Rush Loves The Lord's Resistance Army

Last week, the Obama Administration announced they would be sending 100 military advisers – primarily US Special Forces troops – to Uganda to help their military to deal with a shadowy insurgent group known as the Lord's Resistance Army (or LRA). According to Foreign Policy, radio host Rush Limbaugh was quick to take to the airwaves to condemn the move, accusing Obama of, among other things, forcing the US to take arms to help an oppressive Muslim regime to hunt down a noble band of Christians fighting for their right to live and worship in peace. According to Rush: “[The] Lord's Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. ....[The] Lord's Resistance Army objectives. I have them here. ‘To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people.’ Now, again Lord's Resistance Army is who Obama sent troops to help nations wipe out.” The subtext of Rush's rant is that this is yet another battle in President Obama's, who is really an African and a Muslim, ongoing war on Christianity.

The problem with Rush's deft analysis, beyond the obvious, is that the LRA has nothing to do with either Christianity or fighting for liberty against an oppressive regime; one writer aptly described the LRA as a “death cult”. Their leader, Joseph Kony, might possibly be the vilest human being on the planet, and his core followers aren't much better. For nearly two decades the LRA has plagued Central Africa. Favored tactics of the LRA include mutilating people by cutting off their noses, ears and limbs as a way of spreading fear, or to descend on a village, slaughtering the adults and carrying away the children, pressing boys as young as nine or ten years old into their militia and allowing members to take similarly aged girls as “wives”. The LRA has nothing to do with the Lord, or resistance, but is really just a mechanism to keep Kony alive.

Of course Rush didn't seem to know any of this when he began his tirade. Limbaugh was acting as what we euphemistically refer to today a “low information individual”, or what in a less PC time we'd call a friggin' idiot, when discussing the LRA. Apparently at some point during his show, according to FP, one of his underlings must have looked the LRA up on the Internet and saw that they weren't quite the good Christian group Rush made them out to be. Limbaugh made a semi-retraction saying that they needed to do more research on the LRA – though anyone who has spent any time at all on Africa could have told him right off the bat that the LRA had more in common with the Manson Family than Jesus; the LRA was also the subject of an in-depth piece last year in The Atlantic.

But Rush was following that old adage of “why let the facts get in the way of a good story”, especially a story that so neatly played to the prejudices of his listeners.

Today's Editorial Cartoon

Pretty funny editorial cartoon today by way of Facebook:

Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan

Newly-minted top-tier Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain actually injected foreign policy into the seemingly-endless Republican nomination battle this past weekend; of course the way he chose to do it was pretty sad indeed.

When asked about so-called “gotcha” questions put to presidential candidates – those questions that the candidate really shouldn't be expected to know the answer to, yet by not knowing they look unprepared for the job – Cain said, basically, that in running for president he doesn't really need to know who the leader of Uzbekistan is; his reply referencing a question posed to George W. Bush that started the whole “gotcha” campaign question phenomenon. Now in a broad sense, I think Cain has a point. There are 193 member-nations in the UN, I don't think it is right to expect someone running for the US presidency to know the leaders of them all, though I would expect a candidate to know, in broad terms at least, what kind of relationship the US has with the country in question and the larger regional issues surrounding it. Unfortunately Cain didn't make that simple point, rather he said it didn't matter if he knew who was the president of “Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan”. Way to make a valid point while sounding like a jackass there Herman...

I suppose it would come as a surprise for Mr. Cain to learn that Uzbekistan is an vital ally in our War on Terror operations in Afghanistan: the Uzbeks operate a link in the Northern Supply Route that ships material into Afghanistan, so if the Uzbeks were to decide to drop out of the Route, we'd have a really, really hard time keeping our 100,000 troops in-country clothed and fed – you would kind of think that makes Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan at least worth a little of his attention (the president, by the way, is Islam Karimov).

