Can We Divest from Weapons Dealers?

Impoverished people living in numerous countries today would stand a far better chance of survival, and risk far less trauma, if weapon manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon stopped manufacturing and selling death-dealing products.

Mar-08-2019

(PORTLAND, Ore.) - About three decades ago, I taught writing at one of Chicago’s alternative high schools. It’s easy to recall some of their stories—fast-paced, dramatic, sometimes tender.

I would beg my students to three-hole-punch each essay or poem and leave it in a binder on our classroom shelf, anxious not to lose the documentation of their talents and ideas.

Some of the youngsters I taught told me they were members of gangs. Looking down from the window of my second-floor classroom, I sometimes wondered if I was watching them selling drugs in broad daylight as they embraced one another on the street below.

Tragically, in the two years that I taught at Prologue High School, three students were killed. Colleagues told me that they generally buried three students per year. They died, primarily, from gunshot wounds.

I think they could have survived their teenage years if weapons and ammunition hadn’t been available.

Similarly, I believe impoverished populations of numerous countries at war today would stand a far better chance of survival, and risk far less trauma, if weapon manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon, stopped manufacturing and selling death-dealing products.

It would also help if the people living in countries that export deadly weapons were well-informed about the consequences these businesses bring.

Consider this: The 2018 U.S. Census Report tallies U.S. exports of bullets to other countries.

 Topping the list is $123 million-worth of bullets to Afghanistan—an eight-fold rise over the number of bullets sold in 2017 and far more than the number of bullets sold to any other country.

During a recent visit to Afghanistan, I heard many people voice intense fear of what would happen if civil war breaks out. It seems to me that those who manufacture bullets are doing all they can to hasten the likelihood and deadly outcome of an armed struggle.

But rather than help people here in the United States understand conditions in countries where the U.S. conducts airstrikes, President Donald Trump is hiding the facts.

On March 6, 2019, Trump revoked portions of a 2016 executive order imposed by President Barack Obama requiring annual reports on the number of strikes taken and an assessment of combatant and civilian deaths.

Trump has removed the section of the mandate specifically covering civilian casualties caused by CIA airstrikes, and whether they were caused by drones or “manned” warplanes.

A U.S. State Department email message said the reporting requirements are “superfluous” because the Department of Defense already must file a full report of all civilian casualties caused by military strikes. However, the report required from the Pentagon doesn’t cover airstrikes conducted by the CIA.

And last year, the White House simply ignored the reporting requirement.

Democracy is based on information. You can’t have democracy if people have no information about crucial issues. Uninformed about military practices and foreign policy, U.S. citizens become disinterested.

I lived alongside civilians in Iraq during the 2003 “Shock and Awe” bombing of Baghdad. In the hospital emergency rooms I heard survivors asking, through screams and tears, why they were being attacked. Since that time, in multiple visits to Kabul, I have heard the same agonized question.

The majority of Afghanistan’s population consists of women and children. When civilians in that country die because of U.S. attacks—whether within or beyond “areas of active hostilities”; whether conducted by the CIA or the Department of Defense; whether using manned or unmanned warplanes—the attack is almost certain to cause overwhelming grief.

Often the survivors feel rage and may want revenge. But many feel despair and find their only option is to flee.

Imagine a home in your neighborhood suddenly demolished by a secret attack; you have no idea why this family was targeted, or why women and children in this family were killed. If another such attack happened, wouldn’t you consider moving?

Reporting for The New York Times, Mujib Mashal recently interviewed a farmer from Afghanistan’s Helmand province displaced by fighting and now unable to feed his family.

“About 13.5 million people are surviving on one meal or less a day,” Mashal writes, “and 54 percent of the population lives below the poverty line of a $1 a day.”

Last week, an international crisis sharply escalated in a “dogfight” between India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed states.

The crisis has been somewhat defused. Media reports quickly focused on the relative military strength of both countries—observing, for example, that the dilapidated state of India’s jet fighters could be a “win” for U.S. weapons manufacturers.

“It is hard to sell a front-line fighter to a country that isn’t threatened,” said an analyst with the Lexington Institute.

“Boeing and Lockheed Martin both have a better chance of selling now because suddenly India feels threatened.”

A few weeks ago, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited heads of state in Pakistan and India. Photos showed warm embraces and respectful receptions.

The CEO of Lockheed Martin, Marillyn Hewson, also embraces the Saudi government. She serves on the boards of trustees of two Saudi technological universities, and presides over a company that has been awarded “a nine-figure down payment on a $15 billion missile-defense system for Saudi Arabia.”

The Saudis will acquire new state-of-the-art weapons even as they continue bludgeoning civilians in Yemen during a war orchestrated by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. And the Saudis will build military alliances with nuclear-armed India and Pakistan.

With both India and Pakistan possessing nuclear weapons, every effort should be made to stop the flow of weapons into the region. But major weapon making companies bluntly assert that the bottom line in the decision is their profit.

Attending funerals for young people in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, at the time one of the poorest in Chicago, I felt deep dismay over the profits that motivated gun runners who sold weapons to students, some of whom would be soon fatally wounded.

