Medieval Cruelty in Modern Times: ISIS Thugs Behead American Journalist

Christopher Dickey

08.19.14

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James Foley was executed in the most horrific way possible on video so the jihadists can prove they are fearsome knights of the caliphate.

The group known as ISIS has murdered American journalist James Foley, beheading him as if he were a captive taken in medieval combat. It posted a YouTube video designed for a 21st-century audience and threatened to kill another journalist hostage, Steven Joel Sotloff, if the United States continues its airstrikes against ISIS positions in Iraq.

The murderers, who now call themselves “knights” serving the “caliph” of the self-declared Islamic State that straddles northern Syria and Iraq, had Foley make a statement before he died.

But first the video showed President Obama’s press conference this month explaining his reasons for intervening against the group he calls ISIL. Then Foley was shown on his knees, his body erect—even proud—clad in an orange tunic with no collar, and his head shaved. Beside him, brandishing a short knife, was his executioner clad in black, his face covered, his voice unmistakably British.

“I call on my friends, family, and loved ones to rise up against my real killers, the U.S. government,” said Foley. He called on his parents not to accept any “meager compensation” for his death. The U.S. bombing campaign against ISIS was “the last nail in my coffin” he told the camera. He called on his brother John, a member of the U.S. Air Force, to “think about what you are doing, think about the lives you destroy. … I died that day, John, when your colleagues dropped that bomb on those people, they signed my death certificate. I wish I had more time. I wish I could have the hope of freedom and seeing my family once again. But that ship has sailed. I guess all in all I wish I wasn’t American.”

Then the British-accented executioner makes a little speech claiming any aggression against the Islamic State is an aggression against Muslims everywhere—whom this sinister pseudo-ninja seems to think he represents. Then he begins to saw at Foley’s throat. The screen goes black for a second.

One can surmise that the IS video producers thought the actual act of decapitation with a six-inch blade would be too gruesome for the kind of audience they want to reach—the video-game generation of wannabe jihadis around the world. Those kids might be too squeamish to watch the many extant ISIS videos of Christians and Shia being decapitated, photographs of which have been published even on sites like Catholic.org as ISIS wages its campaign toincite a global religious war and its victims and enemies fall into its trap.

Then he begins to saw at Foley’s throat. The screen goes black for a second.

Then, in the Foley video, which was quickly taken down from YouTube but doubtless has been spread around, we see a shot of Foley’s body with its severed head resting on it. And then Sotloff is presented to the camera and Obama is challenged to save him by halting the bombing.

“We have seen a video that purports to be the murder of U.S. citizen James Foley by ISIL,” said a statement from the National Security Council. “The intelligence community is working as quickly as possible to determine its authenticity. If genuine, we are appalled by the brutal murder of an innocent American journalist and we express our deepest condolences to his family and friends. We will provide more information when it is available.”

Although there is little question about his final moments, the matter of how Foley came into the hands of ISIS is more than a little mysterious. Foley was a risk taker who reported from the front lines, fully aware of the dangers that might entail. He was taken prisoner in Libya in 2011 before being released.

In Syria, he was picked up by gunmen from what the Federal Bureau of Investigation called an “organized gang” shortly after he left an Internet café on November 22, 2012. In May 2013, GlobalPost President Philip Balboni said that “with a very high degree of confidence, we now believe that Jim was most likely abducted by a pro-regime militia group”—that is, one loyal to President Bashar Assad—and that he was being held near Damascus by the Syrian Air Force intelligence service. “Based on what we have learned,” said Balboni, “it is likely Jim is being held with one or more Western journalists, including most likely at least one other American.”

The Return of the Americans to Iraq

R. S. Kalha

August 19, 2014

http://www.idsa.in/idsacomments/TheReturnoftheAmericanstoIraq_rskalha_190814.html

The inevitable has happened. The Americans have returned to Iraq and are using air power to resist the growing onslaught of IS forces against Kurdish Peshmerga fighters defending Kurdistan. Latest reports suggest that the IS forces that were barely 25-30 kilometers away from the Kurdish capital of Irbil are being pushed back with the help of US air power. The decision to commit US military power has been camouflaged in suitably humanitarian terms to give the impression that it was an effort designed to ‘protect’ the fleeing Yazidis and other minority groups. Perhaps the US establishment wished to assuage any guilt complex that might remain over their inaction when the Israelis were blasting the hapless children of Gaza with missile and tank fire. Secondly, the US made it clear that this intervention was designed to secure the safety and security of ‘our personnel’ stationed at Irbil. However, the US also clarified that this action was based on ‘narrow and specific objectives and not a broad based counter terrorism campaign against the IS’ . 

While the US reticence to once again become involved in Iraq is entirely understandable, but what alarmed the Americans was that IS forces mounted ‘multi-pronged’ attacks across a wide swathe of territory controlled by Kurdish Peshmerga forces. The attacks by the IS forces were swift as they were unexpected, but unusually effective demonstrating according to US officials a high degree of ‘military proficiency.’ They easily pushed the Kurdish forces out of a number of towns and villages very close to Irbil; the Kurdish Capital. The Americans feared that Irbil just might fall. In Irbil there is a US Consulate with support staff, a joint US-Kurdish Command Centre, a fairly large US business community with most US oil majors having their personnel and headquarters there.