And Cain's pithy answer illustrates at least a partial answer to that oft-asked US foreign policy question: “why do 'they' hate us?” In part, it is because of the stunningly arrogant view some (or many) Americans have towards the wider world; that not much of it really matters, so why should we care how others feel? We Americans think nothing of chest-thumping exhibitions of patriotism, yet we never seem to think that other people from other countries might be just as proud of their homelands as we are of ours; even folks from Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan. On a personal note, a friend of mine was recently traveling to Central Asia and told me she'd be traveling on Uzbekistan Airways; the image that immediately popped into my head was of Borat and a biplane. But she assured me Uzbekistan Airways was a modern operation, and a quick check on Wikipedia showed that indeed it is – their fleet is made up almost entirely of Boeings and Airbuses, most of which are newer than those aircraft flown by domestic US airlines. I felt appropriately chastised.

But I'm also not running for president. If the current crop of Republican candidates, Mr. Cain included, are truly the best our nation has to offer for the most-important job in the land, maybe we shouldn't feel so proud.

R.I.P, Al Davis

Al Davis, the iconic leader of the NFL's resident bad boys, the Oakland (nee LA, nee Oakland) Raiders passed away this weekend. That reminded me of my own memorable brush with Al a few years ago, a story my friend Dan said was too good not to share, so here it is:

I was taking a Southwest Airlines flight from LA to Portland, via Oakland. Southwest's policy at the time was that there were no assigned seats on their flights; instead you got a number at check in, boarded the plane in order and took any available seat, all of which I dutifully did when my number was called. I took an aisle seat in a three-seat row. I noticed that the older man sitting at the window was kitted out, head-to-toe in Raiders gear, and thought to myself “Wow, that looks like Al Davis.” I decided that it couldn't really be Al since a) I didn't think he'd so blantantly advertise by dressing like an advert from a Raiders gear catalog and b) why would Al Davis fly Southwest? So I settled into the little self-imposed cocoon I go into when I fly and got ready to endure the next few hours of travel to Portland.

A few moments later a boarding passenger noticed my aisle-mate and said “its great to meet you Mr. Davis,” they shook hands. A second passenger soon did the same. I noticed Al glance at me like he was expecting me to also pay my respects. I looked at my magazine instead, though I did notice that along with all the Raiders catalog gear, he was also wearing a huge bracelet with “AL” spelled out in diamonds on an onyx background – the Raiders colors, of course. As the plane filled a third, fourth and fifth person all paid their respects to Mr. Davis, who kept glancing at me, expecting me to do the same. By this time, I was feeling pretty self-conscious; I also would have felt like a real tool saying “Oh hi Mr. Davis” at this point, so I kept silent instead.

During the flight a few more people stopped by to say hello, talking to their icon over this strangely mute guy on the aisle who had the honor of sitting one seat away from Mr. Davis Himself (Al had announced earlier to one boarding passenger that he had in fact bought two seats for the flight so he could have the one directly next to him empty). When we landed in Oakland, Al got up to leave but not before our eyes locked and he gave me this long look that said, YOU REALLY DON'T KNOW WHO I AM?!?

And thus was my brush with the man, the legend, Al Davis, in the world of football, he will be missed.

NATO's Humanitarian Hypocrisy

Reports coming out of Sirte, Libya point to an ongoing humanitarian disaster as a pitched battle for control of the coastal city drags on. Residents say that neighborhoods are bombed and shelled indiscriminately, doctors in the overwhelmed hospitals complain of shortages of everything from medicine to fuel for their generators, while tens of thousands of people remain hunkered down in their houses, fearful of retribution if they leave the city limits.

This sounds like exactly the type of situation NATO intervened in Libya to prevent as part of their “humanitarian” mission, except many of the bombs falling on Sirte are being dropped by NATO aircraft. Sirte is the hometown of Moammar Gadhafi, and is the largest remaining stronghold of support for the old regime. The Libyan rebels have launched several attacks trying to drive into the center of Sirte, but so far all have been turned back. So they appear to be falling back to the old Gadhafi-era tactic of just blasting the city to pieces. Rebel leadership claims that the civilian population of Sirte has fled and the only people left are militias loyal to Gadhafi; or alternatively that any civilians left in the city are being used by Gadhafi militias as “human shields”.