In the ensuing decades, larger, more ambitious weapon peddlers have engendered and prolonged fighting between warlords, within and beyond the United States.

How different our world could be if efforts were instead directed toward education, health care, and community welfare.

_________________________________________

Kathy Kelly, syndicated by PeaceVoice, co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

#UnitedStates #Weapons #FollowTheMoney #GunsKillPeople #GunshotWounds

The Banks Files: Brexit funder urged campaign to “press it harder” after Jo Cox murder

Despite an agreement by all groups to suspend campaigning in the aftermath of Jo Cox’s death, Arron Banks instructed the social media team at Leave.EU to “boost” an existing sponsored Facebook ad.

8 Mar 2019

Brexit backer Arron Banks urged campaigners to “keep pumping” out material the morning after MP Jo Cox’s murder, Channel 4 News can reveal.

Leaked emails and documents reveal that despite an agreement by all groups to suspend campaigning in the aftermath of her death, the millionaire businessman instructed the social media team at Leave.EU to “boost” an existing sponsored ad on Facebook.

New evidence also reveals that his campaign discussed secretly exerting influence and control over other groups, pumping in cash not properly declared to authorities, in a potential breach of spending laws.

Banks secretly bankrolled Labour’s Eurosceptic movement Labour Leave, funding at least three figures on its executive board, an office and computers. Labour Leave is under investigation by the Electoral Commission.

“Keep pumping”

The emails show that on June 17 2016, the morning after Jo Cox’s death, Arron Banks issued an order to Liz Bilney, the CEO of Leave.EU and other staff:

“Keep pumping the McKenna video”, he says “and up the Spend A”.

Ms Bilney replies: “Yes that’s starting to get traction now and with paid advertising and no active campaigning could get a lot of take up today.”

Arron Banks replies: “Exactly – press it harder.”

He adds later: “Boost it more.. The ban is on new stuff and activity not the sponsored page..”

Referendum campaigners agreed to pause after the murder of Jo Cox

Jo Cox press release

Channel 4 News can also reveal how a press officer paid by Leave.EU drafted a press release in the name of the outwardly independent Labour Leave campaign group attacking the media for politicising her murder.

Arron Banks approved the release stating: “Much better for them to do it.”

The release, dated 17 June 2016, condemns the media as deplorable for making ‘political mileage for Remain’ from Jo Cox’s death.

“Blackmailing Brexiteers to tone down their campaign is a new low,” it reads.

One Leave.EU figure suggests altering the wording: “I think it also needs more about being a time for showing respect,” he writes… “and drawing unsubstantiated inferences about motive or causes at such a time is disrespectful to Jo Cox’s memory”.

But Leave.EU’s Andy Wigmore replies: “NO – don’t need to say this – her husband has already made it political… the tone is about right.”

Labour Leave would later condemn the statement – claiming it had been issued falsely in their name.
Labour MP Alison McGovern told Channel 4 News: “It’s horrific. Watching that makes me feel sick. The day Jo was killed was one of the worst days of my life, and to think a discussion was going on makes me deeply upset.”

The Labour MP Jo Stevens said: “I haven’t got any words to describe how I feel about that. That Brendan (Cox) would make political capital about his wife being murdered on the street, immediately after her death – why would anybody suggest that?”

“It’s horrible, it’s absolutely horrible, and they didn’t abide by the agreement to stop campaigning either, we know that, they carried on. And you know, if anything, they used that situation for their own ends. That, that just tells me it was deliberate, and to do it in response to a voice of reason inside their own camp saying ‘don’t do it’, they’d stoop to anything.”

Funding for other groups

The emails appear to show Arron Banks funnelled hundreds of thousands of pounds into other campaign groups, coordinated campaigning, spending and strategy. None of the groups declared they were working with Leave.EU to the Electoral Commission.

In one email, a colleague of Arron Banks suggested that he could help “a small number of groups… to raise their funding”. The move would take the activities of Leave.EU’s campaign “from a £700K cap to a £5m cap.”

Funding for Ukip

Leave.EU incurred election expenses worth tens of thousands of pounds for Ukip, including organising, designing and funding Nigel Farage’s referendum battle bus to the tune of £67,000.
Staff from Leave.EU were also sent to work on it, and dozens of emails between the two groups discussed aspects of the tour.

However, Ukip and Leave.EU never declared any joint spending.

Ukip declared the bus in their spending return, even though the spending had been initiated, organised and paid for by Leave.EU.

Private jet

Leave.EU also hired a private jet to fly Nigel Farage to a Ukip event in Gateshead and failed to declare the £12,400 spend.

The flight was signed off by Arron Banks, but was never declared to the Electoral Commission.
Ukip told Channel 4 News this was a matter for Nigel Farage, although the paperwork for the flight was addressed to Ukip and Mr Farage was the party’s leader at the time.

Labour Leave

The Banks organisation also funded an office, computers and paid for staff working for Labour Leave, a group that claimed it was “funded and staffed by Labour, Trades Unions and socialist Society members.”

Labour Leave did not declare any donations from Leave.EU or the Banks organisation.