The Kurds are the last remaining ethnic group in Iraq that still feel beholden to the US. Ever since the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US beginning 2003, the Kurdish areas have witnessed relative peace and have developed economically, whilst the rest of Iraq was convulsed in sectarian warfare with mass killings and bombings on an almost daily basis. During the period of US military occupation from 2003 to 2011, not a single US soldier lost his life in Kurdistan. During this period slowly but steadily the Kurdish areas moved from complete autonomy within the Iraqi State to near independence; an outcome that the Kurds have dared to dream ever since their aspirations for an independent state were denied as a result of the settlements reached at Versailles; post the First World War. In the Middle-East they remain the only significant and distinct ethnic group, with a language and a culture of their own; that does not have a state. The Kurds are not Arabs, but are Sunni Muslims with a population of about 25 million that is scattered over Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey. And for most of the World they remained a ‘forgotten’ people till the Americans moved in; first by declaring a ‘no fly-zone’ to save them from the wrath of Saddam at the end of the First Gulf War and later by devolving progressively greater autonomy as the US occupation of Iraq; post 2003 proceeded. Kurdish troops were relied upon extensively by the US in their bid to ‘control’ the situation in Iraq. The Kurds also know that but for the presence of US military power in the region, their autonomy would be rather short lived. Of interest is the fact that the Kurds maintain friendly relations with Israel.

All the President's Men and Women

By Michael Weiss

Legend has it that former New York Governor Mario Cuomo once asked Sydney Schanberg, an editor at Newsday, how he might win over the liberal columnist Murray Kempton, whose reputation for scrappily sticking up for those brought low on the left and the right was the source of much bipartisan admiration. “Try getting indicted, Governor,” came the reply.

I’ve felt a Kemptonesque twinge of empathy for the president this week, although it doesn’t run nearly so deep. His summer golf game has been rudely interrupted by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s more pressing calendar of events. A feisty Congress, including members of his own party who face difficult midterm elections, still think he was wrong not to arm Syria’s rebels earlier and more extensively and don’t mind saying so now that the Levant and Mesopotamia have become the set of a Mad Maxmovie. At the end of July, more than a dozen representatives and senators told Obama he was wrong. One in particular, Sen. Bob Corker, must have really told him so because, according to theDaily Beast, the president once again lost that unflappable confidence which helped get him elected and replied that the prospect of such a policy succeeding was “horseshit.” The chairman of the joint chiefs, two defense secretaries, two secretaries of state, two former Arabic-speaking ambassadors with regional specialties in Syria, a former CIA director, and a current deputy CIA director respectfully disagree, but what can they know?

When Obama hasn’t been doing battle with the Islamic State (IS) in and around Iraqi Kurdistan, he’s been ranged against former members of his own administration who, either out of principle or opportunism, have surveyed what has been wrought by seven-and-a-half years of American absenteeism in the Middle East and declared it a man-made disaster.

Let’s start with the principled. Ambassador Fred Hof was the first State Department official to resign from the administration over its appalling Syria policy, and since then, he has not only been the acutest and most well-informed critic of America’s sleepwalk into the caliphate, but also, I would imagine, a conduit for channeling the frustrations of current officials who know the price of whispering to the press against this White House. Hof lays out what appears to be a FUBAR consensus in a recent essay for Politico. “Few in the administration – including at very senior levels – think” that the bolstering of the mainstream Syrian opposition would not have hindered or slowed the rise of the IS, much less do they believe that such an option was, as Obama recently and defensively put it, a “fantasy.”

Hof is at his best in snaring the president in his own contradictions. If this policy is so illusory, he writes, then why did Obama just authorize $500 million to be included in next year’s Pentagon budget for the arming and training of an admittedly tiny quotient of Syrian rebels for exactly that purpose – combating the rise of ISIS? Why is the president ridiculing his own plan? Why should Congress get behind something he presents as faunal excrement? And why does Obama persist in the lie that the rebels are “former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth” when Syria has had for decades a system of universal conscription and mandatory military service? The Washington Post weeks ago reported that the Violations Documentation Center, a reliable opposition-linked organization in Syria, found that of a small sample group of killed rebel fighters, soldiers actually constituted more than half of the total number, while doctors accounted for one percent, and farmers less than one percent. . Even where conscription does not apply, such condescending categorizations as the president resorts to are also misleading. I’ve spoken to innumerable “lawyers” or “professors” over the past several months about the deterioration of Iraq, including many who still hold the title of “colonel.”

ISIS’S CALIPHATE DECLARATION: REGIONAL REACTION – ANALYSIS

By Sikandar Azam,Observer Research Foundation

AUGUST 18, 2014

The fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1924 had marked the end of the Caliphate period. Nevertheless, the quest to re-establish it has drawn the energies of many over the last decades. In April 1996, Mullah Mohammad Omar was declared Amir-al-Mu’minin (Leader of Muslims) from Afghanistan and recently Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has claimed to be the Amir-al-Mu’minin in the area under his control in Iraq.

The aim was to revive the Caliphate or the concept of one Islamic nation in the world. The announcement received sympathies and rejections as well.

“For ideological jihadists, caliphate is the ultimate aim, and the IS (Islamic State) – in their eyes – has come closer to realising that vision than anyone else. On that basis, IS leaders believe that they deserve everyone’s allegiance”, said Prof. Peter Neumann, of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London.

Consequently, the announcement of ‘caliphate’ appears to have inspired many jihadists to join IS including those previously aligned to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula including the spokesman of al-Qaeda, some members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Jabhat al- Nusra in Syria. Tahreek-e-Khilafat and Sipah-e-Sahaba of Pakistan have also rendered their support to the IS and become the first to support the group from outside the West Asian region.