But reporters from Reuters offer a different view. They have talked with citizens in Sirte and report that while many still support Gadhafi, they are neither fighters nor human shields. Many, instead, are simply unwilling to abandon their homes or are more fearful of rebel retribution if they were to leave town than they are of falling bombs and mortars. There is some evidence supporting their fears; several weeks ago, the UK's Telegraph newspaper reported from Tawarga , a city of 10,000, now turned into a ghost town. Tawarga was a center of support for Gadhafi that fell to the rebels, who promptly emptied it. As one rebel commander said: “Tawarga no longer exists.”

A true humanitarian mission would prevent wanton revenge attacks like this, since in addition to being morally wrong, they also make the eventual process of reconciliation between the warring sides all the more difficult. But as NATO has managed to prove, the humanitarian mission talk was all a front anyway for a policy of ridding the West of a major irritant in Col. Gadhafi. NATO gave up any pretext of a humanitarian mission when they began to act as the de facto air force for the rebel movement, including staging precision bombing runs against Gadhafi's headquarters during the rebel's final assault on Tripoli. The generals back at NATO HQ in Brussels were probably disappointed when the rebels failed to find Gadhafi's body among the rubble.

Staging a humanitarian mission means protecting civilians, all the civilians, not just the ones who agree with your worldview. Through their actions, NATO and its member nations (the United States included) have shown that what's going on in Libya is not an exercise in humanitarian intervention, but rather a perversion of it.

Africa's New “King Cobra”

Ok, I have to admit that I didn't pay a lot of attention to the recent elections in Zambia, I'm guessing neither did you. I saw that presidential elections were held and that there were protests when the vote counting was taking a suspiciously long time; I was surprised then to read that the challenger won, since long vote counts usually mean that it's just taking the ruling side more time than expected to fill out thousands of bogus ballots. After that, I just filed the Zambia story away and moved on.

That was too bad, since, thanks to this story from The Australian, it turns out the situation in Zambia is far more interesting than a few headlines would make you believe. The elections were indeed won by the challenger, the populist candidate, 74-year old Catholic Michael Sata, who is also known as the “King Cobra” for his sharp tongue, The Australian explains (and just to make the situation a little more interesting, Sata ran on a ticket with Guy Scott, a white Zambian, as his running mate). The main issue in the election turned out to be China.

Zambia is rich in minerals, minerals that China covets to keep their industrial machine rolling. China has had a relationship with Zambia that dates back to the 1970s, but Chinese efforts in the country have exploded in recent years as China's economy continues to grow – more growth means more and more need for the minerals that Zambia has in abundance. This need, combined with some heavy-handed Chinese business practices, has led to a growing wave of anti-China sentiment in Zambia, a sentiment that Sata was able to tap into to draw a line between himself and now-former President Rupiah Banda who is staunchly pro-Chinese. Sata used terms like “infesters” and “bogus” in describing Chinese businessmen in Zambia and played up on ill feelings left by the Banda regime's failure to prosecute Chinese managers who shot Zambian coal miners during a strike.

The situation in Zambia is a big example of a growing unease in Africa about just how deeply China is penetrating into the continent. While many African regimes have welcomed Chinese investment – especially regimes under international pressure like Sudan and Zimbabwe, since Chinese investment typically comes with no strings attached – there are also fears that the Chinese are acting like a new wave of colonists. Chinese projects typically extract raw materials – gold, coal, oil, etc. - either using African unskilled labor under Chinese management, or sometimes with imported Chinese labor. The result is a system that builds little value for the African nations beyond fees paid for the minerals themselves, which reminds some Africans too much of the old colonial days.

For his part, Sata seems unafraid of the mighty Chinese; unlike, perhaps, the South Africans, who canceled a scheduled visit by the Dalai Lama thanks to Chinese pressure. In addition to his sharp words directed at Chinese business interests, he also recently referred to Taiwan as a “country”, a reference that greatly upset Beijing. It will be interesting to see if other African leaders start to follow Sata's lead and look at China a little more skeptically.