The emails suggest that at least three prominent members of Labour Leave were also paid by Banks’s organisation. They include the former Labour MP and trade minister Nigel Griffiths, Brendan Chilton, the General Secretary of Labour Leave. and the Head of Communications, Olly Huitson.
Mr Huitson and Mr Griffiths told Channel 4 News they had expected the payments to be declared by the relevant organisation.

Mr Huitson said he worked for Labour Leave only and understood that his costs would be treated as a non-cash donation from the Banks organisation. They were not declared.

In an interview, John Mills, the Labour donor who ran Labour Leave, admitted he had failed to properly declare the office costs to the Electoral Commission. But he insisted Labour Leave was an independent organisation, and not controlled or directed in any way by Arron Banks or Leave.EU.

He said: “We were our own people, we ran our own ship, we had our own money. He did not provide any cash for us at all. He may of employed some of the people we did and paid them but they were separate from anything that was authorised expenditure by Labour Leave.”

Channel 4 News can reveal that Labour Leave is under investigation by the Electoral Commission.
Last night, Arron Banks failed to respond to the allegations. Informing Channel 4 News that he was skiing in Italy, he told the programme:

“The length and sheer number of details in the letter means that it will take seven days to respond to your request.” He later revised that to five days.

Criticism of Israel is misrepresented as Anti-Semitism

 9 March 2019 

After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70 the Jews were thrust into the outer world - many into Arab countries, later to become Muslim, where they were extended protection, and later into the Roman and then Christian world where they were accepted for many centuries. There were no pogroms until the Middle Ages and then they were centuries apart.   

Over two millennia many big tribal groups have been dispersed - the Slavs, the Moguls, the Bantu, the Tamils, the Celts - the list is a long one - but only the Jews have had an idée fixe about where they want to go back to.   

During the past thousand years, while the Jews were in the diaspora, the Arabs reinforced their settlements on the same land that some Jews yearned for, just as pre-Arab tribes had settled it in the time before Moses - and just as the Celts settled in Ireland, the Europeans in North America, the Moguls in India and the Russians in Siberia.   

According to the texts of the Old Testament, the ultra religious, settlement inclined, Israelis have it partly right - the whole of Palestine did once belong to them

When in 1897 the rabbis of Vienna sent a fact-finding mission to Palestine they reported back that the bride “was beautiful but married to another man.”   

Theodor Herzl, the convener of the first Zionist Conference, was not obsessed by a return to Palestine. Almost anywhere would do. Argentina was the first choice with its empty fertile spaces. The Uasin Gishu plateau near Nairobi, Kenya, was another. But the Zionist conference overruled him.   

 The course of the First World War and the likely break up of the Ottoman Empire led the British to think that Jewish control of Palestine would be more secure for British interests than Arab. In 1917 came the Balfour Declaration whereby the British cabinet declared that they viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Lord Curzon, the former Indian viceroy, denounced it as an act of “sentimental idealism” and said that Britain had a “stronger claim to parts of France.”   

According to the texts of the Old Testament, the ultra religious, settlement inclined, Israelis have it partly right - the whole of Palestine did once belong to them. But only partly. Read Genesis. When the Lord spoke to Moses and told him that he would deliver the Jews from Egypt he also said he would bring them into “a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey; unto the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites.” In other words the Jews were to conquer and displace other tribes who had been long possessors of the land now called Palestine, and even other tribes further south such as the Midianites.   

Later in the Book of Numbers, the Lord told Moses to “vex the Midianites and smite them”. Moses and his army did. “They slew all the males” and took the women and children captive. Then Moses said to his commanders, “Have ye saved all the women alive?......Now therefore kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him.”   

Theodor Herzl, the convener of the first Zionist Conference, was not obsessed by a return to Palestine. Almost anywhere would do. Argentina was the first choice with its empty fertile spaces. The Uasin Gishu plateau near Nairobi, Kenya, was another. But the Zionist conference overruled him  

The Jews would stop at almost nothing. Genocide, on occasion, was the tool of total conquest. Is this the proud history that present day Jews are fighting to uphold a millennia later? The Jews of the Old Testament were as cruel as the Moguls and Tartars and it is as difficult to justify the present day Israeli occupation of Palestine as it would be to justify a Mogul regime in Russia or an Islamic one in northern India. 

If the Jews want the rest of the world’s sympathy they have to be able to justify their modern day presence in Palestine better than they do. They have to recognise how wrong were their conquests, both old and present.   

But now the Jews are in Palestine in such significant numbers the only solution is to honour the rest of the text of the Balfour Declaration. “Nothing should be done that may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, it said. This was the British condition. The Israelis overlook it today at their peril. More than half appear to.   

Does to pose these arguments make me an anti-Semite? In last week’s New York Times, columnist Roger Cohen makes it clear that anyone who queries the Jews right to Israel is anti-Semitic. Likewise, he accuses those of us, who fought against apartheid, as racist. He accuses us of “pursuing the systematic “Nazification of Israel”. This is accusation by association.   

 I resent Cohen’s accusations and if I had more space I could expose the falsity of many more.   

New York Times lets Israel do its “fact checking”

Occupation forces monitor a young Palestinian demonstrator along the Gaza boundary.
 

 Mohammed ZaanounActiveStills

The New York Times has told me it is perfectly content to accept the word of the Israeli government over the facts.

