worker's car and shot out the rear tires in a "black-out" rage. But USIS's background check summary stated only that he "deflated the tires on a construction worker's vehicle." OPM's Miller said in a written statement to CPI on Sept. 19 that the check met all investigative standards. FBI/Getty Images Author: Rebecca LaFlure is the McCormick national security reporting Fellow with the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, independent investigative news outlet. For more of its stories on this topic go to publicintegrity.org. Foreign Policy http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/10/01/how_congress_screwed_up_americas_security_clearance_system?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full

#US #Security #Intelligence #Terror #global war on terror #GunControl

[anthonyramienski]

The American people elected their representatives to make their lives easier, not harder

President Obama as quoted in President Obama NAILS IT in one sentence, Daily Kos,Thu Oct 03, 2013 at 08:58 AM PDT

#Obama #Shutdown #US45

[anthonyramienski]

WWII:Hitler on Gun control

Definitely an opinion piece...Do we need to keep guns to prevent another Hitler?-one view..."Read on" mykeystrokes.com "Do or Do not. There is no try." “The Hitler Gun Control Lie”: Pro-Proliferation Gun Enthusiasts Have Their History Dangerously Wrong By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, January 11. 2013 This week, people were shocked when the Drudge Report posted a giant picture of Hitler over a headline speculating that the White House will proceed with executive orders to limit access to firearms. The proposed orders are exceedingly tame, but Drudge’s reaction is actually a common conservative response to any invocation of gun control. The NRA, Fox News, Fox News (again), Alex Jones, email chains, Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, Gun Owners of America, etc., all agree that gun control was critical to Hitler’s rise to power. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (“America’s most aggressive defender of firearms ownership”) is built almost exclusively around this notion, popularizing posters of Hitler giving the Nazi salute next to the text: “All in favor of ‘gun control’ raise your right hand.” In his 1994 book, NRA head Wayne LaPierre dwelled on the Hitler meme at length, writing: “In Germany, Jewish extermination began with the Nazi Weapon Law of 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler.” And it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense: If you’re going to impose a brutal authoritarian regime on your populace, better to disarm them first so they can’t fight back. Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute. University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them. The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years. The law did prohibit Jews and other persecuted classes from owning guns, but this should not be an indictment of gun control in general. Does the fact that Nazis forced Jews into horrendous ghettos indict urban planning? Should we eliminate all police officers because the Nazis used police officers to oppress and kill the Jews? What about public works — Hitler loved public works projects? Of course not. These are merely implements that can be used for good or ill, much as gun advocates like to argue about guns themselves. If guns don’t kill people, then neither does gun control cause genocide (genocidal regimes cause genocide). Besides, Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?” he told Salon. Proponents of the theory sometimes point to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as evidence that, as Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano put it, “those able to hold onto their arms and their basic right to self-defense were much more successful in resisting the Nazi genocide.” But as the Tablet’s Michael Moynihan points out, Napolitano’s history (curiously based on a citation of work by French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson) is a bit off. In reality, only about 20 Germans were killed, while some 13,000 Jews were massacred. The remaining 50,000 who survived were promptly sent off to concentration camps. Robert Spitzer, a political scientist who studies gun politics and chairs the political science department at SUNY Cortland, told Mother Jones’ Gavin Aronsen that the prohibition on Jewish gun ownership was merely a symptom, not the problem itself. “[It] wasn’t the defining moment that marked the beginning of the end for Jewish people in Germany. It was because they were persecuted, were deprived of all of their rights, and they were a minority group,” he explained. Meanwhile, much of the Hitler myth is based on an infamous quote falsely attributed to the Fuhrer, which extols the virtue of gun control: This year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future! The quote has been widely reproduced in blog posts and opinion columns about gun control, but it’s “probably a fraud and was likely never uttered,” according to Harcourt. “This quotation, often seen without any date or citation at all, suffers from several credibility problems, the most significant of which is that the date often given [1935] has no correlation with any legislative effort by the Nazis for gun registration, nor would there have been any need for the Nazis to pass such a law, since gun registration laws passed by the Weimar government were already in effect,” researchers at the useful website GunCite note. “As for Stalin,” Bartov continued, “the very idea of either gun control or the freedom to bear arms would have been absurd to him. His regime used violence on a vast scale, provided arms to thugs of all descriptions, and stripped not guns but any human image from those it declared to be its enemies. And then, when it needed them, as in WWII, it took millions of men out of the Gulags, trained and armed them and sent them to fight Hitler, only to send back the few survivors into the camps if they uttered any criticism of the regime.” Bartov added that this misreading of history is not only intellectually dishonest, but also dangerous. “I happen to have been a combat soldier and officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and I know what these assault rifles can do,” he said in an email. He continued: “Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.” Source: http://mykeystrokes.com/2013/01/12/the-hitler-gun-control-lie-pro-proliferation-gun-enthusiasts-have-their-history-dangerously-wrong/

