Who’s Paying the Pro-War Pundits? Lee Fang in The Nation

Talking heads like former General Jack Keane are all over the news media fanning fears of ISIL. Shouldn’t the public know about their links to Pentagon contractors?

If you read enough news and watch enough cable television about the threat of the Islamic State, the radical Sunni Muslim militia group better known simply as ISIL, you will inevitably encounter a parade of retired generals demanding an increased US military presence in the region.

But what you won’t learn from media coverage of IS is that many of these former Pentagon officials have skin in the game as paid directors and advisers to some of the largest military contractors in the world.

Ramping up America’s military presence in Iraq and directly entering the war in Syria, along with greater military spending more broadly, is a debatable solution to a complex political and sectarian conflict. But those goals do unquestionably benefit one player in this saga: America’s defense industry.

Keane is a great example of this phenomenon. His think tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which he oversees along with neoconservative partisans Liz Cheney and William Kristol, has provided the data on IS used for multiple stories by The New York Times, the BBC and other leading outlets.

Retired General Anthony Zinni, perhaps the loudest advocate of a large deployment of American soliders into the region to fight IS, is a board member to BAE Systems’ US subsidiary, and also works for several military-focused private equity firms.

CNN pundit Frances Townsend, a former Bush administration official, has recently appeared on television calling for more military engagement against IS. As the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit that studies elite power structures, reported, Townsend “holds positions in two investment firms with defense company holdings, MacAndrews & Forbes and Monument Capital Group, and serves as an advisor to defense contractor Decision Sciences.”



“Mainstream news outlets have a polite practice of identifying former generals and former congressmembers as simply ‘formers’—neglecting to inform the public of what these individuals are doing now, which is often quite pertinent information, like that they are corporate lobbyists or board members,” says Jeff Cohen, an associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College.

The full article is available here

Six Steps To Beat ISIS Without War - Phyllis Bennis in Foreign Policy In Focus

There is no military solution to the problem of ISIS. Military actions will not set the stage for political solutions; they will prevent those solutions from taking hold.

The bottom line is there is no immediate action that will make ISIS disappear. You can’t destroy an ideology—or even an organization—through bombing

As horrifying as the beheading of the two U.S. journalists was, revenge is never a good basis for foreign policy.A military strike might bring some immediate satisfaction, but we all know revenge is a bad basis for foreign policy, especially when it has such dangerous consequences.

We have to recognize that military solutions really don’t work. Have we forgotten the failures of the U.S. wars in the Middle East over these many years? We need to keep our focus on the medium- and long-term solutions, something not so easy to do in an election year.

Weakening ISIS requires eroding the support it relies on from tribal leaders, military figures, and ordinary Iraqi Sunnis.

Step One: Stop the airstrikes. Airstrikes defeat the important goal of ending popular support for ISIS, and instead actually serve to strengthen the extremist organization.

Step Two: Make real the commitment for “No boots on the ground.” The U.S. must also stop flooding the region with arms that only result in more violence against civilians, and end its policy of ignoring the violations of human rights and international law committed by its allies.

Step Three: Organize a real diplomatic partnership to deal with ISIS. Iran has more influence in Baghdad than Washington does. If we are serious about wanting to encourage the Iraqi government to accept a truly more inclusive approach, joint pressure from the U.S. and Iran holds the best chance.

Step Four: Initiate a new search for broader diplomatic solutions in the United Nations. That means working to build a real coalition aimed at using diplomatic and financial pressures, not military strikes, at the international level in both Iraq and Syria.

Step Five: Push the UN, despite Lakhdar Brahimi’s resignation, to restart real negotiations on ending the civil war in Syria. That means everyone involved needs to be at the table

Step Six: Massively increase U.S. humanitarian contributions to U.N. agencies for the millions of refugees and displaced people from both Syria and Iraq. The U.S. has pledged significant funds, but much of it has not actually been made available to the agencies, and more should be pledged and given.​

The full article is available here

The Truth About Sharia Law - Kevin Eckstrom in Religion News Service

Often what we try to ban is the very same thing we do not understand.
The story of Shariah in Indonesia's Aceh province is a telling lesson that what we think we know of Islamic law is often more complicated and nuanced in reality. It is the only province in the world’s most populous Muslim nation to impose Shariah.

But why was Shariah introduced in the first place?