Michael F. Brown - 7 March 2019

I had advised the newspaper of record that columnist Bret Stephens misrepresented the facts in his implicit rejoinder to Michelle Alexander’s incisive opinion piece calling to break the silence on Palestine.

Stephens wrote: “Nearly 1,300 Israeli civilians have been killed in Palestinian terrorist attacks in this century: That’s the proportional equivalent of about 16 September 11s in the United States.”

This is wrong.

According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which keeps meticulous statistics, 823 Israeli civilians were killed from 29 September 2000 until the end of January this year, along with 433 “Israeli security force personnel.”

In the same period, nearly 10,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel – the equivalent of dozens of September 11s, to use Stephens’ yardstick – although for him, Palestinian casualties apparently don’t matter at all.

Rather than correct or vigorously look into the erroneous information presented by their anti-Palestinian columnist, op-ed editor James Dao wrote me that Stephens got his “information from the Israeli government, and I’m fine with that.”

I’m not at all fine with this. Passing false Israeli government information to the public as truth is propaganda, not journalism or legitimate commentary.

Stephens is entitled to his own opinions, but he is not entitled to his own facts. Nor is the Israeli government. The word of the Israeli government – and of Bret Stephens – should be tested against real data.

In this instance, we’re not only being lied to, but told: All Palestinian fighters are terrorists and all Israelis – even armed occupation soldiers – are civilians.

The newspaper, which is rightly willing to contradict the lies of President Donald Trump, is in this instance taking quite a different approach to the lies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Dramatic decline

This is dangerous. And it undercuts the credibility of a newspaper I have long challenged to do better.

The failure to correct represents a dramatic decline from when I spoke nearly 14 years ago to New York Timespublic editor Daniel Okrent.

There is less recourse now than there was then with the newspaper no longer having an ombudsman to whom readers can turn.

I cannot know for certain, but I think Okrent would be troubled by the outsourcing of “fact-checking” to the Israeli government.

Stephens is a partisan. And he plays to anti-Palestinian racism. His credibility was shot – or should have been – when he wrote of a “Palestinian blood fetish.” That’s vile and clear-cut bigotry against the Palestinian people.

Strikingly, he makes a similarly broad statement in his recent Sunday article when he pushes back against progressives who are increasingly concerned about Israel’s discriminatory policies: “All of this is profoundly unsettling to a Jewish community that has generally seen the Democratic Party as its political home.”

This is an anti-Semitic generalization by Stephens. Not everyone in the Jewish community thinks as Stephens claims. American Jews are not monolithic when it comes to efforts to secure Palestinian rights and freedom.

Many Jews oppose Israeli occupation and other crimes, and are deeply troubled by ongoing attacks by members of the Israel lobby against women of color speaking out for Palestinian rights.

Moreover, many Jews reject Israel’s official state ideology, Zionism, as settler-colonialism and apartheid. Beyond the concerns raised by Jewish Voice for Peace about Zionism, anti-Zionist Jewish groups include Neturei Karta and the Satmar Hasidim, the largest Hasidic sect in the United States.

Letters in place of agreed fact

Rather than issue a correction, Dao suggested I write a letter instead. But that was my first response before even turning to him.

The letter was not published. Nor would it have been an entirely acceptable outcome. A correction from the newspaper carries far more weight than the opinion of a letter writer.

More than a decade ago The New York Times Magazine took a similar approach and insisted I write a letterabout an error regarding the location of the Israeli barrier and the fact that in many places it does not separate Israel from the occupied West Bank but the West Bank from the West Bank.

Meanwhile the magazine did issue one rather insignificant correction about the article, noting that a photo caption “misidentified a piece of equipment on a road near the structure. It was an Israeli military vehicle, not a tank.”

This “correction” even asserted that the article it related to was about the “controversial barrier being built to separate Israel from the West Bank.” In other words, the “correction” contains a worse error than the one it is purportedly correcting.

The newspaper, as reported, has since made the same error and failed to correct it notwithstanding numerous requests.

Reporter Russell Goldman wrote in March 2017: “The elusive British street artist Banksy has decorated the interiors of the Walled Off Hotel, a nine-room guesthouse in the West Bank city of Bethlehem whose windows overlook the barrier that separates the territory from Israel.”

Once again The New York Times should be describing a barrier that largely separates Palestinians from each other and from their own land within the occupied West Bank.

The location of the barrier and the fact that many Israelis killed have not been civilians but military occupation forces are pieces of information that can be easily verified.

That The New York Times refuses to correct Stephens, placing unquestioning trust in the assertions of Israeli officials, indicates that Stephens has been provided too much space to advance Israel-related propaganda.

I don’t believe Dao harbors the same anti-Palestinian animus that Stephens does – and even Stephens on Friday criticized Netanyahu’s “demagogic attacks on Israeli Arabs” though he couldn’t bring himself to call them Palestinian citizens of Israel or express an iota of alarm about the occupation and Netanyahu’s war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.

But relatively mild criticism of Netanyahu cannot mitigate gross errors of fact, racist slurs and indulgence of Israeli human rights abuses as Stephens has done over his career.