#WWII #Hitler #Gun Control #Holocaust

[anthonyramienski]

WWII: Hirohito-Emperor of Japan

We just finished talking about the Emperor of Japan and his role at the start of the war...here is the NY Times obituary ... Hirohito On April 29, 1901, Hirohito, ruler of Japan during World War II and Japan's longest-reigning monarch, was born. Following his death on Jan. 7, 1989, his obituary appeared in The Times. January 7, 1989 OBITUARY Hirohito, 124th Emperor of Japan, Is Dead at 87 By SUSAN CHIRA, Special to the New York Times Emperor Hirohito, the last of the World War II leaders and Japan's longest-reigning monarch, died today at the Imperial Palace. He was 87 years old. In his 62-year reign, the Emperor presided over the most tumultuous era in Japan's modern history, although like most of the 123 emperors before him, he watched more than he acted. During his reign, his nation embraced militarism, conquered much of Asia, waged war on the Allied Powers, suffered the world's first atomic bombing, and painfully rebuilt, rising in just four decades to become the world's most vibrant economic power. Hirohito's death came at 6:33 A.M. (4:33 P.M. Friday, Eastern standard time) after more than a year of declining health. He had been confined to his bed for more than three months. Akihito Becomes Emperor Because Japanese tradition decrees that the Chrysanthemum Throne may not be empty, Crown Prince Akihito, Hirohito's 55-year-old son, became Japan's 125th Emperor. In a ceremony as ancient as his title, Akihito received two of the Imperial treasures - a sword and a jewel - and received the Imperial seal and the seal of state. Shoichi Fujimori, the grand steward of the Imperial Household Agency, announced the Emperor's death at 7:55 A.M. and revealed for the first time that Hirohito had been suffering from cancer of the duodenum, a section of the small intestine. ''The whole nation is deeply saddened by his death,'' the steward said, using a special honorific verb reserved for the death of an emperor. ''Despite the concerted efforts of medical treatment, finally today His Majesty passed away from a tumor in the duodenum.'' The Emperor's chief physician, Akira Takagi, told reporters this morning that doctors had known Hirohito had cancer in September 1987, after they had operated on his pancreas. But, he said, the doctors lied about that fact to prevent the Emperor from learning that he had cancer. In Japan, cancer patients are usually not told that they have the disease. Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita, dressed in a black suit with black armbands, said: ''The sad news of the passing of His late Majesty the Emperor has left me grief-stricken. Our sincere prayers for his recovery were in vain, and I am at a loss for words.'' There has been no official announcement of the date of the funeral, but Government officials have decided that it will be held 40 to 50 days after Hirohito's death. This morning, the Cabinet decided to call a six-day official mourning period, during which all Government agencies will refrain from music and dancing and will fly flags. For private citizens and private companies, the Government is suggesting a two-day mourning period. This morning, the flags outside the Imperial Household Agency were draped with black bunting. As news of Hirohito's death spread, many Japanese throughout Tokyo put flags outside their homes and businesses. An elderly woman hoisted a flag to half-staff outside a sushi shop, radio stations played classical music and a crowd gathered near the Imperial Palace. A large contingent of riot police officers were deployed to guard against anti-imperial demonstrations or the possibility that avid followers might commit suicide. No Shinto Rites Planned According to the Japanese television network NHK, the state funeral will not follow the Shinto rituals performed when the Emperor Taisho, Hirohito's father, died. Because Japan has since adopted a new, democratic Constitution, the Government wants to distinguish all the ceremonies surrounding Hirohito's death and Akihito's ascension from the past, when Shinto was the state religion. But many traditions are being honored. This morning at the Imperial Palace, Mr. Takeshita, members of his Cabinet, the speakers of both houses of the legislature and other officials, clad in morning coats, watched the brief and ancient ritual that passes to the new Emperor two of Japan's three sacred treasures. As Akihito stood on a white rug in front of a white and gold throne, Imperial Household Agency chamberlains bowed twice, then held up a sword and a jewel, wrapped in embroidered cloth and tied with a purple cord. Another chamberlain then placed the Imperial and state seals, wrapped in purple coth and stamped in gold with the Chrysanthemum crest, before Akihito. He bowed, and then stood as Mr. Takeshita and other Government officials bowed deeply before him. Then a chamberlain picked up the sword with both hands and walked out, followed first by Akihito and then by other chamberlains bearing the jewel and the imperial and state seals wrapped in purple cloth and stamped in gold with the chrysanthemum crest. Japanese are now mourning the end of an era: Showa, or Enlightened Peace, the title by which Hirohito will henceforth be known. That was the title chosen for Hirohito's reign when he succeeded his father, the Emperor Taisho, at the age of 25 on Dec. 25, 1926. This afternoon, the Government said the new era name will be Heisei, which roughly translates as ''the achievement of peace.'' Chief Cabinet Secretary Keizo Obuchi, explaining the choice, said the new coinage expressed the hope that ''both within the country and outside, on heaven and on earth, peace will be achieved.'' When Hirohito ascended the throne, his subjects revered him as a descendant of Amaterasu, the sun goddess who, according to Japanese mythology, created the Japanese archipelago from the drops of water that fell from her spear. Fueled by militarist propaganda that drew on these myths, more than two million soldiers died in his name. 