Simple: politics.

Government officials in Jakarta were trying to delegitimize the separatist movement in Aceh, and by linking them with images of hard-line Islamic law, Jakarta calculated that the rebels would lose support at home and (especially) abroad.

Shariah is a daily fact of life in Aceh. But what does that actually mean?

For one, alcohol is hard to find, and public drunkenness is punishable by 40 lashes (how intense of a lash may be a matter of dispute between one end of the whip and the other). Intimate relations between unmarried adults can get you nine lashes, and gambling between 12 and 16. All Muslim women must wear a hijab in public. According to the Shariah Court, 53 cases were heard last year, down from 72 in 2012.

In more extreme (and rare) cases, human rights activists say women have been raped for suspected adultery, and proposals for implementing Shariah law have ranged from forcing women to ride side-saddle on motorbikes to requiring four witnesses to prove a rape.

But it’s important to note that Shariah law is only applied to Muslims; there is little to no threat of foreigners or non-Muslims being subjected to Shariah punishments. If you want a beer at your hotel, you can easily find one. Non-Muslim women can walk freely with their heads uncovered (except in a mosque).

The bottom line is that the imposition of Shariah was a cynical political ploy — and it worked. There were, and are, no wild-eyed fanatics seeking to impose their religious laws on other faiths. There is no Taliban running amok, guns blazing. Here, at least, Shariah mostly works in a democratic context, however imperfectly.

Back in America, a handful of states have moved to ban “foreign laws” from the courts — and by “foreign laws” they really mean Shariah. That, too, is a cynical political ploy designed to rally the base and alienate the opposition.

Too often, when we talk about Islam, we overlap religion with politics, or we see Islam through the distorted lens of Middle East turmoil or puritanical Arab culture. Still reeling from the trauma of 9/11, we project our own fears and misconceptions onto others, sometimes for our own purposes (political or otherwise).

Let’s be clear: Islam has its share of problems, as does Shariah. But often what we try to ban is the very same thing we do not understand. We see things in extremes, and fail to consider political, cultural or historical factors that shape the current context. When you pull back the veil a bit, you may be surprised by what you find.

The full article is available here

ISIS Is America's Legacy in Middle East - Tom Engelhardt in Mother Jones

Though the militants of ISIS would undoubtedly be horrified to think so, they are the spawn of Washington. 13 years of regional war, occupation, and intervention played a major role in clearing the ground for them. 

When you think about it, from the moment the first bombs began falling on Afghanistan in October 2001 to the present, not a single US military intervention has had anything like its intended effect.

Each one has, in time, proven a disaster in its own special way, providing breeding grounds for extremism and producing yet another set of recruitment posters for yet another set of jihadist movements. Looked at in a clear-eyed way, this is what any American military intervention seems to offer such extremist outfits—and ISIS knows it.

All in all, the invasions, the occupations, the drone campaigns in several lands, the deaths that ran into the hundreds of thousands, the uprooting of millions of people sent into external or internal exile, the expending of trillions of dollars added up to a bin Laden dreamscape. They would prove jihadist recruitment tools par excellence.

Though the militants of ISIS would undoubtedly be horrified to think so, they are the spawn of Washington. Thirteen years of regional war, occupation, and intervention played a major role in clearing the ground for them. They may be our worst nightmare (thus far), but they are also our legacy—and not just because so many of their leaders came from the Iraqi army we disbanded, had their beliefs and skills honed in the prisons we set up (Camp Bucca seems to have been the West Point of Iraqi extremism), and gained experience facing US counterterror operations in the "surge" years of the occupation.

In fact, just about everything done in the war on terror has facilitated their rise. After all, we dismantled the Iraqi army and rebuilt one that would flee at the first signs of ISIS's fighters, abandoning vast stores of Washington's weaponry to them. We essentially destroyed the Iraqi state, while fostering a Shia leader who would oppress enough Sunnis in enough ways to create a situation in which ISIS would be welcomed or tolerated throughout significant areas of the country.

Americans prefer to believe that all problems have solutions. There may, however, be no obvious or at least immediate solution when it comes to ISIS, an organization based on exclusivity and divisiveness in a region that couldn't be more divided.

But we do have reasonable evidence from the past 13 years of what an escalating American military intervention is likely to do: not whatever it is that Washington wants it to do.

The full article is available here