With this track record, Dao should not accept the word of Stephens – and the Israeli government – over that of a credible human rights organization.

The New York Times should issue a correction at the end of Stephens’ next column making clear that the Israeli government provided the erroneous information and that fact-checkers did not seek out more reputable sources of information.

Before Resigning, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson Irked Trump

At one point rumored to be contender to run the Pentagon, she vexed the president with her independence.

Heather Wilson, the secretary of the U.S. Air Force, testifies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington on Dec. 6, 2017. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

BY LARA SELIGMAN

 | MARCH 8, 2019, 1:16 PM
Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson submitted her resignation to U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday, bringing to a close months of speculation over whether she would be nominated for secretary of defense—or fired.

Wilson, a Rhodes scholar and former Republican congresswoman from New Mexico who is leaving the Pentagon to head the University of Texas at El Paso, drew Trump’s ire last year over what was seen as her campaign to undercut his effort to stand up a separate Space Force as a sixth branch of the U.S. military, Foreign Policy reported in October.

Wilson also clashed with then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, who was promoted to acting secretary of defense after James Mattis stepped down at the end of the year, over the Space Force, sources said at the time.

“Some senior officials know how to disagree with [the president] without being disagreeable to him. Heather Wilson hasn’t managed to do that. Her opposition to the Space Force has grated on him and I think he permanently sees her as troublesome and ineffective now,” a U.S. administration official told FP at the time.

But in the last few weeks, Wilson was rumored to be a candidate to replace Mattis as secretary of defense—making her Shanahan’s competition, at least in the press if not in reality, for the permanent job.

It now seems clear that Wilson did not ultimately get the nod. She was not forced out, but it seems that her disagreements with Shanahan, who is now the leading candidate to replace Mattis, contributed to her decision, according to one source close to the conversation.

“She is not going to be Secdef, and she has no desire to work for the current acting [Secretary of Defense],” the source said.

Wilson’s tenure as the Air Force’s top civilian was rocked last summer by Trump’s unexpected order to establish a Space Force, separate and apart from the Air Force. The effort—a move that both Wilson and Mattis had come out against publicly before Trump announced it—was widely seen at the time as a vote of no confidence in the Air Force’s stewardship of military space. For Wilson, who as Air Force chief was responsible for much of the Defense Department’s assets and operations in space, creating a separate Space Force and a new civilian position—an assistant secretary of defense for space—was effectively a demotion.

By all accounts, Wilson pushed back strongly. In a June 19 memo to airmen, she cautioned that the process of standing up a Space Force will take some time and that immediate changes will not occur. The memo, which was distributed across the Air Force, made its way to the president’s desk, a source said at the time.

“This work directed by the president will be a thorough, deliberate, and inclusive process,” said the memo, which was signed by Wilson, Air Force Chief of Staff Dave Goldfein, and Chief Master Sgt. Kaleth Wright. “As such, we should not expect any immediate moves or changes.”

Then, in September, Wilson sent a memo to Shanahan that detailed a long list of requirements for the new Space Force. According to the Sept. 14 document, creating it would take an additional 13,000 people and $13 billion over five years—a figure some critics said was badly exaggerated.

The memo angered both the White House and Shanahan, who was the Pentagon’s lead on the Space Force effort.

“Shanahan hates her guts,” one source said at the time, noting that Wilson often sends her second in command, Undersecretary Matthew Donovan, to meetings with Shanahan in her place.

Since then, Wilson has seemed to get on board with the Space Force, and she appeared to succeed in winning more control over the new service. In the final proposal sent to Congress March 1, the Pentagon is now advocating for a Space Force within the Air Force, much in the same way the Marine Corps is formally part of the Navy, rather than a separate entity.

Most recently, Wilson appeared to throw her hat in the ring for the top Pentagon job in an interview with Politico’s Women Rule podcast. She had a key ally in Vice President Mike Pence, whom she knew from their days in the House of Representatives.

Some people in the administration pushed for Wilson as the choice because it “changes the narrative on Trump,” a former administration official told FP in February. She also has excellent relationships in Congress as a former Republican congresswoman and would be easily confirmed, the former official added. Wilson would have been the first female defense secretary.

One current U.S. administration official told FP in February that Wilson was in contention, but other sources expressed skepticism that she would ultimately get the nod.

It seems that the voices against Wilson ultimately won out.

“It has been a privilege to serve alongside our Airmen over the past two years and I am proud of the progress that we have made restoring our nation’s defense,” Wilson said in her resignation letter, dated March 8. Wilson’s last day will be May 31.

Loren Thompson, an analyst with the Lexington Institute, said “the day-to-day stress of the job has really weighed” on Wilson, particularly the constant speculation about whether she was going to be promoted or fired.

“Heather Wilson was very highly qualified to be secretary of the Air Force: She is a former military officer, a rated pilot, Rhodes scholar, and a [former] member of congress. It does not get any better than that,” Thompson said. “If those qualifications aren’t good enough to give a person job security, then something is wrong.”