'Endure the Unendurable' But on Aug. 15, 1945, that myth was shattered as his subjects heard Hirohito's voice for the first time. He announced Japan's surrender on the radio and called on the Japanese to ''endure the unendurable.'' Now, he told his countrymen in a second precedent-shattering announcement five months later, the people were sovereign and the Emperor was not divine. Thus Akihito becomes the first Emperor to be installed since Japan was transformed into a constitutional democracy under the American Occupation at the end of World War II. Eleven years old at the end of the war, the young Crown Prince diligently prepared himself to become Emperor in the new democratic era, studying English with an American tutor and becoming the first heir to the throne to marry a commoner. The new Emperor is only the fourth in 120 years since Japan opened itself to the world, abandoned feudalism and began its industrial drive under his great-grandfather, the Emperor Meiji. Hirohito's long illness left his nation prepared for his death. Until the last two years, he had been vital, pursuing his avocation as a marine biologist, walking in his garden, and waving at the public a few times a year from the balcony at the Imperial Palace. Surgery in 1987 But in September 1987 he underwent surgery on his pancreas, the first operation ever performed on a Japanese emperor. He appeared to rally from the operation successfully. But last year, he began to grow thinner and had to cancel several public appearances. On the night of Sept. 19 he vomited blood, and the nation began a tense, televised vigil. Crews of reporters camped out at the Imperial Palace, reporting his temperature, blood pressure, pulse, and respiration rate throughout his final illness. As the Emperor's condition worsened, Government officials canceled trips abroad, public figures put off weddings and other celebrations, and cities around the country canceled autumn festivals. For a while, Japan seemed suspended in time, forced to face the prospect of life without the only emperor most of the nation had ever known. As Hirohito lingered, receiving blood transfusions almost daily, his erratic blood pressure and other vital signs dutifully reported several times a day, the public's initial wave of emotion subsided somewhat. This morning, Mr. Takeshita said: ''Our country has since pursued the realization of peace and democracy under the new constitution. It has achieved remarkable progress by virtue of the untiring efforts of our people and has now become an important member of the international community. I feel most keenly that these achievements have been made possible by the presence of His Late Majesty as the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people.'' REAGAN SENDS CONDOLENCES WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 (Special to The New York Times) - President Reagan tonight extended condolences to the Emperor's family and to the people of Japan after Hirohito's death was announced. ''His Majesty's 62-year reign spanned one of the most tumultuous, and yet at the same time constructive, eras in the history of mankind - an age of unprecedented economic collapse, and most vicious war, astonishing scientific achievement, and dramatic political and social changes throughout the world,'' said Mr. Reagan, who added that he had enjoyed several meetings with the Emperor, most recently in Tokyo in 1986. Saying the Emperor played a ''truly heroic role'' in bringing an end to the war, Mr. Reagan added, ''We shall long remember him for his contributions which strengthened the United States-Japan relationship and set a future course of continued close and friendly relations.'' The statement was issued after the President entered Walter Reed Army Medical Center for surgery. Marlin Fitzwater, the White House press secretary, said no decision had been made on who would represent the United States at the Emperor's funeral. He noted that the funeral would probably be scheduled for ''some period that would take us into the next Administration. http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0429.html

#WWII #Japan #Hirohito

[anthonyramienski]

The way that we can best thank our good soldiers for their service is to keep in mind, whenever contemplating the next military engagement, the ravages of the last one

FRANK BRUNI, The New York Times Published: September 14, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/opinion/sunday/what-war-means.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_ae_20130914&_r=0

#MWH #Syria #Iraq #afghanistan #war #veterans

[anthonyramienski]

WWII:Hitler's Son?