Gradually, as predicted by some experts, this local faction is turning into a movement. It is because IS has many more advantages and poses more danger than al-Qaeda. Firstly, it is located in the heart of traditional power centres of the Islamic world, Iraq and Syria. Secondly, its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi claims to be a descendent of the Prophet Mohammad’s family. Thirdly, he has religious credentials as a holder of PhD in Islamic studies. Lastly, this group is fighting a sectarian Jihad which tends to be more polarising that other forms of Jihad.

It is very unfortunate for the Sunnis that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is rigidly sectarian. Instead of building national unity in Iraq he sidelined the Sunnis. The fear and anger among the Sunnis has triggered the revolt among the tribes in central Iraq.

A Blueprint to Save Iraq from Disaster?

Maxmillian Angerholzer IIIJames Kitfield

August 19, 2014

America's national interests in the oil-rich Middle East endure. Washington should turn to a familiar playbook to ensure Iraq does not fall apart—and drag down the region with it.

Iraq is disintegrating. The country’s weak social fabric has been torn by sectarian violence and the merciless attacks of an Islamic extremist group bent on civil war. The White House is struggling to fashion a coherent response, even as polls show a majority of Americans disapproving of the president’s handling of the crisis. Nervously eyeing upcoming mid-term elections, lawmakers from the president’s own party are agitating for a change of course before it is too late.

Seemingly snatched from recent headlines, that is actually the situation that former president George W. Bush confronted in the summer of 2006. With the United States on the brink of its first military defeat since Vietnam, the Bush administration was searching for a new strategy. At that time, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG) was founded to chart a new way forward in Iraq, and to build Congressional support for that strategy on both sides of the political aisle. We believe the ISG experience and recommendations offer important lessons as policy makers and lawmakers contemplate the current Iraq crisis.

Of course, the perceived U.S. stakes involved have changed. In 2006, there were tens of thousands of U.S. troops still in Iraq. After launching a war of choice to topple Saddam Hussein, President Bush understood that the United States would be held accountable for whatever tragedies attended Iraq’s violent breakup. By contrast, President Obama campaigned for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq, and he can argue that the Iraqis—not the Americans—squandered the chance for a better future purchased at great cost in American blood and treasure.

And yet our national interests in the oil-rich Middle East endure. At a time when U.S. commitment to its international partners is being widely questioned, theviolent breakup of Iraq along sectarian lines would directly threaten U.S. allies such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Lebanon. The United States also still holds a strategic partnership agreement with the government in Baghdad.

More to the point, Al Qaeda in Iraq—the Sunni extremists fomenting civil war in Iraq in 2006—has since taken root in the fertile soil of the Syrian civil war, darkly blossoming into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). After capturing wide swaths of territory in both Syria and Iraq, ISIS occupies a larger sanctuary, is better financed, and has proven more wantonly murderous than core Al Qaeda was prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. And ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has made no secret of his plans to take his jihad directly to the United States homeland. Beyond the immediate strategic partnership between the United States and the Iraqi government, countering ISIS is central to the global struggle against jihadist terrorism.

The fact that an initially reluctant Obama administration has rushed advanced weapons and roughly a thousand military advisers to Iraq, while directly launching airstrikes against ISIS targets in northern Iraq, shows that President Obama understands that the United States still has vital national interests in Iraq and the region.

Iraq: The Economic and Governance Sides of the Crisis

By Anthony H. Cordesman

AUG 18, 2014

http://csis.org/publication/iraq-economic-and-governance-sides-crisis

There is no question that the Islamic State is the most immediate aspect of the Iraq crisis. It needs to be checked, its gains need to be reversed, and it needs to be driven out of Iraq if possible. But – and it is a critical but – Iraq requires far more. It is going to require fundamental political and economic reforms to achieve any meaningful form of unity and stability and to overcome its sectarian and ethnic divisions.

The last three years have effectively made Iraq a failed state. Prime Minister Maliki did not simply fail by becoming corrupt, authoritarian, and sectarian. He and those around him failed at every level.

Two CSIS reports illustrate the scale of the issues that must now be addressed. One provides an in depth analysis of the economic and governance problems the Maliki regime helped create and is called Iraq in Crisis. 

The other is called Hitting Bottom: The Maliki Scorecard in Iraq, and is a summary overview of the judgments international agencies made of Iraqi development and governance towards the end of the Maliki regime.

The Economic Challenges

It is tempting to begin by focusing on their broader failures in creating a system of governance and rule of law that could bring together Iraq’s Arab Shi’ites, Arab Sunnis, Kurds, and minorities. It is important to understand, however, that it will take more than political incentives to heal Iraq.

Iraq’s oil wealth has not been used to create the economic conditions for unity, and is a critical underlying problem in trying to heal its sectarian and ethnic divisions. The Maliki regime strongly favored itself and Arab Shi’ites over Arab Sunnis, and wavered between efforts to bribe the Kurds and force them to put all petroleum development under central government control.

The end result is that record oil revenues did little to raise Iraq’s overall per capita income and meaningful employment levels, and created a deeply discriminatory economy. There are no reliable data on Iraq’s income distribution by sectarian and ethnic faction, or even a meaningful national GINI index, but the scale of Iraq’s problems is illustrated by how its overall per capita income compares to that of other Gulf States. The CIA estimates Iraq’s per capita income at $7,100. To put this number in perspective, Iran is $12,800, Saudi Arabia is $31,300, Kuwait is $42,100, the UAE is $29,900, and Qatar is $102,100.

Maliki and company did not develop a meaningful development program. They did not address the crisis in employment. They did not find effective ways to divide and use the nation’s oil wealth. They did not reform the economy or lift the barriers to stable investment and growth. They did not deal with the massive problems in Iraq’s unproductive state sector and state own enterprises, or its inefficient agricultural sector and use of water.

They did not address education and health reform, and offer Iraq’s youth a meaningful future. They create overambitious and impractical plans for petroleum development, but did not create effective plans for the development and growth of Iraq’s infrastructure.

Why We Fight Wars

Paul Krugman

AUG. 17, 2014

A century has passed since the start of World War I, which many people at the time declared was “the war to end all wars.” Unfortunately, wars just kept happening. And with the headlines from Ukraine getting scarier by the day, this seems like a good time to ask why.

Once upon a time wars were fought for fun and profit; when Rome overran Asia Minor or Spain conquered Peru, it was all about the gold and silver. And that kind of thing still happens. In influential research sponsored by the World Bank, the Oxford economist Paul Collier has shown that the bestpredictor of civil war, which is all too common in poor countries, is the availability of lootable resources like diamonds. Whatever other reasons rebels cite for their actions seem to be mainly after-the-fact rationalizations. War in the preindustrial world was and still is more like a contest among crime families over who gets to control the rackets than a fight over principles.

If you’re a modern, wealthy nation, however, war — even easy, victorious war — doesn’t pay. And this has been true for a long time. In his famous 1910 book “The Great Illusion,” the British journalist Norman Angell argued that “military power is socially and economically futile.” As he pointed out, in an interdependent world (which already existed in the age of steamships, railroads, and the telegraph), war would necessarily inflict severe economic harm even on the victor. Furthermore, it’s very hard to extract golden eggs from sophisticated economies without killing the goose in the process.

We might add that modern war is very, very expensive. For example, by any estimate the eventual costs (including things like veterans’ care) of the Iraq war will end up being well over $1 trillion, that is, many times Iraq’s entire G.D.P.

So the thesis of “The Great Illusion” was right: Modern nations can’t enrich themselves by waging war. Yet wars keep happening. Why?

One answer is that leaders may not understand the arithmetic. Angell, by the way, often gets a bum rap from people who think that he was predicting an end to war. Actually, the purpose of his book was to debunk atavistic notions of wealth through conquest, which were still widespread in his time. And delusions of easy winnings still happen. It’s only a guess, but it seems likely that Vladimir Putin thought that he could overthrow Ukraine’s government, or at least seize a large chunk of its territory, on the cheap — a bit of deniable aid to the rebels, and it would fall into his lap.

And for that matter, remember when the Bush administration predicted that overthrowing Saddam and installing a new government would cost only $50 billion or $60 billion?

The larger problem, however, is that governments all too often gain politically from war, even if the war in question makes no sense in terms of national interests.

Recently Justin Fox of the Harvard Business Review suggested that the roots of the Ukraine crisis may lie in the faltering performance of the Russian economy. As he noted, Mr. Putin’s hold on power partly reflects a long run of rapid economic growth. But Russian growth has been sputtering — and you could argue that the Putin regime needed a distraction.

Isis: a portrait of the menace that is sweeping my homeland

Hassan Hassan

The Observer,

Saturday 16 August 2014

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The rise of Isis is rooted in a mix of politics, a Sunni sense of isolation and a shakeup in Salafist doctrine. Here, an analyst whose Syrian home has seen some of its bloodiest excesses, explains its dramatic surge 

Thousands of Yazidis trapped in the Sinjar mountains by Isis forces escape to safety. Photograph: Getty Images

Abu al-Mutasim, 18, from a Syrian border town in the province of Deir Ezzor, joined the rebellion against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in early 2012. He left his family home in Bahrain, where his parents worked, and fought for the Free Syrian Army for a few months before joining the hardline group Ahrar al-Sham. Around the end of the year, disillusioned, he went to visit his family. His parents banned him from travelling back to Syria. But last summer he returned to join theIslamic State in Iraq and Syria (Isis), now renamed the Islamic State.

I asked him what he would do if his father were a member of Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida's official franchise in Syria, and the two met in a battle. "I would kill him," he replied firmly. "Abu Ubaida [a prophet's companion] killed his father in battle." What drives people such as al-Mutasim? I faced this question directly recently, as I saw Deir Ezzor, the province where I too come from, overrun by Isis, and as the group carried out some of the Syrian conflict's grisliest atrocities.

Isis, a Salafi jihadist force, evolved out of a group founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant who moved to Iraq after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002. He later launched al-Qaida in Iraq, responsible for the bombing of the Askari mosque in Samarra that triggered Iraq's 2006-07 civil war. Renamed the Islamic State in Iraq after its leader was killed in a US raid in 2006, it was weakened in 2007 after US forces aligned with Sunni Iraqi tribes to fight the group.

Will the U.S. Defend Japan? More of a Definite Maybe

By Paul Sracic

August 19, 2014

Recent history ought to teach us the dangers of assuming a ‘slam dunk.’ 

The late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once famously observed, “[P]olitics is an argument about the future, and no one knows that future.” Despite this warning, in recent weeks Jun Okumura and I have both tried our hand at predicting a future that neither of us can be confident in knowing. Still, the gravity of the event that we are both speculating about – the landing of Chinese troops on the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands and the concomitant reaction of the U.S. government – is such that it needs to be discussed and debated. That is why I am grateful for Mr. Okumura’s thoughtful response to my article. Although he no longer works for the Japanese government, those in leadership positions in Japan likely share Mr. Okumura’s understandings. Therefore, if I am right and Mr. Okumura is wrong, then perhaps the Japanese government’s actions are being guided by a false and therefore dangerous impression.

While allowing that U.S. President Barack Obama may consult with Congress if time and the situation allows, Mr. Okumura implies that the U.S. president does not need the “authorization” of Congress to come to the aid of Japan, since the War Powers Resolution does not use that word. In fact, although section 3 of the law requires only consultation, section 5 specifically demands a declaration of war or “a specific authorization for such use of United States Armed Forces” if troops are to remain in harm’s way for more than 60 days. In practice, when presidents are going to seek this authorization, they do so before, rather than after initiating actions. This is what President George W. Bush did, for example, before attacking Iraq. The reason that Obama did not seek this authorization when establishing a no fly zone in Libya was because, despite the advice of his own Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, he did not think his actions in Libya amounted to “hostilities” triggering the procedures of the War Powers Resolution.

Now, past presidents have used the military without congressional authorization. President Bill Clinton supported NATO airstrikes over the conflict in Kosovo even though the House of Representatives deadlocked when asked to authorize the action. More recently, Obama has ordered airstrikes in Iraq without first getting permission from Congress. Yet when Obama wanted to use force in Syria last year, he sent a letter to Congressasking them to authorize the use of military force. Only when it became apparent that he did not have the votes did he suspend the request. Tellingly, he did not take any action.

If Obama does go to Congress, as I suspect he would, the situation becomes very unpredictable. Japan has many supporters in Congress, and the administration’s conclusion that the Mutual Defense Treaty covers the Senkaku/Diaoyu archipelago will carry some weight. Still, a recent Pew survey found that a majority of Americans think the U.S. ought to “mind its own business internationally.” Fewer than a third of Americans held a similar view just ten years ago. The lack of support for action in Syria is evidence that this creeping isolationism is gaining ground on Capitol Hill. It is also clearly reflected in the views of Republicans and Democrats such as Rand Paul and Elizabeth Warren who are considered potential standard bearers for the parties in the 2016 presidential contest. It seems foolhardy to ignore this increasingly significant theme in U.S. politics when trying to predict the actions of Congress, whether one is talking about the Middle East, or the East China Sea.

Mr. Okumura is right to focus on the damage that a lack of a U.S. response would do to U.S.-Japan relations. The problem is that, given the insignificance of the islands, at least in the eyes of most Americans, this is really the only argument that Japan’s supporters will be able to make. Moreover, the argument can be turned around. Will Japan want to risk losing the protection that the Mutual Defense Treaty offers to Tokyo because the Congress refused to extend it to a set of uninhabited islands to the south?

To be clear, it is not so much that I disagree with Mr. Okumura’s analysis as that I do not share in his confidence. That is why my original article was in the form of a question, rather than an answer. Recent history ought to teach us the dangers of assuming a “slam dunk,” when the situation is much less clear.

Paul Sracic is Professor and Chair of the Department of Politics and International Relations at Youngstown State University in Ohio, where he also directs the Rigelhaupt Pre-Law Center.

Britain's Role in Europe Is to Be a Pain

By Clive Crook

22 AUG 17

If I were a Scot, I'd be leaning toward voting for independence in next month's referendum, on the logic that the advantages of self-government outweigh the drawbacks of being a small state. How does that logic apply to Britain's choice about remaining a member of the European Union?

The same kind of calculation applies, but it's more complicated than the Scotland-U.K. question. To begin with, of course, the U.K. is still an independent state. It has surrendered some powers to Europe, but for most purposes, it doesn't have to leave the EU to achieve self-governance.

Trouble is, the EU is intent on testing the meaning of self-government. It's hard to know what the EU will be, say, 10 years from now. It was conceived as a work in progress -- formally committed to the goal of "ever closer union." The EU's constitution is unusual: Rather than describing a settled design, it commits its members to perpetual constitutional innovation.

I count that as a drawback of EU membership, and a growing one. For many years, as the union was building a single economic space, it could move toward closer integration under the terms of this perpetual-flux constitution, confident that the next steps were a good thing and would command wide support. Then this stopped being true.

The union expanded its membership far beyond western Europewithout bothering to ask whether that was all right with its existing citizens. It dismantled internal controls on migration -- a good policy, but not one with popular consent. The single currency was both a bad idea and, in many countries, unpopular, too; again, it happened regardless, all in pursuit of the elite-driven project of ever-larger, ever-closer union.

Why Americans Go to War

Max Boot 

08.18.2014

I wonder what it says about the modern “progressive” mindset that Paul Krugman can only imagine two reasons to wage war: for profit or for the political advantage of the leader who initiates hostilities. He (rightly) debunks the idea of waging war to make money in most cases, but is sympathetic to the idea that some leaders initiate hostilities to bolster domestic support–he thinks Vladimir Putin is one such today and that the Chinese leaders could be another example in the future although why he thinks that George W. Bush belongs in the same category is unclear. (Krugman argues that the Iraq War helped Bush win reelection but in fact it nearly cost him the 2004 election and in any case the political consequences were unforeseeable, and I believe irrelevant, when Bush launched the war in 2003.)

But the broader failing of Krugman’s article–amazing for a man who, whatever you think of his politics, is highly intelligent and broadly educated–is that he entirely omits a major reason why countries fight wars: to defend their liberties. Krugman is presumably familiar with the theory of “just war,” but there is no sign of it in his article that assumes that all wars are initiated for one ignoble motive or another. This is perhaps an indication of how far liberalism has come from the fighting faith of its greatest champions–presidents such as John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

They were familiar with war and yet did not dismiss it as nothing more than a crass, self-interested undertaking. Recall Kennedy’s famous inaugural address: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Or FDR’s D-Day prayer in 1944: “Men’s souls will be shaken with the violences of war. For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.”

America’s brave troopers today fight for freedom in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond, all the while yearning, as FDR said, “for the end of battle” when they can return home. They are not there to seize natural resources or to pump up a president’s approval ratings–nor, for all of my differences with President Obama, do I believe he has ordered troops into harm’s way for such nefarious purposes. War may be a brutal, ugly business, and one that should never be undertaken lightly; but it is also the essential safeguard of peace and freedom. Presumably Krugman understands that, but his failure to take note if it is nevertheless startling–and telling.

Topics: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George W. Bush, Iraq

Fukushima Facing a Long Road to Recovery

By Clint Richards

August 19, 2014

As residents move back and food exports resume, the long-term stigma will be difficult to overcome. 

After suggesting on Sunday that an evacuation advisory might be lifted for a portion of the town of Kawauchi near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the Environment Ministry on Monday announced that the ban on inhabiting the area will be lifted on October 1. The town, located within the exclusion zone of 20 km of the stricken power plant, was home to 3,000 people before the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Additionally, the first exports of rice from Fukushima prefecture since the disaster have reached Singapore, in what is hoped to be the beginning of revitalizing one of Japan’s largest agricultural producing regions. Although there are signs that the region affected by the nuclear disaster could start to see some level of normalcy, the cleanup efforts and the stigma surrounding the region will take much longer to overcome.

Environment Ministry officials said on Monday that radiation cleanup efforts in the eastern portion of Kawauchi had been finished and the ban would be lifted, although residents had already been allowed to make short visits to the area after an initial cleanup. This is only the second district within the exclusion zone to have the ban removed, after residents of the Miyakoji district in Tamura were allowed to return in April. The government’s cleanup efforts for this area have fallen behind mainly due to its inability to find places willing to house the waste for long-term storage.

Additionally, Fukushima prefecture has resumed the export of rice that was halted immediately after the 2011 nuclear disaster. Kashihikari brand rice has sent 300 kg of rice to Singapore, which is expected to be sold on Friday once it clears customs, according to the National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations. In the year up to the disaster in March 2011, Fukushima prefecture exported 100 tons of rice. Singapore lifted its ban on food products from Fukushima in May, and Japanese exports of marine and agricultural goods in general increased 10.3 percent year on year between January and June of this year.

While this is good news for both the residents of the exclusion zone and the prefecture’s agricultural industry in general, returning to normal life and production levels before the disaster will be difficult for the foreseeable future. With only two small districts within the exclusion zone allowed to return after three years of cleanup efforts, the problem of finding municipalities willing to store the waste is becoming acute. Additionally, the stigma attached to Fukushima agricultural products will not be easily solved, as many countries still ban these goods, and many Japanese themselves are still leery of eating them. The government will have to find ways to further reassure consumers, while finding a transparent and long-term solution to the cleanup effort.

Vietnam's Ticking Debt Bomb

By Elisabeth Rosen

August 19, 2014

For Vietnam, the debt problem serves as a reminder that the state should have limited influence in business. 

Vietnam may find it hard to reach its goal of 5.8 percent growth this year if bad debt continues to hold back the economy.

The central bank has made moves to bring down the debt ratio, but structural changes are also needed to ensure the health of the economy in the long-term.

“The bad debt problem can’t be resolved if there is no disclosure and transparency to prevent corruption and crony capitalism,” influential economist Vu Dinh Anh told me.

The bad debt ratio at Vietnamese banks was estimated at 4.84 percent at the end of June, continuing a steady rise since the beginning of the year. And these are only the official numbers. Moody’s Investors Service estimates that non-performing loans (NPLs) account for 10-15 percent of the total–more than double the central bank estimate.

Unlike the central bank’s figures, Moody’s takes into account special mention loans and other weak assets that should technically be classified as non-performing. While banks were told last year to categorize their loans in line with these standards, the deadline was delayed three times after banks expressed concern that the abruptly higher totals would cause businesses to fold; implementation is currently set for the first quarter of 2015.

“This lack of data is a major issue. Without knowing the real NPL ratio and structure, we can’t understand the problem,” Anh said.

The debt problem has already taken a toll on the economy as banks have been forced to set aside more capital rather than issue loans. Despite the central bank slashing interest rates on a number of occasions, lending in Vietnam only increased a scant 3.5 percent in the first half of the year.

“The bad debt in Vietnam is not huge enough to cause an economic crisis. But it prevents the economy from making a fast recovery,” said Dinh Tuan Minh, a former economic analyst at the Military Bank.

Roots of the problem

US: CYBERCOM EXPANDS CAPACITY IN DEFENSE OF NETWORKS, NATION

By Cheryl Pellerin,American Forces Press Service

AUGUST 19, 2014 

Navy Adm. Mike Rogers, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, speaks with a DoD News reporter during an interview at the NSA headquarters building at Fort Meade, Md., Aug. 14, 2014. DoD photo 

U.S. Cyber Command continues to expand its capabilities and capacity, Navy Adm. Mike Rogers said Aug. 14.

The Cybercom commander was speaking during an interview at the NSA headquarters building here. Rogers is also director of the National Security Agency and chief of the Central Security Service.

“The decision to create [Cybercom] was a … recognition of a couple things. No. 1, the increasing importance of the cyber domain and the cyber mission set in Department of Defense operations in the 21st century,” Rogers said.

Such a command would add to the department’s ability to protect and defend its networks, and give policymakers and operational commanders a broader range of options, he said.

The second consideration involved DoD’s mission to defend the nation, coupled with the potential of nation-states, groups and individuals to conduct offensive cyber activities against critical U.S. infrastructure.

In that scenario, the admiral said, defense officials thought it was likely the president would “turn to the secretary of defense and say, ‘In your mission to defend the nation, I need you to do the same thing here in the cyber arena against this mission set critical to U.S. infrastructure, and I need an organization capable of doing that.’”

These conditions led the department to realize the need to create a traditional warfighting organization capable of executing a spectrum of cyberspace missions, Rogers said.

And, he added, they knew they needed to do so “with a dedicated professionalized workforce. This is not a pickup game where you just come casually to it.”

Rogers said he focuses on five priorities for Cybercom.

IS INFORMATIONALIZATION GOOD FOR THE MIDDLE EAST? – ANALYSIS

By Jon W. Anderson,Arab Media and Society

AUGUST 19, 2014

A man during the 2011 Egyptian protests carrying a card saying "Facebook,#jan25, The Egyptian Social Network". Photo by Essam Sharaf, Wikipedia Commons. 

Nearly all studies and most opinion about new media and information technologies in the Middle East have held that they are a boon in an environment of information-averse regimes, state-controlled media, and limited communications. New media, in this reckoning, open communications to new voices, foster an expanded public sphere,[1] break the molds of old patterns not only of communication but also of thought,[2] or modify media ecologies[3]—all of which erode state monopolies and shift balances from state-cultivated models of citizenship to citizens’ taking charge.[4] Skeptical voices have been few, redundantly focused on multiple means of censorship to offset the benefits of new media, or cautioning against jumping to conclusions about new media impacts.[5] Early pessimistic assessments of the prospects for informational freedom in the digital age have been largely assimilated, such as Kalathil and Boas’ demonstration that the malleability of the Internet is also available to authoritarian states,[6] while more recent, more global, and more famous critiques have yet to influence research priorities in the Middle East.[7] None of these has strayed far from global views of epochal, structural transformation in open networks beyond noting lingering Middle East exceptions, especially lagging numbers of participants by comparison to other regions and to the rest of the world. Regionally as well as globally, open communications, network flows, and other notions of informationalization generally seem to be embraced as an unalloyed good by most analysts, if not by all actors.

“Informationalization” is a concept formulated by the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells as a key characteristic of the “information age,”[8] in which the balance of production that shifted from agriculture to manufacture with industrialization and then from manufacturing to service industries, shifts in post-industrial society toward information services and information technologies as dominant forces in economic, political, social and cultural change—or as Castells put it, “the new social morphology of our societies.”[9] Notions of informationalization penetrate extensively into thinking about business, economic development and politics independently of Castells’ prolific treatments that linked it particularly to networked society. A turn-of-the-century favorite was the concept of “knowledge work” as a new denominator for development in post-industrial economies that the first Arab Human Development Report recommended for Arab countries to turn their “human resources” into human capital by embracing information and communications technology (ICTs).[10] We don’t hear much about knowledge workers any more, as attention to ICT-driven change has shifted to social media-enabled youth and from prosperity, which seems more elusive than ever, to freedom, which again seems just around the corner, so long as the tools and their users can stay a step ahead of its adversaries.

By the mid-2000s, Arab rulers had embraced informationalization, whether prompted by the AHDRs, by Castells’ vision of networked society and others like it circulating through consultants’ reports, or by brushing shoulders with industry representatives and celebrity experts at venues such as the World Economic Forum. Governments from the Gulf to Egypt rushed to build media and tech “cities”—now in the UAE, Jordan, Egypt—that combine features of industrial parks with free-trade zones devoted to media and ICT development.

NSA/GCHQ/CES Infecting Innocent Computers Worldwide

https://www.schneier.com/

There's a new story on the c't magazin website about a 5-Eyes program to infect computers around the world for use as launching pads for attacks. These are not target computers; these are innocent third parties.

The article actually talks about several government programs. HACIENDA is a GCHQ program to port-scan entire countries, looking for vulnerable computers to attack. According to the undated GCHQ slide, they've completed port scans of 27 different countries and are prepared to do more.

The point of this is to create ORBs, or Operational Relay Boxes. Basically, these are computers that sit between the attacker and the target, and are designed to obscure the true origins of an attack. Slides from the Canadian CSE talk about how this process is being automated: "2-3 times/year, 1 day focused effort to acquire as many new ORBs as possible in as many non 5-Eyes countries as possible." They've automated this process into something codenamed LANDMARK, and together with a knowledge engine codenamed OLYMPIA, 24 people were able to identify "a list of 3000+ potential ORBs" in 5-8 hours. The presentation does not go on to say whether all of those computers were actually infected.

Slides from the UK's GCHQ also talk about ORB detection, as part of a program called MUGSHOT. It, too, is happy with the automatic process: "Initial ten fold increase in Orb identification rate over manual process." There are also NSA slides that talk about the hacking process, but there's not much new in them.

The slides never say how many of the "potential ORBs" CESG discovers or the computers that register positive in GCHQ's "Orb identification" are actually infected, but they're all stored in a database for future use. The Canadian slides talk about how some of that information was shared with the NSA.

Increasingly, innocent computers and networks are becoming collateral damage, as countries use the Internet to conduct espionage and attacks against each other. This is an example of that. Not only to these intelligence services want an insecure Internet so they can attack each other, they want an insecure Internet so they can use innocent third-parties to help facilitate their attacks.

The story contains formerly TOP SECRET documents from the US, UK, and Canada. Note that Snowden is not mentioned at all in this story. Usually, if the documents the story is based on come from Snowden, the reporters say that. In this case, the reporters have said nothing about where the documents come from. I don't know if this is an omission -- these documents sure look like the sorts of things that come from the Snowden archive -- or if there is yet another leaker.

NSA/GCHQ: The HACIENDA Program for Internet Colonization

Source Link

Translations of this article are available inGerman, French, Italian and Spanish.

Since the early days of TCP, port scanning has been used by computer saboteurs to locate vulnerable systems. In a new set of top secret documents seen by Heise, it is revealed that in 2009, the British spy agency GCHQ made port scans a "standard tool" to be applied against entire nations (Figure 1, see the picture gallery). Twenty-seven countries are listed as targets of the HACIENDA program in the presentation (Figure 2), which comes with a promotional offer: readers desiring to do reconnaissance against another country need simply send an e-mail (Figure 3).

Hacienda, Mugshot, Olympia, ORB - Slides and Graphics

The documents do not spell out details for a review process or the need to justify such an action. It should also be noted that the ability to port-scan an entire country is hardly wild fantasy; in 2013, a port scanner called Zmap was implemented that can scan the entire IPv4 address space in less than one hour using a single PC. [3] The massive use of this technology can thus make any server anywhere, large or small, a target for criminal state computer saboteurs.

The list of targeted services includes ubiquitous public services such as HTTP and FTP, as well as common administrative protocols such as SSH (Secure SHell protocol – used for remote access to systems) and SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol – used for network administration) (Figure 4). Given that in the meantime, port scanning tools like Zmap have been developed which allow anyone to do comprehensive scans, it is not the technology used that is shocking, but rather the gargantuan scale and pervasiveness of the operation. The next section gives background on how port-mapping tools work and what information is gained by using them, making it clear what becomes possible when a state actor uses them at scale.

Background: The TCP Three-Way Handshake

The most commonly-used protocol on the Internet is TCP | the Transmission Control Protocol. Every time an email is sent or a web page is browsed, TCP is the protocol that is used to move data reliably between clients and servers. Port-mapping tools take advantage of a structural problem in TCP in order to determine what services are running on a system. Since the early days of TCP, port scanning has been used by attackers to locate vulnerable systems. Whenever a TCP client wants to communicate with a TCP server, the two parties perform what is called a TCP three-way handshake. The flawed design of this handshake is the foundation for port mapping tools, as during the handshake, the server leaks information about the availability of a service without checking the client's authorization.

Apple Becomes Voice Of Reason In Cyber War Of Words

8/19/2014 

Source Link

Apple has emerged as a rare voice of reason in the war of words between China and the west over cyber security, with word that the global tech giant has decided to host some of its users’ personal data on Chinese-based computers. Apple’s move was almost surely a business decision first and foremost, providing its Chinese users with speedier services. But the move also sends a signal that other western companies should consider following, reflecting Apple’s belief that using Chinese infrastructure doesn’t pose a risk to compromising a company’s private data.

The US and China have taken steps to curb the use of hardware from each others’ companies in their domestic infrastructure over the past year, saying such equipment could make their systems vulnerable to spying. The series of actions has dealt a setback to some of the world’s largest tech firms, with Chinese firms including Huawei and ZTE and western giants like IBM,Cisco and Microsoft feeling an impact from government moves.

Against that backdrop, Apple emerged last week as a rare voice of rationality when it announced its decision to begin storing some of its Chinese users’ personal data on servers located inside the country. (English article) The decision marked a first for Apple, and the accompanying explanation was also a relatively rare move for a company that seldom publicly explains its business decisions.

Apple said it wasn’t concerned about security risks from using servers hosted in data centers owned by China Telecom, one of the country’s 3 state-owned carriers that control most of the domestic market for telecoms services. It cited its sophisticated encryption technology for its confidence, noting that such technology would protect its data even if someone managed to access China Telecom’s servers or intercept data as it traveled over domestic telecoms networks.

Such sophisticated encryption technology has always been critical to guaranteeing the security of data, and is widely used by most of the world’s major companies as one of the most important steps they can take to protect customer privacy. Thus by using such technology, Apple’s China-based data should be secure from unauthorized access by any third-parties, both public and private.

Apple’s move was a business decision, since the storage of user data on locally based computers that are geographically closer to its Chinese users will give them faster service. But the move was also a smart public relations tactic by Apple, which has come under fire in China on a number of fronts over the past year for some of its local business practices.