 

Lara Seligman is a staff writer at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @laraseligman

Ending Terror In Kashmir

by Yelena Biberman-8 Mar 2019

Why—on February 14th— did a 20-year-old Kashmiri villager blow himself up, taking with him the lives of 46 Indian security personnel? What should the Indian government do in response to the deadliest attack on its forces in Kashmir since the insurgency began in 1988?

The first question drew a series of quick and confident responses from powerful voices in India and the international community: Pakistan is to blame. And so is any country that supports Pakistan (i.e. China). “Today, as condemnations pour in from countries across the globe, leading international powers must take their share of blame for their unwillingness or inability to draw a red line around Pakistan’s patronage of terror,” prominent Indian journalist Barkha Dutt declared in the Washington Post. “How will India ‘punish’ Pakistan?” speculated the BBC.

It is undeniable that Pakistan supports militant organizations such as Jaish-e-Mohammad, which claimed responsibility for the February 14th attack. But it is also true that, in the eyes of many Kashmiris, the Indian state has been terrorizing them for several decades.

In my forthcoming book, I detail India’s sponsorship of numerous nonstate counterinsurgency outfits which committed major human rights violations in the region. Drawing on fieldwork in Kashmir, which included interviews with victims, former militants, military and security officials, human rights activists, and journalists, I develop a new “balance-of-interests” framework that explains the peculiar state-nonstate alliances that emerged in the region during the civil war. Among the proxies were battle-hardened former insurgents and criminals. The kidnappings, interrogation, torture, and assassinations which many of them carried out were, at times, indiscriminate and inflicted serious trauma on the local population. One former commander explained to me why the Indian military officials embraced the militants: “Let’s say you are a post commander. You know you want to kill the militants operating in your area. You damn well don’t care for anything [else] at that point in time. It’s easy to sit back and reflect now. But, at that point in time, the question is – How do I get rid of this nonsense?”

There is a common assumption in the existing literature that states use nonstate actors to do their dirty work. But, in Kashmir, the official military and security personnel have also been responsible for widespread abuses.

Kashmir is the most densely militarized zone in the world, with roughly one soldier for every ten civilians. The military and police exercise enormous coercive power over the civilian population. The Jammu and Kashmir Disturbed Areas Act, for example, authorizes police personnel (of the rank of sub-inspector and above) operating in “disturbed areas” to use force “even to the causing of death, against any person who is indulging in any act which may result in serious breach of public order.” The parallel Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act gives the governor (in addition to the central government) the power to declare an area “disturbed,” and authorizes army officers to use lethal force if they are “of opinion that it is necessary so to do for the maintenance of public order.” These and other laws (including the UN-condemned Public Safety Act) confer arbitrary power and impunity to India’s security forces. It is not surprising that significant corruption and widespread human rights violations followed these legal provisions. For example, a top counterinsurgency officer was accused of encouraging Kashmiri men to join rebel groups and then turning them in (or killing them) to receive rewards.

The Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), a highly reputable local Kashmiri human rights organization, has tracked claims of abuse carried out by the Indian military and security personnel. Citing “India’s history of denying the applicability of international law to the Kashmir conflict,” the organization called for the international community to “bring to bear moral and economic pressure on India to recognize the paramountcy of the rights of the people of Jammu and Kashmir in this armed conflict, and its obligations to them under international humanitarian and human rights law.”

The suicide bomber, Adil Dar, belongs to the so-called Kashmiri “generation of rage.” This generation played the leading role in the 2016-17 uprisings, which involved widespread youth protests in nearly every district of the Kashmir Valley. Hundreds of students were injured in clashes with the armed forces, and many were arrested. The Indian security forces used pellet guns against mainly stone-throwing protestors. This drew significant international attention and condemnation, but did not cease.

The recent attack is not an isolated incident, but part of a dramatic increase in violence across the region.  Labeling Pakistan a “state sponsor of terrorism” or improving security measures in the region would do little to address the underlying reason why a growing number of young Kashmiris see militancy as the only viable option. Any “jaw-breaking response” by India, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised, is also likely to fail. India cannot realistically invade its nuclear-armed neighbor beyond Pakistan-administered Kashmir, where its “surgical strikes” in 2016 were quite ineffective.

The Kashmiri insurgency is largely an indigenous movement. Pakistan’s prior efforts to foment rebellion, such as the ill-fated Operation Gibraltar, failed when they did not receive local support. India must look inward, towards its own policies in Kashmir, to find the causes of violent outbursts by Kashmiri locals. “Your atrocities will further our cause and beliefs. We will not plead, but rather fight until death,” the suicide bomber warned the Indian government in a previously recorded video which circulated on social media following the attack.

Seeing Kashmir purely through the prism of “security” ignores the political and social underpinnings of the conflict. The upcoming national election makes it an inconvenient time for the Indian government to fashion a Kashmir peace deal while simultaneously engaging with Pakistan in a dialogue. “But then, when will that time come, if ever?” Alok Asthana, a retired Indian Army colonel, rightly wondered. “Surely the resurgence of a disease creates the right conditions and motivation to tackle the core issue.”

About the Author: Yelena Biberman is an assistant professor of political science at Skidmore College and a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center.

This article was originally published by Political Violence @ a Glance on 22 February 2019.

How Nicolás Maduro has been able to cling to power in Venezuela

This handout picture released by Miraflores palace press office shows Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro (C) during a visit to an industry in an event to boost the basic businesses in Guayana, Venezuela on March 6, 2019. – Sanctions have worsened Venezuela’s crippling economic and political crisis, the UN human rights chief said Wednesday, as Washington warned it may expand measures targeting President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government. (Photo by HO / Venezuelan Presidency / AFP) / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE – MANDATORY CREDIT AFP PHOTO / PRESIDENCIA VENEZUELA – MIGUEL ANGULO – NO MARKETING – NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS – DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTSHO/AFP/Getty Images

By Mary Beth Sheridan | The Washington Post-March 9, 2019

CARACAS, Venezuela — He rules a nation where inflation is spiraling toward 10 million percent. The United States and about 50 other countries no longer recognize him as president. His popularity has slumped to around 14 percent.

And yet, Nicolás Maduro has so far withstood intense pressure from Washington and a Venezuelan anti-government movement that has filled the streets for weeks. The opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, who has posed the strongest challenge to Maduro since the former union leader assumed the presidency in 2013, has called for a big demonstration Saturday.

How does Maduro manage to cling to power? The short answer is that the authoritarian leader has the military on his side. He has ensured their loyalty by offering promotions and allowing them to enrich themselves through state businesses or criminal activities, analysts say.

The Trump administration may face a complicated calculus in the next few weeks. The harsh sanctions it imposed in January on Venezuela’s crucial oil industry may soon start to asphyxiate the country’s already weak economy, and the military may resist diplomatic and economic pressure to split with Maduro.

“What happens if you don’t break that military structure and the country continues to deteriorate? You have the terrible scenario of a Cuba or an Iran or a Syria or a Zimbabwe,” said Luis Vicente Leon, head of the Datanalisis polling firm, referring to countries whose authoritarian governments dug in and survived, despite profound economic and political crises.

Guaidó — who has the support of around 60 percent of Venezuelans, according to a recent Datanalisis poll — and the United States have tried a variety of approaches to lure the military away from Maduro. They range from private talks to a proposed Venezuelan amnesty law that would shield officers from future prosecution.

The trouble is, many senior officers are deeply compromised. Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez, who sought to carry out a left-wing “Bolivarian revolution,” allowed officers to make money through activities as varied as organizing the state-run food distribution system and protecting drug traffickers, analysts say.

“The law of amnesty isn’t attractive enough,” said Felix Seijas, a social scientist who teaches at the Central University of Venezuela. “Those who are compromised are very compromised. The amnesty law will not benefit them. Those who aren’t that compromised won’t need the amnesty law.”

To accept an amnesty, military officers would have to trust that a future government would pardon them and that institutions would follow the law. But it is difficult to predict how a new government would essentially rebuild Venezuela’s institutions, which for two decades have been molded by the “chavista” movement, becoming highly politicized.

Complicating matters, Cuban advisers to the Venezuelan military work to prevent defection, surveilling officers to guarantee their loyalty, according to diplomats, analysts and former military officers. “We have to remember these [Venezuelan] guys are being advised by the Cubans, who are masters of staying in power — 60 years and counting,” said Brian Winter, a Latin America expert at the Americas Society in New York.

That’s not to say the military is solidly behind Maduro. The economy has been so devastated by mismanagement and corruption that hunger is widespread, even among mid- and lower-ranking officers. Prices are soaring, and food and medicine are scarce.

More than 700 low-ranking soldiers have fled across the Colombian border in recent weeks, many complaining of limited food and dissension in the ranks.

“We have lots of information suggesting that just as most Venezuelans are clearly unhappy with this regime and want it to come to an end, most members of the Venezuelan military feel the same way,” Elliott Abrams, the U.S. special envoy for Venezuela, said Friday at a press briefing in Washington.
Soldiers “may get a small and inadequate lunch at the barracks, but that doesn’t help your aunts and your uncles and your cousins and your brothers and your sisters,” Abrams said.

Leon noted that anti-government movements trying to replace authoritarian leaders in other countries have sometimes had to make unpalatable choices to ensure the military was in line. In Nicaragua, for example, when Violeta Chamorro won the presidency in 1990 and ended a decade

of left-wing Sandinista rule, she gave a top Defense Ministry job to Humberto Ortega — the brother of the outgoing president. In Chile, Augusto Pinochet was permitted to stay on as head of the armed forces after stepping down as president.

But ultimately, Leon said, in Venezuela, the issue isn’t whether the military is loyal to Maduro. “The military is not defending Maduro,” he said. “They are defending themselves.”

The Washington Post’s Carol Morello in Washington and Rachelle Krygier in Miami contributed to this report.

The silent majorities of Japan and South Korea grow tired of official squabbles

Mourners hold paper cutouts of yellow butterflies, symbols of sexual slavery victims, during a funeral ceremony of former South Korean "comfort woman" Kim Bok-dong, who was forced to serve as a sex slave for Japanese troops during World War II, near the Japanese embassy in Seoul on February 1, 2019. Source: Jung Yeon-je / AFP

8 Mar 2019

MANY observers argue that Japan–South Korea relations are at their lowest point since diplomatic normalisation in 1965.

The relationship appears marred by exchanges of emotional language, as both Tokyo and Seoul react to the statements and actions of the other with their own sense of justice and remain ignorant of or indifferent to the other side’s perspective.

But while this may be the case at the official level, the views of the silent majority — ordinary Japanese and Koreans — suggest otherwise.

In October 2018, South Korea’s Supreme Court ordered three Japanese companies to pay compensation for wartime labourers during Japan’s colonial rule.

According to the Court, the agreement to establish diplomatic normalisation between the two countries in 1965 had not done justice to the wartime labourers, and therefore had not terminated the labourers’ individual rights to claim compensation.

SEE ALSO: South Korea should communicate if it wants peace on the Peninsula

The Japanese government rebuffed the court decision, with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe saying that the ruling is ‘unthinkable’ from the standpoint of international law (where bilateral treaties take precedence over domestic judicial decisions).

A mourner wears a face mask with a paper cutout of butterfly, symbols of sexual slavery victims, during a funeral ceremony of former South Korean “comfort woman” Kim Bok-dong. Source: Jung Yeon-je / AFP

Tokyo points to Article II of the Agreement on the Settlement of Problems Concerning Property and Claims, signed together with the 1965 basic treaty, which stipulates that problems concerning the property, rights, interests and claims of Japan, South Korea and their nationals ‘is settled completely and finally’.

South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in officially says that it is a matter of the separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers in South Korea but he personally empathises with the court decision. Both administrations are dealing with the issue as a judicial one, fighting on judicial grounds, and appear to believe that justice is respectively theirs.

Tokyo’s lack of respect for South Korea’s judicial independence was recently matched by the ignorance of South Korean National Assembly Speaker Moon Hee-sang.

During an interview in early February 2019, the Speaker commented that if the Japanese Emperor ‘holds the hands of the elderly (former comfort women) and says he’s really sorry, then that one word will resolve matters once and for all’.

Whether such an act would really ‘resolve matters once and for all’ is highly questionable. More importantly, the Emperor’s status in post-war Japan derives from the country’s constitution, which stipulates the role as ‘the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people’.

SEE ALSO: South Korea: Wartime ‘comfort women’ to get museum in their honour

The Emperor is careful to behave cautiously so that his words or actions do not significantly affect domestic politics and diplomatic affairs. If the Emperor is to play a role at all, it should be a symbolic one after the settlement of the issue between Tokyo and Seoul.

The current state of Japan–South Korea tension could be characterised as a ‘clash of justice’ regarding each country’s interpretation of colonial rule and the 1965 regime after diplomatic normalisation.

The origin of this vicious cycle dates back to the early 1990s, when the comfort women issue surfaced as a diplomatic issue for the first time.

In the 1990s, Tokyo and Seoul dealt with the issue reasonably well. Japan’s prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa issued a statement of ‘heart-felt apology’ to the former comfort women in a meeting with South Korea’s president Roh Tae-woo in Seoul in January 1992.

Later, following the August 1993 release of the Kono Statement in which then chief cabinet minister Yohei Kano acknowledged the Japanese military’s responsibility, Japan’s prime minister Morihiro Hosokawa recognised the country’s wrong-doings in a nationally televised press conference with South Korea’s president Kim Young-sam in Gyeongju in November 1993.

In 1995, Japan also established the Asian Women’s Fund and issued the Murayama Statement, an apology to victims of Japanese wartime aggression. This process eventually culminated in the historic reconciliation between Japan’s prime minister Keizo Obuchi and South Korea’s president Kim Dae-jung in October 1998.

But there was political backlash against these reconciliation efforts in both countries: from the ideological right in Japan and from the ideological left in South Korea. At the time, Shinzo Abe was at the centre of political movements questioning the necessity of Japan–South Korea reconciliation and Moon Jae-in was a lawyer and a liberal activist criticising the incomplete nature of the reconciliation.

(L-R on blue chairs) South Korean former “comfort women” Kim Bok-Dong, Gil Won-Ok and Lee Yong-Soo were forced to serve as sex slaves for Japanese troops during World War II. Source: AFP PHOTO / JUNG YEON-JE

Now Abe and Moon are leading the two countries. Their divergent views on the issue encourage their respective political followers to assert subjective and similarly oppositional beliefs.

These vocal activists are minorities in both societies. But once they express their emotions as a matter of justice, the majority falls silent in both countries.

This gives the superficial impression that Japan–South Korea relations are entirely poor. Rather than taking advantage of widespread national sentiment for their political advantage, Abe and Moon express their own positions, which reflect only those of a vocal minority.

It is not ironic nor contradictory, then, that relations between Japanese and Korean civil societies are still healthy.

SEE ALSO: What’s on the cards for the third inter-Korean summit?

Ordinary citizens still travel between the two countries frequently. When conscientious Japanese and Koreans get together in business, academia and society, they are either indifferent or scratching their heads together rather than replaying political conflict.

They are trying to weather the current storm, thinking ‘enough is enough’ and making efforts to sustain the foundations of the relationship.

Yoshihide Soeya is Professor of Political Science at Keio University. This article has been republished from East Asia Forumunder a Creative Commons license.