Perry (and Washington) On US Foreign Policy

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry was in New York today giving a speech where he accused President Barack Obama of not only single-handedly setting out to destroy the United States, but to destroy Israel as well. The backdrop for Perry's speech was the United Nations General Assembly meeting where the Palestinians are widely expected to petition the UN for full member-nation status. Perry contends that the Palestinians wouldn't be taking such a step if Obama hadn't thrown Israel under the bus.

"Simply put, we would not be here today, at the precipice of such a dangerous
move, if the Obama policy in the Middle East wasn't naive, arrogant, misguided
and dangerous,” Perry said.

As we've seen from last week's special election in Queens, New York to fill the seat of disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner, potentially sabotaging America's relationship with the world's billion-plus Muslims by vetoing Palestine's petition to the UN just isn't enough to make some people believe that Obama isn't anti-Israel. Perry's fellow presidential candidate, businessman Herman Cain, has also said that he would make support for Israel the bedrock of his presidency.

Since candidates, particularly Republican candidates, love to wrap themselves in the words of the Founding Fathers, it’s a good time to print what George Washington himself had to say about “foreign entanglements”:

A passionate attachment of one Nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite Nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest, in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite Nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the Nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained; and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld.

Now none of what I'm saying should be taken as an anti-Israeli position; I think that the only places US presidential candidates should be speaking of defending so passionately are parts of the United States itself. But if we are talking foreign policy, I can easily think of a list of places of far more strategic/economic importance to the United States than Israel that these candidates should be focusing on, for example:

Mexico – the country with which we share thousands of miles of border, which is currently locked in bloody battle with the militias of a group of powerful drug cartels.
China – the nation many feel will soon join America in the Superpower Club.
Canada – the other nation with whom we share thousands of miles of border, who also is our largest trading partner and a major energy supplier; just because the Canadians are quiet doesn't mean we can ignore them.
The European Union – gripped by an economic crisis that could drag our country into a recession, or a depression.
Saudi Arabia – the country that still exports more of the black sticky stuff we're addicted to than anyone else in the world.

Those are just five off the top of my head. You could probably make a case for Russia, Brazil, India, Japan and even Somalia as having more real importance to the United States than Israel. Yet an outsized portion of our foreign policy efforts remain focused on the US-Israel relationship. And at least in the early days of the campaign, it seems like Israel will take center stage in our foreign policy debates as well.

Kids 'n' Guns

Imagine a contest that brings together young scholars from different parts of a country, what do you suppose an appropriate prize would be for the winners? A new iPad? A scholarship of some sort? A set of encyclopedias? Well, if the country is Somalia and the group sponsoring the event is the Islamic insurgent group al-Shabaab, the correct answer is cash, and an AK-47.

According to a report on the BBC, those were some of the prizes awarded to boys aged 10-17 in a Koran-reciting contest for children from Shabaab-controlled areas of Somalia. The winners received the equivalent of $700 and an AK-47, second place won $500, and an AK-47, while the third place team received $400 and a pair of hand grenades (yeah, still trying to figure out the logic of that one). The prizes were in keeping with al-Shabaab's philosophy that young men should study the Koran with one hand and hold a gun with the other.

Sadly, child soldiers are nothing new for Somalia. Children are employed as fighters not only by insurgent groups like al-Shabaab, but also by the US-backed Somali Transitional Federal Government, the supposed legitimate rulers of Somalia. Still, potentially giving a 10-year old an automatic weapon as a prize for scholarly achievement is pretty screwed up no matter the reality of the situation. According to the BBC, a similar contest in the Shabaab-controlled port city of Kismayo gave out a rocket-propelled grenade as a top prize.

Turtle Bay Train Wreck

So if all goes as threatened tomorrow, the legs could get kicked out from under US diplomatic efforts across the Middle East/Islamic world. That's because Tuesday was the day set by President Mahmood Abbas to petition the United Nations to admit Palestine as a full member-state, a petition the United States has already publicly promised to veto on behalf of Israel.