There is very strong evidence that Adolf Hitler actually fathered a child during WWI with a French woman. See this 2012 article ... New evidence boosts claim that Hitler had a secret French love child 17 February 2012 Adolf Hitler purportedly fathered Jean-Marie Loret in 1917 with a 16-year-old French mistress. By M. Alex Johnson, msnbc.com New evidence has emerged to support the disputed theory that Adolf Hitler had a secret son in 1918 after an affair with a teenage French mistress, a French newsmagazine reported Friday. The man, Jean-Marie Loret, died in 1985 after an eventful life that saw him join the French Resistance and fight German forces led by the man who the evidence suggests was his father. Loret claimed to be Hitler's son in an autobiography he published in 1981. The claim has been hotly debated by historians ever since, with the weight of opinion concluding that the story was bunk. The new evidence — which includes handwriting analysis, documents indicating Hitler secretly supported the woman financially and paintings signed "Adolf Hitler" discovered in her home — is outlined by Le Point magazine, whose report Friday was widely picked up in the French media but largely ignored by German news outlets. The evidence comes from Loret's lawyer, Francois Gibault, who said Loret's children could use it to establish a claim to royalties from Hitler's manifesto, "Mein Kampf." Loret's 30-year-old autobiography is also expected to be republished to include the new evidence. Loret's mother, Charlotte Lobjoie, was 16 when Hitler, who was a corporal serving with German forces in France in World War I, supposedly had an affair with her while on leave in 1917. Loret wrote that his mother told him that she was working in a hayfield in Fournes-en-Weppe with other young women when they spotted the young soldier drawing on a sketch pad across the street. She was chosen to go ask him what he was doing. "He was attentive and friendly," she told her son, and that sparked a relationship that lasted several weeks. Le Point writes: One evening in June 1917, returning a little drunk from a night out with a friend, he [Hitler] got frisky with Charlotte. In March of the next year, a son was born. ... Years passed, and Charlotte refused to talk about the mysterious circumstances of her son's birth. Destitute and vaguely shamed, she gave up custody of her son to another family in 1934. His "real father" refused to see him but continued from time to seek to ask for news about him from his mother. A few weeks before she died in the early '50s, Charlotte confessed to her son the true identity of her father. The shock was terrible. In his 1981 book, "Your Father's Name Was Hitler," Loret wrote: "In order not to fall into anxiety, I worked tirelessly, never taking vacation — 20 years without going to a movie." Le Point quoted Guibalt on Friday as saying that during the 1970s, however, Loret began seeking evidence of his parentage. He hired several experts: a historian, who visited his childhood home and questioned witnesses; a geneticist from the University of Heidelberg, who compared Hitler's and Loret's blood types; and a handwriting analyst, who compared their writings. "All reached the same conclusion," Le Point reported. "Jean-Marie Loret was probably the son of Adolf Hitler." "When he came to me in 1979, I had before me a lost man who did not know whether he wanted to be recognized as the son of Adolf Hitler," the magazine quoted Guibalt as saying. "He experienced the feelings of many illegitimate children: the desire to discover his past, but also a fear of the old memories. I talked with him a lot, playing more the role of a psychologist than a lawyer," Guibalt said. The magazine reported that the new evidence includes paintings signed "Adolf Hitler" — Hitler was a painter before going into politics — that were discovered in the attic of Lobjoie's home, as well as a Hitler-signed portrait of a woman believed to be Lobjoie that was discovered in Germany. It also includes documents that Le Point said establish that officers of the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, hand-delivered envelopes of cash to Lobjoie during the German occupation of France. Loret, meanwhile, was with Resistance forces at the Maginot Line in 1939, Le Point reported, and in 1940, his unit fought a fierce battle against German troops in the Ardennes. During the German occupation, Loret worked as a Resistance spy under the name "Clement," it said. Now, Gibault said, Loret's children could have a claim to royalties from "Mein Kampf," the philosophy of which Loret fought bitterly during World War II. Source: World News on MSNBC.com http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/17/10436413-new-evidence-boosts-claim-that-hitler-had-a-secret-french-love-child

#WWII #Hitler #Hitler's son #France #WWI