Last week the Saudis issued a dire warning via the pages of the New York Times that a veto would make the United States “toxic” across the region and could put an end to the decades-long US-Saudi love affair. It was a warning so dire, that you're almost inclined to ignore it, to simply dismiss it as another bit of hyperbole in a region long noted for such verbal excess. But things have changed in the MENA (Mid-East/North Africa) region. The “Arab Spring” has made despots take note that you sometimes actually have to listen to your people. And while the House of Saud has managed to stave off overthrow, they have done so with a mix of security crackdowns and by passing out tens of billions in social aid to the growing Saudi underclass; no wonder they're worried about how “toxic” America might become.

The Arab street is sure to take a veto as yet another put-down of the long oppressed Palestinian people; but I'm viewing a veto as an incredibly hypocritical move on the part of the United States, for two reasons. First, the US has spent much of 2011 cheerleading (in the case of Egypt), threatening (in the case of Syria) or bombing (in the case of Libya) on behalf of some notion of self-determination among the oppressed Arab peoples. Yet in the case of Palestine, we're taking the opposing position – continuation of a status quo that fundamentally denies Palestinians many of the rights that we're saying the Egyptians, Syrians and Libyans deserve; all, apparently, because it doesn't fit into our preconceived notion of how the Palestinians should gain these rights and because Israel opposes it – neither is a terribly convincing argument in favor of a veto.

To make matters worse, a veto of Palestinian membership would go against the precedent that the United States itself set for such situations with Kosovo back in 2008. The Kosovars had been engaged in a multi-year, UN-overseen process of negotiating a settlement of final status with Serbia (Serbia wanted Kosovo to remain part of the country, the Kosovars wanted to split), when the Kosovo side decided that the talks were going nowhere and unilaterally declared their independence from Serbia. The United States, along with Great Britain and France, were quick to recognize the independence of Kosovo, even though it was in explicit violation of the UN-led process and seemingly out of step with the norms of international law – the argument was that the Kosovars' right to self-determination had to be respected more than some UN “process”. Then there's Palestine, which has been involved in two decades of negotiations started in 1993 under the Oslo Accords with Israel as part of the “two-state solution” that would see the creation of a nation of Palestine. From the Palestinian point of view, that day will never come; the negotiations, when they even happen, seem endless, and in the meanwhile Israel continues to expand “settlements” in the West Bank that every year gobble up a little more of the land that would one day become the Palestinian state. And despite American insistence that all parties return to the negotiating table, there is zero reason to expect there to be any substantive movement, let alone a real breakthrough, so President Abbas has decided enough is enough and is using the UN declaration as an end-run around a moribund process.

Given the precedent we unwillingly set with Kosovo, the United States should be a vocal supporter of Palestinian membership in the UN, but instead, we are promising a veto. And before you say that the difference is terrorism, it is worth noting that the Kosovo Liberation Army, which became the government of Kosovo, was and is considered a terrorist organization by Serbia and as late as the 1990s was also considered a terrorist organization with possible ties to al-Qaeda by other countries, including the United States.

But while the Kosovars were supposedly within their rights to short-circuit continued negotiations they found pointless, the Palestinians are committing a breach of international law by taking the same action. Saudi Arabia's Turki al-Faisal is likely right in saying the veto will fuel anti-American anger in the Arab street, the rest of the world may just take note of the rank hypocrisy of the move.

No, That's My Breakfast....

Passengers being detained for having suspicious materials is not an uncommon occurence in this era of heightened airline security. But it becomes newsworthy when the passenger in question is Australia's Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd and the material in question is his jar of Vegemite.

Rudd was detained briefly on his way to the UN General Assembly meeting via Mexico City when airport screeners found a jar of Vegemite in his carry-on bag. Vegemite is a brown yeast spread that is beloved in Australia and generally reviled in the rest of the world for its "unique" taste. Rudd was allowed to to continue after he explained that they were in fact examining his breakfast and said via Twitter that the "only problem traveling to New York is they tried to confiscate our Vegemite."

Vegemite gained global attention thanks in large part to the song "Down Under" by the 80's Australian band Men at Work, as seen below: